Distortion to orbits of asteroids beyond Pluto imply mystery planet is tugging at them, claims astronomer

The evidence for 'Planet X' - the mysterious hypothesised planet on the edge of our solar system - has taken a new turn thanks to the mathematics of a noted astronomer.

Rodney Gomes, an astronomer at the National Observatory of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, says the irregular orbits of small icy bodies beyond Neptune imply that a planet four times the size of Earth is swirling around our sun in the fringes of the solar system.

Tomorrow, May 29, 2012 at about 07:07 UT, the asteroid designated 2012 KT42 will pass only ~14,000 km (8,700 miles) or about ~0.05 lunar distance (or 0.0001379 AU) above the Earth's surface. The asteroid was discovered by Mt. Lemmon Survey with a 1.5-m reflector + CCD on May 28, 2012 at magnitude ~18.1.

According to its absolute magnitude (H=28.8) this asteroid has an estimated size of roughly 3-10 meters, so it is a small object. We have been able to follow-up this object soon after his discovery while it was still on the neocp, from the Siding Spring-Faulkes Telescope South on 2012, May 28.4, through a 2.0-m f/10.0 Ritchey-Chretien + CCD.

At the moment of our images from FTS, "2012 KT42" was moving at about ~3.63 "/min and its magnitude was ~17.5. At the moment of its close approach around 07UT of tomorrow, 2012 KT42 will be bright as magnitude ~12.0 and moving at ~11021"/min.

Below you can see an image (stack of 5x5-second exposures) showing the asteroid. Click on the thumbnail to see a bigger version:

Here you can see an animation showing the motion of 2012 KT42. Each frame is a 5-second exposure through the FTS 2.0-m telescope.

Although a sparrow and a Tyrannosaurus Rex might appear to have nothing in common, evolutionary biologists see more that relates the two creatures than not. A new study, led by Harvard scientists, has shown that modern birds are essentially living dinosaurs with skulls that are remarkably similar to those of their juvenile ancestors.

Arkhat Abzhanov, Associate Professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology and Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, a PhD student in Abzhanov laboratory and the first author of a paper published this week in Nature, found evidence that the evolution of birds is the result of a drastic change in how dinosaurs developed.

Sexual maturity in many dinosaurs took many years to reach. Birds, however, sped up the clock, with some species taking as little as 12 weeks to mature, which allows them to retain the physical characteristics of baby dinosaurs.

"What is interesting about this research is the way it illustrates evolution as a developmental phenomenon," Abzhanov said. "By changing the developmental biology in early species, nature has produced the modern bird - an entirely new creature - and one that, with approximately 10,000 species, is today the most successful group of land vertebrates on the planet."

Mark Norell, chair of the Division of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History and one of the paper's co-authors, said, "The evolution of the many characteristics of birds - things like feathers, flight, and wishbones - has traditionally been a difficult problem for biologists. By analyzing fossil evidence from skeletons, eggs, and soft tissue of bird-like dinosaurs and primitive birds, we've learned that birds are living theropod dinosaurs, a group of carnivorous animals that include Velociraptor."

"This new work advances our knowledge by providing a powerful example of how developmental changes played a major role in the origin and evolution of birds."

Today, May 28th, newly-discovered asteroid 2012 KP24 is flying past Earth only one-tenth the distance to the Moon. Amateur astronomer Rolando Ligustri photographed the 26-meter space rock during the early hours of May 28th when it was about 350,000 km from our planet:

Measurements of the asteroid's orbit confirm that there is no danger of a collision with Earth.

The genetic cause of a syndrome that causes stunted growth in babies has eluded scientists since it was discovered 20 years ago. Now, a gene mutation thought to be linked to large stature has been pinpointed as the culprit of the so-called IMAGe syndrome.

The finding, the researchers say, could lead to new treatments and tests for the stunted-growth disease and its polar opposite syndrome.

Children with IMAGe syndrome have stunted growth before birth - babies with the syndrome end up with a smaller-than-normal body and organs. Complications from the disease can be life-threatening.

Study researcher Eric Vilain, of UCLA, first identified the disorder as a medical resident in his native France, where he cared for two boys, ages 3 and 6, who were dramatically short for their ages.

"I never found a reason to explain these patients' unusual set of symptoms," Vilain said in a statement. "I've been searching for the cause of their disease since 1993."

Whatever ultimately wiped more than 90 percent of life off the planet some 250 million years ago dealt quite a blow, with new research suggesting "living, breathing organisms" didn't truly come back from the grave until 10 million years later.

The researchers think that this recovery took so long because even as species tried to regain their footing, they were hit with further setbacks as the environment continued to change.

"Life seemed to be getting back to normal when another crisis hit and set it back again," study researcher Michael Benton, from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom, said in a statement.

"The carbon crises were repeated many times, and then finally conditions became normal again after five million years or so."

Great dying

The Permian-Triassic extinction event, known informally as "The Great Dying," was the largest mass extinction on Earth. It killed off 96 percent of the world's marine species and 70 percent of the land-bound vertebrates and even a large portion of the world's insects.

Scientists aren't sure what caused the extinction. It seems there may have been three phases, though, so a combination of factors could have coincided to cause such immense damage to life on Earth. Some research suggests that global warming played a role, which may or may not have been set off by a great coal eruption or volcanoes.

The debate over evolution will be a thing of the past within the next three decades, the son of archaeologists Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey has proclaimed.

In an interview with the Associated Press (AP), Richard Leakey, a 67-year-old, Kenyan-born Stony Brook University professor, paleoanthropologist, and avowed atheist, said that he believed scientific discoveries over the next 15 to 30 years will have reached the point that "even the skeptics" will be able to accept the theory put forth by Charles Darwin in his 1859 book Origin of Species.

"If you get to the stage where you can persuade people on the evidence, that it's solid, that we are all African, that color is superficial, that stages of development of culture are all interactive, then I think we have a chance of a world that will respond better to global challenges," he said.

"If we're spreading out across the world from centers like Europe and America that evolution is nonsense and science is nonsense, how do you combat new pathogens, how do you combat new strains of disease that are evolving in the environment?" Leakey continued.

"If you don't like the word evolution, I don't care what you call it, but life has changed. You can lay out all the fossils that have been collected and establish lineages that even a fool could work up," he added. "So the question is why, how does this happen? It's not covered by Genesis. There's no explanation for this change going back 500 million years in any book I've read from the lips of any God."

An abrupt cooling in Europe together with an increase in humidity and particularly in windiness coincided with a sustained reduction in solar activity 2800 years ago. Scientists from the German Research Centre for Geosciences GFZ in collaboration with Swedish and Dutch colleagues provide evidence for a direct solar-climate linkage on centennial timescales. Using the most modern methodological approach, they analysed sediments from Lake Meerfelder Maar, a maar lake in the Eifel/Germany, to determine annual variations in climate proxies and solar activity.

The study published online in Nature Geoscience reports the climatic change that occurred at the beginning of the pre-Roman Iron Age and demonstrates that especially the so-called Grand Minima of solar activity can affect climate conditions in western Europe through changes in regional atmospheric circulation pattern. Around 2800 years ago, one of these Grand Solar Minima, the Homeric Minimum,caused a distinct climatic change in less than a decade in Western Europe.

The exceptional seasonally laminated sediments from the studied maar lake allow a precise dating even of short-term climate changes. The results show for a 200 year long period strongly increased springtime winds during a period of cool and wet climate in Europe. In combination with model studies they suggest a mechanism that can explain the relation between a weak sun and climate change. "The change and strengthening of the tropospheric wind systems likely is related to stratospheric processes which in turn are affected by the ultraviolet radiation" explains Achim Brauer (GFZ), the initiator of the study. "This complex chain of processes thus acts as a positive feedback mechanism that could explain why assumingly too small variations in solar activity have caused regional climate changes."

Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) researchers have found that detailed knowledge about your genetic makeup -- the interplay between genetic variants and other genetic variants, or between genetic variants and environmental risk factors -- may only change your estimated disease prediction risk for three common diseases by a few percentage points, which is typically not enough to make a difference in prevention or treatment plans. It is the first study to revisit claims in previous research that including such information in risk models would eventually help doctors either prevent or treat diseases.

"While identifying a synergistic effect between even a single genetic variant and another risk factor is known to be extremely challenging and requires studies with a very large number of individuals, the benefit of such discovery for risk prediction purpose might be very limited," said lead author Hugues Aschard, research fellow in the Department of Epidemiology.

The study appears online May 24, 2012 and will appear in the June 8, 2012 print issue of The American Journal of Human Genetics.

Do our brains continue to produce neurons throughout our lifetimes? That's been one of the most hotly debated questions in the annals of science. Since the 1950s, studies have hinted at the possibility, but not until the late 1990s did research prove that the birth of new neurons, called neurogenesis, goes on in the brains of adult primates and humans. Now a surprising new study in humans shows that in the olfactory bulb-the interface between the nose and the brain and an area long - known to be a hot spot of neurogenesis - new neurons may be born but not survive. The finding may rule out neurogenesis in this area, or it might show only that some people don't stimulate their brains enough through the sense of smell, some researchers say.

Previous studies have found evidence of neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb of adult humans. But those studies measured only proteins produced by immature neurons, leaving open the question of whether these youngsters ever grew up to connect with other cells to form functional networks, says neuroscientist Jonas Frisén of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. If new olfactory neurons really reached adulthood throughout a person's life, researchers should find neurons of a variety of ages in this region.

That's not what Frisén and his team saw. The discovery is based on a technique he and his colleague Kirsty Spalding hit upon in 2005, in which they found a clever way to deduce the age of neurons. The method relies on atomic testing carried out in the 1950s and 1960s, which released massive amounts of carbon-14 into the atmosphere; the atmospheric ¹⁴C has been steadily declining ever since. Thus, the later a cell is born after this testing, the less ¹⁴C it contains.