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Nearby star should harbor detectable, Earth-like planets
2008-05-02 12:02:00
A rocky planet similar to Earth may be orbiting one of our nearest stellar neighbors and could be detected using existing techniques, according to a new study led by astronomers at the University of California, Santa Cruz.The closest stars to our Sun are in the three-star system called Alpha Centauri, a popular destination for interstellar travel in works of science fiction. UCSC graduate student Javiera Guedes used computer simulations of planet formation to show that terrestrial planets are likely to have formed around the star Alpha Centauri B and to be orbiting in the "habitable zone" where liquid water can exist on the planet's surface. The researchers then showed that such planets could be observed using a dedicated telescope. "If they exist, we can observe them," said Guedes, who is the first author of a paper describing the new findings. The paper has been accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal. Coauthor Gregory Laughlin, professor of astronomy and astrophysi...
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Genetic Sequencing of Protein from T. rex Bone Confirms Dinosaurs' Link to
2008-04-25 18:43:00
Scientists have put more meat on the theory that dinosaurs' closest living relatives are modern-day birds. Molecular analysis, or genetic sequencing, of a 68-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex protein from the dinosaur's femur confirms that T. rex shares a common ancestry with chickens, ostriches, and to a lesser extent, alligators.The dinosaur protein was wrested from a fossil T. rex femur discovered in 2003 by paleontologist John Horner of the Museum of the Rockies; the bone was found in a fossil-rich stretch of land in Wyoming and Montana. The new research results, published this week in the journal Science, represent the first use of molecular data to place a non-avian dinosaur in a phylogenetic tree, a "tree of life," that traces the evolution of species."These results match predictions made from skeletal anatomy, providing the first molecular evidence for the evolutionary relationships of a non-avian dinosaur," says Science paper co-author Chris Organ, a researcher at Harvar...
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Upright Walking Began 6 Million Years Ago
2008-04-09 19:49:00
A shape comparison of the most complete fossil femur (thigh bone) of one of the earliest known pre-humans, or hominins, with the femora of living apes, modern humans and other fossils, indicates the earliest form of bipedalism occurred at least six million years ago and persisted for at least four million years.William Jungers, Ph.D., of Stony Brook University, and Brian Richmond, Ph.D., of George Washington University, say their finding indicates that the fossil belongs to very early human ancestors, and that upright walking is one of the first human characteristics to appear in our lineage, right after the split between human and chimpanzee lineages. Their findings are published in the March 21 issue of the journal Science.The research is the first thorough quantitative analysis of the Orrorin tugenensis fossil – a fragmentary piece of femur – which was discovered in Kenya in 2000 by a French research team. Dr. Jungers, Chair of Anatomical Sciences at SBU School of Medicine, a...
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Recovering from a mass extinction
2008-03-18 18:39:00
The full recovery of ecological systems, following the most devastating extinction event of all time, took at least 30 million years, according to new research from the University of Bristol. About 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian, a major extinction event killed over 90 per cent of life on earth, including insects, plants, marine animals, amphibians, and reptiles. Ecosystems were destroyed worldwide, communities were restructured and organisms were left struggling to recover. This was the nearest life ever came to being completely wiped out.Previous work indicates that life bounced back quite quickly, but this was mostly in the form of ‘disaster taxa’ (opportunistic organisms that filled the empty ecospace left behind by the extinction), such as the hardy Lystrosaurus, a barrel-chested herbivorous animal, about the size of a pig. The most recent research, conducted by Sarda Sahney and Professor Michael Benton at the University of Bristol and published in Proceed...
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1000 Genomes Project
2008-03-07 19:01:00
An international research consortium today announced the 1000 Genomes Project , an ambitious effort that will involve sequencing the genomes of at least a thousand people from around the world to create the most detailed and medically useful picture to date of human genetic variation. The project will receive major support from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England, the Beijing Genomics Institute, Shenzhen (BGI Shenzhen) in China and the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Drawing on the expertise of multidisciplinary research teams, the 1000 Genomes Project will develop a new map of the human genome that will provide a view of biomedically relevant DNA variations at a resolution unmatched by current resources. As with other major human genome reference projects, data from the 1000 Genomes Project will be made swiftly available to the worldwide scientific community through freely accessible public databa...

Blue-eyed humans have a single, common ancestor
2008-02-16 14:07:00
New research shows that people with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor. A team at the University of Copenhagen have tracked down a genetic mutation which took place 6-10,000 years ago and is the cause of the eye colour of all blue-eyed humans alive on the planet today. “Originally, we all had brown eyes”, said Professor Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine. “But a genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a “switch”, which literally “turned off” the ability to produce brown eyes”. The OCA2 gene codes for the so-called P protein, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives colour to our hair, eyes and skin. The “switch”, which is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 does not, however, turn off the gene entirely, but rather limits its action to reducing the production of melanin in the iris – effectively “diluting” brown eyes to blue. The switch’s effect ...
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Paleontologists say two explosive evolutionary events shaped early history
2008-02-12 19:55:00
Scientists have known for some time that most major groups of complex animals appeared in the fossils record during the Cambrian Explosion, a seemingly rapid evolutionary event that occurred 542 million years ago. Now Virginia Tech paleontologists, using rigorous analytical methods, have identified another explosive evolutionary event that occurred about 33 million years earlier among macroscopic life forms unrelated to the Cambrian animals.They dubbed this earlier event the "Avalon Explosion." The discovery, reported in the Jan. 4 issue of Science, suggests that more than one explosive evolutionary event may have taken place during the early evolution of animals. The Cambrian explosion event refers to the sudden appearance of most animal groups in a geologically short time period between 542 and 520 million years ago, in the early Cambrian Period. Although there were not as many animal species as in modern oceans, most (if not all) living animal groups were represented in the Cambr...
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Losses of long-established genes contributed to human evolution, scientists
2008-02-01 19:27:00
The evolution of new genes is not the only way for a species to change. The loss of genes may also lead to adaptations that help species survive, but this idea has not been well studied. Now, scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz, have carried out the first systematic computational analysis to identify long-established genes that were lost during the millions of years of evolution leading to the human species. Their findings appear in the December 14 issue of PLoS Computational Biology."This is the first study designed to search the entire genome for recent loss of genes that do not have any near-duplicate copies elsewhere in the genome. These are likely to be the more important gene losses," said David Haussler, professor of biomolecular engineering at UCSC. Haussler and five others in his research group--postdoctoral researcher Jingchun Zhu, graduate students Zack Sanborn and Craig Lowe, technical projects manager Mark Diekhans, and evolutionary biologist Tom Prin...
More About: Evolution , Human , Scientists , Long , Losses

Lush or Lightweight?
2008-01-05 12:04:00
Some fruit flies can drink others under the table. Now, scientists at North Carolina State University have a few more genetic clues behind why some flies are more sensitive to alcohol than others. And the results might lead to more knowledge about alcoholism in humans.After genetically modifying fruit flies to be either extremely sensitive or extremely resistant to alcohol – lightweights or lushes – the NC State scientists found that a number of fruit fly genes undergo changes when sensitivity to alcohol changes.A number of these genes, the researchers report, are similar to genes found in humans, suggesting that they may be good targets to study human predisposal to alcoholism.The research is published in the November edition of Genome Biology, which is available online at http://genomebiology.com.The research team – Dr. Tatiana Morozova, a post-doctoral researcher in zoology; Dr. Trudy Mackay, William Neal Reynolds Professor of Genetics; and Dr. Robert Anholt, professor of z...
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Strong Evidence Points to Earth’s Proximity to Sun as Ice Age Trigger
2007-10-09 19:47:00
Analysis of Antarctic ice cores led by Kenji Kawamura, a visiting scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, shows that the last four great ice age cycles began when Earth’s distance from the sun during its annual orbit became great enough to prevent summertime melts of glacial ice. The absence of those melts allowed buildups of the ice over periods of time that would become characterized as glacial periods.Results of the study appear in the Aug. 23 edition of the journal Nature.Jeff Severinghaus, a Scripps geoscientist and co-author of the paper, said the finding validates a theory formalized in the 1940s but first postulated in the 19th Century. The work also helps clarify the role of carbon dioxide in global warming and cooling episodes past and present, he said. “This is a significant finding because people have been asking for 100 years the question of why are there ice ages,” Severinghaus said.A premise advanced in the 1940s known as the Milankovitch...
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Comet May Have Exploded Over North America 13,000 Years Ago
2007-10-01 20:21:00
New scientific findings suggest that a large comet may have exploded over North America 12,900 years ago, explaining riddles that scientists have wrestled with for decades, including an abrupt cooling of much of the planet and the extinction of large mammals. The discovery was made by scientists from the University of California at Santa Barbara and their colleagues. James Kennett, a paleoceanographer at the university, said that the discovery may explain some of the highly debated geologic controversies of recent decades.The period in question is called the Younger Dryas, an interval of abrupt cooling that lasted for about 1,000 years and occurred at the beginning of an inter-glacial warm period. Evidence for the temperature change is recorded in marine sediments and ice cores.According to the scientists, the comet before fragmentation must have been about four kilometers across, and either exploded in the atmosphere or had fragments hit the Laurentide ice sheet in northeastern Nor...
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Seas could rise higher than we thought
2007-09-13 19:03:00
Leading climatologist Professor Stefan Rahmstorf has revealed at a UNSW public lecture that sea-level rises caused by global warming are higher than those published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change earlier this year.Professor Rahmstorf, who is from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, is being hosted in Sydney by UNSW’s Climate Change Research Centre, led jointly by Professor Andy Pitman and Professor Matthew England.Professor England warned that global warming being caused by burning fossil fuels, and the resulting carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere, could lead to unpredictable, non-linear effects on climate.“The combined effects of ocean warming and melting polar ice caps will weaken the overturning of the ocean’s water, which is critical for absorbing carbon dioxide and buffering the effects of global warming,” says England, who has pioneered scientific understanding of the Southern Ocean’s relationship to climate change effects ...
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A catastrophic megaflood separated Britain from France
2007-08-25 12:42:00
A catastrophic megaflood separated Britain from Franc e hundreds of thousands of years ago, changing the course of British history, according to research published in the journal Nature.The study, led by Dr Sanjeev Gupta and Dr Jenny Collier from Imperial College London, has revealed spectacular images of a huge valley tens of kilometres wide and up to 50 metres deep carved into chalk bedrock on the floor of the English Channel.Using high-resolution sonar waves the team captured images of a perfectly preserved submerged world in the channel basin. The maps highlight deep scour marks and landforms which were created by torrents of water rushing over the exposed channel basin.To the north of the channel basin was a lake which formed in the area now known as the southern North Sea. It was fed by the Rhine and Thames, impounded to the north by glaciers and dammed to the south by the Weald-Artois chalk ridge which spanned the Dover Straits. It is believed that a rise in the lake level eve...
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Scientists propose the kind of chemistry that led to life
2007-07-26 19:33:00
Before life emerged on earth, either a primitive kind of metabolism or an RNA-like duplicating machinery must have set the stage – so experts believe. But what preceded these pre-life steps? A pair of UCSF scientists has developed a model explaining how simple chemical and physical processes may have laid the foundation for life. Like all useful models, theirs can be tested, and they describe how this can be done. Their model is based on simple, well-known chemical and physical laws.The basic idea is that simple principles of chemical interactions allow for a kind of natural selection on a micro scale: enzymes can cooperate and compete with each other in simple ways, leading to arrangements that can become stable, or “locked in,” says Ken Dill, PhD, senior author of the paper and professor of pharmaceutical chemistry at UCSF. The scientists compare this chemical process of “search, selection, and memory” to another well-studied process: different rates of neuron firing in ...
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Evidence of the monumental strength of tyrannosaurids
2007-07-16 18:57:00
New evidence may help explain the brute strength of the tyrannosaurid, says a University of Alberta researcher whose research findings demonstrate how a fused nasal bone turned the animal into a "zoological superweapon." "Fused, arch-like nasal bones are a unique feature of tyrannosaurids," said Dr. Eric Snively, a post doctoral research fellow at the U of A. "This adaptation, for instance, was keeping the T. rexes from breaking their own skull while breaking the bones of their prey."Snively and co-authors, number-crunching physicist Donald Henderson from the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology and Doug Phillips from the University of Calgary, compared the skulls and teeth of a number of tyrannosaurids to non-tyrannosaurids. In one of the first studies that looked at the structural mechanics of dinosaur skulls, the scientists used CT scans to investigate such factors as tooth, nasal and cranium strength. The research is published in the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica. Tyran...
More About: Evidence , Monumental , Anno , Monument

Cancer drug enhances long-term memory
2007-07-10 13:48:00
A drug used to treat cancer has been shown to enhance long-term memory and strengthen neural connections in the brain, according to a new study by UC Irvine scientists.In the study with mice, scientists found that histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors – currently used in clinical trials to attack cancerous tumors – relaxes the protein structure that organizes and compacts genomic DNA, allowing for easier activation of genes involved in memory storage. This finding suggests that HDAC inhibitors could boost memory in humans and – because of the way they work – be therapeutic for people with Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s diseases and Rubenstein-Taybi syndrome.“We have demonstrated for the first time that HDAC inhibitors applied directly to the hippocampus enhance memory and synaptic plasticity in the brain, and we now know a molecular mechanism through which these enhancements occur,” said Marcelo Wood, assistant professor in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior a...
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Report Offers Guidance on How to Safely Explore Vast Aquatic Systems Buried
2007-07-04 12:49:00
The National Science Foundation (NSF) should work within the environmental framework of the international Antarctic Treaty system to develop a global scientific consensus on minimally disruptive ways to investigate one of the "last unexplored places on Earth"--a unique system of lakes, and the aquatic systems that may connect them, buried thousands of meters under the Antarctic ice sheet--according to a newly released report.To avoid contaminating these lakes and other features, which scientists have only recently discovered and which have been cut off from the outside world for millions of years, the report calls for NSF to work with international scientific organizations and Treaty signatories to develop a management plan for any potential exploration efforts and, as part of that plan, "ensure that the environmental management of subglacial environments is held to the highest standards."The report, "Exploration of Antarctic Subglacial Aquatic Environments: Environmental and Scient...
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Vigorous Exercise Keeps People Thin with Age
2007-06-14 18:51:00
The old adage “use it or lose it” is truer than ever. People who maintain a vigorously active lifestyle as they age gain less weight than people who exercise at more moderate levels, according to a first-of-its-kind study that tracked a large group of runners who kept the same exercise regimen as they grew older. The study also found that maintaining exercise with age is particularly effective in preventing extreme weight gain, which is associated with high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and other diseases. The study, conducted by Paul Williams of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), followed 6,119 men and 2,221 women who maintained their weekly running mileage (to within three miles per week) over a seven-year period. On average, the men and women who ran over 30 miles per week gained half the weight of those who ran less than 15 miles per week. “To my knowledge, this is the only study of its type,” says Wi...
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New Deep-Sea Hydrothermal Vents, Life Form Discovered
2007-05-22 20:32:00
A new "black smoker"--an undersea mineral chimney emitting hot springs of iron-darkened water--has been discovered at 8,500-foot depths by an expedition funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) to explore the Pacific Ocean floor off Costa Rica.Scientists from Duke University, the Universities of New Hampshire and South Carolina, and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts have named their discovery the Medusa Hydro thermal Vent Field.The researchers chose that name to highlight the presence there of a unique pink form of the jellyfish order stauromedusae. The jellyfish resemble "the serpent-haired Medusa of Greek myth," said expedition leader Emily Klein, a geologist at Duke University.The bell-shaped jellyfish sighted near the vents may be of a new species "because no one has seen this color before," said Karen Von Damm, a geologist at the University of New Hampshire.According to Von Damm, stauromedusae are usually found away from high-temperature hydrotherm...
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When fish first started biting
2007-05-19 19:50:00
Before fish began to invade land, about 365 million years ago, they had some big problems to solve. They needed to come up with new ways to move, breathe, and eat. Take the latter, for example. Fish usually pucker up and suck prey into their mouths. But air is 900 times less dense than water, so land-livers must bite into their food to get a meal. Researchers at Harvard University have just completed a study that gives a clear picture of how that change was made. “Aquatic creatures developed the tools they needed to feed on land before they completely left water,” notes Molly Markey, a lecturer on earth and planetary sciences. “Our research suggests that these first tetrapods, four-footed animals, bit on prey in shallow water or on land. Although they may have occasionally captured a meal by suction.” To become biters, the invaders had to change their teeth and skulls, and learn to walk. Along with Charles Marshall, a professor of biology and of geology at Harvard’s Museum...
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Dinosaur extinction didn’t cause the rise of present-day mammals
2007-05-16 20:24:00
A new, complete 'tree of life' tracing the history of all 4,500 mammals on Earth shows that they did not diversify as a result of the death of the dinosaurs, says new research published in Nature today.The study was undertaken in the UK by scientists at Imperial College London and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL). It contradicts the previously accepted theory that the Mass Extinct ion Event (MEE) that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago prompted the rapid rise of the mammals we see on the earth today.The multinational research team has been working for over a decade to compile the tree of life from existing fossil records and new molecular analyses. They show that many of the genetic 'ancestors' of the mammals we see around us today existed 85 million years ago, and survived the meteor impact that is thought to have killed the dinosaurs. However, throughout the Cretaceous epoch, when dinosaurs walked the earth, these mammal species were relatively few in number, an...
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Engineers create 'optical cloaking' design for invisibility
2007-05-14 20:01:00
Researchers using nanotechnology have taken a step toward creating an "optical cloaking" device that could render objects invisible by guiding light around anything placed inside this "cloak." The Purdue University engineers, following mathematical guidelines devised in 2006 by physicists in the United Kingdom, have created a theoretical design that uses an array of tiny needles radiating outward from a central spoke. The design, which resembles a round hairbrush, would bend light around the object being cloaked. Background objects would be visible but not the object surrounded by the cylindrical array of nano-needles, said Vladimir Shalaev, Purdue's Robert and Anne Burnett Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineer ing.The design does, however, have a major limitation: It works only for any single wavelength, and not for the entire frequency range of the visible spectrum, Shalaev said."But this is a first design step toward creating an optical cloaking device that might work for...
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"Missing Mass" Found in Recycled Dwarf Galaxies
2007-05-13 20:59:00
Astronomers studying dwarf galaxies formed from the debris of a collision of larger galaxies found the dwarfs much more massive than expected, and think the additional material is "missing mass" that theorists said should not be present in this kind of dwarf galaxy.The scientists used the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope to study a galaxy called NGC 5291, 200 million light-years from Earth. This galaxy collided with another 360 million years ago, and the collision shot streams of gas and stars outward. Later, the dwarf galaxies formed from the ejected debris."Our detailed studies of three 'recycled' dwarf galaxies in this system showed that the dwarfs have twice as much unseen matter as visible matter. This was surprising, because they were expected to have very little unseen matter," said Frederic Bournaud, of the French astrophysics laboratory AIM of the French CEA and CNRS. Bournaud and his colleagues announced their discovery in the May 10 ...
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How Does the Brain Tell Time?
2007-05-12 19:07:00
"Time " is the most popular noun in the English language, yet how would we tell time if we didn't have access to the plethora of watches, clocks and cell phones at our disposal? For decades, scientists have believed that the brain possesses an internal clock that allows it to keep track of time. Now, a UCLA study of the journal Neuron proposes a new model in which a series of physical changes to the brain's cells helps the organ to monitor the passage of time."The value of this research lies in understanding how the brain works," said Dean Buonomano, associate professor of neurobiology and psychiatry at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the university's Brain Research Institute. "Many complex human behaviors — from understanding speech to playing catch to performing music — rely on the brain's ability to accurately tell time. Yet no one knows how the brain does it." The most popular theory assumes that a clock-like mechanism — which generates and ...
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James Webb Space Telescope
2007-05-12 13:05:00
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is a large, infrared-optimized space telescope, scheduled for launch in 2013. JWST will find the first galaxies that formed in the early Universe, connecting the Big Bang to our own Milky Way Galaxy. JWST will peer through dusty clouds to see stars forming planetary systems, connecting the Milky Way to our own Solar System. JWST's instruments will be designed to work primarily in the infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum, with some capability in the visible range.JWST will have a large mirror, 6.5 meters (21.3 feet) in diameter and a sunshield the size of a tennis court. Both the mirror and sunshade won't fit onto the rocket fully open, so both will fold up and open only once JWST is in outer space. JWST will reside in an orbit about 1.5 million km (1 million miles) from the Earth.This May, there will be more than one "web slinger" coming to town. In addition to the superhero, who will make his third movie appearance, NASA has its own...
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NASA Finds Extremely Hot Planet, Makes First Exoplanet Weather Map
2007-05-11 18:42:00
Researchers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have learned what the weather is like on two distant, exotic worlds. One team of astronomers used the infrared telescope to map temperature variations over the surface of a giant gas planet, HD 189733b, revealing it likely is whipped by roaring winds. Another team determined that the gas planet HD 149026b is the hottest yet discovered. "We have mapped the temperature variations across the entire surface of a planet that is so far away, its light takes 60 years to reach us," said Heather Knutson of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., lead author of the paper describing HD 189733b. The two planets are "hot Jupiters" -- sizzling, gas giant planets that zip closely around their stars. Roughly 50 of the more than 200 known planets outside our solar system, called exoplanets, are hot Jupiters. Visible-light telescopes can detect these strange worlds and determine certain characteristics, such as their sizes...
More About: Weather , Planet , Xtreme , Nasa , Plan

Nanogenerator Provides Continuous Electrical Power
2007-05-10 23:27:00
Researchers have demonstrated a prototype nanometer-scale generator that produces continuous direct-current electricity by harvesting mechanical energy from such environmental sources as ultrasonic waves, mechanical vibration or blood flow.Based on arrays of vertically-aligned zinc oxide nanowires that move inside a novel “zig-zag” plate electrode, the nanogenerators could provide a new way to power nanoscale devices without batteries or other external power sources. “This is a major step toward a portable, adaptable and cost-effective technology for powering nanoscale devices,” said Zhong Lin Wang, Regents’ Professor in the School of Materials Science and Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “There has been a lot of interest in making nanodevices, but we have tended not to think about how to power them. Our nanogenerator allows us to harvest or recycle energy from many sources to power these devices.” Details of the nanogenerator are reported in the Apr...
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Leading Scientists Announce Creation Of Encyclopedia Of Life
2007-05-10 19:04:00
Realizing a dream articulated in 2003 by renowned biologist E.O. Wilson, Harvard and four partner institutions have launched an ambitious effort to create an Encyclopedia of Life (EOL), an unprecedented project to document online every one of Earth's 1.8 million known species. For the first time in history, the EOL would grant scientists, students, and others multimedia access to all known living species, even those just discovered.The effort will be supported by a new $10 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and $2.5 million from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. With a Wikipedia-style Web page detailing each organism's genome, geographic distribution, phylogenetic position, habitat, and ecological relationships, organizers hope the EOL will ultimately serve as a global beacon for biodiversity and conservation. Harvard joins the Field Museum in Chicago, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., the Smithsonian Institution, and the Biodiv...
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Examination of radiation left from birth of universe could alter theories
2007-05-09 18:54:00
Using relic radiation from the birth of the universe, astrophysicists at the University of Illinois have proposed a new way of measuring the fine-structure constant in the past, and comparing it with today.By focusing on the absorption of the cosmic microwave background by atoms of neutral hydrogen, the researchers say, they could measure the fine-structure constant during the “dark ages,” the time after the Big Bang before the first stars formed, when the universe consisted mostly of neutral hydrogen and helium.The fine-structure constant characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic force, which is one of the four fundamental forces in physics. But, the fine-structure constant may not be constant. Recent observations of quasars – starlike objects billions of light-years away – have found a slightly different value for the fine-structure constant.“If the fine-structure constant does vary over time and space, we could use it as a probe of new physics beyond the standar...
More About: Universe , Left , Birth , Theories , Radiation

China's earliest modern human
2007-05-09 14:00:00
Researchers at WUSTL and the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing have been studying a 40,000-year-old early modern human skeleton found in China and have determined that the "out of Africa" dispersal of modern humans may not have been as simple as once thought. Erik Trinkaus, Ph.D., the Mary Tileston Hemenway Professor of anthropology in Arts & Sciences, his colleague Hong Shang, and others at the IVPP examined the skeleton, recovered in 2003 from the Tianyuan Cave, Zhoukoudian, near Beijing City. The skeleton dates to 42,000 to 38,500 years ago, making it the oldest securely dated modern human skeleton in China and one of the oldest modern human fossils in eastern Eurasia. The find could help explain how early man moved across Europe and Asia towards the East, a movement that is not completely understood by anthropologists. The "Out of Africa" theory proposes that modern humans evolved in Africa and then spread throughout the earth somewhe...
More About: Human , Modern , Uman , Arli , Lies