Month: November 2020

[I have no opinion on this. It's just interesting science. What if any implications this might have, I don't know. Jan]

The question of whether a 7-million-year-old primate, nicknamed ‘Toumai,’ walked on two or four legs has whipped up drama amongst palaeontologists – complete with a vanishing femur.

Since the discovery of Sahelanthropus tchadensis’s first fossil back in 2001, it has often been cited as our earliest known hominin ancestor. Initial analysis suggested that Sahelanthropus regularly walked upright and had a combination of ape-like and human-like features.

These conclusions, however, were based on a single skull.

The skull has anatomical features that potentially indicate this primate had an erect spine, and therefore spent some of its time walking on two legs only. Its small teeth also appear more human than ape-like. A later reconstruction supported these findings.

But other researchers have since argued that this alone is not enough evidence to class Sahelanthropus as a hominin biped – a primate directly ancestral to humans – rather than a related, but not directly ancestral hominid.

Around the same time and at the same location where the skull was found, in Toros-Menalla in Chad, a partial left femur was also recovered. The femur vanished after another researcher started to examine it in 2004, having come across it supposedly by chance.

Aude Bergeret-Medina and her supervisor, palaeoanthropologist Roberto Macchiarelli from the University of Poitiers in France, eventually continued their analysis based on measurements and photos. They have just published their findings, which cast doubt on Sahelanthropus’s place in our family tree.

"Based on our analyses, the partial femur lacks any feature consistent with regular bouts of terrestrial bipedal travel," Macchiarelli and team write in their paper.

"Thus, if there is compelling evidence that S. tchadensis is a stem hominin, then bipedalism can no longer be seen as a requirement for inclusion in the hominin clade."

Another paper still awaiting peer review from one of the authors of the original Sahelanthropus studies disputes this, claiming the femur has a hard top ridge that supports an upright stance.

Meanwhile, another palaeontologist, Martin Pickford from the French National Museum of Natural History, wonders if the femur even belongs to Toumai, or at least another Sahelanthropus.

Still, others agree with Macchiarelli’s assessment of the femur.

"I saw the pictures 10 or 12 years ago, and it was clear to me that it’s more similar to a chimp than to any other hominin," University of Tübingen palaeontologist Madelaine Böhme, who was not involved in any of the studies, told New Scientist.

Analysis of molecular differences in our DNA suggests that humans parted ways with chimpanzees and bonobos (our closest still living relatives), around 6-8 million years ago. The only other fossil evidence of a possible hominin from that time is from Orrorin tugenensis.

Macchiarelli and team compared the femur with one from O. tugenensis and determined that there’s at least species-level difference between them.

After also comparing them with Australopithecus, gorillas, and modern humans, they believe these differences suggest the mode of locomotion of the two oldest species was also different.

They suspect Sahelanthropus may be an ancestral relative with no remaining living descendants – a primate lineage that went extinct.

They also point out others have suggested the small teeth found in the original study could just indicate the primate is female. But the team agrees that fascinating questions nonetheless remain, particularly around the lines that we use to define what exactly makes a primate a human, quoting a 2017 paper in their conclusion:

"Exactly where in Africa, and under what circumstances, the ape-human demarcation began, and when, how and why the ape-human boundary became irrevocably established, are important research challenges that are still unresolved."

We’ll need many more fossils before we know the answers.

This research was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/seven-million-year-old-fossil-may-not-be-from-one-of-our-earliest-ancestor-after-all

Source: https://www.sciencealert.com/seven-million-year-old-fossil-may-not-be-from-one-of-our-earliest-ancestor-after-all

[It is fascinating that this asteroid might hit the earth by 2068. But there are unknowns due to slight orbital changes. Either way, Western Science can handle it. They can also push it away from hitting the earth. This is probably the easiest and most practical solution to the problem. Jan]

Astronomers say they’ll have to keep an eye on the near-Earth asteroid Apophis to see how much of a danger the space rock poses to our planet during a close pass in 2068. But don’t panic: The chances of an impact still seem very low.

Under certain circumstances, the sun can heat an asteroid unevenly, causing the space rock to radiate away heat energy asymmetrically. The result can be a tiny push in a certain direction — an effect called Yarkovsky acceleration, which can change the path of an asteroid through space.

Since astronomers hadn’t measured this solar push on Apophis before, they didn’t take it into consideration when calculating the threat the asteroid poses to us in 2068. Those previous calculations showed a tiny impact probability — around 1 in 150,000.

CLOSE
Now, a new study shows the asteroid is drifting away from its previously predicted orbit by about 557 feet (170 meters) a year due to the Yarkovsky effect, lead author and University of Hawaii at Manoa astronomer David Tholen said during a press conference on Oct. 26.

"Basically, the heat that an asteroid radiates gives it a very tiny push," he explained during a virtual meeting of the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences. You can find the press conference on YouTube here. It begins at the 22-minute mark.

"The warmer hemisphere [of the asteroid] would be pushing slightly more than the cooler hemisphere, and that causes the asteroid to drift away from what a purely gravitational orbit would predict," Tholen said.

Showing the orbit for the 1,120-foot-wide (340 m) Apophis, he indicated that astronomers thought they had enough observations of the asteroid — collected over the years after its discovery in 2004 — to more or less rule out an impact in 2068. Those calculations, however, were based on an orbit not affected by the sun’s energy. Ultimately, this means we can’t yet rule out Apophis being a threat in 2068, Tholen said.

"The 2068 impact scenario is still in play," Tholen said. "We need to track this asteroid very carefully."

Fortunately, the asteroid will make a close (yet still safe) approach to our planet in 2029, allowing ground-based telescopes — including the Arecibo Observatory’s powerful radar dish — to get a more detailed look at the asteroid’s surface and shape. Apophis will be so close it will be visible with the naked eye, at third magnitude — about as bright as the binary star Cor Caroli.

"Of all dates, Friday the 13th in April, April 13 [2029], is when the flyby will occur," Tholen said., "Obviously, the 2029 close approach is critical. We’ll know after that occurs exactly where it [Apophis] was as it passed the Earth, and that will make it much easier for us to predict future impact scenarios."

Tholen’s team made the discovery after four nights of observation in January and March with the Subaru Telescope, a Japanese optical-infrared telescope on the summit of Maunakea, Hawaii. The researchers collected 18 exposures of the asteroid at a very high precision, with an error of only 10 milliarcseconds in each observation. (A milliarcsecond is a thousandth of an arcsecond, an angular measurement that helps scientists measure cosmic distances.)

"We really nailed the position of this asteroid extremely well," Tholen said. "That was enough to give us a strong detection of the Yarkovsky effect, which is something we’ve been expecting to see now for a while."

Tholen noted that Apophis has been troublesome for astronomers, with "numerous impact scenarios" predicted (and then largely ruled out) since it was first found in 2004. For example: Initially, scientists calculated a 3% chance of Apophis slamming into our planet in 2029, a prediction Tholen said was quickly ruled out after more observations showed the true path of the little world.

If there’s any threat of an impact, astronomers will know long before 2068 how to approach the problem. Engineers around the world are developing ideas about how to deflect dangerous asteroids from our planet, concepts that range from gravitational tugs to "kinetic impactors" that would knock an incoming rock off course.

A joint European-NASA mission will also test and observe asteroid deflection at a space rock called Didymos, starting in 2022. If all goes to plan, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft will slam into "Didymoon," the moon orbiting Didymos. The European Space Agency will then launch the Hera mission in 2023 or 2024 and reach Didymos two years later, to see how well the kinetic impactor did in moving the moon from its previous orbit.

NASA has a dedicated Planetary Defense Coordination Office that collects asteroid observations from a network of partner telescopes, and which runs through scenarios with other U.S. agencies for asteroid deflection or (in the worst case) evacuating threatened populations from an incoming space rock. So far, decades of observations have found no imminent asteroid or comet threats to our planet.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/asteroid-apophis-acceleration-2068-impact-chance.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2962140&m_i=_yb8hVP6wDIvbceY_bOVGTRB8hvAtHHhCzxjaH6fUSqgRnp4n7vl7kT8LcZpu_101VTSlCXQMJ7Kcty6cFcvc6Fo8YcQf7ybuBZfbSI__g

Today’s humans carry the genes of an ancient, unknown ancestor, left there by hominin species intermingling perhaps a million years ago.

The ancestor may have been Homo erectus, but no one knows for sure — the genome of that extinct species of human has never been sequenced, said Adam Siepel, a computational biologist at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and one of the authors of a new paper examining the relationships of ancient human ancestors.

The new research, published today (Aug. 6) in the journal PLOS Genetics, also finds that ancient humans mated with Neanderthals between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago, well before the more recent, and better-known mixing of the two species occurred, after Homo sapiens migrated in large numbers out of Africa and into Europe 50,000 years ago. Thanks to this ancient mixing event, Neanderthals actually owe between 3% and 7% of their genomes to ancient Homo sapiens, the researchers reported.

"Our best conjecture is that an early group of anatomically modern humans left Africa then encountered and interbred with Neandertals, perhaps in the Middle East," Siepel told Live Science. "This lineage [of humans] would then have been lost — either gone extinct, or absorbed by the Neandertals, or migrated back to Africa."

Ancient mixers
The new research illustrates the complexity of humanity’s deep history. Evidence has long been accumulating that humans and Neanderthals mated while their populations overlapped in Europe, before Neanderthals went extinct around 30,000 years ago. In 2010, researchers reported that between 1% and 4% of modern human genes in people in Asia, Europe and Oceania came from Neanderthal ancestors. When you add up all the snippets of Neanderthal DNA present in all modern humans today, some 20% of the Neanderthal genome may be preserved, according to 2014 research.

As scientists have been able to sequence more fragile fragments of DNA from fossils of ancient human ancestors, they’ve discovered a complex web of interbreeding stretching back millennia. Some Pacific Islanders, for example, carry pieces of the DNA of a mysterious ancient species of humans known as Denisovans.

The researchers of the new study used a computational method of comparing the genomes of two Neanderthals, a Denisovan and two modern African individuals. (Africans were chosen because modern people in Africa don’t carry Neanderthal genes from the well-known human-Neanderthal interbreeding that occurred in Europe starting 50,000 years ago.) This method allowed the researchers to capture recombination events, in which segments of chromosomes — which are made up of DNA — from one individual get incorporated into the chromosomes of another.

"We are trying to build a complete model for the evolutionary history of every segment of the genome, jointly across all of the analyzed individuals," Siepel said. "The ancestral recombination graph, as it is known, includes a tree that captures the relationships among all individuals at every position along the genome, and the recombination events that cause those trees to change from one position to the next."

One advantage of the method, Siepel said, is that it allows researchers to find recombination events inside of recombination events. For example, if a bit of ancient hominin DNA from an unknown ancestor were incorporated in the Neanderthal genome, and then a later mating event between Neanderthals and humans inserted that mystery DNA into the human genome, the method allows for the identification of this "nested" DNA.

The analysis turned up evidence of this sort of nested insertion of DNA. The finding that Homo sapiens seem to have mated with Neanderthals between 200,000 and 300,000 years ago meshes with previous evidence of some sort of mixing event between the two species prior to humans moving en masse to Europe, Siepel said.

The researchers also found that 1% of the Denisovan genome hails from the genes of an unknown ancestor, from an interbreeding event that must have happened, roughly, a million years ago. This mystery ancestor could have been Homo erectus, Siepel said, because Homo erectus likely did overlap in Eurasia with the ancestors of Denisovans and Neanderthals. However, these fragments are tiny and there are no Homo erectus sequences to compare them to, so this is speculative.

In both cases, these interbreeding events were passed along again to modern humans: 15% of the interbreeding sequences found in Denisovans are present in people living today, the researchers found.

The new results are another piece of evidence that ancient and modern human lineages mixed relatively frequently, Siepel said.

"A picture is emerging of a series of distinct but related populations moving around the globe and frequently interacting with one another, with occasional interbreeding events that produced hybrid offspring," Siepel said. "These hybrid offspring might in some cases have suffered from reduced fitness — this is an area of controversy — but apparently many of them were healthy enough to survive and reproduce, leaving a patchwork of archaic and modern human DNA in Neanderthals, Denisovans and modern humans.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/mystery-ancestor-mated-with-humans.html

Source: https://www.livescience.com/mystery-ancestor-mated-with-humans.html

Earth makes a tiny seismic rumble every 26 seconds.

Is the pulsating caused by ocean waves, volcanoes, or something else completely? Theories abound.

The "microseism" doesn’t seem to be hurting anything and has not been a high priority.

Why is Earth pulsating every 26 seconds, and why can’t scientists explain it after 60 years? This is an enigma wrapped in a periodically predictable mystery motion. It could be a harmonic phenomenon, a regular seismic chirp caused by the sun’s energy, or a beacon drawing scientists to its source to begin a treasure hunt.

In the early 1960s, a geologist named Jack Oliver first documented the pulse, also known as a "microseism," according to Discover. Oliver, who worked at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory at the time, heard the noise, but didn’t have the advanced instruments seismologists have now at his disposal.

Since then, scientists have spent a lot of time listening to the pulse and even finding out where it comes from: “a part of the Gulf of Guinea called the Bight of Bonny,” Discover says.

Some researchers think the pulse has a kind of prosaic cause. Under the world’s oceans, the continental shelf acts as a gigantic wave break—it’s the boundary off the very far edge of, for example, the North American continental mass where the highest part of the plate finally falls off into the deep abyssal plain. Scientists have theorized that as waves hit this specific place on the continental shelf in the Gulf of Guinea, this regular pulse is produced.

If that sounds improbable, consider all the different shapes of drums, from timpani to bass drums to bongos that you hit with your hands. It’s not impossible that just one shape of continental shelf “drum” would create the right harmonic bang to rattle the Earth. If that’s true, we’re probably lucky it’s just one.

But other researchers think the cause is a volcano that’s also very near the critical spot: “That’s because the pulse’s origin point is suspiciously close to a volcano on the island of São Tomé in the Bight of Bonny,” Discover explains. And there’s a similar volcanic microseism that’s already well documented in Japan.

It seems like reams of new scientific research emerge every day, but the mystery pulse is a good reminder that so much remains to be discovered. Scientists have studied the pulse and debate its origin, but it just hasn’t reached a tipping point of interest to be solved. Discover explains that researchers have likely been studying higher-priority seismic events instead, which makes sense.

This year, for example, seismologists have an important opportunity to study a much quieter Earth during global quarantine. That could mean they all redouble efforts on high-priority subjects, or it could mean that the right listener at the right time could finally understand the 26-second chirp once and for all. In a perfect world, we could have both.

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a34531984/earth-pulsates-every-26-seconds/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=110520&utm_campaign=nl21998877&src=nl

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/environment/a34531984/earth-pulsates-every-26-seconds/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=110520&utm_campaign=nl21998877&src=nl

It was a getaway attempt worthy of Ian Fleming, but in the end, a suspected US fraudster proved he was no James Bond.

Matthew Piercey, 44, a California man accused of financial crimes, briefly evaded justice when the FBI tried to arrest him on Monday morning.

He first fled by car and then used a sea scooter to hide from agents underwater in a frigid lake.

Agents watched his bubbles on the surface for around 25 minutes before he emerged and was handcuffed.

He is accused of leading a $35m (£27m) Ponzi scheme at his local church.

Sea scooters, also known as diver propulsion vehicles, are underwater devices that can pull a person wearing scuba gear. They were used for the underwater battle in the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball and have been employed by real-life militaries around the world.

Officials said that when they moved in to arrest Mr Piercey he fled in a pickup truck, twice driving off the road. He was then seen jumping in to the lake near the city of Redding with a strange device in his hand.

Police later learned that the model he used, a Yamaha 350Li, can reach speeds of 4mph (6.5km/h) and can travel at depths of 100ft underwater.

"You never know what is going through someone’s mind when they’re being pursued by the FBI," said lawyer Josh Kons, who is representing several victims of the alleged fraud.

"And we kept investigating, and all of a sudden today, here he is trying to escape into a lake, using a submersible device."

After Mr Piercey emerged, police medics examined him for hypothermia and gave him dry clothes they had collected from his wife, according to the Sacramento Bee news website.

Investigators say that he and his business partner Kenneth Winton used funds invested in their companies, Family Wealth Legacy and Zolla, to pay for personal expenses, and that few liquid assets remained for them to return to clients.

Mr Piercey is charged with wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, and witness tampering and is facing 20 years in prison.

Prosecutors have also deemed him a flight risk.

Source: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-54977909

On July 3, 1969, just 17 days before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walked on the lunar surface, the USSR made its second attempt to test-fire its own moon rocket, known as N1.

No official announcement about the secret mission had ever been made, but in subsequent passes over the Soviet test range in Tyuratam, Kazakhstan, U.S. spy satellites glimpsed utter devastation at one of the two launch pads known to host the moon rocket.

The Soviet Union didn’t know it at the time, but its hopes for reaching the moon also ended on that charred launch pad in 1969.

The story of the Soviet N1 rocket and the wider lunar program in the USSR is still shrouded in mystery, especially compared to the Apollo program. To this day, historians debate how and why the pioneering Soviet space program suddenly fell behind in the race to the moon and how far behind it had been at the moment when Armstrong and Aldrin set foot on another world.

The truth is no one element completely doomed the Soviet Union’s lunar program. The Kremlin’s resting on its laurels after winning the race into Earth’s orbit with Sputnik and Gagarin certainly played a role. Internal rivalries between leaders of the Soviet space program—Sergei Korolev, Valentin Glushko and Vladimir Chelomei—didn’t help things, either.

But as early as April 1961, U.S. policy makers had already singled out the lunar expedition as something that the U.S. was likely to achieve ahead of the USSR, simply because of the American economic and technological superiority.

Add to that the lukewarm support of the civilian space program by the Soviet military, which in large part held purse strings of the rocket industry, and it becomes clear that the Soviet engineers never had a chance to beat NASA to the moon.

Even half a century after the events, we’re still learning pieces of the extensive and multi-faceted Soviet effort to put humans on the moon.

Only in 2015 did the successor to the OKB-1 design bureau, which developed the giant N1 rocket, release details illustrating the growing pains of the Soviet lunar exploration program, reminiscent of the torturous path to the final mission design in the Apollo project.

The documents from April 1963 testify how the Soviet engineers just completed an analysis of 26 different scenarios for the lunar expedition and were only able to narrow them down to four diverse architectures, which still needed more detailed studies before the final plan could be picked. In retrospect, it’s stunning to see how far from the final architecture, these four finalist scenarios had been with the plan’s less-than-feasible hopes for multiple launches of super-rockets, yet-to-be-tried docking procedures, and ambitious refueling in Earth’s orbit.

For comparison, in the middle of 1962, the fathers of the Apollo project had already favored the rendezvous in the lunar orbit as the key element of the flight scenario and a single-launch architecture, thus clearing the way for a fast-paced development of the Saturn V rocket for the Apollo missions.

The Rocket That Started the Space Race
Even at this early paper phase—when serious investments of money and materiel had not been required from the Kremlin—the Soviet engineers were almost a year behind the U.S., and it went only downhill from there for the Soviets.

Various disputes on the use of propellant and design of the future moon rocket and other strategic disagreements within the industry put complicated and delayed the Soviet lunar program. Only in 1964, had Soviet engineers gotten necessary political go-ahead to join the moon race, but it was already too late.

In the next four years, myriad technical problems and flawed flight tests kept widening the gap between Apollo and its Soviet rival.

When the time came for production, the USSR also faced geographical disadvantages. For example, the launch site in Tyuratam was located far from sea ports, meaning the assembly of booster stages for the moon rocket would have to be moved to the arid steppes of Kazakhstan—along with an army of workers.

Finally, the killing blow to the Kremlin’s lunar efforts came from the main propulsion system of the N1 rocket. Initially, there were various plans to equip the N1 with engines up to 600 tons of thrust, but the lack of necessary machinery and time forced designers to settle for a much smaller 150-ton engine. It meant that a total of 24—and when that proved not enough, 30—engines would have to be working in a precisely choreographed fashion to lift the monstrous vehicle off the pad.

Building the large static-firing facility, which would allow engineers to tune up the capricious multi-engine cluster on the ground, was also abandoned to save time and money. So when the brand-new engines first met together, they were supposed to work on the actual rocket in real flight.

Lunik 1 manned lunar landing module, it was intended to operate in conjunction with the zond 9 spacecraft in 1971.
The Lunik 1 manned lunar lander planned for the Soviet lunar program. It never flew.

During the first launch attempt on February 21, 1969, the vehicle failed after one minute and eight seconds in flight due to a propulsion system failure. The leaders of the project were disappointed but not discouraged—after all, nobody died, the launch pad remained intact, and the rocket actually demonstrated some ability to fly (at least up an altitude of 30 kilometers).

Indeed, many Soviet veterans of the N1 project lived through spectacular failures of so many preceding rockets that this could almost be seen as good news. So the Soviet team pressed ahead with the second N1 launch attempt as soon as possible.

The second N1 rocket, designated 5L, reached the pad in the summer of 1969, after Apollo 9 and Apollo 10 had already completed dress rehearsal missions ahead of the actual lunar landing attempt—an American victory loomed on the horizon. As the sixth Saturn V rocket slated for the Apollo 11 mission was undergoing checks at Cape Canaveral, the second N1 vehicle reached the launch pad.

The N1 rocket No. 5L blasted off into the night from July 3 to July 4, 1969.

As it climbed to an altitude of around 100 meters, just 10.5 seconds after liftoff, some bright pieces ominously fell off from its tail section. The colossus then seemingly froze in mid-air and started tilting to its side. At the tip of the rocket, the emergency escape engines fired and pulled the capsule, meant to carry the two-person crew, into darkness. With its flight control system paralyzed by an engine explosion, the giant rocket was unable to steer itself downrange and crashed back onto the launch pad with most of its propellant.

The massive explosion almost completely wiped out half of the two-pad launch complex, a project that took several years to complete. Some pieces from the rocket were apparently found as far as six miles away and windows were reported to be blown off in buildings located nearly four miles from the launch pad.

A Done Deal
The failure of the second launch sealed the Soviet’s fate in the moon race and raised the question if a Soviet cosmonaut would ever walk on the moon. In the next several years, N1 made two more unsuccessful (though not as devastating) launch attempts before the Soviet government shut down the program in June 1974.

The Soviet space program continued making great contributions to humanity’s exploration of space, including its famous Soyuz rocket, but the dream of a Soviet cosmonaut on the moon died on a Kazakhstan launchpad in the summer of ’69.

Source: https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/rockets/a22531/why-didnt-russia-make-it-to-the-moon/

The twin infants’ double burial was unearthed in Krems am Wachtberg, Austria.

An ancient grave in Austria may represent the oldest burial of twins on record, a new study finds.

The 31,000-year-old burial dates to the Upper Paleolithic (a period lasting from 40,000 to 10,000 years ago), also known as the Old Stone Age. One of the infants died shortly after childbirth, while his twin brother lived for about 50 days, or just over 7 weeks, according to analyses of both babies.

A third infant, a 3-month-old, interred in a burial about 5 feet (1.5 meters) away is likely their cousin, according to the research, published online Nov. 6 in the journal Communications Biology.

Researchers found the twins’ oval-shaped burial at the archaeological site of Krems-Wachtberg, on the bank of the Danube River by the town center of Krems in 2005. The twin infants’ remains were covered with ochre, a red pigment often used in ancient burials across the world. The double burial also contained 53 beads made out of mammoth ivory that were likely once threaded on a necklace, and a perforated fox incisor and three perforated mollusks, which were possibly necklace pendants, the researchers said. A mammoth shoulder blade placed over the burial protected the small bodies interred beneath it over the millennia.

The nearby burial of the other infant also contained ochre, as well as a 3-inch-long (8 centimeters) mammoth-ivory pin, which may have fastened a leather garment together at the time of burial, the researchers said.

The finding made headlines shortly after its discovery, and researchers even created a replica of the twins’ burial, which went on display at the Natural History Museum Vienna in 2013. However, scientists still had much to learn about the ancient burial. So, in the new project, an interdisciplinary group of researchers teamed up to decipher the relationship between these three infants and to determine their sex and age at death.

The study is the first on record to use ancient DNA to confirm twins in the archaeological record, the researchers said. And not just any twins, but identical twins.

This is the "earliest proof of a twin birth," study senior researcher Ron Pinhasi, an associate professor in the Department of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Vienna, said in a statement (translated from German with Google Translate). Researchers don’t know how common twin births were during the Upper Paleolithic (the rate fluctuates by region and time), but today, twins (both identical and fraternal) happen in about one in 85 births, while identical twins are born in about one in 250 births.

"To discover a multiple burial from the Paleolithic period is a specialty in itself," study lead researcher Maria Teschler-Nicola, a biologist at the Natural History Museum Vienna, said in the statement. "The fact that sufficient and high-quality old DNA could be extracted from the fragile child’s skeletal remains for a genome analysis exceeded all of our expectations and can be compared to a lottery ticket."

A genetic analysis of the third infant revealed that he was a third-degree male relative, likely a cousin, the researchers found.

The twins’ bodies were covered with the red pigment ochre.

A replica of the double burial on display at Natural History Museum Vienna. (Image credit: Kurt Kracher/© NHM Vienna)
To determine at what age the babies died, the researchers looked at each baby’s top second incisor. The team paid special attention to the so-called "newborn line," a dark line in the tooth enamel that separates the enamel formed prenatally from that formed after birth, Teschler-Nicola said.

Those newborn lines, as well the infants’ skeletal development, suggested the twins were either full, or nearly full-term, babies. It appears that the infants’ hunter-gatherer group buried the first twin, then reopened the grave when they buried his brother.

This finding confirms the cultural-historical practice of reopening a grave for the purpose of reburial, which had never been documented before in a Paleolithic burial, the researchers said.

The team also analyzed chemical elements, including isotopes of carbon, nitrogen and barium, in the tooth enamel, revealing that each of the twins was breastfed. Even though the twins’ cousin survived for three months, "stress lines" in his teeth suggest that he had feeding difficulties, perhaps because his mother had a painful breast infection known as mastitis, or maybe because she didn’t survive the birth.

It’s unknown exactly why these infants died, but the deaths of these twins and their cousin were likely painful events for this Paleolithic hunter-gatherer group, who set up camp and buried their babies by the Danube so long ago. "The babies were obviously of particular importance to the group and highly respected and esteemed," Teschler-Nicola told Live Science. The extraordinary burials "seems to imply that the death of the babies was a great loss for the community and their survival."

Source: https://www.livescience.com/oldest-twin-burial-on-record.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2962140&m_i=vHKF6N_PzRC3mEK95pTX3iJyuwiAW5oSX1W4mUouDqafeJditB888QK%2BDRyWsts53smC3Vr%2BCR7dzDJCjF7trIvDk24e266DiBTe%2BhfvvM

[Nature is freaky. Here is an eel eating it's way out of a bird's stomach. The eels often do it with fish. They don't take shit! Nature is nasty. Jan]

A snake eel fighting for its life pulled an "alien" move by bursting out of the stomach of a heron that had just swallowed it whole, according to photos snapped by an amateur photographer in Delaware.

The photos show the snake eel, its head dangling in midair, as the heron — looking surprisingly unbothered — flies onward.

The unusual event attracted a lot of attention among the local predators, said Sam Davis, an engineer from Maryland who took the photos on the Delaware shore. Several juvenile eagles and a fox were following the heron, possibly hoping to scavenge a meal in case the heron or the snake eel didn’t make it, he said.

When Davis first spotted the bizarre flight, he thought that a snake or eel had bitten the heron’s neck. Davis was about 75 yards to 100 yards (68 to 91 meters) away from the animals, but he had a telephoto lens for long-range photography, and so he shot photos as he watched the heron fly about and even land in the water with the eel still attached to it. "The heron didn’t seem to act much differently," Davis told Live Science. "It was in the water and flying around."

Meanwhile, the eel was arching its body, "so i guess it was still alive at some point," he said.

It wasn’t until Davis returned home and edited the photos that he realized that the snake eel wasn’t biting the heron. After enlarging the photos, "I could see the eel, you could see its eyes," he said. "It was actually coming out the other end" — headfirst.

Snake eels are usually known for burrowing out of the stomachs of fish.

The snake eel arches its body. It’s unknown if it survived. (Image credit: Sam Davis)
The photos show "a pretty amazing sight," said John Pogonoski, an ichthyologist with the Australian National Fish Collection at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who wasn’t involved with the heron and snake eel’s encounter. "I would think this is either very rare or very rarely seen in a bird species, at least as far as I am aware."

Earlier this year, Pogonoski and his colleagues published a study in the journal Memoirs of the Queensland Museum on snake eels (a fish from the family Ophichthidae), detailing how snake eels can burrow out of the guts of fish that prey on them. "But usually they don’t get very far," he told Live Science in an email. Once swallowed, snake eels can use their hard heads or tails to bust out of the digestive tract, but usually end up in the predator’s body cavity, muscle tissues or swim bladder. Once trapped, snake eels often "become ‘mummified’ or ‘encysted’ [closed up in a cyst] and die rather than escape," he said.

In one instance, "a co-author of the paper once discovered a live snake eel inside a fish he caught when he cleaned the fish to eat it," Pogonoski said.

Davis never learned what happened to the heron and snake eel photographed in Delaware in 2011 (he uploaded the photos to a wildlife site only a few months ago). When he left the shore, the heron was still flying around with the snake eel hanging below it.

According to Pogonoski, "the heron possibly survived, it didn’t look too inconvenienced, but would depend on how well the wound healed and if it was able to avoid an infection."

As for the snake eel, it "would only have survived if it was dropped over or very close to water with a salinity it could normally tolerate," he said.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/snake-eel-bursts-out-of-heron.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2962140&m_i=cNX86UyNAtkoas7BFD9FL0FBidZHx0KGmu57FAHvRlvZqnITi7UthNDf3TRvjQBRe6ZINOQ%2BI6ajkBamkKYNf0zv0CJyLoPazSYHtRsccI

Source: https://www.livescience.com/snake-eel-bursts-out-of-heron.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2962140&m_i=cNX86UyNAtkoas7BFD9FL0FBidZHx0KGmu57FAHvRlvZqnITi7UthNDf3TRvjQBRe6ZINOQ%2BI6ajkBamkKYNf0zv0CJyLoPazSYHtRsccI

[Nature is freaky. Here is an eel eating it's way out of a bird's stomach. The eels often do it with fish. They don't take shit! Nature is nasty. Jan]

A snake eel fighting for its life pulled an "alien" move by bursting out of the stomach of a heron that had just swallowed it whole, according to photos snapped by an amateur photographer in Delaware.

The photos show the snake eel, its head dangling in midair, as the heron — looking surprisingly unbothered — flies onward.

The unusual event attracted a lot of attention among the local predators, said Sam Davis, an engineer from Maryland who took the photos on the Delaware shore. Several juvenile eagles and a fox were following the heron, possibly hoping to scavenge a meal in case the heron or the snake eel didn’t make it, he said.

When Davis first spotted the bizarre flight, he thought that a snake or eel had bitten the heron’s neck. Davis was about 75 yards to 100 yards (68 to 91 meters) away from the animals, but he had a telephoto lens for long-range photography, and so he shot photos as he watched the heron fly about and even land in the water with the eel still attached to it. "The heron didn’t seem to act much differently," Davis told Live Science. "It was in the water and flying around."

Meanwhile, the eel was arching its body, "so i guess it was still alive at some point," he said.

It wasn’t until Davis returned home and edited the photos that he realized that the snake eel wasn’t biting the heron. After enlarging the photos, "I could see the eel, you could see its eyes," he said. "It was actually coming out the other end" — headfirst.

Snake eels are usually known for burrowing out of the stomachs of fish.

The snake eel arches its body. It’s unknown if it survived. (Image credit: Sam Davis)
The photos show "a pretty amazing sight," said John Pogonoski, an ichthyologist with the Australian National Fish Collection at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who wasn’t involved with the heron and snake eel’s encounter. "I would think this is either very rare or very rarely seen in a bird species, at least as far as I am aware."

Earlier this year, Pogonoski and his colleagues published a study in the journal Memoirs of the Queensland Museum on snake eels (a fish from the family Ophichthidae), detailing how snake eels can burrow out of the guts of fish that prey on them. "But usually they don’t get very far," he told Live Science in an email. Once swallowed, snake eels can use their hard heads or tails to bust out of the digestive tract, but usually end up in the predator’s body cavity, muscle tissues or swim bladder. Once trapped, snake eels often "become ‘mummified’ or ‘encysted’ [closed up in a cyst] and die rather than escape," he said.

In one instance, "a co-author of the paper once discovered a live snake eel inside a fish he caught when he cleaned the fish to eat it," Pogonoski said.

Davis never learned what happened to the heron and snake eel photographed in Delaware in 2011 (he uploaded the photos to a wildlife site only a few months ago). When he left the shore, the heron was still flying around with the snake eel hanging below it.

According to Pogonoski, "the heron possibly survived, it didn’t look too inconvenienced, but would depend on how well the wound healed and if it was able to avoid an infection."

As for the snake eel, it "would only have survived if it was dropped over or very close to water with a salinity it could normally tolerate," he said.

Source: https://www.livescience.com/snake-eel-bursts-out-of-heron.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2962140&m_i=cNX86UyNAtkoas7BFD9FL0FBidZHx0KGmu57FAHvRlvZqnITi7UthNDf3TRvjQBRe6ZINOQ%2BI6ajkBamkKYNf0zv0CJyLoPazSYHtRsccI

Source: https://www.livescience.com/snake-eel-bursts-out-of-heron.html?utm_source=Selligent&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=9160&utm_content=LVS_newsletter+&utm_term=2962140&m_i=cNX86UyNAtkoas7BFD9FL0FBidZHx0KGmu57FAHvRlvZqnITi7UthNDf3TRvjQBRe6ZINOQ%2BI6ajkBamkKYNf0zv0CJyLoPazSYHtRsccI

Half of the stars in our galaxy that are similar to the sun could be home to an Earth-like planet capable of supporting life.

A team led by Steve Bryson at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California analysed data from the Kepler space telescope, searching for rocky planets within the habitable zone of stars the same size as our sun. The habitable zone is found at the distance from a star where it isn’t too hot or too cold for liquid water to exist.

Based on detections of …

Continue reading at: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2258911-there-could-be-around-5-billion-habitable-planets-in-the-milky-way/