June 30, 2006 8:27
Remember the Ozone Hole?
Back in the late 80's, atmospheric scientists were taken by surprise by the Antarctic ozone hole--a thinning (not an actual hole) in the protective layer of stratospheric ozone molecules that protect Earth's surface from harsh ultraviolet rays from the Sun. It didn't take long to realize that the culprit was chlorofluorocarbons (CFC's), used in refrigerators, air conditioners and some spray cans. And in an impressive contrast to the current inaction on global-warming gases, the Montreal Protocol of 1987 essentially banned these chemicals worldwide.
But that didn't take care of the CFC's already in the atmosphere, which have continued destroying ozone, and it didn't destroy the stuff in old refrigerators and other places, some of which is still leaking into the environment. Even with these leftovers, scientists thought at first the hole would close up within a couple of decades. Then they upped their estimate to 2050. And now NASA scientists, using more accurate data from satellites and more sophisticated computer models than ever before, are saying in the journal Geophysical Research Letters that the hole will persist until at least 2068--and that it won't even start to shrink until 2018.
That means Antarctica will be blasted with excess ultraviolet light during the southern spring, which gets under way in December, for years to come. And that will continue to stress the already fragile Antarctic ecosystem.
June 28, 2006 1:58
Who Stole King Tut's Mom?
The tomb known as KV63, discovered last year in a fluke accident, is the first found in Egypt's fabled Valley of the Kings since King Tutamkhamen's was excavated back in 1922. It's right next to Tut's resting place—only about 75 ft. away. That and some other hints led Zahi Hawass, the scholar-showman who runs Egypt's department of antiquities, to conclude that the new tomb belonged to Tut's mother, Queen Kiya, who may have died in childbirth when the boy king was still a baby.
That being the case, lots of hope and anticipation was focused on the five adult-size and two miniature coffins found inside. But one by one, they were opened to reveal such mundane items as pottery shards, mud seals, embalming materials, small animal bones, papyrus fragments, trays, pieces of twine or rope, and six small pillows stuffed with feathers or down. The same sort of stuff was in 28 storage jars found in the tomb.
But just a few hours ago, the last coffin was opened to reveal...more stuff. Only the top layer has been examined so far. It contains garlands made of gold foil, dried flowers, reeds, berries or seeds, and string; more embalming materials; and some strips of linen wrapped up like an Ace bandage (around itself, not another object). And more pottery shards, of course, which seem to be as common in Egypt as camels. No one knows if the collars were ever placed on a mummy, or placed in the sarcophagus for future use. Sifting through all of the contents could take weeks.
In short, the tomb seems to have been mostly used as a storage bunker where mummy-makers and tomb-outfitters stashed their materials. If Queen Kiya ever rested there, she was probably spirited away by tomb raiders sometime in the 3,000 years since the crypt was created. And the mystery of who did it—if it was actually done—may never be solved. For his part, Otto Schaden, of the University of Memphis (Tennessee, not Egypt), who led the team that actually did the excavation, doubts very much that she was. "Normally," he says, "if a mummy had been placed there and the tomb was robbed, you’d expect to fingers, toes or other small bones. I think [Hawass] is going out on a limb.” A program about the opening of the coffin will air on the Discovery Channel on July 9.
Much credit and thanks go to my colleague Andrea Dorfman,by the way who did key reporting on this item, and who has actually been to the Valley of the Kings, to my great envy. We collaborated on this Egyptology piece for TIME back in 1995.
—M.L
June 28, 2006 10:21
Stonehenge with Palm Trees
GILMAR NASCIMENTO / AP
Granite blocks in Amapa, Brazil, part of a grouping of 127 stones, may be the vestiges of South America's oldest astronomical observatory
Scientists have long known that paleolithic people were keen observers of the heavens. The proof is in ancient carvings and drawings, but also in huge monuments like England's celebrated Stonehenge, which was clearly laid out, at least in part, to track the annual meanderings of the Sun. But the indigenous prehistoric people of the Western Hemisphere were no slouches at monumental observatories either. Just a few weeks ago, a 4,200-year-old site was found near Lima, Peru, featuring mammoth sculptures that align perfectly with the rising sun on Dec 21--midsummer and the longest day of the year in most of South America. It's the oldest such observatory ever found.
And now Brazilian researchers have announced their own discovery: a megalithic observatory consisting of 127 blocks up to 9 ft. tall forming a circle atop a hill near Calcoene, in the state of Amapa. Here, too, one of the blocks seems to be placed so as to mark Dec 21--but since Calcoene is slightly north of the Equator, it's midwinter, the shortest day (the block is angled so its shadow disappears entirely on that day). This monument is probably a lot younger than the Peruvian one--maybe 2000 years old--but it's still a remarkable indication of how widespread the practice was.
It's no surprise that South and Central American sites are only now being found: much of the area is overgrown with jungle, in contrast to the grassy places where England's paleolithic monuments stand. Entire Mayan cities are still being uncovered, and there are sure to be many more observatories as well, just waiting for someone to stumble upon them.
June 27, 2006 1:56
Asteroid On The Way
JULIAN BAUM / SPL / PHOTORESEARCHERS
An artists' rendering of an asteroid headed for Earth
The asteroid or comet that ended the reign of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was probably about six miles across. A 30-mile–wide space rock of some sort was probably the cause of the giant Permian-Triassic exctinction 250 million years ago, which wiped out most animal life on Earth. So the news that that a half-mile asteroid will be whipping by Earth on Monday, July 3, might seem like no big deal.
Guess again. Even a small asteroid can carve a big hole; the mile-wide Barringer Meteor Crater in Arizona was caused by a relatively minuscule 150-ft.-wide meteorite. A half-miler could wipe out New York City in about a second. And while such a precision strike would be wildly improbable, the most likely impact site--the open ocean--could be even more destructive, setting off a tsunami that would dwarf the one that devastated Southeast Asia in 2004.
The good news is that this asteroid, known only as 2004 XP14, won't get any closer to us than the Moon, and poses no danger (when it was first discovered in December, 2004, there was some concern about a potential impact when it comes around again later in the century, but a more precise calculation of its orbit has convinced astronomers that won't happen. The bad news is that there are many many thousands of asteroids out there that are big enough to do serious damage, but which haven't been found yet. The Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) search, using an automated telescope to look for Earth-approaching space rocks, has found more than 1,500 already, including 2004 XP14; the Spacewatch project in Arizona has found many more. And while none threatens us yet, the asteroid with Earth's name on it could literally be discovered tomorrow.
June 22, 2006 9:15
The Hottest Earth in 400 Years--At Least
Whenever I hear a weather report declaring it's the hottest June 10 on record or whatever, I can't take it too seriously, because "ever" really means "as long as the records go back," which is only as far as the late 1800s. Scientists have other ways of measuring temperatures before that, though--not for individual dates, but they can tell the average temperature of a given year by such proxy measurements as growth marks in corals, deposits in ocean and lake sediments, and cores drilled into glacial ice. They can even use drawings of glaciers as the were hundreds of years ago compared with today.
And in the most comprehensive compilation of such data to date, says a new report from the National Research Council, it looks pretty certain that the last few decades have been hotter than any comparable period in the last 400 years. That's a blow to those who claim the current warm spell is just part of the natural up and down of average temperatures--a frequent assertion of the global-warming-doubters crowd.
The report was triggered by doubts about past-climate claims made last year by climatologist Michael Mann, of the University of Virginia (he's the creator of the "hockey stick" graph Al Gore used in "An Inconvenient Truth" to dramatize the rise in carbon dioxide in recent years). Mann claimed that the recent warming was unprecedented in the past thousand years--that led Congress to order up an assessment by the prestigious Research Council. Their conclusion was that a thousand years was reasonable, but not overwhelmingly supported by the data. But the past 400 was--so resoundingly that it fully supports the claim that today's temperatures are unnaturally warm, just as global warming theory has been predicting for a hundred years. And if there's any doubt about whether these proxy measurements are really legitimate, the NRC scientists compared them with actual temperature data from the most recent century, when real thermometers were in widespread use. The match was more or less right on.
In the past nearly two decades since TIME first put global warming on the cover, then, the argument against it has gone from "it isn't happening" to "it's happening, but it's natural," to "it's mostly natural"--and now, it seems, that assertion too is going to have to drop away. Indeed, Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who chairs the House Science Committee and who asked for the report declared that it did nothing to support the notion of a controversy over global warming science--a controversy that opponents keep insisting is alive. Whether President Bush will finally take serious action to deal with the warming, however, is a much less settled question.
June 22, 2006 8:20
Plutos New Moons, Named at Last
When astronomers discover a new moon of Jupiter, it's not even close to being a big deal Galileo found the first four in the early 1600s, and at last count the giant planet had dozens. But tiny, distant Pluto was believed to be moonless until Charon was found in 1978. So it was news indeed when Alan Stern, a planetary scientist from the Southwest Research Institute, in Boulder, Colo., announced last fall that he'd spotted two new moons with the Hubble telescope.
And now they have names. The International Astronomical Union (which is still undecided on whether Pluto is really a planet) has officially called the two plutettes Nix and Hydra, as suggested by Stern and his collaborators. The former is the Greek goddess of darkness (and should really be spelled "nyx," but that spelling was taken already, by an asteroid). The latter is the nine-headed monster that guarded the gates of Hades in Greek mythology.
No news yet on whether Pluto will keep its status as a planet, though--and thus, no news either on what to name 2003UB313, the Pluto-sized object discovered last summer. That's because the astronomical union has rules for how to name planets and how to name other sorts of objects. If Pluto is a planet, so is UB313; if not, not. Watch this space.
June 20, 2006 7:51
Stem Cells Fix Paralyzed Rats
Embryonic stem cells can turn into pretty much any cell type in the body, from heart to liver to skin. That's why therapies based on stem cells hold the almost incredible promise of curing any disease involving the death of cells--which means pretty much any disease in the medical books, aside from cancer.
So far, alas, it's all been purely theoretical--but a report out of Johns Hopkins, to be published in Annals of Neurology next Monday, is anything but. Scientists took embryonic stem cells from mice, coaxed them to grow into motor neurons--the nerve cells that transmit movement signals to muscles--and implanted them in the spinal cords of rats who had been paralyzed. The result: after six months, 11 out of 15 rats had regained some use of their previously useless legs.
This isn't actually the first time stem cells have been used to treat paralyzed rats; in the earlier experiments, though, they were used to repair existing nerve cells. This time, they literally created new ones, and got them to grow toward and attach to muscles--a major step forward.
Two hugely important caveats, though. The first, which medical researchers can't emphasize enough: what works in rodents may not work at all in humans. Cancer, for example, as was famously explained after an overblown story about a new treatment back in 1998, has been cured dozens of different times in mice. The Johns Hopkins scientists will try pigs next, but it's years before any such treatment is tried, even as an experiment, in humans.
The second caveat: the cells couldn't have grown without the addition of a mix of growth factors and other chemicals that allowed them to develop properly. Even if it passes all the hurdles that lie before it, stem cell therapy will almost certainly never be just a simple procedure. It will, like just about all of modern medicine, require a touch of alchemy to make it work.
June 20, 2006 9:35
A Step Closer to Whaling
KATE DAVISON / EPA
A Japanese whaling ship injurs a whale with its first harpoon attempt
If you're old enough to remember "Save the Whales" bumper stickers, you're old enough to remember that commercial whaling was a big issue back in the 1970s and early '80s. The anti-whaling movement got powerful enough, in fact, that whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission (IWC) two decades ago. Since then, whaling is only permitted where it's vital for survival--for the Inuit in Alaska, for example—or for scientific purposes.
But earlier this week, at a meeting in the Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis, the IWC voted by a narrow margin to declare that the ban was invalid. The move has no immediate impact: reversing the ban in practice requires a 75% majority, and the actual vote was 33/32.
It was a big symbolic victory, though, for Japan, where whale meat is a delicacy, and which has loudly opposed the ban from the start. Japan, along with Iceland, has also made liberal use of the IWC’s “scientific purposes” exemption, taking hundreds of whales every year in what groups like Greenpeace say is a complete sham. Norway simply ignores the ban. With a simple majority, Japan and its pro-whaling allies could in principle rescind Greenpeace and other anti-whaling groups’ formal observer status at IWC meetings. And though such a move failed this time, a majority vote could force commission decisions to be made in secret, so that small nations siding with Japan would be less subject to political or moral pressure. Some critics have charged that Japan has in essence bought votes from some IWC members by investing in their fishing industries. The Los Angeles Times reports, for example, that six Caribbean states that voted with Japan received more than $100 million in Japanese aid over the past eight years.
June 15, 2006 10:13
Rare Rhino Sighting
The Sumatran Rhinoceros is one of the most endangered species in the world, with only a few hundred still alive. That's why biologists were so excited to find hints of a previously unknown population of no more than 13 of the beasts deep in the jungles of Sabah, on the Malaysian section of Borneo last year. Now they're even more excited: the World Wildlife Fund has just announced a motion-activated camera has snapped the first picture ever taken from this population, confirming its existence beyond doubt. That gives an extra glimmer of hope that the Sumatran rhino can avoid going extinct.
But it's still a long shot.
June 13, 2006 10:05
Colonel Sanders, Call Your Lawyer
DAVID SILVERMAN / GETTY
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, or CSPI, is a healthy-lifestyle advocacy organization with a penchant for colorful language. Among other ear-catching epithets, it calls salt "the silent killer," and describes giant burgers as "food porn." Needless to say, CSPI doesn't like fast-food joints very much, except when they nudge their food in the direction of being a bit healthier. McDonald's got a pat on the back a couple of years ago when it backed off "supersizing," for example. And just last week, CSPI praised Wendy's because, although it still sells its Classic Triple burger, a towering edifice of meat, the chain has dropped the use of partially hydrogenated oil, also known as trans fat, a type of processed oil that's really bad for your arteries.
But KFC still uses the stuff to fry chicken and potatoes, and it's also an ingredient in biscuits, pot pie, and several desserts. And since the Colonel hasn't been a good boy, CSPI announced minutes ago that it--or rather, a retired doctor named Arthur Hoyte, of Rockville, Maryland, very strongly supported by CSPI--is taking him to court. According to the CSPI statement, Hoyte "had purchased fried chicken at KFC outlets in Washington, DC, and elsewhere, not knowing that KFC fries in partially hydrogenated oil."
Given that Hoyte is a doctor, this has a bit of the flavor of the police captain in Casablanca announcing that he is "shocked...shocked!" to learn that gambling was going on at Humphrey Bogart's bar. But such is the posturing that goes on in our legal system. And the numbers CSPI quotes are really pretty awful. A typical 3-piece Extra Crispy combo meal, says the organization (drumstick, two thighs, potato wedges, and a biscuit) contains 15 grams of trans fat. That's more, says CSPI, than you should eat in a week.
CSPI didn't disclose how much it's asking for--but money isn't the point. The point is to throw as unpleasant a spotlight of publicity on KFC as possible, and get the chain to switch to some safer oil, like canola. Depending on how big a splash this suit makes, that might even happen.
June 8, 2006 9:26
Nano Dinosaurs
It's nano-week at Eye on Science. Yesterday I wrote about miniature solar systems. Today it's miniature sauropods, the long-necked, long-tailed herbivores that include what we used to call Brontosaurus. The fossils were unearthed in Germany back in 1998, in a quarry in the Harz Mountains. At first, their small size suggested to paleontologists that they belonged to immature dinos--but a careful analysis of the growth marks inside the bones made it clear they were adults. Instead of being as much as 150 ft. long (including tail) fully grown, they were more like 20.
The explanation? As German paleontologists explain in Nature, it's most likely a case of "island dwarfing," a phenomenon in which large mammals isolated on islands tend to shrink over many generations. The miniature fossil "hobbit" remains found on the island of Flores, in Indonesia, are the most recent example to make news.
The fact that they were found in Germany is in perfect keeping with this theory, since at the time the nano-dinos lived, about 150 million years ago, that part of the world was mostly submerged--with a few islands poking out. The place where these fossils were found just happens to be one of them.
June 7, 2006 11:11
Nano-Solar Systems
Astronomers have been arguing a lot lately over whether Pluto is a planet or not--it's so much smaller and different in composition from others, and at the same time so similar to a lot of other objects in the outer solar system.
But at the big end of the planetary size range, there's plenty of dispute as well. There's nothing bigger than Jupiter orbiting our own Sun, as far as we know. But many of the objects found orbiting distant stars over the past decade are significantly bigger--five or 10 times Jupiter's mass. That's getting into the range of something called a brown dwarf--something bigger than a planet but smaller than a star--and nobody knows exactly where the planet-brown dwarf cutoff should be set.
And it's all gotten much more complicated: observers have lately learned that objects as small as five times Jupiter's mass can float freely in space--they're not orbiting anything at all. And just a day or two ago, Ray Jayawardhana of the University of Toronto, announced at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Calgary, Alberta, that several of these...whatevers...have disk-shaped clouds of dust swirling around them--disks that will quite likely condense into moons. Or...somethings that will be called moons if the parent bodies are called planets. Which hasn't been decided.
There is a proposition on the table, though, offered by Gibor Basri, of the University of California, a pioneer at finding brown dwarfs. He'd keep the term "planet," but add some new nomenclature, as follows (for a more technical presentation, go here):
FUSOR - an object that achieves core [nuclear] fusion during its lifetime
PLANEMO - a round non-fusor.
PLANET - a planemo orbiting a fusor.
Under this scheme the Sun is no longer a star, but a "fusor." Pluto and a dozen or so other objects, including a few asteroids would be "planemos," and they'd also be planets. The new bodies Jayawardhana has found would be planemos, but not planets. It all makes good sense. The only problem I can see is that it sounds kind of like the dialogue from a really cheesy sci-fi movie. You can just imagine it: "We come in peace from the planemo Zorg, orbting fusor HD-331."
I don't think the world is quite ready.
June 5, 2006 12:44
A Telescope a Million Light-Years Across
It's bizarre, but true. Back in the 1930s, Einstein suggested that a massive object in the cosmic foreground could warp spacetime so it acted as a lens, distorting and magnifying something in the background. In 1979, astronomers found such a "gravitational lens," and since then they've been discovering them all over the place--and using them to make impressive discoveries. A couple of months ago, for example, gravitational lensing revealed the existence of a planet orbiting a star 20,000 light-years away.
Now there's another impressive demonstration of the power of this technique: scientists at the American Astronomical Society's spring meeting in Calgary, Alberta announced yesterday that they've spotted what may be three very faint, dim galaxies at the edge of the visible universe--galaxies caught very near the time of their birth, a billion years or less after the Big Bang, and thus more than 12 billion years in our past. In the case of the planet, the "lens" is a single foreground star in our own Milky Way. In this case, it's an entire cluster of galaxies halfway across the universe. Without the added magnification power of the cluster, the background galaxies wouldn't be visible, even with the world's most powerful telescopes. With it, astronomers can now begin to try and understand exactly when and how the first galaxies formed--a phenomenon that's still shrouded in mystery.
For more on a scientific feat that would have pleased Einstein no end, go here.
June 2, 2006 9:39
Springtime for Dinosaurs
Every schoolkid knows—as we didn’t when I was one—that the dinosaurs were done in, at least in part, by a comet or asteroid that slammed into Earth some 65 million years ago. That cosmic ethnic cleansing paved the way for mammals to begin their takeover, which culminated, eventually, in the rise of humans.
But the dinosaurs themselves were beneficiaries of an even bigger mass extinction about 250 million years ago. Known informally as the Great Dying, the Permian-Triassic extinction destroyed about 90% of marine species and 70% of land vertebrates. If it hadn’t happened, the Age of Dinosaurs might instead have been the Age of Really Large Amphibians.
What caused it, though, has always been a mystery, since not all extinctions are necessarily caused by impacts. But this one might now have to be added to the list of those that were. Thanks to some clever detective work, planetary scientists may have found the smoking gun for the Great Dying: a crater buried a mile under the East Antarctic Ice sheet. At 300 miles across, it suggest the impact of a 30-mi.-wide space rock (the Chicxulub crater, on Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula, the remnant of the object that got the dinosaurs, is less than half as wide, and its impactor was probably only 6 miles wide).
The new crater was first suggested by readings from the twin GRACE satellites, which measured a glitch in the Earth’s gravity field over East Antarctica. That suggested a “mascon,” or mass concentration, which sometimes results when a giant space strike causes some of the dense molten mantle to rise into the planet’s crust and cool there. When they saw the mascon, the scientists figured there could well be a ring-shaped crater remnant surrounding it—and when they looked with ground-penetrating radar, there it was.
This isn’t definitive proof, but the landforms seem to be of about the right age, and they have just the right shape for an impact. Its timing also suggests that this impact might literally have cracked apart the primordial supercontinent known as Gondwana, sending the fragment now known as Australia wandering slowly northward.
June 1, 2006 2:53
Hot Times at the North Pole
Climate scientists have known for some time that the Earth was considerably warmer about 55 million years ago than it is today--but new evidence from the Arctic shows that the word "considerably" is a considerable understatement. By drilling deep into the sediments at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean, says a report in this week's Nature, researchers were able to gauge ocean temperatures much further into the past than ever before for this region--and to their astonishment, discovered that the water averaged a balmy 73º F compared with today's -4º.
No climate model had suggested such balmy water the North Pole before; the excess warming, say the researchers, must have been caused by a greater outpouring of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than anyone expected. One possibility is a huge release of methane--something that has been flagged by scientists as a danger as today's permafrost starts to melt and frozen marshlands begin to decompose. Is that what happened 55 million years ago? Nobody knows--but the evidence from the Arctic Ocean seabed suggests that unexpected factors could kick global warming into even higher gear than anyone is now predicting.
June 1, 2006 2:14
Dude, Who's Got my Space Hammer?
During yesterday's space walk outside the International Space Station, American and Russian astronauts ended up having to use makeshift tools. Why? Because they can't find the ones they need. You know how it is. You fix that leaky airlock or unclog the low-gravity toilet, and when you're done you lay the wrench or the plunger down somewhere--and then you can't find it next time you need it. In this case, they're missing part of the Russian foot restraint meant to keep the spacewalker attached to a 55-ft.-long mobile boom (they'll improvise with an American tether) and a bag used for retrieving a plate that collects space residue (they'll use ordinary bags wrapped with bungee cords).
One thing they didn't do was hit a golf ball. They also didn't shoot baskets, but the golf drive was actually on the schedule until the last minute: it's a paid publicity stunt for a Canadian golf-ball company (you can just imagine what John Glenn would have said if they'd tried to make him do this). No word on why the shot was dropped, but it will happen on a spacewalk sometime in the future.
About Eye On Science
TIME contributing writer Michael D. Lemonick fills you in on what's hot, what's cool, what's controversial and what's just plain silly in the world of science. Comments encouraged.
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