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Neanderthals Survive Until 24,000 Years Ago In South East Of Spain


Science Daily
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:29 UTC
Gibraltar
© Museum of GibraltarPresent day landscapes of Gibraltar (above) and reconstructed landscapes of Gibraltar from 30,000 years ago (below).

Over 14,000 years ago during the last Pleistocene Ice Age, when a large part of the European continent was covered in ice and snow, Neanderthals in the region of Gibraltar in the south of the Iberian peninsula were able to survive because of the refugium of plant and animal biodiversity. Today, plant fossil remains discovered in Gorham's Cave confirm this unique diversity and wealth of resources available in this area of the planet.

The international team jointly led by Spanish researchers has reconstructed the landscape near Gorham's Cave in Gibraltar, by means of paleobotanical data (plant fossil records) located in the geological deposits between 1997 and 2004. The study, which is published in the Quaternary Science Reviews, also re-examines previous findings relating to the glacial refugia for trees during the ice age in the Iberian Peninsula.
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Info

U.S. scientist sees use of resources on Moon in future

Divya Gandhi
The Hindu
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 20:15 UTC
Carle Pieters
© UnknownProfessor Carle Pieters
"Scientists around the world have come to understand that the Moon is clearly the stepping stone for the future of the human species beyond the Earth," according to Carle Pieters, planetary geologist and Principal Investigator for National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Moon Mineralogy Mapper, one of the 11 scientific instruments onboard Chandrayaan-I that recently detected iron-bearing minerals in a lunar crater.

"And so it is no coincidence that four countries - India, China, Japan and U.S. - are showing simultaneous interest in the Earth's celestial neighbour," she says.

Professor Pieters is now faculty at the Department of Geological Sciences, Brown University, U.S. The Moon could support future explorations of Mars or near-Earth asteroids through fuel and, "if we get lucky," water resources too, she says.
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Meteor

Did a comet strike Earth, leaving crystalline dust in the Oklahoma Panhandle?


The Oklahoman
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 16:27 UTC
A giant comet slammed into the atmosphere and fractured. The resulting swarm of fragments also exploded, scattering tiny diamonds in widely separated locations and plunging the warming Earth into a renewed and deadly deep freeze.

When Leland Bement first heard the theory, "I was highly skeptical," he said. "You just roll your eyes."

But a discovery in the Oklahoma Panhandle changed his viewpoint. It began when Bement, research archaeologist with the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey, was contacted by a team of scientists who had read about Bement's research. For years, Bement had been studying remnants of Indian communities that existed around the end of the last Ice Age - about 13,000 years ago - in the area that is now the Panhandle.
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Meteor

Where Do Comets Come From?

Rachel Courtland
New Scientist
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 14:30 UTC
Comet Overhead
© Walter Pacholka, Astropics/SPLHale-Bopp, seen here from Joshua Tree National Park, California, was one of the brightest comets of the 20th century.
Few cosmic apparitions have inspired such awe and fear as comets. The particularly eye-catching Halley's comet, which last appeared in the inner solar system in 1986, pops up in the Talmud as "a star which appears once in seventy years that makes the captains of the ships err". In 1066, the comet's appearance was seen as a portent of doom before the Battle of Hastings; in 1456, Pope Callixtus III is said to have excommunicated it.

Modern science takes a more measured view. Comets such as Halley's are agglomerations of dust and ice that orbit the sun on highly elliptical paths, acquiring their spectacular tails in the headwind of charged particles streaming from the sun. We even know their source: they are Kuiper belt objects (KBOs) tugged from their regular orbits by Neptune and Uranus.

But there's a problem. Certain comets, such as Hale-Bopp, which flashed past Earth in 1997, appear simply too infrequently in our skies. Their orbits must be very long, far too long to have an origin in the Kuiper belt. The conclusion of many astronomers is that the known solar system is surrounded in all directions by a tenuous halo of icy outcasts, thrown from the sun's immediate vicinity billions of years ago by the gravity of the giant planets.
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Sherlock

Albania Reveals Ancient Treasures


China View
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 05:02 UTC
This sparkling stretch of the Ionian Sea is slowly giving rise to lost treasures dating back 2,500 years and shipwrecks from ancient times.

Over the past two years, a research ship carrying American and Albanian experts has combed the waters off southern Albania, using scanning equipment and submersible robots to seek out ancient wrecks. In what organizers have said is the first archaeological survey of Albania's seabed, at least five sites have been located, which could fill in blanks on ancient shipbuilding techniques.

"Albania is a tremendous untapped (archaeological) resource," U.S. archaeologist Jeffrey Royal from the Florida-based RPM Nautical Foundation, a nonprofit group leading the survey, said.
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Magnify

Turning Down Gene Expression Promotes Nerve Cell Maintenance


PhysOrg
Mon, 02 Feb 2009 10:57 UTC
Anyone with a sweet tooth knows that too much of a good thing can lead to negative consequences. The same can be said about the signals that help maintain nerve cells, as demonstrated in a new study of myelin, a protein key to efficient neuronal transmission.

Normal nerve cells have a myelin sheath, which, much like the insulation on a cable, allows for rapid and efficient signal conduction. However, in several diseases - the most well-known being multiple sclerosis - demyelination processes cause the breakdown of this "insulation", and lead to deficits in perception, movement, cognition, etc. Thus, in order to help patients of demyelinating disease, researchers are studying the pathways that control myelin formation and maintenance.
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Magnify

Single Gene Lets Bacteria Jump From Host To Host


PhysOrg
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 19:24 UTC
Gene
© William OrmerodThe diminutive bobtail squid, which feeds at night near the surface of the ocean, uses a luminescent bacterium to form a light organ that mimics moonlight and confuses predators.
All life -- plants, animals, people -- depends on peaceful coexistence with a swarm of microbial life that performs vital services from helping to convert food to energy to protection from disease.

Now, with the help of a squid that uses a luminescent bacterium to create a predator-fooling light organ and a fish that uses a different strain of the same species of bacteria like a flashlight to illuminate the dark nooks of the reefs where it lives, scientists have found that gaining a single gene is enough for the microbe to switch host animals.

The finding, reported this week (Feb. 1) in the journal Nature by a team of scientists from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is important not only because it peels back some of the mystery of how bacteria evolved to colonize different animals, but also because it reveals a genetic pressure point that could be manipulated to thwart the germs that make us sick.
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Sherlock

How Ancient Greeks Chose Temple Locations

Graciela Flores
Natural History/LiveScience
Sat, 31 Jan 2009 18:03 UTC
To honor their gods and goddesses, ancient Greeks often poured blood or wine on the ground as offerings. Now a new study suggests that the soil itself might have had a prominent role in Greek worship, strongly influencing which deities were venerated where.

In a survey of eighty-four Greek temples of the Classical period (480 to 338 B.C.), Gregory J. Retallack of the University of Oregon in Eugene studied the local geology, topography, soil, and vegetation - as well as historical accounts by the likes of Herodotus, Homer, and Plato - in an attempt to answer a seemingly simple question: why are the temples where they are?
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Fish

Tropical Turtle Fossil Found in Arctic


LiveScience
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 14:13 UTC
The last place scientists expected to find the fossil of a freshwater, tropical turtle was in the Arctic. But they did.

The discovery, detailed today in the journal Geology, suggests animals migrated from Asia to North America not around Alaska, as once thought, but directly across a freshwater sea floating atop the warm, salty Arctic Ocean. It also provides additional evidence that a rapid influx of carbon dioxide some 90 million years ago was the likely cause of a super-greenhouse effect that created extraordinary heat in the polar region.
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Sherlock

Legendary British Warship 'Found?'


BBC News
Sun, 01 Feb 2009 15:25 UTC
Victory
© BBC NewsAn artist's impression of how HMS Victory may have looked.
A US-based salvage firm is believed to have found remains from the wreck of a legendary British warship which sank in the English Channel in 1744.

Odyssey Marine Exploration is expected to announce on Monday that it has found HMS Victory, the forerunner of Nelson's famous flagship of the same name.

The valuables from the vessel, including brass cannons, could be worth millions of pounds, some experts say.
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