What makes chimps four times stronger than humans?

Recently a pet chimp inflicted devastating injuries on a Connecticut woman - a stark reminder that chimps are much stronger than humans, as much as four-times stronger, some researchers believe.

But what is it that makes our close primate cousins so much stronger than we are?

A possible explanation is that great apes simply have more powerful muscles. Indeed, biologists have uncovered differences in muscle architecture between chimpanzees and humans.

But evolutionary biologist Alan Walker, professor at Penn State University, thinks muscles may only explain a part of the story.

Walker argues that humans may lack the strength of chimps because our nervous systems exert more control over our muscles. Our fine motor control prevents great feats of strength, but allows us to perform delicate and uniquely human tasks.

On the other hand, great apes, with their all-or-nothing muscle usage, are explosive sprinters, climbers and fighters, but not nearly as good at complex motor tasks. In other words, chimps make lousy guests in China shops.

Our finely-tuned motor system makes a wide variety of human tasks possible. Without it we couldn't manipulate small objects, make complex tools or throw accurately. And because we can conserve energy by using muscle gradually, we have more physical endurance - making us great distance runners.

Walker's hypothesis stems partly from a finding by primatologist Ann MacLarnon. MacLarnon showed that, relative to body mass, chimps have much less grey matter in their spinal cords than humans have.

Spinal grey matter contains large numbers of motor neurons - nerve cells that connect to muscle fibres and regulate muscle movement.

More grey matter in humans means more motor neurons, Walker proposes. And having more motor neurons means more muscle control.

Our surplus motor neurons allow us to engage smaller portions of our muscles at any given time. We can engage just a few muscle fibres for delicate tasks like threading a needle, and progressively more for tasks that require more force, according to a Penn State release.

Conversely, since chimps have fewer motor neurons, each neuron triggers a higher number of muscle fibres. So using a muscle becomes more of an all-or-nothing proposition for chimps. As a result, chimps often end up using more muscle than they need.

'That is the reason apes seem so strong relative to humans,' Walker writes.

The study is scheduled for publication in the April issue of Current Anthropology.

IANS

A 37-year-old Maud Island Frog

Sydney, March 31: Researchers have stumbled upon a 37-year-old frog in New Zealand, making it one of the longest living frogs known to science.

A male of the threatened species called Maud Island Frog was found to be 37 years old, another male was 35 and a female was 34. Most frog species live between four and 15 years.

A study by a team from Victoria University of Wellington led by associate professor Ben Bell recently found the frogs during an ongoing study.

Bell said Maud Island Frogs have proven to be some of the oldest known frogs in the wild.

"What I thought might be a five-year study is still ongoing, with many frogs surviving over 25 years. We also studied Archey's frog and Hochstetter's frog in the Coromandel Ranges (of New Zealand), and discovered these species are long-lived also. Our oldest known Archey's frog is 23 years old, and Hochstetter's frog is 12 years old."

Bell is director of Victoria University's Centre for Biodiversity and Restoration Ecology, and his study of Archey's frog in the Coromandel Ranges alerted conservation agencies to the species' sudden decline in the late 1990s.

His team discovered that the species was infected with the pathological amphibian chytrid fungus there.

Bell said the team also initiated a trial translocation of 100 Maud Island Frogs to a restored site at Boat Bay on Maud Island 25 years ago, which had proven successful.

IANS

Violent videogames can improve eyesight

London, March 30: A new study has revealed that playing violent action games, which involve killing opponents, can help in enhancing people's contrast sensitivity function -- the ability to see subtle changes of light and dark against a uniform background.

According to the researchers, contrast sensitivity is very important because it aids eyesight in certain conditions, including driving at night or when there is poor visibility on the roads, which declines with age.

The researchers from Rochester University in New York, Goldschleger Eye Research Institute and Tel Aviv University in Israel believe their new findings clearly shows that "contrast sensitivity function is affected not only by deterioration in the eye itself, but also in the signals coming from brain".

In their study, they compared the reactions of a group of seasoned gamers with a group of the same age people who did not play computer games often. In fact, they also conducted an experiment where a small sample of non-gamers were asked to play intensively for 50 hours over nine weeks.

The volunteers played either a fighting game, Unreal Tournament 2004, or a Shoot-Em-Up, Call of Duty 2, and the results were compared with another group who played more sedate games for the same time.

Those playing action games saw their ability to discern contrast improve by between 43 and 58 per cent, a rise not mirrored in the other group, according to the findings, published in the 'Nature Neuroscience' journal.

Bureau Report

Slushy water on Titan may be proof of volcanism

London, March 30: New radar images from NASA’s Cassini probe have suggested that slushy water from a hidden ocean may be pooling onto the icy surface of Saturn’s moon Titan, thus bolstering the case for the existence of volcanoes on its surface.

Titan’s exterior, where the temperature is around -180 degree Celsius, is thought to be mostly water-ice, but it may be a different story deep down.

Variations in the moon’s rate of rotation suggest an ocean could lurk below.

An area of Titan called Hotei Arcus appears to fluctuate in brightness on timescales of several months, and in 2005, Robert Nelson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and colleagues, suggested this might be the result of “cryovolcanic” eruptions of water from below.

Others argued that the flickers were caused by the moon’s hazy atmosphere. The cryovolcanism idea was bolstered in 2008, when observations of Hotei Arcus by a radar instrument aboard NASA’s Cassini probe revealed structures that resembled lava flows.

Some opponents of the idea still argued these might be deposits of sediment, carried by a flow of methane in the past.

Now, according to a report, radar images from Cassini have allowed scientists led by Randolph Kirk of the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona, to create a 3D view of the area.

It turns out that the sinuous structures tower 200 meters above their surroundings. They say that this is consistent with the structures having formed when slushy water and ammonia squirted onto the surface and froze, but that they could not have been produced by a flood of liquid methane depositing sediment.

The structures may have formed when slushy water and ammonia squirted onto the surface and froze.

If slush volcanoes have been erupting recently, Titan would join a select group of solar system objects - Earth and Io - known to be volcanic at present.

As for life existing in the ocean below, Kirk said, “It’s conceivable life could be going on down there.”

ANI
Image: USGS/JPL/NASA

The Winchester Mystery House

The Winchester Mystery House is a well-known California mansion that was under construction continuously for 38 years, and is reputed to be haunted. It once was the personal residence of Sarah Winchester, the widow of gun magnate William Wirt Winchester, but is now a tourist attraction. Under Sarah Winchester's day-to-day guidance, its "from-the-ground-up" construction proceeded around-the-clock, without interruption, from 1884 until her death on September 5, 1922, at which time work immediately ceased. The cost for such constant building has been estimated at about US $5.5 million (if paid in 1922, this would be equivalent to almost $70 million in 2008 dollars).

Photo by: hbeachsurfer

The mansion is renowned for its size and utter lack of any master building plan. According to popular belief, Sarah Winchester thought the house was haunted by the ghosts of individuals killed by Winchester rifles, and that only continuous construction would appease them. It is located at 525 South Winchester Blvd. in San Jose, California.

Photos by: canadianlookin

Deeply saddened by the deaths of her daughter Annie in 1866 and her husband in 1881, and seeking solace, Sarah consulted a medium on the advice of a friend. According to popular history, the medium, who has become known colloquially as the "Boston Medium", told Sarah that she had the feeling that there was a curse upon the Winchester family because the guns they made had taken so many lives. She told Sarah that "thousands of people have died because of it and their spirits are now seeking deep vengeance."

Photos by: cannellfan

Photo by: northerner

Although this is disputed, popular belief holds that the Boston Medium told Sarah that she had to leave her home in New Haven and travel West, where she must "build a home for yourself and for the spirits who have fallen from this terrible weapon, too. You can never stop building the house. If you continue building, you will live. Stop and you will die."

Photo by: jacek

There is another version of the story stating that the spiritual medium told Sarah Winchester that wherever she went, the spirits would follow to haunt her so she built an outrageously confusing house and slept in different rooms every night to confuse the ghosts pursuing her.

Photo by: jamesandtim

Sarah inherited more than $20 million upon her husband's death. She also received nearly 50 percent ownership of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, giving her an income of roughly $1,000 per day, none of which was taxable until 1913. This amount is roughly equivalent to $21,000 a day in 2008. All of this gave her a tremendous pool of wealth from which to draw to fund construction on the mansion.

Official site

How to save Earth from an asteroid impact

Scientists have used a virtual model to investigate options to save the Earth from an asteroid impact.

The model was developed by a team led by David Dearborn of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, which modelled the impact of a nuclear explosion on an asteroid’s trajectory.

It is based on the option of gently nudging the asteroid away from Earth without breaking it apart, either by exploding a nuclear device at a distance or zapping it with high-powered lasers.

The team’s virtual asteroid was 1 kilometer in diameter and made of rocky rubble loosely bound together by gravity, which is considered by many planetary scientists to be the most likely composition for small asteroids.

Thirty years before the asteroid was set to collide with Earth, a nuclear blast, equivalent to 100 kilotonnes of TNT, was set off 250 meters behind it.

The nudge from the explosion increased its velocity by 6.5 millimeters per second, a slight change but enough for it to miss us.

The technique also reduced the risk of a break-up.

Just 1 per cent of the asteroid’s material was dislodged by the blast, and of that only about 1 part in a million remained on a collision course with Earth.

Dearborn adds that the technology for this method is already established, unlike for the use of a heavy object to shove the asteroid onto a different path - the “kinetic impactor” strategy.

“Should an emergency arise, we should know that the technology is available, and we should have some idea of how to properly use it,” he said.

He has now begun simulating the effect of nudging an asteroid with a smaller nuclear explosion - less than 1 kilotonne - 1 meter below its surface.

This would reduce the device’s weight, making it easier and quicker to launch.

ANI

Ironware piece unearthed from Turkey found to be oldest steel

A piece of ironware excavated from a Turkish archaeological site is about 4,000 years old, making it the world's oldest steel, Japanese archaeologists said on Thursday.

Archaeologists from the Middle Eastern Culture Center in Japan excavated the 5-centimetre piece at the Kaman-Kalehoyuk archaeological site in Turkey, about 100 kilometers southeast of Ankara, in 2000. The ironware piece is believed to be a part of a knife from a stratum about 4,000 years old, or 2100-1950 B.C., according to them.

An analysis at the Iwate Prefectural Museum in Morioka showed that the ironware piece was about 200 years older than one that was excavated from the same site in 1994 and was believed to be the oldest steel so far made in 20th-18th centuries B.C.

The ironware is highly likely to have been produced near the Kaman-Kalehoyuk site as a 2-cm-diameter slag and two iron-containing stones have also been excavated, Kyodo news agency quoted the archaeologists as saying.

Hideo Akanuma, an archaeologist at the Iwate Prefectural Museum, said the fresh finding led to a change in the history of iron and steel production, noting that such production was earlier thought to have begun in the Hittite kingdom dating in the 14th to 12th centuries B.C.

Via

Three juvenile Triceratops were gregarious gangsters

Three juvenile Triceratops, a species thought to be solitary, died together in a flood and now have been found in a 66 million-year-old bone bed in Montana, lending more evidence to the idea that teen dinosaurs were gregarious gangsters.

Triceratops were ceratopsids, herbivorous dinosaurs that lived until the the very end of the Cretaceous Period. They have been found in enormous bone beds of multiple individuals, but all known Triceratops fossils up to now have been solitary individuals.

In fact, Triceratops is one of the best-known of all dinosaurs, with more than 50 total specimens discovered, so it looked pretty certain that they were anti-social and avoided hanging out with their own kind.

However, the new discovery of a jumble of at least three juveniles in the famous Hell Creek Formation suggests that the three-horned Triceratops were social, or at least the juveniles were, revealing something about their behavior — a feature that is notoriously hard to discern from fossils.

This news follows recent research headed up by Paul Sereno at the University of Chicago who found fossils of a bunch of juvenile ornithomimids hanging out in a group. Other researchers have found small herds of Psittacosaurus, a small cousin of Triceratops that lived in Asia.

"The pattern is that is emerging is this isn't randomness of fossilization," said Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University doing his studies at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. "This is a repeated pattern that probably indicates something fundamental about juvenile dinosaurs and the fact that they congregated together. We see it in all these groups of dinosaurs. Maybe not every group of dinosaurs did this, but it's something that is deep in dinosaur history. You don't see so much of it in birds and crocodiles. In dinosaurs, it seems to be something very common."

The Triceratops site was discovered in 2005 by Burpee Museum volunteer Helmuth Redschlag. Redschlag, a devoted fan of "The Simpsons" television program, named the bone bed the "Homer Site." Brusatte and colleagues soon excavated and found the multiple Triceratops , apparently gathered in a small herd.

It looks like at least three juveniles died there at same time as a result of flooding, common in this location laced at the time with flood plains and river channels.

"We don’t know why they were grouped together or how much time they spent together," said Joshua Mathews of the Burpee Museum of Natural History and Northern Illinois University, who led the project. "Herding together could have been for protection, and our guess is that this wasn’t something they did full-time."

Excavation at the Homer Site is ongoing, and the Burpee Museum team expects to find additional fossils of Triceratops juveniles.

The findings are detailed in the current issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Support for the project came from the Geological Society of America, the Explorers Club and other sources.

Copyright © 2009 Imaginova Corp.
Photo by enginestudio.org

The largest exploding star

Washington, March 24: Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science and San Diego State University have observed the largest exploding star yet seen, which is the size of 50 suns.

While exploding stars, called supernovae, have been viewed with everything from the naked eye to high-tech research satellites, no one had directly observed what happens when a really huge star blows up.

Dr. Avishay Gal-Yam of the Weizmann Institute’s Faculty of Physics and Professor Douglas Leonard of San Diego State University recently located and calculated the mass of a gigantic star on the verge of exploding, following through with observations of the blast and its aftermath.

As they continued to track the spectacular event, they found that most of the star’s mass collapsed in on itself, resulting in a large black hole.

Their findings have lent support to the reigning theory that stars ranging from tens to hundreds of times the mass of our sun all end up as black holes.

Until now, none of the supernovae stars that scientists had managed to measure had exceeded a mass of 20 suns.

Gal-Yam and Leonard were looking at a specific region in space using the Keck Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii and the Hubble Space Telescope.

Identifying the about-to-explode star, they calculated its mass to be equal to 50-100 suns. Continued observation revealed that only a small part of the star’s mass was flung off in the explosion.

According to Gal-Yam, most of the material was drawn into the collapsing core as its gravitational pull mounted.

In subsequent telescope images of that section of the sky, the star seems to have disappeared. In other words, the star has now become a black hole – so dense that light can’t escape.

ANI

How NASA lost Moon pictures

The heart-stopping moments when Neil Armstrong took his first tentative steps onto another world are defining images of the 20th century: grainy, fuzzy, unforgettable.

But 2006. just 37 years after Apollo 11, the magnetic tapes that recorded the first moon walk - beamed to the world via three tracking stations, including Parkes's famous "Dish" - have gone missing at NASA's Goddard Space Centre in Maryland.

A desperate search has begun amid concerns the tapes will disintegrate to dust before they can be found.

It is not widely known that the Apollo 11 television broadcast from the moon was a high-quality transmission, far sharper than the blurry version relayed instantly to the world on that July day in 1969.

Among those battling to unscramble the mystery is John Sarkissian, a CSIRO scientist stationed at Parkes for a decade. "We are working on the assumption they still exist," Mr Sarkissian told.

"Your guess is a good as mine as to where they are."

Mr Sarkissian began researching the role of Parkes in Apollo 11's mission in 1997, before the movie The Dish was made. However, when he later contacted NASA colleagues to ask about the tapes, they could not be found.

"People may have thought 'we have tapes of the moon walk, we don't need these'," said the scientist who hopes a new, intensive hunt will locate them.

If they can be found, he proposes making digitalised copies to treat the world to a very different view of history.

But the searchers may be running out of time. The only known equipment on which the original analogue tapes can be decoded is at a Goddard centre set to close in October, raising fears that even if they are found before they deteriorate, copying them may be impossible.

"We want the public to see it the way the moon walk was meant to be seen," Mr Sarkissian said.

"There will only ever be one first moon walk."

Originally stored at Goddard, the tapes were moved in 1970 to the US National Archives. No one knows why, but in 1984 about 700 boxes of space flight tapes there were returned to Goddard.

"We have the documents to say they were withdrawn, but no one knows exactly where they went," Mr Sarkissian said.

Many people involved had retired or died.

Also among tapes feared missing are the original recordings of the other five Apollo moon landings. The format used by the original pictures beamed from the moon was not compatible with commercial technology used by television networks. So the images received at Parkes, and at tracking stations near Canberra and in California, were played on screens mounted in front of conventional television cameras.

"The quality of what you saw on TV at home was substantially degraded" in the process, Mr Sarkissian said, creating the ghostly images of Armstrong and Aldrin that strained the eyes of hundreds of millions of people watching around the world.

Even Polaroid photographs of the screen that showed the original images received by Parkes are significantly sharper than what the public saw. While the technique looks primitive today, Mr Sarkissian said it was the best solution that 1969 technology offered.

Among the few who saw the original high-quality broadcast was David Cooke, a Parkes control room engineer in 1969.

"I can still see the screen," Mr Cook, 74, said. "I was amazed, the quality was fairly good."

Via

Some people have anti-HIV antibodies

Washington, March 22: Some individuals are known to control HIV infection without medication as they produce antibodies that are able to neutralise diverse strains of the disease.

Until now, however, scientists were hampered in studying the way effective HIV-neutralising antibodies arise during natural HIV infection because they lacked the tools to obtain more than a few HIV-specific antibodies from any given individual.

A new research endeavour has assembled a group of state-of-the-art techniques for the first time to study the phenomenon of natural antibody-mediated HIV neutralisation.

The project demonstrates how this system can isolate dozens of HIV-specific antibodies from a single HIV-infected individual, something never accomplished before.

Applied prospectively to a large group of HIV-infected individuals, the system will enable scientists to identify and define the diverse set of neutralising antibodies that arise during natural HIV infection, information that may prove important in vaccine development.

John R. Mascola, Richard T. Wyatt and Mark Connors, all of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), part of the National Institutes of Health, participated in the research.

Michel C. Nussenzweig of The Rockefeller University led the team of 22 co-investigators in this collaboration, said a NIAID release.

Bureau Report

Rare reptile found in NZ

A hatchling of a rare reptile with lineage dating back to the dinosaur age has been found in the wild on the New Zealand mainland for the first time in about 200 years, a wildlife official said on Thursday.

The baby tuatara was discovered by staff during routine maintenance work at the Karori Wildlife Sanctuary in the capital, Wellington, conservation manager Raewyn Empson said.

"We are all absolutely thrilled with this discovery," Empson said.

"It means we have successfully re-established a breeding population back on the mainland, which is a massive breakthrough for New Zealand conservation."

Tuatara are the last lizard-like descendants of a reptile species that walked the Earth with the dinosaurs 225-million years ago, zoologists say.

There are estimated to be about 50 000 of them living in the wild on 32 small offshore islands cleared of predators, but this is the first time a hatchling has been seen on the mainland in about 200 years.

The New Zealand natives were nearly extinct on the country's three main islands by the late 1700s due to the introduction of predators such as rats.

Empson said the hatchling is thought to be about one month old and likely came from an egg laid about 16 months ago.

Two nests of eggs - the size of pingpong balls - were unearthed in the sanctuary in 2008 and tuatara were expected to hatch around this time.

"He is unlikely to be the only baby to have hatched this season, but seeing him was an incredible fluke," she said.

The youngster faces a tough journey to maturity despite being in the 250 hectare sanctuary and protected by a predator-proof fence.

It will have to run from the cannibalistic adult tuatara, and would make a tasty snack for the morepork (native owl), kingfisher and weka (New Zealand's endemic flightless rail), Empson said.

"Like all the wildlife living here, he'll just have to take his chances" Empson said.

"They've been extinct on the mainland for a long time," said Lindsay Hazley, tuatara curator at the Southland Museum and Art Gallery on South Island.

He added that "you can breed tuatara by eliminating risk, but to have results like this among many natural predators (like native birds) is a positive sign."

About 200 tuatara have been released since 2005 into the Karori Sanctuary, which was established to breed native birds, insects and other creatures.

Tuatara have unique characteristics, such as two rows of top teeth closing over one row at the bottom and a pronounced parietal eye - a light-sensitive pineal gland on the top of the skull that gives the appearance of a third eye.

Via

ValCamonica - Collection of prehistoric rock art

ValCamonica
Photo bernat.erasmus

ValCamonica is a glaciated valley in the Alpine foothills of Lombardy, italy, that contains a rich collection of prehistoric rock art conventionally divided into four chronological phases (Neolithic, Copper Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age) with subdivisions. Thousands of images were pecked into the glacially smoothed rock surfaces, and they include daggers, chariots, warriors and warfare, sun motifs, hunting and plowing scenes, men and animals, and geometric designs. Certain images are interpreted as huts while some at the site of Bedolina in Valcamonica are usually thought to be maps of settlements.

Fighting scene

Naquane carvings
Photos Gyrus

Ossimo 4 rock
Photo wyatt moody

The white pigment seen within the depressions of this piece is meant to replicate the modern day chalk used to "highlight" the actual engraving, which would otherwise be almost impossible to see after so many thousands of years.

Prehistoric petroglyphs 1

Prehistoric petroglyphs 2

The known rock art comprises around 300,000 petroglyphs, although hundreds of decorated rocks probably remain buried. The art was first pointed out by a shepherd in 1914, but serious study really began decades later. This was the first rock art in Europe to be named a World Heritage Site by the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The major set of decorated rock surfaces that is arranged for public visitation, with walkways, etc., is that of Naquane (another part of this site).

Prehistoric petroglyphs 3

Prehistoric petroglyphs 4

Prehistoric petroglyphs 5

Prehistoric petroglyphs 6
Photos bernat.ersamus

Prehistoric petroglyphs 7

Each year over 200,000 people come to visit this site from around the world. It is believed that this specific engraving was created during the Copper Age, between 2400 - 2200 BC.

Prehistoric petroglyphs 8
Photos paula moya

Evidence of salt water found on Mars

Washington, March 18: A group of scientists who worked on the Phoenix Mars lander last year say they have found evidence of liquid salt water on the red planet.

An analysis of photographs from the lander that explored Mars for six months shows drops of what could be salty, liquid water on the legs of the lander.

They believe the droplets were kicked up from just below the planet's surface when Phoenix landed in May and say they grew and merged over time much as water particles would do.

The findings are to be presented in a report, 'The Physical and Thermodynamic Evidence for Liquid Water on Mars', at an astronomy conference in Texas Monday.

'A large number of independent physical and thermodynamical evidence shows that saline water may actually be common on Mars,' said the report's chief author, University of Michigan professor Nilton Renno.

'Liquid water is an essential ingredient for life. This discovery has important implications to many areas of planetary exploration, including the habitability of Mars,' he said.

But the evidence is controversial even among scientists who worked on the mission and was never raised by NASA at the time, with some saying there were other more probable explanations. Still 22 scientists have signed onto the report.

Phoenix did confirm the existence of ice on Mars to much fanfare and in the past researchers believed that was the only type of water likely to be found on the planet, where temperatures average about negative 60 degrees Celsius at the rover's landing site.

Renno, a co-investigator on the Phoenix mission, said another discovery by Phoenix - the presence of perchlorate salts - is consistent with liquid water.

The salts could significantly lower the freezing point of water to between negative 67 and negative 75 degrees - much as salt is used in cold climates on Earth to melt ice and snow. Renno said there could be areas across the planet that are too salty to freeze.

IANS