Brain tissue that is 2500 years old being studied

The archeology world is abuzz with tests on a skull discovered in Britain which is around 2500 years old and still have brain tissue, inside---it sounds like a shrunken but pretty whole brain, in the cranium. This was not found in a peat bog, and embalming or other preservation procedures appear not to have been a factor. The head belonged to someone killed, and it was buried separately. Here are excerpts from one popular account of the situation facing scientists.

Archaeologists believe they have discovered one of the world's oldest brains that once belonged to a man in Iron Age Britain who was sacrificed in a ritual killing...'The survival of brain remains where no other soft tissues are preserved is extremely rare,' said Sonia O'Connor, research fellow in archaeological sciences at the University of Bradford. ...
'I think that it will be very important to establish how these structures have survived, whether there are traces of biological material within them and, if not, what is their composition.'...They discovered the solitary skull face-down in the pit in dark brown organic rich, soft sandy clay....The team is also investigating details of the man's death and burial that may have contributed to the survival of what is normally highly vulnerable soft tissue...Samples of brain material had a DNA sequence that matched sequences found only in a few individuals from Tuscany and the Near East. Carbon dating suggests the remains date from between 673-482BC.Fractures on the second neck vertebrae point to some kind of trauma before the man died and and a cluster of about nine horizontal fine cut-marks made by a thin-bladed instrument, such as a knife, can be seen on the front of the brain. Scientists are now investigating how lipids and proteins found in the brain preserved the brain and what happened between the man dying and his burial..... The preservation of the brain in otherwise skeletonised remains is even more astonishing but not unique...Dr O'Connor added: 'The hydrated state of the brain and the lack of evidence for putrefaction suggests that burial, in the fine-grained, anoxic sediments of the pit, occurred very rapidly after death. This is a distinctive and unusual sequence of events, and could be taken as an explanation for the exceptional brain preservation.'

Dust to rocks

A new article summarized in physorg.com discusses how the first rocks are formed from the dust of nebulae. Here is an excerpt.

.... The study adds weight to the idea that the first solid material in the Solar System was fragile and extremely porous – much like candy floss – and that it was compacted during periods of extreme turbulence into harder rock, forming the building blocks that paved the way for planets like Earth.
...[The physicists theorize]  the early carbonaceous chondrite rocks were shaped by the turbulent nebula through which they travelled billions of years ago, ...research suggests that the turbulence caused these early particles to compact and harden over time to form the first tiny rocks."
.[Their ideas coincide with the picture sketched wherein]..originally ... microscopic dust particles collided with one another and stuck together, coalescing around larger grain particles called chondrules, which were around a millimetre in size.

Their conclusions and the amazing techniques allowing their insights can be read in Nature Geoscience, Sunday 27 March 2011, in the article entitled "Earliest rock fabric formed in the Solar System preserved in chondrule rim".  Now if we only knew what 'candy floss' is. 

A Fly in a Cathedral (Rutherford)

The New York Times, has an article this week describing the last century, as that of Rutherford's model of an atom. Here is a wee sample of a short article you might enjoy.

'The critical discovery in this atomic model emerged a century ago in a talk before the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in March 1911 and a paper published soon after in the Philosophical Magazine. Both were by Ernest Rutherford, who had won the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry in part for his discovery of the alpha particle, which he later proved was the nucleus of a helium atom.

By 1911, scientists had already measured the charge and mass of an electron. But no one was sure how the atom was structured....

[Rutherford found evidence of a] " central charge” that is “concentrated at a point” — a point soon called the nucleus. ...Compared to the whole atom, Rutherford said, the nucleus was like “a fly in a cathedral.” ...'

The "Moon Illusion" still a mystery

This quote is from space.com

When the perigee moon lies close to the horizon, it can appear absolutely enormous. That is when the famous “moon illusion” combines with reality to produce a truly stunning view.

For reasons not fully understood by astronomers or psychologists, a low-hanging moon looks incredibly large when hovering near trees, buildings and other foreground objects. The fact that the moon will be much closer than usual this weekend will only serve to amplify this strange effect.

So … a perigee moon, either rising in the east at sunset or dropping down in the west at sunrise might seem to make the moon appear so close that it almost appears that you could touch it. 

Gaps in origin theory

The March 15 New York Times reports on the mysteries surrounding the evolution of animal life on earth. Below are a few sketchy points that the article, which you should read, makes. Notice the nice start and the abrupt ending, not sure what that is about. The excerpts:

The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. The intermediate species that might show how that transition took place have become extinct.

“We’re just missing the intervening steps,” said Nicole King, an evolutionary biologist ...Now scientists are trying to figure out how a single-celled organism like Capsaspora ... became a multicellular animal. Fortunately, they can get some hints from other cases in which microbes made the same transition. Plants and fungi evolved from single-celled ancestors,...

Primitive multicellularity may have been fairly easy to evolve. “All that has to happen is that the products of cell division stick together,” said Richard E. Michod of the University of Arizona. Once single-celled organisms shifted permanently to colonies, they could start specializing on different tasks. This division of labor made the colonies more efficient. They could grow faster than less specialized colonies....

The origin of animals depended on genes that were already in place,[in single celled ” Dr. King said.In the transition to full-blown animals, Dr. King argues, these genes were co-opted for controlling a multicellular body.

...Animals didn’t just evolve multicellular bodies, however. They also appear to have evolved new ways of generating different kinds of bodies. Animals are more prone to mutations that shuffle sections of their proteins into new arrangements, a process called domain shuffling. ...

MicroRNAs don’t seem to exist in single-celled relatives of animals. Sponges have eight microRNAs. Animals with more cell types that evolved later also evolved more microRNAs. Humans have 677, for example.

MicroRNAs and domain shuffling gave animals a powerful new source of versatility...

[A phosphorous enhanced environment, made possible by receding ice age changes created an algae powered oxygen rich] niche to be occupied,” said Dr. Ruiz-Trillo, “and it was occupied as soon as the molecular machinery was in place.

Who needs fiction with stories like these

There have been new ruins found in Peru which are said to rewrite Incan history.  In 1533 Pizarro put an Incan noble named Manco as a puppet on the Incan throne. In 1537 Manco managed to escape and flee with treasure, men, and even Spanish defectors, to an Incan city the Spanish did not know about, and never could find. Manco died in 1545, and his sons continued to fight the invaders until 1571, when the Inca leadership was decisively destroyed by the Europeans. This city which may date to the precursors of Incan civilization, (the Wari culture) sounds as glorious as Machu Pichu (once thought to be the hidden refuge, of the, as we would call them now, freedom fighters.). The stories appearing in the popular press are confusing, and like this particular link I present here, poorly written. The dates given in this article are full of errors. The fact remains this is a wonderful story, (through the twentieth century the natives leaving close to the ruins refused to reveal the whereabouts of the city) and this article, the clearest expostion I have read so far.

Fumes from Denmark

The first paragraphs of an interesting article about purported scientific fraud in Denmark are below. The whole article should be read--fascinating stuff.

"Denmark has been rocked by a science fraud case involving Milena Penkowa, a high-profile professor of medicine specialising in brain research. The case has also embroiled the rector of Copenhagen University, the previous minister of science and a number of co-authors, and has undermined the public view of science.

Penkowa, 37, is under investigation by the police for allegedly falsifying research protocols in animal experiments for her DMSc thesis submitted in 2001 and rejected in 2003. In 2004 she submitted another doctoral thesis, which in 2006 was defended publicly resulting in her DMSc degree.

She was suspended in April 2010 from her position as professor and research group leader in the neuroprotection section of the faculty of health sciences at Copenhagen University, and later left that post.

Minister of Science Charlotte Sahl-Madsen had to answer questions in parliament for a panel investigating the case, and ordered Copenhagen University to clarify all matters in the case of Penkowa's doctoral thesis and subsequent suspicions of falsification of scientific articles.

Following a media outcry that started last year, she is now also under investigation by the police. Penkowa has several times refuted all accusations in what is developing into the largest Danish scientific fraud case ever.

She has maintained a high media profile, giving interviews on television and to newspapers and women's magazines. Penkowa claims that the negative reactions towards her are due to professional envy and the Scandinavian 'Law of Jante', an unwritten value-nomenclature saying individuals should not expose themselves publically as being better than anybody else.....

Penkowa said the allegations derived primarily from one person, "my counterpart, who in the press is the 'anonymous source' (with different addresses). Nevertheless, I trust that the claims are being handled properly by the proper organs, which remain independent from the press."