The Jesus Christ Lizard

DOD tries to uncover secret of flying snakes

Marc Kaufman – An unusual breed of Asian snakes can glide long distances in the air, and the Department of Defense is funding research at Virginia Tech to find out why.

Most animals that glide do so with fixed wings or a wing-like part. But not the “flying snakes” of Southeast Asia, India and southern China – at least five members of the genus Chrysopelea.

As video of the reptiles show, they undulate from side to side, in almost an air-slithering, to create an aerodynamic system. It allows them to travel from the top of the biggest trees in the region (almost 200 feet high) to a spot about 780 feet away from the tree’s trunk.

“Basically . . .they become one long wing,” said John Socha, the Virginia Tech researcher who has traveled extensively in Asia to study the snakes and to film them.

“The snake is very active in the air, and you can kind of envision it as having multiple segments that become multiple wings,” he said. “The leading edge becomes the trailer and then the trailer become the leading edge.”

It gets stranger. During a technique not yet understood, some of the snakes can actually turn in air. What’s more, they all take a flying leap off their perch to get airborne, then drop for a while to pick up speed before starting the motion that keeps them aloft much longer than they would otherwise.  …

via DOD tries to uncover secret of flying snakes.

Why people who are rich are no good at empathy

People who are rich have trouble recognising the emotions of others, a new study claims.

The university research has found that those who are poorer are better at gauging how someone feels because they need to rely on other people more often.

Scientists speculated that the rich performed worse in tests because they can solve their problems without relying on others. In other words, because of their wealth they are not as dependent on the people around them.

Whereas people who cannot afford to buy support services – such as childcare – have to rely on neighbours or relatives to watch their children while they attend work or run errands.

One experiment used volunteers who worked at a university. Some had graduated from college while others had not. Researchers used educational level as a proxy for social class.

In the U.S, where the study was carried out, the term ‘upper class’ often equates to how rich someone is, rather than the more complex notions of class that exist in Britain.

The volunteers did an emotion perception test in which they were told to look at pictures of faces and indicate which emotions each face was displaying.

People with more education performed worse on the task than people with less education.

In another study, university students who were of higher social standing – determined from each student’s self-reported perceptions of his or her family’s socio-economic status – had a more difficult time accurately reading the emotions of a stranger during a group job interview.

The research team said that these results suggest that people of upper-class status are not very good at recognising the emotions other people are feeling.

A final experiment found that, when people were made to feel that they were at a lower social class than they actually were, they got better at reading emotions.

The study published in Psychological Science – a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, was co-written by Michael Kraus, of the University of California-San Francisco. …

via Why people who are rich are no good at empathy | Mail Online.

 

‘Squid worm’ emerges from the deep

A plankton-feeding worm that uses bristles to swim and sports slender “arms” on its head, has been discovered nearly 3,000 metres below sea level off the Indonesian coast. The squid-like creature, which grows to 9cm or more, was captured by a robotic submersible in the Celebes Sea, a marine basin that plunges to 6,200 metres at its deepest.

Researchers, from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in California named it Teuthidodrilus samae – a new genus and species. They said: “This illustrates how much we have to learn about even the large, common inhabitants of deep pelagic communities.”

In a series of exploration dives, researchers spotted the worm, slowly rising and falling in the water around 100m above the seafloor, where it feeds on passing plankton. The worm swims or treads water by waving hundreds of bristles that run along the length of its body on either side.

The 10 slender arm-like appendages that give the worm its unusual appearance are a combination of elongated gills and sensory organs. They are probably used to pick scraps of food from the “marine snow” of organic detritus that constantly falls to the seabed from above. Each is as long or longer than the whole of the worm’s body.

The discovery has surprised scientists because the creature appears to be so common. In seven underwater missions the submersible spotted 16 individual specimens. “How could such an animal evade collection until now?” the team writes in the journal Biology Letters. …

via ‘Squid worm’ emerges from the deep | Science | The Guardian.

Now that’s an alien life form. Awesome. Kind of gave me the creeps too. Most new animals discovered look another kind of crab, or another kind of fish, or another kind of some other easily recognizable animal.

3,000-Year-Old Trumpet Played Again

Now you can hear a marine-inspired melody from before the time of the Little Mermaid’s hot crustacean band. Acoustic scientists put their lips to ancient conch shells to figure out how humans used these trumpets 3,000 years ago. The well-preserved, ornately decorated shells found at a pre-Inca religious site in Peru offered researchers a rare opportunity to jam on primeval instruments.

The music, powerfully haunting and droning, could have been used in religious ceremonies, the scientists say. The team reported their analysis Nov. 17 at the Second Pan-American/Iberian Meeting on Acoustics in Cancun, Mexico.

Listen to the ancient trumpets being played through links at bottom of story.

“You can really feel it in your chest,” says Jonathan Abel, an acoustician at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. “It has a rough texture like a tonal animal roar.”

Archaeologists had unearthed 20 complete Strombus galeatus marine shell trumpets in 2001 at Chavín de Huántar, an ancient ceremonial center in the Andes. Polished, painted and etched with symbols, the shells had well-formed mouthpieces and distinct V-shaped cuts. The cuts may have been used as a rest for the player’s thumb, says study co-author Perry Cook, a computer scientist at Princeton University and avid shell musician, or to allow the player to see over the instrument while walking. …

HELL CACOPHONY

A group of conch-shell instruments made by a pre-Inca civilization sound similar to a kid learning to play the trumpet. Click here to listen.

ANCIENT TONE

A musician plays the fundamental frequency and the first overtone of a 3,000-year-old shell trumpet unearthed in Peru. Click here to listen.

via 3,000-Year-Old Trumpet Played Again : Discovery News.

Disc UFO entered San Antonio sky dark and ’turned on its lights’

A Texas witness reports a slow moving disc-shaped object without lights moved over northwest San Antonio on November 21, 2010, “turned on its lights,” stopped and hovered for a minute, then “flew rapidly to the north into cloud coverage,” according to testimony from the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) witness reporting database.

“It flew very, very slowly and wobbled from side to side,” the witness stated.

The witness stated that the unlit object was noticeable in the night sky because “it was slightly darker than the sky line.” The object then flew into an area “well lit with flood lights.”

No video or images were included with the MUFON report, which was filed on November 22, 2010. San Antonio is the second largest city in Texas, population 1.4 million.

via Disc UFO entered San Antonio sky dark and ’turned on its lights’ – National ufo | Examiner.com.

Return to King Solomon’s mines

Thomas Levy, an anthropologist from the University of California at San Diego, gazes upward from an ancient copper-smelting site that may correspond with the fabled mines of King Solomon. Levy says the environment is so miserable that the workers would have to be “either slaves — or undergrads.”

Alan Boyle writes:Did King David and Solomon actually exist? The long-running debate over the accuracy of biblical accounts is resurfacing on TV and in print.

David is one of the best-known figures in Jewish scriptures — thanks to his stone-slinging victory over the giant Goliath, his divine selection as king of the Israelites, his purported authorship of the Book of Psalms, and of course his linkage to Christian and Muslim tradition. His son, Solomon, was described as the builder of the first Jewish Temple, famed for his wisdom and wealth but also for his failings.

The biblical stories raise a huge question for archaeologists: If these guys were so famous, why did they leave virtually no trace on the region’s historical record? Some experts suggested that the real-life David and Solomon were, at best, minor figures in the ancient Middle East whose reputations grew in the centuries that followed. According to these experts, the Jerusalem of the 10th century B.C. was little more than a hill-country village, and nothing like the glittering city described in the Books of Chronicles.

via Cosmic Log – Return to King Solomon’s mines.

Gold and the Periodic Table of the Elements

Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum – The periodic table lists 118 different chemical elements. And yet, for thousands of years, humans have really, really liked one of them in particular: gold. Gold has been used as money for millennia, and its price has been going through the roof.

Why gold? Why not osmium, lithium, or ruthenium?

We went to an expert to find out: Sanat Kumar, a chemical engineer at Columbia University. We asked him to take the periodic table, and start eliminating anything that wouldn’t work as money. …

So we’re down from 118 elements to 30, and we’ve come up with a list of three key requirements:

1. Not a gas.
2. Doesn’t corrode or burst into flames
3. Doesn’t kill you.

Now Sanat adds a new requirement:  You want the thing you pick to be rare. This lets him cross off a lot of the boxes near the top of the table, because the elements clustered there tend to be more abundant.

At the same time, you don’t want to pick an element that’s too rare.  So  osmium — which apparently comes to earth via meteorites — gets the axe.

That leaves us with just five elements: rhodium, palladium, silver, platinum and gold. And all of them, as it happens, are considered precious metals.

But even here we can cross things out. Silver has been widely used as money, of course. But its reactive — it tarnishes. So Sanat says it’s not the best choice.

Early civilizations couldn’t have used rhodium or palladium, because they weren’t discovered until the early 1800s.

That leaves platinum and gold, both of which can be found in rivers and streams.

But if you were in the ancient world and wanted to make platinum coins, you would have needed some sort of magic furnace from the future. The melting point for platinum is over 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Gold happens to melt at a much lower temperature, which made it much easier for pre-industrial people to work with.

So we ask Sanat: If we could run the clock back and start history again, could things go a different way, or would gold emerge again as the element of choice?

“For the earth, with every parameter we have, gold is the sweet spot,” he says. “It would come out no other way.” …

via Gold and the Periodic Table of the Elements : Planet Money : NPR.

Researchers kick-start ancient DNA

Binghamton University researchers recently revived ancient bacteria trapped for thousands of years in water droplets embedded in salt crystals.

For decades, geologists have looked at these water droplets — called fluid inclusions — and wondered whether microbes could be extracted from them. Fluid inclusions have been found inside salt crystals ranging in age from thousands to hundreds of millions years old.

But there has always been a question about whether the organisms cultured from salt crystals are genuinely ancient material or whether they are modern-day contaminants, said Tim Lowenstein, professor of geological sciences and environmental studies at Binghamton.

Lowenstein and Binghamton colleague J. Koji Lum, professor of anthropology and of biological sciences, believe they have resolved this doubt. And they’ve received $400,000 from the National Science Foundation to support further research on the topic.

Lowenstein’s team, which has been pursuing this problem for years, began by examining the fluid inclusions under a microscope. “Not only did we find bacteria, we found several types of algae as well,” he said. “The algae actually may be the food on which the bacteria survive for tens of thousands of years.”

When Lum got involved, the researchers began to wonder about the DNA of the organisms they were finding.

“You have a little trapped ecosystem,” Lum said. “Some of these guys are feeding on other ones trapped in this space. The things that aren’t alive in there, their DNA is still preserved.”

via Researchers kick-start ancient DNA.

Of all the world records profiled on Extreme Science this one has proved to be the most elusive and tricky to keep updated. It seems there are a number of different organisms that hold the record for the “longest lived” and their exact ages are still under investigation. In fact, the only thing we can report for certain is that the records listed here will probably be upstaged by a new discovery in the near future. Below is a listing of what is currently in the literature as some of the oldest organisms still living today:

October, 1999; 250-million-year-old bacteria were found in ancient sea salt beneath Carlsbad, New Mexico. The microscopic organisms were revived in a laboratory after being in ‘suspended animation’, encased in a hard-shelled spore, for an estimated 250 million years. The species has not been identified, but is referred to as strain 2-9-3, or B. permians.

May, 1995; 40-million-year-old bacteria (Bacillus sphaericus) were found in the stomach of a bee encased in amber. These bacteria were also found in a state of suspended animation and were re-animated in a laboratory. …

via ExtremeScience

‘BacillaFilla’ glue made from bacteria can knit cracks in concrete back together

Niall Firth – A bacteria that can knit together cracks in concrete structures by producing a special ‘glue’ has been developed by British scientists.

The genetically-modified microbe has been programmed to swim down fine cracks in the concrete. Once at the bottom it produces a mixture of calcium carbonate and a bacterial glue which combine to ‘knit’ the building back together.

The ‘BacillaFilla’ eventually hardens to become the same strength as the surrounding concrete and is designed to make buildings last longer.

Joint project instructor Dr Jennifer Hallinan said: ‘Around five per cent of all man-made carbon dioxide emissions are from the production of concrete, making it a significant contributor to global warming.

‘Finding a way of prolonging the lifespan of existing structures means we could reduce this environmental impact and work towards a more sustainable solution.

‘This could be particularly useful in earthquake zones where hundreds of buildings have to be flattened because there is currently no easy way of repairing the cracks and making them structurally sound.”

The bacterium used by researchers is called Bacillus subtilis and is commonly found in soil.

The BacillaFilla spores only start germinating when they make contact with concrete – triggered by the very specific pH of the material – and they have an in-built self-destruct gene which means they would be unable to survive in the environment.

via ‘BacillaFilla’ glue made from bacteria can knit cracks in concrete back together | Mail Online.