Science

Scientists say that for the first time ever, they have discovered a whale skeleton on the ocean floor near Antarctica. According to a new study, the skeleton was found nearly a mile below the surface and is teeming with strange life, including at least nine new species of small deep-sea creatures.

Whales naturally sink to the ocean floor when they die, however it is very uncommon for scientists to actually come across the whale's final resting places. The discovery of a "whale fall" usually requires a remote-controlled undersea vehicle and luck.

Study researcher Jon Copley of the University of Southampton in England said in a statement:

"At the moment, the only way to find a whale fall is to navigate right over one with an underwater vehicle."

Copley and his team of researchers' chance encounter with the spread of bones that belonged to a 35-foot-long southern Minke whale came as they were exploring an undersea crater near the South Sandwich Islands.

Copley explained:

"We were just finishing a dive with the U.K.'s remotely operated vehicle, Isis, when we glimpsed a row of pale-coloured blocks in the distance, which turned out to be whale vertebrae on the seabed."

When whales die and subsequently sink to the bottom of the ocean floor, their carcasses provide nutritional boosts and habitats for deep sea life. While their flesh decomposes within weeks, their bones can last anywhere from 60 to 100 years. The bones can thus support bacteria and other strange creatures including zombie worms, the mouthless, eyeless animals that feed off skeletons.

Fossils show that inbreeding may have been a common practice among early human ancestors. The evidence comes from pieces of a roughly 100,000-year-old human skull that was unearthed at a site called Xujiayao, located in the Nihewan Basin of northern China.

The owner of the skull appears to have had a now-rare congenital deformity that likely arose through inbreeding. The fossil, which has been dubbed Xujiayao 11, is one of many examples of ancient human remains that display rare or unknown congenital abnormalities.

Study leader Eric Trinkhaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis, said:

These populations were probably relatively isolated, very small and, as a consequence, fairly inbred."

The skull fossil has a hole at its top, which is indicative of a disorder known as "enlarged parietal foramen", which matches a modern human condition of the same name that is caused by a rare genetic mutation. The genetic abnormalities obstruct the formation of bone by preventing small holes in the prenatal braincase from closing. This process usually occurs within the first five months of the fetus' development. These days, these mutations are rare and occur in just one in 25,000 human births.

The Mars Curiosity rover has once again been thwarted from resuming its science experiments. On Monday, the mission's chief scientist said that the rover went into safe mode again over the weekend due to a computer file error.

While in safe mode, the rover's activities are on hold, but the rover itself remains in contact with Earth.

Earlier this month, Curiosity was sidelined following a problem with its computer memory, which also caused it to enter safe mode.

The Curiosity team had been hoping to restart experiments this week when the new issue came up.

Astronomers around the world are excitedly preparing for the arrival of the comet ISON, which could become one of the brightest comets ever seen when it makes its way through the inner solar system later this year.

When Comet ISON makes its closest pass by the sun in late November 2013, it could potentially shine as brightly as the moon. This is, of course, if the most optimistic of scenarios comes to fruition. There is a chance that it might not be as spectacular as hoped, but astronomers are hoping that it is.

NASA has already brought together a small team of experts to organize an observing campaign for Comet ISON. Officials with the Comet ISON Observing Campaign (CIOC) said that coordinating the efforts of observatories on the ground and in space should help them get as much quality science as possible out of the flyby.

Kari Battams, a scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington and a member of the CIOC, says:

"It's a rare opportunity that we've got such a long heads-up time, so we actually have time to organize a campaign like this. There's a lot of new science that we could get from this."

The Mariana Trench, which is located in the Western Pacific ocean, is the deepest point in the ocean at nearly 7 miles below the ocean surface. The trench is so deep that the incredible pressure exerted by all of the water makes it a hazardous environment that is difficult for anything to live in. However, the Mariana Trench is not without life, as researchers have discovered microbes living at the bottom where the water pressure is about 1,000 times higher than the pressure at the surface of the ocean.

The research expedition occurred in 2010, in which researchers sent a robot to the botom of the trench to evaluate microbial life on site. The reason that the scientific tests were conducted at the bottom of the trench was because microbial life that can live with such incredible pressure would have died before reaching the ocean's surface.

Scientist working with cloning technology have nearly revived an extinct frog species. By implanting a "dead" cell nucleus into a fresh egg from another frog species, the scientists were able to create living embryos. Although the embryos lived only a few days, the research is groundbreaking and has brought the idea of bringing back extinct species like the woolly mammoth one step closer to being an actual possibility.

The scientists with the Lazarus Project haven't yet published their results, but state that future barriers to bringing the frog species back to life are "technological, not biological."

The Lazarus Project is named after the famous biblical character Lazarus, who according to the Gospel of St. John, Jesus brought back from the dead after he had laid in his tomb for four days.

The final gastric-brooding frog, the Rheobatrachus silus, which swallowed its eggs, brooded young in its stomach, and gave birth through its mouth - died out in 1983. The scientists say that the woolly mammoth could be once again wandering Siberia in less than 20 years.

Research teams from around the world are in a race to sequence the mammoth genome from an analysis of DNA from remains that were found frozen in the ice of northern Russia. The last woolly mammoths died out 4,000 years ago on Wrangel Island, which is located between the East Siberian and Chukchi seas.

As for the frogs, the researchers were able to recover cell nuclei from R. silus tissues that were collected during the 1970s and kept for 40 years in a conventional deep freeze. Over the course of five years, the scientists used a laboratory technique known as somatic cell nuclear transfer in which they took fresh eggs from the distantly related Great Barred Frog, deactivated their nuclei, and then replaced them with genes from the extinct frog.

It sounds like science fiction, but according to a new study, it actually happens: earthquakes can, and do, turn water into gold.

A study published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience reveals that gold deposited billions of years ago in quartz veins often exists along seismically active faults. Earthquakes can shake up the rocks in these faults, sometimes pulling the rocks apart and allowing flash vaporization to occur.

Geologists have long known that gold comes from mineral-rich, underground water networks, but this new study shows just how pressure changes initiated by earthquakes helps to facilitate these mineral-rich streams.

Dion Weatherly, a geophysicist at the University of Queensland in Australia and lead author of the study, said that by using a model, scientists were able to determine a quantitative mechanism for the link between gold and quartz that is seen in many of the world's gold deposits.

Sex in space has allegedly already occurred, but both the Russian and U.S. space programs deny it. Now, astronauts thinking about joining the exclusive "220-mile club" may want to rethink. Scientists are now saying that doing the deed in space could be very hazardous to one's health as they have found during plant experiments that changes in gravity damages cells and could lead to life-threatening illnesses.

Researchers say that zero gravity affects process involved in reproduction, brain diseases, and even cancer.

To understand how zero gravity might affect astronauts, scientists chose to use plants.

Professor Anja Geitmann, a biologist and Montreal University said:

"Just like during human reproduction the sperm cells in plants are delivered to the egg by a cylindrical tool. Unlike the delivery tool in animals the device used during plant sex consists of a single cell - and only two sperm cells are discharged during each delivery event."

The interior of both animal and plant cells is similar to a city, with factories known as organelles that are dedicated to manufacturing, energy production and waste processing. A network of so-called intracellular "highways" enables communication between the organelles, as well as the delivery of cargo between them and between the inside of the cell and its outside environment. Plant cells in particular have a particularly busy "highway" system.

Scientists say that a new genus and species of extinct saber-toothed cat has been unearthed in Polk County, Fla.

The fossil, which is 5-million-years-old, is related to the carnivorous predator Smilodon fatalis from the La Brea Tar Pits of Los Angeles. This group of saber-toothed cats known as Smilodon were thought to have originated in the Old World, and later migrated to North America. However the age of the new species suggests that the group evolved in North America.

Study co-author Richard Hulbert Jr., a vertebrate paleontology collections manager at the Florida Museum of Natural history, says that Smilodon appears in the fossil record about 2.5 million years ago, however there were not many intermediate forms to indicate to scientists where it originated. He added:

"The new species shows that the most famous saber-toothed cat, Smilodon, had a New World origin, and it and its ancestors lived in the southeastern U.S. for at least 5 million years before their extinction about 11,000 years ago," Hulbert said in a statement. "Compared to what we knew about these earlier saber-toothed cats 20 or 30 years ago, we now have a much better understanding of this group."

Hulbert and his team of researchers discovered the fossils of the new cat, Rhizosmilodon fiteae, during the excavation of a phosphate mine in 1990. The new species was named for Barbara Fite of Lutz, Fla., who donated a fossil of the species from her collection, which had a very well-preserved lower jaw with all three chewing teeth. The name Rhizosmilodon means "root of Smilodon", because the scientists believe that the cat may be the direct ancestor of Smilodon, which went extinct 11,000 years ago.

A new study of fossils suggests that more than 100 million years ago, birds living in what is now China had wings on their legs. Researchers discovered evidence of large leg feathers in 11 bird specimens from China's Shangdong Tianyu Museum of Nature, which suggest that early birds had four wings, which may have played a role in the evolution of flight.

Most in the scientific community believe that birds evolved from other feathered dinosaurs, a belief that is supported by discoveries of fossils of feathery birdlike creatures.

The leg feathers have been seen in the 11 of the museum of fossils that had been collected from the Lower Cretaceous Jehol formation in Liaoning, China, from a period of about 150 million to 100 million years ago. Researchers ay that these feathers are stiff and stick straight out from the birds' legs, and have enough surface area to be aerodynamic. The fossils belong to at least four different groups, including the genera Sapeornis, Yanornis, Confuciusornis, and Enaniornithes, which suggests that the leg feathers were not just an evolutionary rarity.

For the study, which was published on Thursday, March 14, in the journal Science, the researchers also analyzed feathers of other birds and nonbird dinosaurs. Feathers that covered the entire leg and feet first developed in dinosaurs, continued in early birds, and later disappeared. Birds gradually lost feathers on their feet and then their legs. Today, modern birds have wings only on their arms.