from BBC News Online
International researchers say they
have made a "significant step" towards a
predictive blood test for tuberculosis. A
DNA fingerprint in the blood shows
promise in identifying which carriers of
TB will go on to get symptoms and spread
the infection.
Such a test would allow earlier
diagnosis and treatment of the lung
disease, potentially saving many lives.
Experts say the research, published in
Nature, is "remarkable" but
needs to be proven by further work.
Tuberculosis, or TB, is an infectious
bacterial disease of the lungs, causing
symptoms such as coughing, chest pains
and weight loss. Someone in the world is
newly infected with TB every second, with
nearly two million deaths each year.
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from the Chronicle of Higher
Education
Ever since word got out that a
prominent Harvard University researcher
was on leave after an investigation into
academic wrongdoing, a key question has
remained unanswered: What, exactly, did
he do?
The researcher himself, Marc D.
Hauser, isn't talking. The usually
quotable Mr. Hauser, a psychology
professor and director of Harvard's
Cognitive Evolution Laboratory, is the
author of Moral Minds: How Nature
Designed Our Universal Sense of Right and
Wrong (Ecco, 2006) and is at work on
a forthcoming book titled Evilicious:
Why We Evolved a Taste for Being
Bad. He has been voted one of the
university's most popular professors.
... An internal document ... sheds
light on what was going on in Mr.
Hauser's lab. It tells the story of how
research assistants became convinced that
the professor was reporting bogus data
and how he aggressively pushed back
against those who questioned his findings
or asked for verification.
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from the San Diego
Union-Tribune (Registration
Required)
JAKARTA, Indonesia (Associated Press)
-- Coral that survived the 2004 tsunami
is now dying at one of the fastest rates
ever recorded because of a dramatic rise
in water temperatures off northwestern
Indonesia, conservationists said, warning
Wednesday that the threat extends to
other reefs across Asia.
The Wildlife Conservation Society
deployed marine biologists to Aceh
province, on the tip of Sumatra island,
in May when surface waters in the Andaman
Sea peaked at 93 degrees Fahrenheit (34
degrees Celsius)--a 7 degree Fahrenheit
(4 degree Celsius) rise over long-term
averages.
The teams discovered massive
bleaching, which occurs when algae living
inside coral tissues are expelled.
Subsequent surveys carried out together
with Australia's James Cook University
and Indonesia's Syiah Kuala University
showed 80 percent of those corals have
since died.
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from the New York Times
(Registration Required)
In a study that sheds new light on the
effects of end-of-life care, doctors have
found that patients with terminal lung
cancer who began receiving palliative
care immediately upon diagnosis not only
were happier, more mobile and in less
pain as the end neared--but they also
lived nearly three months longer.
The findings, published online
Wednesday by The New England Journal
of Medicine, confirmed what
palliative care specialists had long
suspected. The study also, experts said,
cast doubt on the decision to strike
end-of-life provisions from the health
care overhaul passed last year.
"It shows that palliative care is the
opposite of all that rhetoric about
'death panels,'" said Dr. Diane E. Meier,
director of the Center to Advance
Palliative Care at Mount Sinai School of
Medicine and co-author of an editorial in
the journal accompanying the study. "It's
not about killing Granny; it's about
keeping Granny alive as long as
possible--with the best quality of
life."
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from the Los Angeles Times
(Registration Required)
From the size and shape of the beak,
researchers have always known that the
massive South American "terror bird" was
a predator. Now they know precisely how
the bird killed--wielding its huge skull
and hooked beak like an pickax and
repeatedly chopping at prey until it
succumbed.
The 5-foot-tall, 90-pound
Andalgalornis steulleti, whose
skull was nearly twice the size of a
human's, went extinct millions of years
ago, but Argentine and U.S. researchers
have been using CT scans and
biomechanical reconstructions to deduce
how the flightless predators killed.
Their findings were announced
Wednesday.
The new study "allows researchers to
get down to the real nitty-gritty of the
animal and be more specific about some of
its behavior techniques," said vertebrate
paleontologist Bob Chandler of the
Georgia College & State University in
Milledgeville, Ga., who did not take part
in the study. "This allows us to add
another layer to the biomechanics of
paleontology."
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from the Guardian (UK)
Hundreds of lives a year will be saved
if the National Health Serivce (NHS)
embraces a transplant revolution
involving patients receiving donated
kidneys that were previously rejected as
inadequate, doctors claim today.
Since the 1970s almost all kidney
transplants using organs from the
deceased have come from "brain dead"
donors, who have typically been involved
in a car crash, brain haemorrhage or
severe head injury in a fall or
industrial accident. But the supply of
available organs from such people is
declining, not least because there are
fewer deaths in road accidents.
In an attempt to tackle this ...
surgeons at several NHS hospitals have
been pioneering the use of kidneys from
people who have died from major heart
failure following severe brain injury.
The orthodox view has been that
DCD--donation after cardiac
death--kidneys are far inferior to those
from "brain dead" donors. But research
published Thursday in the Lancet
shows that kidneys from either source are
equally good at prolonging the life of
patients whose condition would otherwise
kill them.
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from ScienceNOW Daily
News
The International Mathematical Union
(IMU) doled out seven prizes, including
the brand-new, $500,000 Chern Medal
Award, in opening ceremonies at its
quadrennial International Congress of
Mathematicians (ICM) Thursday in
Hyderabad, India.
Also at the meeting, IMU elected its
first woman president, Ingrid Daubechies
of Princeton University. Four
mathematicians received the prestigious
Fields Medal, long regarded as
mathematics' version of the Nobel Prize.
Elon Lindenstrauss of Hebrew
University of Jerusalem and Ngô Bao Châu
of Université Paris-Sud in Orsay, France,
took the prize for analytic work with
applications to number theory. Stanislav
Smirnov of the University of Geneva,
Switzerland, and Cedric Villani of the
Henri Poincaré Institute in Paris won for
theoretical work in statistical
physics.
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from Science News
A giant earthquake that triggered a
deadly southwest Pacific tsunami was
actually two great temblors, finds a pair
of new studies in the Aug. 19
Nature. These results uncover an
unusual sequence of geological events
that is the first of its kind to be
observed by scientists, the study authors
say.
The earthquakes, which likely struck
within two minutes of each other on
September 29, 2009, spawned a tsunami
that killed nearly 200 people in Samoa,
American Samoa and Tonga. Scientists
assumed that a single quake under the
ocean floor had caused the devastation,
but the pattern of far-flung aftershocks,
aberrant tsunami waves and the
inexplicable movement of a Tongan island
cast doubt on that simple
explanation.
"We knew right off the bat that
something was weird about this
earthquake," says geophysicist Eric Geist
of the U.S. Geological Survey in Menlo
Park, Calif. Geist wasn't involved in the
current studies but has puzzled over the
anomalous signs produced by the quake.
"This is a very complicated event, and
these studies, for me, really helped
explain a lot."
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from Smithsonian Magazine
... Tetsuro Matsuzawa and the dozen
scientists and graduate students who work
with him are peering into the minds of
our closest relatives, whose common
ancestor with humans lived some six
million years ago, to understand what
separates them from us. He and his
co-workers probe how chimpanzees
remember, learn numbers, perceive and
categorize objects and match voices with
faces.
It's a tricky business that requires
intimate relationships with the animals
as well as cleverly designed studies to
test the range and limitations of the
chimpanzees' cognition. ... Matsuzawa's
star research subject is a chimp named
Ai, which means "love" in Japanese.
Ai arrived at the Primate Research
Institute, part of Kyoto University, in
1977, when she was 1 year old and
Matsuzawa was 27. Matsuzawa had done some
basic studies with rats and monkeys, but
he knew little about chimpanzees. He was
given the job of training her. Years
later, he wrote an account of their first
meeting: "When I looked into this
chimpanzee's eyes, she looked back into
mine. This amazed me ..."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- Most research on renewable energy has focused on making electricity, which now comes from burning coal and natural gas. But the spill in the Gulf of Mexico, the reliance on Middle East imports and the threat of global warming are reminders that oil is also a pressing worry. A lot of problems could be solved with a renewable replacement for oil-based gasoline and diesel in the fuel tank--either a new liquid fuel or a much better battery.
Yet, success in this field is so hard to reliably predict that research has been limited, and even venture capitalists tread lightly. Now the federal government is plunging in, in what the energy secretary, Steven Chu, calls the hunt for miracles.
The work is part of the mission of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency--Energy, which is intended to finance high-risk, high-reward projects. It can be compared to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, part of the Pentagon, which spread seed money for such projects and incubated a variety of useful technologies, including the Internet.
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from ScienceNOW Daily News
The timeless childhood pursuit of skipping stones across a still pond involves some pretty tricky physics--and now researchers have developed a mathematical model that explains much of it. The model could help engineers design airplane wing surfaces better able to shake off icy buildup and boat hulls that can glide more smoothly through the water.
Scientists have been trying to unravel the physics of skipping for years. They know what happens when a stone first hits the water--or when tiny ice crystals strike the moisture-coated wings of an aircraft--but things get murky after that.
Mathematicians Peter Hicks and Frank Smith of University College London had been working on formulas to describe collisions between particles blowing in the wind. Eventually, they realized that many of the same aspects of those collisions could be applied to bodies skipping over water.
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from Nature News
An age-old mixture of four herbs could spare patients with cancer some of the side effects of chemotherapy.
The cocktail comprises Chinese peonies, Chinese liquorice, the fruit of the buckthorn tree and flowers of the Chinese skullcap plant. In China, they call it 'Huang Qin Tang' and have used it to treat gastrointestinal problems for about 1,800 years.
A start-up pharmaceutical company called PhytoCeutica has dubbed its proprietary pill of the blend 'PHY906,' and shown in early clinical trials that the mix can combat the severe diarrhoea caused by many chemotherapy drugs, which destroy fast-dividing gut cells in addition to tumour cells. Now, researchers at PhytoCeutica and Yale University School of Medicine, both in New Haven, Connecticut, have some early leads on how PHY906 does this, despite the fact that most of its individual chemical components remain unknown.
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from BBC News Online
The discovery of a rare magnetic star--or magnetar--is challenging theories about the origin of black holes. Magnetars are a special type of neutron star with a powerful magnetic field. They are formed by gravitational collapse after the original, or progenitor star, dies and forms a catastrophic supernova.
For this newly discovered magnetar, astronomers calculated that the mass of the progenitor must have been at least 40 times greater than that of our Sun. Collapsing stars of this size should form a black hole. The fact that this one resulted in a neutron star, challenges established theory.
The study, led by Dr. Ben Ritchie of the Open University, is published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. The new magnetar was found in an extraordinary star cluster known as Westerlund 1, located 16,000 light years away in the southern constellation of Ara (the Altar). This region contains numerous massive stars.
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from the Chicago Tribune (Registration Required)
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has issued tips for consumers worried about the recall of 228 million eggs linked to an outbreak of salmonella poisoning.
Authorities say eggs from Wright County Egg in Galt, Iowa, were linked to illnesses in Colorado, California and Minnesota. The CDC said about 200 cases of the strain of salmonella linked to the eggs were reported weekly in June and July, four times the usual number.
State health officials say tainted eggs have sickened at least 266 Californians and seven in Minnesota. The eggs were distributed around the country and packaged under the names Lucerne, Albertson, Mountain Dairy, Ralph's, Boomsma's, Sunshine, Hillandale, Trafficanda, Farm Fresh, Shoreland, Lund, Dutch Farms and Kemp.
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from New Scientist
... How can a single piece of DNA evidence generate massive differences in the statistical weight assigned to it? Last week, a New Scientist investigation showed how different forensic analysts can reach very different conclusions about whether or not someone's DNA matches a profile from a crime scene.
This week we show how, even when analysts agree that someone could be a match for a piece of DNA evidence, the statistical weight assigned to that match can vary enormously.
"Usually DNA evidence is pretty strong," says David Balding, a statistical geneticist at University College London ... "My point is that the number juries are provided with often overstates the evidence. It should be a smaller number."
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
SAN CRISTÓBAL DE RAPAZ, Peru -- The route to this village 13,000 feet above sea level runs from the desert coast up hairpin bends, delivering the mix of exhilaration and terror that Andean roads often provide. Condors soar above mist-shrouded crags. Quechua-speaking herders squint at strangers who arrive gasping in the thin air.
Rapaz's isolation has allowed it to guard an enduring archaeological mystery: a collection of khipus, the cryptic woven knots that may explain how the Incas--in contrast to contemporaries in the Ottoman Empire and China's Ming dynasty--ruled a vast, administratively complex empire without a written language.
Archaeologists say the Incas, brought down by the Spanish conquest, used khipus--strands of woolen cords made from the hair of animals like llamas or alpacas--as an alternative to writing. The practice may have allowed them to share information from what is now southern Colombia to northern Chile.
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from the Minneapolis Star Tribune (Registration Required)
SAVANNAH, Ga. (Associated Press) -- Preserved for nearly 150 years, perhaps by its own obscurity, a short-lived Confederate prison camp began yielding treasures from the Civil War almost as soon as archeologists began searching for it in southeastern Georgia.
They found a corroded bronze buckle used to fasten tourniquets during amputations, a makeshift tobacco pipe with teeth marks in the stem, and a picture frame folded and kept after the daguerreotype it held was lost.
Georgia officials say the discoveries, announced Wednesday, were made by a 36-year-old graduate student at Georgia Southern University who set out to find Camp Lawton for his thesis project in archaeology. He stunned experienced pros by not only pinpointing the site, but also unearthing rare artifacts from a prison camp known as little more than a historical footnote on the path of Gen. William T. Sherman's devasting march from Atlanta to Savannah.
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from Nature News
Investigations into research misconduct cost US institutions more than US$110 million per year, estimates a study published this week. But experts contacted by Nature question whether calculating the cost of investigation is the right way to measure the impact of research misconduct.
The research, published in PLoS Medicine, is based on the costs of a single recent case of research misconduct at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York. In the case, a senior scientist was accused of fabricating data in at least one grant application, and an internal investigation reached a conclusion of research misconduct.
As the work was partly funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services, the matter was referred to the department's Office of Research Integrity (ORI), which has yet to close the case or name the researcher involved. But the length and complexity of the investigation has already motivated Arthur Michalek, the institute's senior vice-president for educational affairs, biostatistician Alan Hutson and their colleagues to try to tally the costs.
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from Scientific American
A farm chemical with an infamous history--causing the worst known outbreak of pesticide poisoning in North America--is being phased out under an agreement announced Tuesday by the Environmental Protection Agency.
Manufacturer Bayer CropScience agreed to stop producing aldicarb, a highly toxic insecticide used to kill pests on cotton and several food crops, by 2015 in all world markets. Use on citrus and potatoes will be prohibited after next year.
Tuesday's announcement comes 25 years after a highly publicized outbreak of aldicarb poisoning sickened more than 2,000 people who had eaten California watermelons. New EPA documents show that babies and children under five can ingest levels of the insecticide through food and water that exceed levels the agency considers safe.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the 71 years since the Yankees slugger Lou Gehrig declared himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," despite dying from a disease that would soon bear his name, he has stood as America's leading icon of athletic valor struck down by random, inexplicable fate.
A peer-reviewed paper to be published Wednesday in a leading journal of neuropathology, however, suggests that Gehrig's demise--and that of some other athletes and soldiers given a diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, commonly known as Lou Gehrig's disease--might have been catalyzed by injuries only now becoming understood: concussions and other brain trauma.
Although the paper does not discuss Gehrig specifically, its authors in interviews acknowledged the clear implication: Lou Gehrig might not have had Lou Gehrig's disease.
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from the Boston Globe (Registration Required)
A team of top scientists, launching what is billed as the most ambitious and advanced survey of the Titanic, sets out next week to map in photographic detail the entire wreck site, and reconstruct in electronic form the ruins scattered on the seabed.
By melding photographs, high-definition video and computer imaging, scientists--including experts at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute--plan to create a three-dimensional computer model that will allow scientists and members of the public to "swim" through the wreckage online, as though they were at the site more than 2 miles below the ocean surface.
"We can raise the ship virtually," said James Delgado, the expedition's principal investigator and president of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology. "The data you can capture is incredible." Scientific research on this scale, Delgado and others said, has never been attempted at these depths, where the pressure is more than 400 times that on earth's surface, and the temperature never moves far from 39 degrees. There is no sunlight and little life.
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from USA Today
One in five American teenagers now suffers from some type of hearing loss, an increase of 31% since the mid-'90s, new research shows.
Most cases of hearing loss are slight, affecting only one ear and involving mostly high-frequency sounds, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Many teens may not even notice the hearing change. About one in 20 have "mild or worsening" hearing loss, which can make them struggle to follow conversations or teachers at school.
"It's very concerning," says study author Josef Shargorodsky, an otolaryngology/head and neck surgery resident at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary in Boston. Other studies show that even a small hearing loss can harm a child's school performance, language development and social interactions, he says.
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from the Los Angeles Times (Registration Required)
The cooling system aboard the International Space Station should be back to normal by midweek after astronauts Doug Wheelock and Tracy Caldwell Dyson used a seven-hour spacewalk Monday to replace a pump that broke July 31.
Early readings showed that the new pump, one of two that power the main cooling system, was working and that the station should be fully operational within a few days. Wheelock signaled a relieved "game over" to NASA's ground control as he finished connecting the pump to the station's ammonia cooling lines.
"This will allow us to recover and focus on research," said Kirk Shireman, deputy manager of the space station program. He said NASA and the six-member crew were looking forward to returning to "normal life" aboard the station.
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from the Washington Post (Registration Required)
On Monday, Louisiana's shrimpers could shrimp again. On the first day of the state's fall season, boats began unloading their catch at bayou-side docks, and processors began peeling, freezing and packaging the shellfish for the long trip to America's dinner plates.
Federal officials said it was safe. They had allowed states to reopen harvest areas, they said, only after tests on fish and shrimp showed no signs of oil or dispersants. In fact, federal officials said, they did not turn up a single piece of seafood that was unsafe to eat--even at the height of BP's oil spill.
But, like many things in the Gulf of Mexico, Monday's ritual only looked like a return to normal. In some places, the start of shrimping was greeted with suspicion instead of joy. Some fishermen and their families worried that the government's testing was inadequate--and that if any seafood diners wound up with a plate of oil-tainted scampi, it would be a knockout blow for their industry.
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from BBC News Online
Europe's "water satellite" has provided a different perspective on the floods in Pakistan. The Smos spacecraft senses the wetness of soils, and its unique instrument has detailed how the earth became saturated in the monsoon rains.
The floods, which began more than two weeks ago in the mountainous northwest, are the worst in recorded history. Some 20 million people and 160,000 sq km of land--a fifth of the country--have been affected by the disaster. Data from the European Space Agency's new Smos satellite has been processed to make a series of maps.
... Satellite data is frequently used in the relief response to major disasters, and in the case of Pakistan the world's satellite fleets were mobilised on 2 August to provide space-borne information under the International Charter [on] Space and Disasters.
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from the Miami Herald (Registration Required)
WYODAK, Wyo. (Associated Press) -- Utilities across the country are building dozens of old-style coal plants that will cement the industry's standing as the largest industrial source of climate-changing gases for years to come.
An Associated Press examination of U.S. Department of Energy records and information provided by utilities and trade groups shows that more than 30 traditional coal plants have been built since 2008 or are under construction.
The construction wave stretches from Arizona to Illinois and South Carolina to Washington, and comes despite growing public wariness over the high environmental and social costs of fossil fuels, demonstrated by tragic mine disasters in West Virginia, the Gulf oil spill and wars in the Middle East. The expansion, the industry's largest in two decades, represents an acknowledgment that highly touted "clean coal" technology is still a long ways from becoming a reality and underscores a renewed confidence among utilities that proposals to regulate carbon emissions will fail.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
MYSTIC, Conn. -- The shipbuilders are long dead, their knowledge gone. The shipyard no longer exists. No blueprints survive, nor ship's models. But the Charles W. Morgan is still here--the world's last surviving wooden whaling vessel, built in 1841. And restorers are spending $10 million to turn the museum piece into a working ship able to ply the unruly sea. They plan to sail the ship on its first voyage in nearly a century, opening a new chapter in its long career.
Built in New Bedford, Mass., a bustling port known as the whaling capital of the world, the Morgan sailed the globe for eight decades in pursuit of leviathans, escaping fire and cannibals, Confederate raiders and Arctic ice. She brought home thousands of barrels of whale oil that lighted homes and cities.
She also delivered tons of baleen, the horny material from the mouths of certain whales that was made into buggy whips and corset stays. In 1941, its centenary, the Morgan was towed to Mystic Seaport for museum display and in 1966 was named a national historic landmark. To learn as much as possible about the old ship and ensure its successful restoration, the specialists here are turning to the art and science of imaging.
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from National Geographic News
Climate scientists have cracked the mystery of why Antarctic sea ice has managed to grow despite global warming--but the results suggest the trend may rapidly reverse, a new study says.
Satellite data show that, over the past 30 years, Arctic sea ice has declined while Antarctic sea ice has mysteriously expanded, according to study leader Jiping Liu, a research scientist at Georgia Tech in Atlanta. "We've seen this paradox, but we don't know why--here we gave an explanation," Liu said.
The new analyses are based on climate models and sea-surface temperature and precipitation observations from 1950 to 2009. They show that, in the 20th century, ocean warming boosted precipitation in the upper atmosphere over the Antarctic region, which fell as snow.
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from Science News
Little asymmetric whatsits from Australia may be the oldest fossils of full-fledged animal bodies yet discovered, beating the previous contenders by tens of millions of years and pushing the evidence for animal life into an earlier geologic time.
The newly unveiled fossils, which resemble sponges, come from rocks between 635 million and 659 million years old, Adam Maloof of Princeton University and his colleagues report online in Nature Geoscience August 17. That timing sandwiches the fossils between two cold spells that iced over most of the planet during a Hollywood-disaster-style geologic period called the Cryogenian.
The proposed animal fossils do "have all the hallmarks" of being something more than just fragments of microbial mats, says biogeochemist Roger Summons of MIT, who was not involved in the study. These layers of single-celled organisms dominated the fossil record for billions of years before the appearance of true multicelled animals.
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from the New York Times (Registration Required)
In the 100 years since the first moose swam into Lake Superior and set up shop on an island, they have mostly minded their moosely business, munching balsam fir and trying to evade hungry gray wolves.
But now the moose of Isle Royale have something to say--well, their bones do. Many of the moose, it turns out, have arthritis. And scientists believe their condition's origin can help explain human osteoarthritis--by far the most common type of arthritis, affecting one of every seven adults 25 and older and becoming increasingly prevalent.
The arthritic Bullwinkles got that way because of poor nutrition early in life, an extraordinary 50-year research project has discovered. That could mean, scientists say, that some people's arthritis can be linked in part to nutritional deficits, in the womb and possibly throughout childhood.
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