Mysterious source of some meteorites

Following are excerpts from a spaceref.com notice about an upcoming issue of  Meteoritics and Planetary Science. A car sized asteroid exploded over the Nubian desert in 2008. Now the evidence for the origin of this event in a celestial body which remains mysterious, is confirmed. What I don't understand though, in the article, is their putting all the fragments in one chamber to be analyzed. Wouldn't that mess up the signs they were analyzing? Anyway, fascinating look at what might be evidence of a proto-planet. (http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32296)

Meteorite just one piece of an unknown celestial body
Source: Carnegie Institution
Posted Wednesday, December 15, 2010

...Now in a series of 20 papers for a special double issue of the journal Meteoritics and Planetary Science, published on December 15, researchers ...demonstrate the diversity of these [meteorite] fragments, with major implications for the meteorite's origin.

In the first round of research, Carnegie Geophysical scientist Doug Rumble, in collaboration with Muawia Shaddad of the University of Khartoum, examined one fragment of the asteroid, ... and determined that it fell into a very rare category of meteorite called ureilites. Ureilites have a very different composition from most other meteorites. It has been suggested that all members of this meteoric family might have originated from the same source, called the ureilite parent body, which could have been a proto-planet.

Now Rumble has expanded his work to examine 11 meteorite fragments, [from the same asteroid] focusing on the presence of oxygen isotopes. Isotopes are atoms of the same element that have extra neutrons in their nuclei.

Rumble explains: "Oxygen isotopes can be used to identify the meteorite's parent body and determine whether all the fragments indeed came from the same source. Each parent body of meteorites in the Solar System, including the Moon, Mars, and the large asteroid Vesta, has a distinctive signature of oxygen isotopes that can be recognized even when other factors, such as chemical composition and type of rock, are different."

...his team prepped tiny crumbs of these 11 meteorite fragments and loaded them into a reaction chamber where they were heated with a laser and underwent chemical reactions to release oxygen and then used another device, called a mass spectrometer, to measure the concentrations of these oxygen isotopes. Results showed that the full range of oxygen isotopes known to be present in ureilites were also present in the studied fragments.
"It was already known that the fragments in the Nubian Desert came from the same asteroid. Taking that into account, these new results demonstrate that the asteroid's source, the ureilite parent body, also had a diversity of oxygen isotopes," says Rumble.

The diversity of oxygen isotopes found in ureilites probably arises from the circumstances of the parent this body's formation. Rumble theorizes that the rock components of this parent body were heated to the point of melting and then cooled into crystals so quickly that the oxygen isotopes present could not come to an equilibrium distribution throughout....

"The exact cause of the problem is still unknown"

Here's a massive printing glitch, problems with paper feeds, that probably has happened to you.According to CNBC, U.S. government printing presses were unable to correctly feed new paper used to make $100 bills causing some notes to crease and create blank spaces on some of the bills. An unknown number of bills printed could be damaged so the entire batch of bills, 1.1 billion of them, will be unusable until someone figures out a way to sort the good ones from the bad. The exact cause of the problem is still unknown.


Above quote from zdnet which has nice pictures.

Is there an unknown companion to the Sun?

Is there a hidden companion to the sun? This idea sounds old-fashioned but now scientists think an object larger than Jupiter, may be orbiting on the edge of our solar system. This article is from Wired--I usually try to edit stuff out of these posts, so that it looks like fair use, but really, all the info seems distinct and important. Of course there are good reasons to visit the site that originated the news below. For one thing, a wonderful picture shows the Oort Cloud is outside the solar system, (what!!) so I may have really confused some stuff.
Check it out.

A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth.

“We’ve accumulated 10 years more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis,” said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana. “Only now should we be able to falsify or verify that you could have a Jupiter-mass object out there.”

In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system’s fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them.

In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and Whitmire confirm their original idea: About 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet.

This idea was a reaction to an earlier notion that a dim brown dwarf or red dwarf star, ominously dubbedNemesis, has pummeled the Earth with deadly comet showers every 30 million years or so. Later research suggested that mass extinctions on Earth don’t line up with Nemesis’s predictions, so many astronomers now think the object doesn’t exist.

“But we began to ask, what kind of an object could you hope to infer from the present data that we are seeing?” Matese said. “What could possibly tickle [comets'] orbits and make them come very close to the sun so we could see them?”

Rather than a malevolent death star, a smaller and more benign companion called Tyche (Nemesis’s good sister in Greek mythology) could send comets streaming from the Oort Cloud toward Earth.

The cosmic snowballs that form the hearts of comets generally hang out in the Oort Cloud until their orbits are nudged by some outside force. This push could come from one of three things, Matese says. The constant gravitational pull of the Milky Way’s disk can drag comets out of their icy homes and into the inner solar system. A passing star can shake comets loose from the Oort Cloud as it zips by. Or a large companion like Nemesis or Tyche can pull comets out of their comfort zones.

Computational models show that comets in each of these scenarios, when their apparent origins are mapped in space, make a characteristic pattern in the sky.

“We looked at the patterns and asked, ‘Is there additional evidence of a pattern that might be associated with a passing star or with a bound object?’” Matese said.

After examining the orbits of more than 100 comets in the Minor Planet Center database, the researchers concluded that 80 percent of comets born in the Oort Cloud were pushed out by the galaxy’s gravity. The remaining 20 percent, however, needed a nudge from a distant object about 1.4 times the mass of Jupiter.

“Something smaller than Jovian mass wouldn’t be strong enough to do the deed,” Matese said. “Something more massive, like a brown dwarf, would give a much stronger signal than the 20 percent we assert.”

There’s one problem, however. The pattern only works for comets that come from the spherical outer Oort Cloud, which extends from about 0.3 to 0.8 light-years from the sun. Comets from the flatter, more donut-shaped inner Oort Cloud don’t create the same distinctive pattern.

“That’s troubling,” Matese said. “It requires an entirely new dynamical explanation for how inner Oort Cloud comets are made observable.”...

“I think this whole issue will be resolved in the next 5 to 10 years, because there’s surveys coming on line … that will dwarf the comet sample we have today,” he said. “Whether these types of asymmetries in the directions that comets are coming from actually do exist or not will definitely be hammered out by those surveys.”

We may not have to wait that long, Matese says. An object like Tyche could be seen directly by WISE, NASA’s infrared space telescope.
“We anticipate that this WISE is going to falsify or verify our conjecture,” he said. “We just have to be patient.”

Images: 1) Comet Sliding Spring, a visitor from the Oort Cloud, was captured by WISE in Jan. 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA 2) The layout of the solar system, including the Oort Cloud, on a logarithmic scale. Credit: NASA


S

Miniature galaxy with miniature black hole

The link here is to an article about what scientists are calling a galaxy within a galaxy. This phenomena (and perhaps it's location)  allows them to study features more common in the early universe. But I cannot relay it reliably, here are parts of the article, and you want to see the picture at the original article.

Following a study of what is in effect a miniature galaxy buried inside a normal-sized one - like a Russian doll - astronomers using a CSIRO telescope have concluded that massive black holes are more powerful than we thought.

An international team of astronomers led by Dr Manfred Pakull at the University of Strasbourg in France has discovered a 'microquasar' - a small black hole, weighing only as much as a star, that shoots jets of radio-emitting particles into space.

Called S26, the black hole sits inside a regular galaxy called NGC 7793, which is 13M light-years away in the Southern constellation of Sculptor.

Earlier this year Pakull and colleagues observed S26 with optical and X-ray telescopes...
Now they have made new observations with CSIRO's Compact Array radio telescope near Narrabri, NSW. These show that S26 is a near-perfect analogue of the much larger 'radio galaxies' and 'radio quasars'. ...

Powerful radio galaxies and quasars are almost extinct today, but they dominated the earlyUniverse, billions of years ago, like cosmic dinosaurs. They contain big black holes, billions of times more massive than the Sun, and shoot out huge radio jets that can stretch millions of light-years into space.

Astronomers have been working for decades to understand how these black holes form their giant jets, and how much of the black hole's energy those jets transmit to the gas they travel through. That gas is the raw material for forming stars, and the effects of jets on star-formation have been hotly debated.

"Measuring the power of black hole jets, and therefore their heating effect, is usually very difficult," said co-author Roberto Soria (University College London)...
"With this unusual object, a bonsai radio quasar in our own backyard, we have a unique opportunity to study the energetics of the jets."
Using their combined optical, X-ray and radio data, the scientists were able to determine how much of the jet's energy went into heating the gas around it, and how much went into making the jet glow at radio wavelengths.

They concluded that only about a thousandth of the energy went into creating the radio glow.

"This suggests that in bigger galaxies too the jets are about a thousand times more powerful than we'd estimate from their radio glow alone," said Dr Tasso Tzioumis of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.

"That means that black hole jets can be both more powerful and more efficient than we thought, and that their heating effect on the galaxies they live in can be stronger."
...
Publication: Roberto Soria, Manfred W. Pakull, Jess W. Broderick, Stephane Corbel, and Christian Motch. "Radio lobes and X-ray hotspots in the microquasar S26." In press in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Available online on the MNRAS website and at http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.0394.

Is the ergot theory of witches behavior diminished?

This gem was in a blog called neurophilosophy. (Don't get excited the guy has no idea what philosophy is).
We quote a regular but unnamed blogger.


"ON August 15th, 1951, an outbreak of hallucinations, panic attacks and psychotic episodes swept through the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, hospitalizing dozens of its inhabitants and leaving five people dead. Doctors concluded that the incident occurred because bread in one of the town's bakeries had been contaminated with ergot, a toxic fungus that grows on rye. But according to investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the CIA had actually dosed the bread with d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD), an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug derived from ergot, as part of a mind control research project"

Moon's formation puzzling

No author listed for this writeup about puzzling features of the moon's current geography. The article is excerpted below and the full article is at this link. The article mentions that further mysteries remain.

Source: University of California Santa Cruz

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32051
Posted Thursday, November 11, 2010

A bulge of elevated topography on the farside of the Moon -- known as the lunar farside highlands -- has defied explanation for decades. But a new study led by researchers at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, shows that the highlands may be the result of tidal forces acting early in the Moon's history when its solid outer crust floated on an ocean of liquid rock.

Ian Garrick-Bethell, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, found that the shape of the Moon's bulge can be described by a surprisingly simple mathematical function. "What's interesting is that the form of the mathematical function implies that tides had something to do with the formation of that terrain," said Garrick-Bethell, who is the first author of a paper on the new findings published in the November 11 issue of Science.

The paper describes a process for formation of the lunar highlands that involves tidal heating of the Moon's crust about 4.4 billion years ago. At that time, not long after the Moon's formation, the crust was decoupled from the mantle below it by an intervening ocean of magma. As a result, the gravitational pull of the Earth caused tidal flexing and heating of the crust. At the polar regions, where the flexing and heating was greatest, the crust became thinner, while the thickest crust would have formed in the regions in line with the Earth.

This process still does not explain why the bulge is now found only on the farside of the Moon. "You would expect to see a bulge on both sides, because tides have a symmetrical effect," Garrick-Bethell said. "It may be that volcanic activity or other geological processes over the past 4.4 billion years have changed the expression of the bulge on the nearside."

The paper's coauthors include Francis Nimmo, associate professor of Earth and planetarysciences at UCSC, and Mark Wieczorek, a planetary geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris. The researchers analyzed topographical data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and gravitational data from Japan's Kaguya orbiter.

A map of crustal thickness based on the gravity data showed that an especially thick region of the Moon's crust underlies the lunar farside highlands. ...

The mathematical function that describes the shape of the Moon's bulge can account for about one-fourth of the Moon's shape, he said. Although mysteries still remain, such as what made the nearside so different, the new study provides a mathematical framework for further investigations into the shape of the Moon.

"It's still not completely clear yet, but we're starting to chip away at the problem," Garrick-Bethell said.

Women and Crime: Problem Solving Techniques

A woman in Erie Pennsylvania has just been convicted of bank robbery. She is already in jail for murdering her husband.  This woman planned, and persuaded 5 men to participate in, a bank robbery which netted a little more than 8,000 dollars.  She wanted the money to put out a hit on her father-in-law.  The woman's name is Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. She is 61, so she must have been in her mid-fifties when all this happened. You have to look at the link. This is because you have to see the pictures of these people.  (And I am getting nervous about how much I quote of articles in this blog.) Here's that link again:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325749/Marjorie-Diehl-Armstrong-guilty-pizza-delivery-bomb-plot-death-man-blew-heist.html
And one other thing:-- the headline mentions her "bizarre plot." I didn't even describe that in my comments.

Newspaper Circulation figures

Media circulation figures out today, October 25, 2010, indicate the Wall Street Journal led the country in increasing circulation numbers. Only the Dallas Morning News also increased circulation numbers in "recent months." Most newspaper declined in circulation. However all the major New York City newspapers posted strong circulation numbers. The New York Times was number 3. I can't tell if the Dallas paper is behind a pay wall, or not. January the NYT is going behind a paywall, though not utterly.  We'll see how that works out. I may have to start getting my local news from another country (The Guardian, for instance.) Of course the WSJ is already behind a paywall. 

In today’s Media Decoder section, Jeremy W. Peters of NYTimes.com shared some promising news for Wall Street Journal readers: WSJ was just one of two major newspapers in the nation to improve daily circulation in recent months. The Audit Bureau of Circulations reported a 5 percent drop in weekday circulation for over 600 newspapers from April to September,however The Journal witnessed a 1.8 percent rise in circulation and an average weekday distribution of more than two million (including 450,000 digital subscriptions). According to a company press release, The Journal upped circulation revenue by 7 percent compared to the April-September 2009 period.

While The Journal boasted the top weekday readership totals in the country, some other New York-based titles maintained high circulation numbers despite the slow decline of newspaper industry in the U.S. Other than WSJ, The New York Times (third), New York Daily News (sixth), and New York Post (seventh) ranked among the country’s top seven papers in terms of weekday circulation. Although these newspapers — along with other heavyweights like USA Today and Los Angeles Times — sold plenty of issues over the past six months, The Journal was joined only by The Dallas Morning News in posting distribution growth since this past spring.

Mysteries of Planetary Evolution

Here is a lovely glimpse of the kinds of issues involved in modeling a history of our own solar system. I could hardly bear to excerpt it, from the current Sky and Telescope online issue. (Nov. 2010). The article purports to answer some dilemmas. For some the interest in is the problems we did not know existed.

Our "New, Improved" Solar System

...

As portrayed on the home page for the NASA/JPL Photojournal, our solar system is an orderly arrangement of planets orbiting the Sun.

NASA / JPL

Compared with the systems of planets being found around other stars, our solar system is an orderly place, with each planet tracking around the Sun in a stable, roughly circular orbit. For centuries, the planets' long-term stability has been taken as evidence that they formed where they are now, sucking up gas, dust, and larger building blocks from the protoplanetary disk around them until reaching their final sizes.

But dig a little deeper, and you find serious problems with that simplistic view. For example, Uranus and Neptune should have ended up much smaller and less massive, because billions of miles from the infant Sun the protoplanetary pickings were slim and the assembly process too slow. Conversely, Mars formed in the fat of the disk and should have ended up at least 10 times more massive than it is today. And no one really understands the asteroid belt's existence — particularly why it's crudely divided into rocky bodies (called S types) nearer the Sun and dark, carbon-dominated hunks (C types) farther out.

Dynamicists solved the Uranus-Neptune dilemma several years ago by positing that the four giant planets were initially a much closer-knit family, coming together in a cozy zone 5 to 12 astronomical units from the Sun.

Computer models suggest that the outer planets formed within a narrow range of heliocentric distances, 5 to 12 a.u. from the Sun (vertical scale, lower left). After about 2 million years, however, the orbit of Saturn entered a 5:3 orbital resonance with Jupiter and became more eccentric. Neptune, which formed closer in than Uranus did, has repeated close encounters with all three of the other planets and is eventually ejected outward to its present location.

A. Morbidelli & others / Astronomical Journal

The Big Four coexisted peacefully at first, but after a couple of million years things got ugly. Jupiter's gravity jostled Saturn into an unstable, wide-swinging orbit, triggering a chain reaction of close encounters that ultimately threw Neptune and Uranus out to the distant depths of interplanetary space they now occupy.

Theorists now have computer models that get the outer solar system to come out right, more or less, but they're still vexed by the inner planets. The thorny problems of a too-small Mars and a compositionally stratified asteroid belt remain.

Worse, discoveries of other solar systems were revealing radically different inner-planet architectures: "hot Jupiters" whirling so close to their suns that a year for them is just days long, and massive planets in orbits so wildly out of round that any lesser worlds they encountered would have been tossed out. Given all the disorder so common among the exoplanets, it's remarkable that the Sun ended up with any small, close-in worlds at all.

But there's been a breakthrough in modeling our solar system's formation, details of which emerged at last week's meeting of the American Astronomical Society's Division for Planetary Sciences. It turns out that getting four right-size terrestrial planets and the right kind of asteroid belt is a snap — but it requires dramatic new thinking about the path Jupiter (and Saturn) took getting to their current locations.

Nobody really knows what the planet system orbiting pulsar B1257+12 would look like if viewed up close, but here's a plausible depiction. Three terrestrial-mass planets orbit the pulsar at close range; an asteroid-mass object (not pictured here) orbits much farther out. Click on the image for a larger view.

Robert Hurt

Solving for Mars

The stage for this revolution was actually set last year, when Brad Hansen (University of California, Los Angeles) tried assembling the inner solar system an entirely new way. He took a cue from the one other place known to have close-in, Earth-size planets: the system surrounding the millisecond pulsar B1257+12. Discovered in 1991, these pulsar planets are often overlooked because their host "star" is so extreme.

Prior computer simulations assumed that the inner planets accreted from a dense, massive belt of mile-wide planetesimals extending almost out to Jupiter. But invariably the outcome was a too-massive Mars and jumbled mess in the asteroid belt. However, Hansen realized that PSR B1257+12's planets must have assembled from a limited disk of hot material closely surrounding the pulsar.

By assembling the terrestrial planets from a narrowly confined disk (gray band), simulations yield a distribution of inner planets (open circles from 23 computer runs) that closely matches the actual arrangement (colored dots). Mercury's upper value assumes the planet formed with the same iron abundance as other terrestrial planets'.

Brad Hansen / Astrophysical Journal

When he tried that approach withour solar system, starting with a disk confined to just 0.7 to 1.0 astronomical unit from the Sun,voilà! — his computer runs routinely coughed up sets of planets with bigger ones (think "Earth" and "Venus") in the middle and smaller ones ("Mercury" and "Mars") near the inner and outer edges.

So why should Earth and its immediate neighbors have formed from such a limited disk? Hansen had no clue when he published his resultslast year. "In my paper I freely admit the choice was ad hoc," he allows. But it worked — far better, in fact, than any of the previous trials.

Meanwhile, the outer-planet crowd had wondered how Jupiter managed to avoid becoming a close-in captive of the Sun, as so many other beefy exoplanets had. On paper, tidal interactions between the King of Planets and the Sun's protoplanetary disk should have drawn Jupiter inward to its doom, or nearly so.

As early as 1999, however, theorists Frederic Masset and Mark Snellgrove (then at Queen Mary College) showed that Jupiter would have indeed migrated inward — but only until it linked up with Saturn in a 3:2 resonance, that is, with the two spaced such that Jupiter completed three orbits for every two of Saturn's. At that point the pair would have reversed direction and headed outward. ...
Hansen's shot-in-the-dark simulations, combined with the realization that the gas giants could have migrated both inward and outward, gave solar-system modelers a "Eureka!" moment. What would have happened, they wondered, if young Jupiter had ventured much closer to the Sun than where it finally ended up?

This simplified sequence shows how the in-and-out migration of Jupiter and Saturn early in solar-system history could have created a truncated disk of material from which the inner planets formed. Their movement also created overlapping zones of rocky (S) and carbonaceous (C) bodies in the asteroid belt.

Kevin Walsh / SWRI

The amazing answers came to light at last week's meeting. Kevin Walsh, who'd worked this problem with Alessandro Morbidelli while post-docing at Côte d'Azur Observatory in France, ran computer simulations that put Jupiter initially 3½ a.u. from the Sun and allowed it to creep inward to 1½ a.u. (about where Mars orbits now). The results were remarkable in their breadth and significance.

First, Jupiter's gravity would have forced the small stuff in its path inward too, creating a perturbation-driven snowplow that piled all the rocky planetesimals into a mini-disk with an outer edge 1 a.u. from the Sun. According to presenterDavid O'Brien (Planetary Science Institute), a member of Walsh's team, Jupiter took only 100,000 years to drive inward to 1½ a.u.and another 500,000 years to reach its current orbit, 5.2 a.u. from the Sun.

Second, the new computer runs confirmed what Hansen had already shown: a mini-disk of rocky material extending only to 1 a.u. provided just what's needed to assemble four terrestrial planets — and a Mars that's not too big.

At the meeting, David Minton and Hal Levison (Southwest Research Institute) described their own simulations using a truncated mini-disk, and they come to much the same conclusions. One key variation is that, in the Minton-Levison runs, Mars forms well within the disk and migrates to its outer edge and beyond.

This could be a good thing, because a moving Mars would provide the gravitational perturbations needed to kick iron-rich planetesimals out of the disk and into the inner asteroid belt, where they're commonly found today. "The original locations of Mars in the [disks] I calculated were quite variable," Hansen comments. "The outward migration was driven by scattering, so things shake up quite a bit."

Third, Jupiter probably would likely have come in even closer, perhaps sliding all the way into the Sun, had not Saturn (already in tow via the 3:2 resonance) grown massive enough to hit the tidal brakes and reverse both planets' movement. In this sense, the formation and survival of the terrestrial planets hinged not on Jupiter's existence but on Saturn's.

Fourth, Jupiter's inward trek would have completely swept clear the asteroidal region from 2 to 4 a.u. Most of the objects there were lost completely, but roughly 15% ended up scattered into a disk beyond Saturn. After reversing course and moving outward, the two planets scattered some of those previously displaced objects again, this timeinward, returning them to what's now the inner asteroid belt.

Fifth, as Saturn and Jupiter continued outward to their final orbits, they encountered another group of asteroids. Unlike the rocky bodies that had boomeranged out and back, these were carbon- and water-rich objects that had formed 6 to 9 a.u. from the Sun. Tossed inward by perturbations from the dynamic duo, they formed most of what's now the outer asteroid belt.

If recent computer simulations are correct, the Sun's innermost planets assembled from a narrow disk of rocky rubble that was only about 30 million miles wide. Such a tightly confined disk yields a Mars that's not too big — a failing of previous modeling.

NASA / JPL / T. Pyle (SSC)

A New Paradigm?

To recap: in one sweeping narrative, these theorists propose solutions for both a minimalist Mars and a stratified asteroid belt with a rock-rich inner region and a carbonaceous, water-harboring outer belt. As a bonus, the new mindset leads naturally to a set of four inner planets (correct sizes, correct orbits) that assembled on the right time scale (within about 30 million years of the Sun's formation). It even provides a source of water for Earth (C-type asteroids) and a near-Earth environment conducive to the presumed giant impact that formed the Moon.

This radical scenario represents "a paradigm shift in our understanding of the evolution of the inner solar system," says Walsh. That's an understatement! It all seems hauntingly Velikovskian to me, except that these folks have clearly done their homework.

Will "Jupiter's Grand Tack" (as Morbidelli dubs it) hold up to further scrutiny? Walsh and his team have submitted a fuller treatment toNature for publication, but other dynamicists are already weighing in based on the presentations heard last week. "Many aspects of their model look good to me," observes SwRI officemate William Bottke, "but lots of first-order things have to be tested before they can declare victory on all fronts."

For example, it's now widely accepted that most of Earth's water was imported from the outer asteroid belt. Yet Bottke thinks the scenario envisioned by Walsh, Morbidelli, O'Brien, and others would require a vast reservoir of water-rich (C-type) bodies, totaling hundreds of times the mass of the current asteroid belt. "We need to vet these models with more physics and more cosmochemistry," he says. Also, the depth of Jupiter and Saturn's inward penetration would have depended critically on how fast Saturn grew to nearly full size and when. The broader the range of initial conditions that "work," the more confidence there'll be that this scenario is the right one.

Morbidelli remains confident that they're onto something profound. "We consider ourselves celestial geologists," he quips. "We're now able to 'read' the current solar-system arrangement well enough to figure out what the early planets did."

Mysteries of vertebrate origins (even of spineless commenters)

The following article is excerpted from Wired (under the headline Hagfish opens major gap in tree of life). Wired picked it up, according to this citation: “microRNAs reveal the interrelationships of hagfish, lampreys, and gnathostomes and the nature of the ancestral vertebrate.” By Alysha M. Heimberg, Richard Cowper-Sallari, Marie Sémon, Philip C. J. Donoghue, and Kevin J. Peterson. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 107 No. 42, October 19, 2010. You should check out the original Wired article; not only have I excerpted it but the article has neat pictures, and really interesting comments. Really interesting. But onward with a story about how there is this gap  between vertebrate life and invertebrate life,---looking at the fossil record there is no immediate intermediary species that would form a link between say jelly fish, and people. 
Now, from the article The origin of all living vertebrates just got more mysterious.

Since the 1970s, many evolutionary biologists have considered an eel-like, deep-sea-dwelling creature called the hagfish to be the closest extant relative of a last common ancestor for all backboned creatures.

That made the hagfish a stand-in for a transitional species between invertebrates and higher animals, spanning a leap as dramatic as any in evolutionary history. But a new family tree based on high-powered molecular analysis lumps hagfish together with lampreys, a jawless fish that’s primitive, but very much a vertebrate.

“It removes hagfish from representing the intermediate step, and makes the jump from invertebrates to vertebrates all the more formidable,” ...

Donoghue’s study,[quoted above and] co-authored with Dartmouth College biologist Kevin Peterson and published October 19 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is the latest in a series of attempts to arrange hagfish and lampreys in the tree of life.

Prior to the 1970s, researchers extrapolated their trees from comparisons of physical characteristics. On this basis, hagfish resembled lampreys. But when scientists used genetic analysis to revisit those comparisons, they found major genetic differences between the two species. Since hagfish have a skull but no backbone and only a rudimentary nervous system, they were interpreted as resembling an earlier, pre-lamprey evolutionary stage.

The new study goes beyond genes to the level of microRNA — molecular snippets that help turn genes on and off and seem to play a crucial role in allowing basic genetic components to be configured and reconfigured in ever-more-complex ways. As a guide for determining relationships between species, they’re more reliable than genes. And they suggest that hagfish really are close relatives of lampreys...

Without hagfish, evolutionary biologists are left with a gap between complex invertebrates like sea squirts..., and simple vertebrates like lampreys. Whatever went between them, “we don’t even know what sort of sensory organs they had, how they made their living feeding, and so on,” said Donoghue. The invertebrates provide little guidance. ...

[C]omparisons have already shown the jump from invertebrate to vertebrate was attended by a duplication of every gene in the genome, and an explosion in new types of microRNA. “There are more microRNAs acquired at the origin of vertebrates than at any other time in animal evolutionary history,” said Donoghue. “It was just bizarre.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/vertebrate-origins/#ixzz12qxd4YVK

The Other Guy (as in guy-wire) part 2

The following article  forms a counter balance to the first story, just preceding this, about an American millionaire. This is all part of a necessary, greater machinery. Both stories are about helpless people who are part of a greater system they have not clue about. In this of course they are typical of everyone (everyone statistically speaking, anyway). Weep perhaps, then turn away. The emotional outrage is not a profitable reaction for someone struggling to understand their own situation. Envy, or anger, only hurts the person with an aim.  Smile perhaps a wee bit at the fact one is named trump, the other little, which I just now noticed myself.

By Andria Simmons, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 11:30 p.m. Wednesday, October 13, 2010

A mentally ill North Carolina man is suing the federal government for deporting him to Mexico, where he was left penniless and forced to fend for himself for four months without even the slightest grasp of the Spanish language.
The ACLU on Wednesday filed a lawsuit on behalf of Mark Lyttle, who settled near Atlanta after returning to the United States last year.
Lyttle's troubles began when he was misidentified as an illegal immigrant in September 2008 while serving a 100-day sentence at a North Carolina prison. He was there on a misdemeanor assault charge for inappropriately touching a female orderly at a psychiatric hospital where he received treatment.
A spokesman for the North Carolina Department of Corrections (DOC) said Lyttle reported his place of birth was Mexico City when he was booked into the prison.
"That brought him to the attention of ICE," said Keith Acree, public affairs director for the North Carolina DOC. "When he finished his prison sentence, he ultimately did get deported.
...
Lawyers for Lyttle claim he had trouble communicating because he has several problems that rendered him "mentally disabled," including bipolar disorder, a history of physical abuse and emotional problems. Lyttle and three of his siblings were removed from their biological parents' home when he was 7 and placed in foster care. They were eventually adopted by a Rowan County, N.C. , family. As a teenager, Lyttle was institutionalized several times at various psychiatric hospitals....
ICE agents investigating Lyttle's immigration status searched criminal and other databases which showed Lyttle had a Social Security number and was a U.S. citizen, according to the lawsuit.
However, Lyttle signed several documents that cemented his impending deportation, including an acknowledgment that he was a citizen of Mexico and an agreement to be voluntarily removed to Mexico. Lyttle said he didn't understand the paperwork and he was confused because he is bipolar.
While he is of Puerto Rican descent, Lyttle was born in Rowan County, N.C., Aug. 2, 1977, and had never traveled outside of the United States before he was deported.
"They didn't believe anything I was saying and I told them numerous times I was an American citizen," Lyttle said.
Lyttle's lawyers claim he was coerced into approving the documents.
After Lyttle's prison term expired on Oct. 28, 2008, he was transferred to ICE custody and spent six weeks at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. He went before an immigration judge on Dec. 9, 2008. The judge ordered Lyttle to be removed to Mexico.
Lyttle was put on a plane to Hidalgo, Texas, on Dec. 18, 2008, and dropped off at the Mexican border. Authorities sent him packing with $5 in his pocket and nothing but a prison-issued jumpsuit on his back.
Relatives say they were never notified of what happened to Lyttle after he left prison.
"It was like he vanished, and for a couple Christmases and holidays I wondered where he was at and why he wouldn't contact me," said Lyttle's brother, David Lyttle, reached by phone Tuesday at his home in Conway, S.C. "Something wasn't right and I couldn't put my finger on it."
...
Lyttle spent eight days begging and sleeping on the streets before he tried to re-enter the country. However, he was rebuffed by border patrol agents who searched their computerized database and found his immigration status to be that of a "prior deported alien," according to the lawsuit.
Lyttle says he spent the next four months on an odyssey through Mexico, Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala. He alternated between homelessness, living in shelters and incarceration in foreign jails. He did not remember his relatives' phone numbers, which he usually kept written down in his wallet, according to his brother.
Because Lyttle lacked proper identification, Mexican officials deported him to Honduras. Honduran officials held Lyttle in an immigration camp, then tossed him in jail, and finally shipped him off to Guatemala.
He finally convinced a U.S. embassy official in Guatemala to contact his two brothers who were serving in the U.S. military. Thanks to the efforts of his brothers and the embassy official, a passport was issued to him within 24 hours.
Yet even after making arrangements to return to the United States, Lyttle was re-arrested at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport and detained for six more days. Then, in a motion to terminate deportation efforts, the Department of Homeland Security finally acknowledged that Lyttle was "not a Mexican citizen, and, in fact, is a citizen of the United States."
Jacqueline Stevens, a professor of political science at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., researches the deportation of American citizens. She said Lyttle's case is similar to others she has seen, where someone in a legally fragile position coming out of prison is somehow diverted into the immigration system.
"They don't have contact with their families, and they get thrown into detention centers in the middle of nowhere," Stevens said. "There is no requirement for a bond hearing there. So people just get fed up with being locked up for so long and figure the only way I am going to get out of here is if they sign this paper saying I'm deportable."
Lyttle settled in Griffin, Ga., and works as a landscaper now, but it he says he still has nightmares about his ordeal.
"They took my freedom from me, they took my dignity from me," Lyttle said. "I'm going to do to them what they did to me."
The lawsuit in U.S. District Court, Northern District of Georgia, seeks unspecified damages from the federal government and additional safeguards to protect the rights of American citizens and persons with mental disabilities who are subject to potential deportation. The Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and top officials from those agencies are named in the lawsuit. The suit also targets Corrections Corporation of America, a Nashville-based private company that runs the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Ga. 

This excerpted article can be seen in full at this link:
http://www.ajc.com/news/north-carolina-man-sues-681887.html

A Tale of Two Guys (as in guy-wires) Part 1

http://www.scotsman.com/news/39Government-told-me-I39d-win39.6585005.jp 

is the link for a story about not local politics, but, perhaps, just "politics." The story is set in Scotland, involving an American millionaire and how he got permission to build what he calls a world class golf course, in an area many locals felt should be protected for environmental and historical reasons. I have another story, quite different, but again, illustrating how the official rules are not the real story.  That other story says part 2 in the title. Below is an article, slightly excerpted, from

'Government told me I'd win' – Donald Trump

Published Date: 17 October 2010
By Eddie Barnes
Political Editor

DONALD Trump has made the "explosive admission" the Scottish Government called him after his golf course plan was rejected by councillors to urge him to press on, assuring him "you'll win".

In new revelations, the US tycoon – whose £750 million development at Menie estate, north of Aberdeen, is already under construction after getting subsequent government approval– reveals details of contacts he had with government after the course's original rejection.
In November 2007, it was turned down by a committee of Aberdeenshire councillors, in a move which scuppered the proposal. But the billionaire businessman claims he was then called by the government and urged to keep his interest alive.
In an interview with Scotland on Sunday, the 66-year- old tycoon claims: "I give the Executive (Scottish Government] a lot of credit. They called me and really wanted me to continue going forward. I said are you kidding? I just lost. I don't like to lose. They said no, you'll win. They didn't want me to leave."
Four days after the rejection, the Scottish Government "called in" the application, on the grounds the decision put the integrity of the planning process in jeopardy. It then went to a public inquiry before being approved by finance secretary John Swinney.
The revelation has brought calls for a new inquiry into the chain of events that preceded that decision.
Labour MSP Duncan McNeil, who led a Holyrood local government committee inquiry into the affair two years ago, said: "This is an explosive admission from Donald Trump. In many ways he has let the cat out of the bag and raises serious questions. The Scottish Government cannot form an impartial view on a planning application that has been called in if they have given secret guarantees to one side. There is now a case for reviewing the evidence in light of this new information."
Trump's plans to create a huge golfing resort on environmentally-protected coastal dunes north of Aberdeen were originally rejected by the council sub-committee on the casting vote of the chairman. Despite that rejection, the full council, following the move to call the project in, later voted for it. Following a public inquiry, which also backed the plan, Swinney approved it in November 2008.
Trump's claim that the Scottish Government offered him its support following the rejection is significant as it is supposed to remain impartial. Officials strongly denied his claims last night.

Parliamentary questions over the issue began after it emerged First Minister Alex Salmond met Trump's representatives after the rejection by the infrastructure services committee of Aberdeenshire Council. He said he was entitled to do so because, as
MSP for Gordon, he is the local parliamentarian. He then set up a meeting between Trump officials and Scotland's chief planner, Jim Mackinnon. Mackinnon and Swinney then took the decision to "call in" the development, removing the council from the process.
In the interview, Trump said the government was backing him all the way during the tortuous planning process.
He said: "They knew what we were doing was right, that it was going to create a lot of jobs and maybe, most importantly, that it was going to be great in terms of the psyche of Scotland because it's going to be really special."
Asked about Salmond's involvement, he added: "I have a lot of respect for Alex Salmond. He's a strong man who loves Scotland above all else. I know he wanted the project to happen because it was good for Scotland."
Giving evidence to MSPs in 2008, the First Minister said he had met Trump aides to urge them to keep going with their application because of fears its rejection would give out the message that Scotland was "not open for business." Ministers insisted calling in the plans had been motivated by concerns that its rejection presented "a threat to the integrity of the planning system" and that the development was "of national significance".
At the inquiry in 2008, Mackinnon said the decision to call in the plans was "not about expediting" the development. He told MSPs: "There is no presumption in favour of, or against, the development; there is a presumption in favour of ensuring that the processes are fair."
Aberdeenshire councillor Martin Ford, the committee chair who voted against the development in 2007, said last night: "This is an extraordinary claim by Mr Trump. If what he says is true, it is a serious matter for the Scottish Government. This was a planning application and there was a process to be followed designed to ensure fairness and proper consideration of the issues before a decision was reached."
Asked whether anyone from government assured Trump he "would win", a government spokesman said: "No, this is not correct. No person in the Scottish Government expressed such a view."
He added: "The issue was determined according to the due process of the public local inquiry, which followed John Swinney's decision to call in the application on 4 December 2007.
"The PLI was announced on 28 February 2008, the independent reporter recommended outline planning permission be granted, and Mr Swinney granted this on 3 November 2008."
He said: "This procedure was totally robust, and was all gone into in the Local Government and Communities Committee Report of 14 March 2008, which said: 'The committee notes that the chief planner and the planning minister (Cabinet secretary for finance and sustainable growth], John Swinney acted in accordance with planning laws when issuing the decision to call in the application'."

Genome mysteries

Here is part of an article from Wired about how little we know about the human genome. I thought boy, this will be an interesting read (and it is) but bottom line, what the teaser meant was we don't even know the number of genes in people. Nothing conceptually surprising, except our ignorance about our ignorance. My thought was they would delve into the mysteries about how genes work together, but no---that is not what this article is about.  

...

Exactly how many genes make up the human genome remains a mystery, even though scientists announced the completion of the Human Genome Project a decade ago. The project to decipher the genetic blueprint of humans was supposed to reveal all of the protein-producing genes needed to build a human body.

“Not only do we not know what all the genes are, we don’t even know how many there are,” Steven Salzberg of the University of Maryland in College Park said October 11 during a keynote address at the Beyond the Genome conference, held in Boston. Most estimates place the human gene count in the neighborhood of 22,000 genes, which falls between the number of genes in a chicken and the number in a grape.

Grape plants have 30,434 genes, by the latest count. Chickens have 16,736 genes, a number Salzberg said will likely grow as scientists put the finishing touches on the chicken genome. As in humans, the gene totals for each species are not as precise as they seem and are subject to revision.
...
...[D]isparate numbers [suggested as possible totals] stem from the fact that genes comprise only about 1 percent of the 3 billion As, Ts, Gs and Cs that make up the human genetic instruction book. And the genes aren’t conveniently laid out as single, continuous stretches of genetic code. Instead, human genes are found in protein-encoding pieces called exons, interspersed with stretches of DNA that don’t make protein. These spacers are called introns.

To make matters worse, each exon in a gene codes for only a portion of a protein. Cells can mix and match different combinations of exons to make various proteins.

Traditionally, scientists have used computer programs to sift through billions of DNA letters and pinpoint the locations of genes. The programs have improved over the years, but they still aren’t as good as people at plucking exons from the sea of introns and figuring out how those protein-encoding segments are spliced together, said Clara Amid, a computational biologist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, England.

Amid is involved in the Gencode project, an effort to identify all the human genes and the many permutations of those genes that can lead to a dizzying number of proteins. She and her colleagues pick out genes the old-fashioned way — by hand. The researchers get plenty of clues where genes are from computerized gene-finders, studies that sequence RNA produced by genes, and from comparisons of human DNA to the genomes of other animals. Synthesizing all that information allows people to accurately find and mark the locations of genes, a process scientists call annotation. “The best computerized methods could replicate the manual annotation only 40 to 50 percent of the time,” Amid said October 12 at the Beyond the Genome conference.

The Gencode team isn’t finished with its work; several chromosomes still need the human touch. Gencode’s current count is 21,671 human genes. “The number will go up, definitely,” Amid said. Already the team has located several new genes on chromosome 4 thanks to data from RNA-sequencing projects, she said.
...

The Mammalian Gene Collection, one effort to catalog all of the full-length RNA versions of genes, lists 18,877 human genes. That number is likely to represent the lower boundary of the gene count, Salzberg said.

If new RNA sequencing methods detect the same proportion of new genes in people as were found in fruit flies, the human genome could gain about 3,000 more genes in addition to those already confirmed by RefSeq. “That would be an exciting result,” Salzberg said. “I’d be surprised, but we like surprises in science.”

Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/human-genome-still-chock-full-of-mysteries/#ixzz12NwSR1gc

When Snakes Fly

Some snakes can fly. Okay, glide, from tree branches, like flying squirrels, and they are called flying snakes. Here's the National Geographic link.. They are not in North America, they are in south Asia. Now.

Charity and bankruptcy

Proposed settlement calls for schools, creditors to split Kathy Cox's $1 million prize

By Bill Rankin 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

11:27 p.m. Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Three schools for blind and deaf children would receive half of the $1 million that Kathy Cox won on a TV show when she was the state schools superintendent, under a recently proposed court settlement.

A legal tug of war over the prize winnings has been going on for more than a year in the Chapter 7 bankruptcy case filed by Cox and her husband, John Cox, a home builder.

On Wednesday, Kathy Cox said she was angered by the agreement.

"I'm happy that the schools will get $500,000, don't get me wrong on that," she said in a telephone interview. "But all of it should have gone to the schools."

In August 2008, Cox appeared on the game show "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?" and aced it, correctly answering all 11 questions and winning the $1 million prize. Cox had said that if she won she would give her winnings to the Georgia Academy for the Blind in Macon, the Georgia School for the Deaf in Cave Spring and the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf in Clarkston.

All three schools, while state-run, do not rely on local funding. Cox said she wanted the money to help build nest eggs for scholarships.

Two months after the game show appearance, the Coxes filed for bankruptcy protection, citing more than $3.5 million in liabilities and less than $650,000 in assets. Last year, Gary W. Brown, the Chapter 7 trustee, filed suit seeking to claim the $1 million for the Coxes' creditors. The suit said that Cox, acting on her own and not as school superintendent, executed a document allowing her prize winnings to be transferred to a charitable gift fund.

Since February, the money has been deposited in the registry of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. The proposed settlement must ultimately be approved by U.S. Bankruptcy Judge W. Homer Drake in Newnan. All parties and creditors in the case had to file a response to the court by Wednesday if they had an objection.

Brown, the trustee, said an Oct. 8 hearing has been set to consider the proposed settlement.

"I think it is a satisfactory resolution and hope it will provide meaningful distribution to the creditors and satisfaction to other interested parties," he said.

Kathy Cox said she is not a satisfied party.

"It actually makes me angry," said Cox, who is now chief executive officer of the U.S. Education Delivery Institute, a Washington think tank.

"If anybody had watched the show, it was so clear I was there as the state school superintendent," she said. "That money had nothing to do with what was happening to us personally."

Cocooned planet

Amazing article about silk at this link, to Seed Magazine.  Until 1999, when the silk producing genome was transcribed (maybe that is not the right word) all the silk came from silkworms, which were kept in confined conditions--still are,--where they are fed a diet of  mulberry leaves, and then killed after they spin their cocoon.
Now scientists can transplant the silk producing gene into other organisms, like potatoes, which turn out to be ideal. The silk harvested this way has many incredible qualities, same as the product of silkworms.Silk is a unique and wonderful product of this planet.

Startling emptiness at heart of our galaxy

Scientists are puzzled by the vacancy they observe around the black hole at the center of our own galaxy. Though this is what I would have thought you'd expect, it turns out that physicists were expecting other stars to fill in the vacuum left by the stars sucked up by the black hole. This article, at New Scientist, briefly excerpted below, talks about the issues.

 ....

Let's not forget that, until now, there has only been indirect evidence for a black hole at the centre of our galaxy. We know that something massive lurks there because its gravity affects the motion of nearby stars, and the most likely culprit is a black hole. But we need direct evidence to be sure. Now the hope is that stars like S2 will not only provide that evidence but also allow us to test our most cherished ideas about black holes.

Among them is the idea, known as the no-hair theorem, that black holes are essentially so simple that they can be described adequately by their mass and how fast they spin. Theorist Clifford Will of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri, suggests that we could test the theorem, and therefore general relativity, by examining the orbits of stars close to the supermassive black hole. One way to do this would be to watch a star complete many orbits around the galactic centre. Einstein's theory predicts that the star's point of closest approach to the centre should progressively shift from one orbit to the next. If the no-hair theorem is correct, the rate of this "precession" depends on the mass and spin rate of the black hole, and nothing else. Even better, says Will, would be to track two stars (The Astrophysical Journal Letters, vol 674, p L25). That way, you can use the relationship between both stars' orbits to cancel out the mass of the black hole, so the precession depends only on its spin. If it turns out that the precession depends on something more complex, then the no-hair theorem is wrong. And if that is true, then general relativity is also wrong. ...

Another way to test relativity is to use pulsars. These super-dense remnants of supernova explosions spin very rapidly, sweeping a lighthouse beam of radio waves across the sky once every turn. This makes them fantastically precise timekeepers. If any exist in the centre of the galaxy, then we might be able to pick up another relativistic effect - gravitational time dilation, where the passage of time slows down in the warped space-time surrounding a massive object. Spot this and we would have evidence of a massive black hole.

Star-spotting

Unfortunately, pulsars are intrinsically faint, making them difficult to detect in the dusty galactic centre. But astronomers have just embarked on an attempt to detect all the pulsars in the Milky Way, and they are hopeful of observing pulsars in the centre of the galaxy ...

Marcus Chown, author of the above excerpted article,  is the author of We Need to Talk About Kelvin (Faber & Faber, 2010). 

Check the shipping cost before you order one

From the BBC, a wonderful story, a science story, about an object in our galaxy, an object measuring about 5000 miles across, which has a huge diamond inside, an object mainly composed of this diamond core. The picture at the BBC makes it so much clearer than the article below.

Twinkling in the sky is a diamond star of 10 billion trillion trillion carats, astronomers have discovered.
The cosmic diamond is a chunk of crystallised carbon, 4,000 km across, some 50 light-years from the Earth in the constellation Centaurus.
It's the compressed heart of an old star that was once bright like our Sun but has since faded and shrunk.
Astronomers have decided to call the star "Lucy" after the Beatles song, Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.
...
"You would need a jeweller's loupe the size of the Sun to grade this diamond," says astronomer Travis Metcalfe, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who led the team of researchers that discovered it.
The diamond star completely outclasses the largest diamond on Earth, the 546-carat Golden Jubilee which was cut from a stone brought out of the Premier mine in South Africa.
The huge cosmic diamond - technically known as BPM 37093 - is actually a crystallised white dwarf. A white dwarf is the hot core of a star, left over after the star uses up its nuclear fuel and dies. It is made mostly of carbon.
For more than four decades, astronomers have thought that the interiors of white dwarfs crystallised, but obtaining direct evidence became possible only recently.
The white dwarf is not only radiant but also rings like a gigantic gong, undergoing constant pulsations.
"By measuring those pulsations, we were able to study the hidden interior of the white dwarf, just like seismograph measurements of earthquakes allow geologists to study the interior of the Earth.
"We figured out that the carbon interior of this white dwarf has solidified to form the galaxy's largest diamond," says Metcalfe.
Astronomers expect our Sun will become a white dwarf when it dies 5 billion years from now. Some two billion years after that, the Sun's ember core will crystallise as well, leaving a giant diamond in the centre of the solar system...

Let's Just Get a Pitcher

The evidence of antibiotic use, found in Nubian mummies from 2000 years ago, did not result from accidental intake,  according to the article excerpted below:

...Said co-author George Armelagos, a biological anthropologist at Emory University in Atlanta.
""They may not have known what tetracycline was, but they certainly knew something was making them feel better."

Armelagos was part of a group of anthropologists that excavated the mummies in 1963. His original goal was to study osteoporosis in the Nubians, who lived between about 350 and 550 A.D. But while looking through a microscope at samples of the ancient bone under ultraviolet light, he saw what looked like tetracycline -- an antibiotic that was not officially patented in modern times until 1950.

At first, he assumed that some kind of contamination had occurred...

His team's first report about the finding, bolstered by even more evidence and published in Science in 1980, was met with lots of skepticism. For the new study, he got help dissolving bone samples and extracting tetracycline from them, clearly showing that the antibiotic was deposited into and embedded within the bone, not a result of contamination from the environment.

The analyses also showed that ancient Nubians were consuming large doses of tetracycline -- more than is commonly prescribed today as a daily dose for controlling infections...  The team, including chemist Mark Nelson of Paratek Pharmaceuticals, reported their results in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

They were also able to trace the antibiotic to its source: Grain that was contaminated with a type of mold-like bacteria called Streptomyces. Common in soil, Strep bacteria produce tetracycline antibiotics to kill off other, competing bacteria.

Grains that are stored underground can easily become moldy with Streptomyces contamination, though these bacteria would only produce small amounts of tetracycline on their own when left to sit or baked into bread. Only when people fermented the grain would tetracycline production explode. Nubians both ate the fermented grains as gruel and used it to make beer.

The scientists are working now to figure out exactly how much tetracycline Nubians were getting, but it appears that doses were high that consumption was consistent, and that drinking started early. Analyses of the bones showed that babies got some tetracycline through their mother's milk.

Then, between ages two and six, there was a big spike in antibiotics deposited in the bone, Armelagos said, suggesting that fermented grains were used as a weaning food.

Today, most beer is pasteurized to kill Strep and other bacteria, so there should be no antibiotics in the ale you order at a bar, said Dennis Vangerven, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.

But Armelagos has challenged his students to home-brew beer like the Nubians did, including the addition of Strep bacteria. The resulting brew contains tetracycline, tastes sour but drinkable, and gives off a greenish hue.

There's still a possibility that ancient antibiotic use was an accident that the Nubians never knew about, though Armelagos has also found tetracycline in the bones of another population that lived in Jordan. And VanGerven has found the antibiotic in a group that lived further south in Egypt during the same period...

Bog Manuscript connects Irish Christianity and Egyptian Christianity

This excerpt about a manuscript found in a bog can be read in full at www.irishcentral.com

CATHY HAYES,
IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Monday, September 6, 2010, 8:06 AM
Updated Monday, September 6, 2010, 8:17
The Faddan More Psalter

A 1,200-year-old manuscript has revealed remarkable evidence of a connection between the early Christian Church in Ireland and the Middle Eastern Coptic Church.

The Faddan More Psalter was found in a north Tipperary bog four years ago when it was unearthed by Eddie Fogarty in July 2006 in the townland of Faddan More, near Birr.

The discovery was claimed by Dr. Pat Wallace, the director of Ireland’s National Museum, as the “most important day in the history of the museum since 1868 when the Ardagh Chalice came in".

The fragmented illuminated vellum manuscript is a book of psalms and dates back to the late eighth century. Its origins remain a mystery.

The manuscript was found upright in the bog for over 1,000 years suggesting it was hidden that way by someone on the run.

The painstaking four-year conservation process, led by Irish book conservatorJohn Gillis, has revealed tiny fragments of papyrus in the lining of the Egyptian-style leather binding of the manuscript, the first tangible link between early Christianity in Ireland and the Middle-Eastern Coptic Church. The discovery has confounded many accepted theories of early Irish Christianity.

"It was a miraculous thing that the manuscript survived at all. It was found by Mr. Fogarty who was cutting turf,” Dr. Wallace told the Sunday Independent.

"It was also remarkable that Mr. Fogarty and the family he was working for, the Leonards of Riverstown, were familiar with the work of the National Museum and knew exactly what to do to protect a manuscript found in wet bog.

"They immediately covered it with wet turf and this was absolutely vital in preserving the manuscript. If they hadn't done that it would have been obliterated in a few hours in the sunshine.

Crates of art, letters, and such unpacked after a century

This article, edited enough I hope, for me to get by claiming fair use, still has all the credits intact. It interested me not because of the items, but what the story says about stuff in general, how it is viewed, and the nature of families, and family stuff, and also the glimpse into the lives of aunts. Or as the headline has it:

Worcester auction has historians and collectors abuzz

By Joseph P. Kahn, Globe Staff  |  September 5, 2010 An extraordinary collection of items belonging to Worcester native Andrew Haswell Green — a visionary who helped remake New York City in the 19th century — will be sold this week in an unprecedented four-day auction at the DCU Center in Worcester. Among the thousands of documents, artworks, china, clothing, and toys being sold are handwritten correspondence to and from four presidents... From Green’s death in 1903 until 2009, virtually none of the items had ever been uncrated and examined. Packing boxes sealed more than a century ago were opened only after the death last summer of Julia Green, his great-great-grandniece and distant heiress. What was discovered has collectors and historians buzzing: an 1810 letter from President James Madison to James Monroe containing the first reference to a White House gardener, a rare 1850 daguerreotype of Green, and an 1875 George Inness oil painting of Mount Washington, among other treasures. It was a time capsule buried in plain sight for a hundred years. “In my 40 years in the auction business, I’ve never seen one person have so much damn stuff,’’ said Richard Oliver, who will preside over the auction.... The items carry no reserve prices — they’ll be sold to the highest bidder, period. “And that’s rare,’’ said Oliver, standing in Julia Green’s basement in Kennebunk, Maine, surrounded by 400 years of Green family history. Of the many public figures departing Massachusetts for New York over the years, from Babe Ruth to Bobby Kennedy, few are more significant than A.H. Green, whom Theodore Roosevelt once admiringly called “the Father of Greater New York City,’’ yet whose legacy has fallen into obscurity. Green spent his entire professional life in Manhattan, and his achievements were monumental. Last February, New York City set aside $4.5 million for an East River park memorializing A.H. Green. He oversaw the creation of Central Park and cultural initiatives leading to the establishment of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York Public Library, and American Museum of Natural History. He was the first to recommend consolidation of the city’s five boroughs and as city comptroller fought against the corrupt political machine run by William “Boss’’ Tweed. At his family’s 600-acre Worcester estate, to which Green repaired regularly, he also amassed a museum-worthy collection of Americana. Green died violently at the age of 83, cut down by an assassin’s bullet in a case of mistaken identity. Unmarried and childless, he had bequeathed his estate to a nephew, Dr. Nathan Green. In 1905, Green’s family sold the Worcester estate to the city of Worcester, which turned it into a municipal park. In 1956 the estate’s sprawling mansion burned down. Fortunately, Nathan Green had long since put his uncle’s effects safely in storage. Upon his death, the storage containers, still mostly unopened, passed to Nathan’s son, Thomas Dudley Green, and eventually to his three children, one of whom was Julia Green. Julia, a museum professional whose employers included Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, neither married nor had children. Taking custody of the Green collection, she never seemed curious about its contents, either, according to her nephew John Green, a lobster dealer and restaurant owner in Kennebunk. Most artifacts, save for a few paintings and pieces of furniture, were kept sealed and stored in her Brookline home. After moving to Maine four years ago, Julia’s modest Kennebunk townhouse became the latest, and last, repository of the Green collection. It passed along to John and his sister upon their aunt’s death. “She could never have known the full contents, but she had a feel for its importance,’’ recalled John, showing a visitor a Civil War battle flag, two miniature swords, and a hand-embroidered man’s purse made in 1760. He began hiring experts to assess the collection a year ago. ..... In addition to more than 10,000 pieces of correspondence, the collection includes rare books and pamphlets, antique toys and games, Tiffany silver, vintage clothing, stamps, and coins. One of Green’s most prized works of art, a 1770 painting by Winthrop Chandler titled “General Timothy Ruggles estate in Hardwick, MA,’’ has been donated to the Worcester Art Museum, as stipulated in Julia’s will. The collection actually spans 10 generations, harking back to A.H. Green’s forebear Thomas Green, who died in 1667. Among the rarest items is Washington’s will, published in Worcester in 1800 by Isaiah Thomas, of which only 13 copies are known to exist. The cache of presidential letters came to Green through his friend John Cadwalader, a New York judge. One dated Jan. 16, 1820, was sent from Thomas Jefferson to President James Monroe, complaining about pestering letters Jefferson had been getting from an unnamed Revolutionary War officer. It is estimated to sell for $2,000 to $4,000. .... Estimates of individual auction items range from a low of $50 to $50,000 and up, yet even Oliver professes to have no idea what the four-day total might be or how many bidders may get involved, in person or online. Just last week, for instance, he came upon a 17th-century Hebrew book estimated to bring $200 to $400. Soon after the book’s description was posted on the auction website (www.rwolivers.com/green) Oliver received calls from Israel, Egypt, and France expressing interest in it. The book could now sell for 10 times his initial estimate, he said. John Green anticipates a total sale of $1 million or more. But to Bill Ralph, an Essex-based historian assisting with cataloging the collection, the significance of what has been preserved, coupled with the story behind its preservation, makes the auction about much more than money and memorabilia. For one thing, he says, it evokes fantasies of finding a Winslow Homer canvas at a roadside yard sale. “This is the fodder that keeps the antiques business going strong,’’ he said. “I hear the lament that there’s nothing new out there. But I tell people this was all packed up in 1905 and taken on this dilatory journey, and they’re amazed.’’ Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.

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