World's Oldest Leather Shoe Found in Armenia

The world's oldest leather shoe found in a cave in Armenia. (Credit: Image courtesy of University College Cork)

(ScienceDaily) -- A perfectly preserved shoe, 1,000 years older than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt and 400 years older than Stonehenge in the UK, has been found in a cave in Armenia.

The 5,500 year old shoe, the oldest leather shoe in the world, was discovered by a team of international archaeologists and their findings will publish on June 9th in the online scientific journal PLoS ONE.

The cow-hide shoe dates back to ~ 3,500 BC (the Chalcolithic period) and is in perfect condition. It was made of a single piece of leather and was shaped to fit the wearer's foot. It contained grass, although the archaeologists were uncertain as to whether this was to keep the foot warm or to maintain the shape of the shoe, a precursor to the modern shoe-tree perhaps? "It is not known whether the shoe belonged to a man or woman," said lead author of the research, Dr Ron Pinhasi, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland "as while small (European size 37; US size 7 women), the shoe could well have fitted a man from that era." The cave is situated in the Vayotz Dzor province of Armenia, on the Armenian, Iranian, Nakhichevanian and Turkish borders, and was known to regional archaeologists due to its visibility from the highway below.

The stable, cool and dry conditions in the cave resulted in exceptional preservation of the various objects that were found, which included large containers, many of which held well-preserved wheat and barley, apricots and other edible plants. The preservation was also helped by the fact that the floor of the cave was covered by a thick layer of sheep dung which acted as a solid seal over the objects, preserving them beautifully over the millennia!

"We thought initially that the shoe and other objects were about 600-700 years old because they were in such good condition," said Dr Pinhasi. "It was only when the material was dated by the two radiocarbon laboratories in Oxford, UK, and in California, US that we realised that the shoe was older by a few hundred years than the shoes worn by Ötzi, the Iceman."

Three samples were taken in order to determine the absolute age of the shoe and all three tests produced the same results. The archaeologists cut two small strips of leather off the shoe and sent one strip to the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit at the University of Oxford and another to the University of California -Irvine Accelerator Mass Spectrometry Facility. A piece of grass from the shoe was also sent to Oxford to be dated and both shoe and grass were shown to be the same age.

The shoe was discovered by Armenian PhD student, Ms Diana Zardaryan, of the Institute of Archaeology, Armenia, in a pit that also included a broken pot and wild goat horns. "I was amazed to find that even the shoe-laces were preserved," she recalled. "We couldn't believe the discovery," said Dr Gregory Areshian, Cotsen Institute of Archaeology at UCLA, US, co-director who was at the site with Mr Boris Gasparyan, co-director, Institute of Archaeology, Armenia when the shoe was found. "The crusts had sealed the artefacts and archaeological deposits and artefacts remained fresh dried, just like they were put in a can," he said.

The oldest known footwear in the world, to the present time, are sandals made of plant material, that were found in a cave in the Arnold Research Cave in Missouri in the US. Other contemporaneous sandals were found in the Cave of the Warrior, Judean Desert, Israel, but these were not directly dated, so that their age is based on various other associated artefacts found in the cave.

Interestingly, the shoe is very similar to the 'pampooties' worn on the Aran Islands (in the West of Ireland) up to the 1950s. "In fact, enormous similarities exist between the manufacturing technique and style of this shoe and those found across Europe at later periods, suggesting that this type of shoe was worn for thousands of years across a large and environmentally diverse region," said Dr Pinhasi.

"We do not know yet what the shoe or other objects were doing in the cave or what the purpose of the cave was," said Dr Pinhasi. "We know that there are children's graves at the back of the cave but so little is known about this period that we cannot say with any certainty why all these different objects were found together." The team will continue to excavate the many chambers of the cave.

The team involved in the dig included; lead author and co-director, Dr Ron Pinhasi, Archaeology Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland; Mr Boris Gasparian, co-director and Ms Diana Zardaryan of the Institute of Archaeology and Enthography, National Academy of Sciences, Republic of Armenia; Dr Gregory Areshian, co-director, Research Associate at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, US; Professor Alexia Smith, Department of Anthropology of the University of Connecticut, US, Dr Guy Bar-Oz , Zinman Institute of Archaeology, University of Haifa, Israel and Dr Thomas Higham, Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit, University of Oxford, UK.

The research received funding from the National Geographic Society, the Chitjian Foundation (Los Angeles), US, Mr Joe Gfoeller of the Gfoeller Foundation of US, the Steinmetz Family Foundation,US, the Boochever Foundation, US, and the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, US.

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Tiny Japanese spacecraft scheduled to land in Australia

A Japanese spacecraft the size of a basketball carrying material from an asteroid is set to touch down in Woomera in June. The Hayabusa spacecraft, which weighs only 17 kilograms, will be the first craft to bring asteroid materials back to Earth. The craft, which first made contact with the asteroid Itokawa in 2005, will land in Australian defence land, at the Woomera Prohibited Area in Southern Australia.

Hayabusa (はやぶさ, Hayabusa? literally peregrine falcon) is an unmanned space mission led by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to return a sample of material from a small near-Earth asteroid named 25143 Itokawa (dimensions 540 meters by 270 meters by 210 meters) to Earth for further analysis.

The Hayabusa spacecraft, formerly known as MUSES-C (ミューゼスＣ, Myūzesu Shī?), was launched on 9 May 2003 and rendezvoused with Itokawa in mid-September 2005. After arriving at Itokawa, Hayabusa studied the asteroid's shape, spin, topography, colour, composition, density, and history. In November 2005, it attempted to land on the asteroid to collect samples but failed to do so. Nevertheless, there is a high probability that some dust swirled into the sampling chamber, so it was sealed, and the spacecraft is slated to return to Earth by June 2010.

The spacecraft also carried a detachable mini-lander but it failed to reach the surface.

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Stephen Hawking: alien life is out there, scientist warns

Life could evolve in the upper atmosphere of gas giants Jupitar Photo: Discovery channel
(telegraph) -- One of the world's leading scientists makes the claim in a new television documentary series, beginning on the Discovery Channel next month.

Hawking says that in a universe with 100 billion galaxies, each containing hundreds of millions of stars, it is unlikely that earth is the only place where life has evolved.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," he said, according to The Sunday Times.

"The real challenge is working out what aliens might actually be like."

Hawking says that they could be microbes – basic animals such as worms which have been on Earth for millions of years, but suggests that extraterrestrial life could develop much further.

"We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet," Hawking said.

"I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach."

The scientist, who is paralysed by motor neurone disease, warned that contact with alien life could spell disaster for the human race.

"If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the American Indians."

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Dennis Hong: My 7 species of robot

(TED) -- At TEDxNASA, Dennis Hong introduces seven award-winnning, all-terrain robots -- like the humanoid, soccer-playing DARwIn and the cliff-gripping CLIMBeR -- all built by his team at RoMeLa, Virginia Tech. Watch to the end to hear the five creative secrets to his lab's incredible technical success.

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Ancient Asphalt Domes Discovered Off California Coast

Chris Reddy (left) of WHOI and Chief Scientist Dave Valentine of UCSB hold a large chunk of undersea asphalt collected with one of the robotic arms of the DSV Alvin. The sample was surprising light in weight compared to rock. (Credit: Photo by Molly Redmond, UC Santa Barbara)

(ScienceDaily) -- They paved paradise and, it turns out, actually did put up a parking lot. A big one. Some 700 feet deep in the waters off California's jewel of a coastal resort, Santa Barbara, sits a group of football-field-sized asphalt domes unlike any other underwater features known to exist.

About 35,000 years ago, a series of apparent undersea volcanoes deposited massive flows of petroleum 10 miles offshore. The deposits hardened into domes that were discovered recently by scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) and UC Santa Barbara (UCSB).

Their report -- co-authored with researchers from UC Davis, the University of Sydney and the University of Rhode Island -- appears online April 25 in the Journal Nature Geoscience. The work was funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Energy and the Seaver Institute.

"It was an amazing experience, driving along…and all of a sudden, this mountain is staring you in the face," said Christopher M. Reddy, director of WHOI's Coastal Ocean Institute and one of the study's senior authors, as he described the discovery of the domes using the deep submersible vehicle Alvin. Moreover, the dome was teeming with undersea life. "It was essentially an oasis," he said, "almost like an artificial reef."

What really piqued the interest of Reddy -- a marine geochemist who studies oil spills -- was the chemical composition of the dome: "very unusual asphalt material," he said. "There aren't that many opportunities to study oil that's been sitting around on the bottom of the ocean for 35,000 years."

Reddy's unique chance came courtesy of UCSB earth scientist and lead author David L. Valentine, who first came upon the largest of the structures -- named Il Duomo -- and brought back a chunk of the brittle, black material in 2007 from an initial dive in Alvin, which WHOI operates for the US Navy. Valentine and Reddy were on a cruise aboard the WHOI-operated research vessel Atlantis, following up on undersea mapping survey by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) and the work of UCSB earth scientist Ed Keller.

"The largest [dome] is about the size of two football fields, side by side and as tall as a six-story building," Valentine said. Alvin's robotic arm snapped off a piece of the unusual formation, secured it in a basket and delivered it to Reddy aboard Atlantis.

"I was sleeping," Reddy chuckled. "Somebody woke me up and wanted me to look at the rocks and test them."

It turned out to be quite an awakening. "I was amazed at how easy it was to break," Reddy recalls, "which confirmed it wasn't solid rock" and lent credence to Keller's theory that these structures might be made of asphalt.

Without access to the sophisticated equipment in his Woods Hole lab, Reddy employed a "25-cent glass tube, the back of a Bic pen and a little nail polish remover" to analyze the crusty substance. He used the crude tools like a mortar and pestle to grind the rock, "and literally within several minutes, it became a thick oil."

"This immediately said to me that this was asphalt," Reddy said. "And I remember turning to Dave [Valentine] and saying, 'We've got to back. Please take me back there'" to the dome.

After making some schedule changes, Valentine cleared the way for him and Reddy to take Alvin back to several sites in 2007. This work also set the stage for a follow-up study in September 2009, when the investigators returned to the domes with Alvin and the Autonomous Undersea Vehicle (AUV) Sentry to study the unique structures. They were joined by, among others, WHOI collaborators Dana Yoerger, Richard Camilli and Robert K. Nelson and Oscar Pizarro, now at the University of Sydney.

"With that combination, we were able to go in and do very detailed mapping of the site and very detailed sampling at the seafloor," Valentine said. Using mass spectrometers and radiocarbon dating in their respective laboratories, the scientists were able to confirm the nature and age of the domes.

"To me, as an oil-spill chemist, this was very exciting," said Reddy. "I got to find out what oil looks like after… 35,000 years."

What it looked like was "incredibly weathered," said Reddy. "That means nature had taken away a lot of compounds. These mounds of black material were the last remnants of oil that exploded up from below. To see nature doing this on its own was an unbelievable finding."

A few asphalt-like undersea structures have been reported, says Valentine, "but not anything exactly like these…no large structures like we see here." He estimates that the dome structures contain about 100,000 tons of residual asphalt and compares them to an underwater version of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, complete with the fossils of ancient animals.

The researchers are not sure exactly why sea life has taken up residence around the asphalt domes, but one possibility is that because the oil has become benign over the years that some creatures are able to actually feed off it and get energy from it. They may also be "thriving" on tiny holes in the dome areas that release minute amounts of methane gas, Reddy says.

The scientists plan to continue studying the domed structures. "We have some very fundamental questions that remain," Valentine says. "It would be nice to know what is going on deep down under these things.

"One future direction is to try and actually drill into them," he says. "We also need to turn it over to some geologists to figure out where this oil is really coming from. More fundamentally, we're going to look at the actual degradation of the oil by microorganisms and maybe even see what organisms are trapped in this…very much like the La Brea Tar Pits."

From a chemical point of view, Reddy says he will continue to probe the question of exactly which of the chemicals that make up the domes "stayed around" all these years.

"Instead of this taking place at a refinery, nature used a variety of its own tools," he said, to manufacture the asphalt substance. With some heating and a few chemical tweaks, he added, this is essentially the same material that paves highways and parking lots. After all, it is California.

The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is a private, independent organization in Falmouth, Mass., dedicated to marine research, engineering, and higher education. Established in 1930 on a recommendation from the National Academy of Sciences, its primary mission is to understand the oceans and their interaction with the Earth as a whole, and to communicate a basic understanding of the oceans' role in the changing global environment.

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Scientists uncover deep ocean current near Antarctica

A mountain is reflected in a bay that used to be covered by the Sheldon glacier on the Antarctic peninsula, January 14, 2009. The glacier has shrunk by about 2 km since 1989, probably because of global warming. Picture taken January 14, 2009. Credit: Reuters/Alister Doyle

(Reuters) -- A team of Australian and Japanese scientists, in a study published in Sunday's issue of the journal Nature Geoscience, found that the current is a key part of a global ocean circulation pattern that helps control the planet's climate.

Scientists had previously detected evidence of the current but had no data on it.

"We didn't know if it was a significant part of the circulation or not and this shows clearly that it is," one of the authors, Steve Rintoul, told Reuters.


Rintoul, of the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Center in Hobart, said it proved to be the fastest deep ocean current yet found, with an average speed of 20 cm (7.9 inches) a second. It was also found to carry more than 12 million cubic meters a second of very cold, salty water from Antarctica.

"At these depths, below three kilometers (two miles) from the surface, these are the strongest recorded speeds we've seen so far, which was really a surprise to us."

He said the current carries dense, oxygen-rich water that sinks near Antarctica to the deep ocean basins further north around the Kerguelen Plateau in the southern Indian Ocean and then branches out.

GLOBAL CONVEYOR BELT

The current forms part of a much larger network that spans the world's oceans, acting like a giant conveyor belt to distribute heat around the globe.

Oceans are also a major store of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that is emitted naturally and by mankind, mainly from burning fossil fuels.

For example, the Gulf Stream brings warm water to the North Atlantic, giving northern Europe a relatively mild climate. Failure of the current, which has occurred in the past, would plunge parts of Europe into a deep freeze, scientists say.

"The deep current along the Kerguelen Plateau is part of a global system of ocean currents called the overturning circulation, which determines how much heat and carbon the ocean can soak up," Rintoul said.

A key part of the circulation is the creation of large volumes of the very cold, salty water in several areas along coastal Antarctica that then sinks to the bottom and flows to other ocean basins.

The team deployed measuring devices anchored to the sea floor at depths of up to 4.5 km (3 miles) and recorded current speed, temperature and salinity for a two-year period.

"The continuous measurements provided by the moorings allow us, for the first time, to determine how much water the deep current carries to the north," Rintoul said.

He said a key issue for predicting climate was whether the overturning circulation was going to stay at its present strength or whether it was sensitive to changes as climate changes.

That meant further improving measurements of the speed and volume of the cold, salty water that is created around Antarctica.

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Earth's Cries Recorded in Space

(space.com/yahoo) -- Earth emits an ear-piercing series of chirps and whistles that could be heard by any aliens who might be listening, astronomers have discovered.

The sound is awful, a new recording from space reveals.

Scientists have known about the radiation since the 1970s. It is created high above the planet, where charged particles from the solar wind collide with Earth's magnetic field. It is related to the phenomenon that generates the colorful aurora, or Northern Lights.

The radio waves are blocked by the ionosphere, a charged layer atop our atmosphere, so they do not reach Earth. That's good, because the out-of-this-world radio waves are 10,000 times stronger than even the strongest military signal, the researchers said, and they would overwhelm all radio stations on the planet.

Theorists had long figured the radio waves, which were not well studied, oozed into space in an ever-widening cone, like light from a torch.

But new data from the European Space Agency's Cluster mission, a group of four high-flying satellites, reveals the bursts of radio waves head off to the cosmos in beam-like fashion, instead.

This means they're more detectable to anyone who might be listening.

The Auroral Kilometric Radiation (AKR), as it is called, is beamed out in a narrow plane, as if someone had put a mask over a torch and left a slit for the radiation to escape.

This flat beam could be detected by aliens who've figured this process out, the researchers say. The knowledge could also be used by Earth's astronomers to detect planets around other stars, if they can build a new radio telescope big enough for the search. They could also learn more about Jupiter and Saturn by studying AKR, which should emit from the auroral activity on those worlds, too.

"Whenever you have aurora, you get AKR," said Robert Mutel, a University of Iowa researcher involved in the work.

The AKR bursts -- Mutel and colleagues studied 12,000 of them -- originate in spots the size of a large city a few thousand miles above Earth and above the region where the Northern Lights form.

"We can now determine exactly where the emission is coming from," Mutel said.

Our planet is also known to hum, a mysterious low-frequency sound thought to be caused by the churning ocean or the roiling atmosphere.

• Audio: Hear Earth Scream
• Video: Earthrise Seen from the Moon
• 101 Amazing Earth Facts
• Original Story: Earth's Cries Recorded in Space
  

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Black Holes in LHC Small Enough to Be Ignored

September will most likely see the LHC operational. Credits: CERN

(softpedia) -- The Large Hadron Collider is rapidly approaching completion and should become operational by the end of the year. It will become the biggest particle collider ever built, probably powerful enough to create even microscopic black holes. It has been suggested on a number of occasions, despite CERN’s reassurance, that such a microscopic black hole would come to accrete matter and grow so big that it would eventually destroy the Earth and even the entire solar system.

As far as I can remember, there have been more than one lawsuits against CERN to stop the Large Hadron Collider from ever becoming operational, for fear that a black hole originating inside it would eat the Earth altogether.

Steve Giddings, professor of physics at the University of California, believes that such a scenario is practically impossible. The strongest argument is that microscopic black holes created inside the LHC would be able to exist for only a very small amount of time, roughly a nano-nano-nanosecond, which is too little time for it to accrete any matter at all. And even if these microscopic black holes do not evaporate in this time, the large scale effects they would produce would be basically unobservable.

In a study co-authored with Michelangelo Mangano of the European Center for Nuclear Research, Giggings found that if the LHC were able to produce microscopic black holes then so could cosmic rays coming from space, which are probably more powerful than any particle collider that will be built on Earth. Since no large scale effects or any microscopic black holes have been ever observed in the Earth's atmosphere, it is only logical to believe that they pose no danger whether or not they exist.

"The future health of our planet and the safety of its people are of paramount concern to us all. There were already very strong physics arguments that there is no risk from hypothetical micro black holes, and we've provided additional arguments ruling out risk even under very bizarre hypotheses," Giddings said.

When completed, the system will collide hadrons, composite sub-atomic particles formed of quarks, in order to study the nature of the universe, look for extra dimensions of space and new sub-atomic particles and forces yet undiscovered.

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Michael Shermer: Why people believe strange things

(TED) -- Why do people see the Virgin Mary on cheese sandwiches or hear demonic lyrics in "Stairway to Heaven"? Using video, images and music, professional skeptic Michael Shermer explores these and other phenomena, including UFOs and alien sightings. He offers cognitive context: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear those Satanic lyrics in Led Zeppelin). In fact, he says, humans tend to convince ourselves to believe: We overvalue the "hits" that support our beliefs, and discount the more numerous "misses."

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Scientists discover way to color MRI scans

A radiologist studies an image from a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner
at the Ambroise Pare hospital in Marseille, southern France, April 8, 2008.

CHICAGO (Reuters) -- U.S. scientists have developed a way to add color to medical scans known as MRIs, potentially enhancing the information and sensitivity the images provide, they said on Wednesday.

MRI stands for magnetic resonance imaging. The technique uses a magnetic field and radio waves to get cross-sectional images of organs and structures the inside the body. Chemical contrast agents help enhance the quality of the images, but they are typically only in shades of gray.

"Once you put things in different colors, you can get a lot of different information out than you can in black and white," said Gary Zabow of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, whose research appears in the journal Nature.

"You might imagine having a normal cell in blue and a cancer cell in red. You can track those cells in the body and see how they behave," Zabow said in a telephone interview.

Instead of using conventional chemical contrast agents to improve MRI image quality, Zabow and colleagues fabricated tiny magnets that could be made using the same methods used by silicon chip makers to develop advanced computer chips.

By adjusting the physical shape of the magnets, they can adjust the radio-frequency signals that make up the image. The radio-frequency signals could be converted into a rainbow of colors by a computer.

"We are able to engineer whatever color we want to by changing the exact geometry of the particles we make," Zabow said.

Each micromagnet consists of two round discs stacked on top of each other with a gap in the middle. As water flows between the discs, protons within the water's hydrogen atoms generate radio-frequency

Zabow thinks the design of the magnets may make them easier to customize than conventional injectable MRI contrast agents, which are made through a chemical synthesis process.

Zabow and colleagues at NIST and the National Institutes of Health fashioned their micromagnets out of nickel, a substance that is toxic to humans. But Zabow said they could just as easily be made out of iron or other magnetic materials. "That is essentially nontoxic," he said.

Zabow said the finding is very early and a long way from testing in humans. "What we are doing here is demonstrating a new idea," he said.

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Astronomers find batch of "super-Earths"

An artist's impression of the trio of super-Earths discovered by an European team using the HARPS spectrograph on ESO's 3.6-m telescope at La Silla, Chile, after five years of monitoring.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -- European researchers said on Monday they discovered a batch of three "super-Earths" orbiting a nearby star, and two other solar systems with small planets as well.

They said their findings, presented at a conference in France, suggest that Earth-like planets may be very common.

"Does every single star harbor planets and, if yes, how many?" asked Michel Mayor of Switzerland's Geneva Observatory. "We may not yet know the answer but we are making huge progress towards it," Mayor said in a statement.

The trio of planets orbit a star slightly less massive than our Sun, 42 light-years away towards the southern Doradus and Pictor constellations. A light-year is the distance light can travel in one year at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, or about 6 trillion miles.

The planets are bigger than Earth -- one is 4.2 times the mass, one is 6.7 times and the third is 9.4 times.

They orbit their star at extremely rapid speeds -- one whizzing around in just four days, compared with Earth's 365 days, one taking 10 days and the slowest taking 20 days.

Mayor and colleagues used the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher or HARPS, a telescope at La Silla observatory in Chile, to find the planets.

More than 270 so-called exoplanets have been found. Most are giants, resembling Jupiter or Saturn. Smaller planets closer to the size of Earth are far more difficult to spot.

None can be imaged directly at such distances but can be spotted indirectly using radio waves or, in the case of HARPS, spectrographic measurements. As a planet orbits, it makes the star wobble very slightly and this can be measured.

"With the advent of much more precise instruments such as the HARPS spectrograph ... we can now discover smaller planets, with masses between 2 and 10 times the Earth's mass," said Stephane Udry, who also worked on the study.

The team also said they found a planet 7.5 times the mass of Earth orbiting the star HD 181433 in 9.5 days. This star also has a Jupiter-like planet that orbits every three years.

Another solar system has a planet 22 times the mass of Earth, orbiting every four days, and a Saturn-like planet with a 3-year period.

"Clearly these planets are only the tip of the iceberg," said Mayor.

"The analysis of all the stars studied with HARPS shows that about one third of all solar-like stars have either super-Earth or Neptune-like planets with orbital periods shorter than 50 days."

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Study shows coffee reduces heart disease risk

Researchers have said coffee drinkers have less chance of contracting heart disease
than non-drinkers. Image: Love coffee. Credit: Ahmed Rabea/flickr

(thetechherald) -- European researchers have shown coffee drinkers to be less at risk of heart disease than people who do not drink the beverage.

A study of 129,000 men and women over two decades showed regular coffee drinkers were less at risk of heart attacks, stroke, and arrhythmia. Women who drank four to five cups per day 34% less likely to die of heart disease, while men who drank the same amount 44% less likely to die from the same cause.

Experts believe that coffee may combat the illness by reducing damage caused at the early stage of heart disease.

"It looks like coffee has some effect that hasn't been established before. The general idea is that coffee is not so bad," says study leader Esther Lopez-Garcia, an epidemiologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid to the New Scientist.

However researchers stopped short of recommending coffee as a health drink saying more research needed to be done on the subject before such a claim could be made.

Some other studies though have found coffee drinkers to have less likelihood in contracting liver cancer and diabetes.

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'Unicorn' deer with rare single horn spotted in Italy

This undated photo provided by the Center of Natural Sciences in Prato, Italy, Wednesday, June 11, 2008, shows a deer with a single horn in the center of its head. (AP / Center of Natural Sciences)

ROME (AP/ctv.ca) -- A deer with a single horn in the centre of its head -- much like the fabled, mythical unicorn -- has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy.

The one-year-old Roe Deer -- nicknamed `Unicorn' -- was born in captivity in a park in the Tuscan town of Prato, near Florence.

He is believed to have been born with a genetic flaw; his twin has two horns.

Calling it the first time he has seen such a case, an official at Prato's Centre of Natural Sciences said today such anomalies among deer may have inspired the myth of the unicorn.

The unicorn, a horse-like creature with magical healing powers, has appeared in legends and stories throughout history, from ancient and medieval texts to the adventures of Harry Potter.

Experts say single-horned deer are rare but not unheard of - but even more unusual is the central positioning of the horn.

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Heart Surgeons as Video Gamers

3-D view: Researchers at Children's Hospital Boston are bringing video-game technology into the operating room. Cardiac surgeon Nikolay Vasilyev gives his stereo goggles a test run while performing surgical simulations. The goggles, coupled with a monitor displaying real-time ultrasound data, provide a stereoscopic 3-D view. Vasilyev tested the technology in beating-heart surgery on pigs' hearts and found that it allowed him to patch a hole more efficiently than with traditional 3-D imaging. Credit: Bill O'Connell

(technologyreview) -- Cardiac surgeons have borrowed a 3-D stereoscopic imaging technology from the video-game industry to help them guide their tools during intricate beating-heart surgeries. In tests of the new imaging device, a surgeon was able to more accurately navigate into pigs' hearts and then to more quickly repair the hearts' torn walls. Eventually, the stereoscopic system may make beating-heart surgery more efficient and less dangerous, perhaps expanding its use into relatively complicated heart repairs.

For certain complex heart procedures such as valve repairs, a surgeon must stop the heart and cut it wide open. These surgeries require a heart-lung bypass machine and come with substantial risks to the patient. In recent years, some surgeons are opting to use beating-heart surgery, a less invasive approach that can often obviate the need for heart-lung bypass. But working on complex, delicate internal structures that move with every heartbeat presents major challenges--particularly because without opening the heart and diverting the blood, it's hard for surgeons to see what they're doing.

For several years, a team at Children's Hospital Boston has been developing a real-time 3-D imaging system for use in beating-heart surgery. An ultrasound device gathers a stream of 3-D data and feeds it to a two-dimensional display, indicating depth with shades of gray. By keeping an eye on the display, a surgeon can see inside the heart during the operation.

But while early results of the technology, which has recently found its way into the operating room, have been promising, surgeons found that the two-dimensional display interfered with their depth perception. "If you're navigating a three-dimensionally complicated structure like the heart, where you're making right turns and left turns and going up and down and all over, using a two-dimensional image makes it very difficult," says Pedro del Nido, chief of cardiac surgery at Children's Hospital and leader of the research team.

For a solution, the team looked to an industry that's well versed in creating an ever-improving 3-D experience: video gaming. Recent advances in image-processing technology have allowed game designers to simulate 3-D environments--complete with depth perception--using stereoscopic vision displays. "To address structural heart disease, you need a three-dimensional map with depth perception," says Marc Gillinov, chief experience officer at Cleveland Clinic's Heart and Vascular Institute. "And that's what the stereoscopic glasses give you."

A stereoscopic vision display works by generating a separate, slightly tilted 3-D image for each eye. The monitor rapidly flicks back and forth between the two versions about 70 times per second. Meanwhile, the viewer wears specialized glasses that alternately block the left and right eyes at the same rate. The flickering is fast enough that the eyes, which can only process some 25 to 30 frames per second, don't notice it.

Split screen: An ultrasound device sends a constant stream of three-dimensional data from the patient's heart to a computer, which splits it into a pair of slightly tilted images--one for each eye. Specialized glasses flicker back and forth between the left and right eyes while the two images flicker back and forth on a computer screen. The result is akin to a holographic video of the heart's inner workings. Credit: Nikolay Vasilyev, Children's Hospital Boston

"Your brain knows how to integrate that information and give you depth perception automatically," says del Nido. "You don't have to have a computer that tells you you're two and a half centimeters from the target--your brain intuitively figures that out, and it does it on the fly." The result is a realistic, hologram-like 3-D experience.

Using this technology, the Children's Hospital team built a custom-made display that could process data from an ultrasound probe. Then cardiac surgeon Nikolay Vasilyev donned a pair of stereoscopic glasses and tried out the display while operating on the beating hearts of pigs.

First, Vasilyev created a tear in the wall dividing the left and right atria, simulating a condition called an atrial septal defect. Then he repaired the hole with a tiny patch, fastening it in place with several tiny anchors. Because the entire surgery was performed with specialized tools that could be inserted through a very small opening in the heart's surface, it was noninvasive enough to let the heart keep beating the whole time. In total, Vasilyev operated on six pigs: three with the stereoscopic display, and three with the regular 3-D display.

In all six surgeries, Vasilyev successfully affixed the patch, with no difference between the two groups in terms of how accurately he placed the anchors--perhaps because he has extensive experience with this particular procedure. But the new device did allow him to more precisely navigate his instruments to their destination--reducing the risk of damage to surrounding structures--and to get the job done 44 percent faster. The results of the study were announced yesterday in the Journal of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery.

The stereoscopic system may help extend the uses of beating-heart surgery, expanding its use in children with congenital heart defects and in complicated heart repairs like extensive holes and faulty valves. Indeed, del Nido sees real-time stereoscopic imaging--combined with cutting-edge surgical instruments--as a platform that might ultimately revolutionize heart surgery the way that laproscopic procedures revolutionized abdominal surgery. "What we're developing here is really a new platform for doing heart repairs in a very different way," says del Nido. "We've taken the initial step: we've done the proof of concept. Now we want to start seeing how far we can go with it."

"Is it going to be ready for prime time tomorrow? No, it's not," says Gillinov. "But could it open up a whole bunch of new ways to fix things in the heart? Yes."

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Indonesia's mud volcano 'unnatural disaster'

The erupting mud volcano in Sidoarjo, which is located about 30 km south of Surabaya
in East Java, Indonesia has been producing large quantities of hot water and mud.

Paris (AFP/iol.co.za) -- Scientists on Monday delivered a rebuttal to claims that an earthquake, and not drilling for gas, unleashed a "mud volcano" that has been spewing sludge in Indonesia for the past two years.

"We are more certain than ever that the Lusi mud volcano is an unnatural disaster and was triggered by the drilling of the Banjar-Panji-1 well," said British professor Richard Davies.

The volcano in Sidoarjo district of East Java has been spewing the equivalent volume of scores of Olympic-sized swimming pools of mud a day since erupting to life on May 29, 2006.

The drilling was carried out by oil and gas company Lapindo Brantas, owned by the family of wealthy welfare minister Aburizal Bakrie.

In January 2007, Davies, of Durham University in northeastern England, argued that the drilling was most likely to blame, an accusation refuted by Lapindo, which pointed the finger at an earthquake two days earlier in the city of Yogyakarta 250 kilometres away.

The new study, published in the peer-assessed academic journal Earth Planetary Science and Letters, outlines and analyses a detailed record of operational incidents in the drilling of Banjar-Panji-1.

Lapindo "has confirmed that the data is correct," Durham University said in a press release. The lead author of the study is Davies, and includes British, Indonesian and Australian investigators.

The authors said they were "99 percent" certain that the Yogyakarta quake could not have caused the mud volcano to start up, as any underground pressure it exerted could only have been tiny.

"We have known for hundreds of years that earthquakes can trigger eruptions. In this case, the earthquake was simply too small and too far away," the university quoted co-author Michael Manga, a professor of University of California at Berkeley, as saying.

Davies added: "We show that the day before the mud volcano started there was a huge kick' in the well, which is an influx of fluid and gas into the wellbore. We show that after the kick the pressure in the well went beyond a critical level."

"This resulted in the leakage of the fluid from the well and the rock formations to the surface - a so called underground blowout'. This fluid picked up mud during its ascent and Lusi was born."

If there had been more protective casing in the borehole, the drillers would have had more chances of controlling this pressure, he said.

Lusi is still flowing at 100 000 cubic metres per day - enough to fill 53 Olympic-sized swimming pools, the researchers added.

In separate research published in May, Davies said that Lusi was collapsing under its own weight as so much mud had been excavated from underneath.

Twelve villages have been affected by the spreading mud and at least 36 000 people have been forced to flee their homes.

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Artificial virus silences genes

The two-layered peptide 'virus' holds a hydrophobic payload between
the layers, and has coiled RNA molecules strapped to the sides

© Wiley-VCH

(rsc.org) -- Scientists in Korea have created an artificial virus that can target the nucleus of cancer cells and knock out specific genes. The work opens up the possibility of a new type of 'vector' for carrying genetic material into diseased cells - the basis of gene therapy.

Usually modified natural viruses are used in gene therapy experiments, as they are the supreme infiltrators of cells. However, these have had only sporadic success - the body's immune system can react against them and there is evidence that the viruses can themselves cause cancer. Efforts to develop artificial viruses - essentially proteins that can smuggle genes into cells without being detected - have been unsuccessful because producing viruses of consistent size and shape has proved difficult.

Myongsoo Lee and colleagues at Yonsei University in Seoul set about making a robust peptide scaffold capable of carrying genetic material into a cell. Lee's team assembled thin sheets of peptides consisting of alternating hydrophobic - water-repelling - and charged amino acids. These sheets self-assembled into long, thin, two-layered sandwich structures. The researchers engineered key features into their scaffold: cationic segments capable of binding nucleic acids, and carbohydrate portions that could dock onto receptors on a cell's surface to allow entry of the particle into the cell.

'The most important structural feature of the virus is that its shape is rod-like,' says Lee. It is easier to control the size and shape of a filamentous virus, which also persist longer in living cells.

The researchers then lashed molecules of RNA onto the virus surface at the cationic binding sites. These short lengths of RNA were chosen specifically to 'silence' genes in a host cell through a process called RNA interference. They presented the RNA-laden virus to cancer cells in a test tube. The virus was taken up and the target genes subsequently silenced. In a second experiment the researchers placed a hydrophobic dye molecule - as a substitute for a drug molecule - in the cavity between the two layers of the virus. This too was taken into the nucleus of the cell, demonstrating the ability of the system to deliver drugs to the nucleus.

Commenting on the work, Peter Searle, based at Cancer Research UK's Institute for Cancer Studies at the University of Birmingham, says, 'This research shows that peptides can assemble into neat ribbon-like structures and bind small nucleic acid molecules. Importantly, the peptides structures can deliver these small molecules into cells. It will be interesting to find out if the ribbons can also bind to larger pieces of DNA - such as whole genes or the genomes of viruses that could kill cancer cells - and deliver these to the intended target cells in the body.'

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Ancient Greek grave found during subway work

In this undated handout photo provided by the Greek Culture Ministry on Friday, June 6, 2008, a 2,300-year-old gold wreath is seen beside two ancient clay pots in a newly-discovered grave in Thessaloniki, northern Greece. The grave, found during work for a new subway, contained four gold wreaths, earrings, as well as clay and copper vases. (AP Photo/Greek Culture Ministry)

ATHENS, Greece (AP/google) -- Greek authorities say subway construction work in the northern city of Thessaloniki has unearthed an ancient grave with a wealth of golden jewelry.

The 2,300-year old grave contained a female skeleton, accompanied by four gold wreaths and gold earrings in the shape of dogs' heads set with semiprecious stones.

A Culture Ministry statement said Friday that the grave goods included a bronze mirror, a bronze vase and six clay pots.

The woman had been buried in a wooden coffin, traces of which survived. The ministry said part of the grave had been destroyed by a modern sewage pipe.

The Thessaloniki subway is scheduled for completion in 2012.

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2,350-year-old wine vases found in wreck

An amphora, thought to have carried wine, discovered on a 2,350 year old shipwreck off Cyprus is seen in this May 29, 2008 handout photograph released by Cyprus News Agency.

NICOSIA, Cyprus (AP/thestar) -- Marine archaeologists have salvaged ancient wine vases piled on the hull of a 2,350-year-old cargo ship lying on the seabed off Cyprus' southern shore, the Mediterranean island's Antiquities Department said Saturday.

The vessel is one of only a few such commercial ships dating from the late Classical period – the mid-fourth century B.C. – to have been discovered so well-preserved.

The ship rests under 45 meters of water some 12 1/2 kilometers from shore.

Divers last month brought to the surface only a few of the more than 500 amphorae – terra-cotta vases used in antiquity to ferry liquid and other foodstuffs - for more study.

They are of the type that carried red wine from the Aegean island of Chios, reputed to be the most expensive of classical antiquity, said a department statement released Friday.

"Apart from the Chian amphorae, which form the overwhelming majority, there are also other types from islands of the north Aegean," it said.

Many more amphorae are believed to lie underneath the sand-buried hull of the ship.

The department said the find is of "great importance" in helping scientists learn more about sea trade and commerce in the Aegean and east Mediterranean during the Classical period.

"The results of this study will shed light on the many problems of nautical and economic history," including commercial relations between the north Aegean and southeastern Mediterranean and how sea trade was organized, the statement said.

The department said this is the first marine archaeology research project conducted exclusively by Cypriot institutions.

Divers will start the next surveying phase in October. The project is being undertaken by the University of Cyprus' Archaeology Research Unit and is funded by the Thetis Foundation, a private institution that protects underwater cultural heritage.

The ship appears to be a contemporary of the famed Kyrenia, a 15-meter merchant vessel that another Greek Cypriot diver accidentally discovered off the island's northern coast more than four decades ago.

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Physicists have 'solved' mystery of levitation

In theory the discovery could be used to levitate a person

(telegraph) -- Levitation has been elevated from being pure science fiction to science fact, according to a study reported today by physicists.

In earlier work the same team of theoretical physicists showed that invisibility cloaks are feasible.

Now, in another report that sounds like it comes out of the pages of a Harry Potter book, the University of St Andrews team has created an 'incredible levitation effects’ by engineering the force of nature which normally causes objects to stick together.

Professor Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin, from the University of St Andrews in Scotland, have worked out a way of reversing this pheneomenon, known as the Casimir force, so that it repels instead of attracts.

Their discovery could ultimately lead to frictionless micro-machines with moving parts that levitate But they say that, in principle at least, the same effect could be used to levitate bigger objects too, even a person.

The Casimir force is a consequence of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the world of atoms and subatomic particles that is not only the most successful theory of physics but also the most baffling.

The force is due to neither electrical charge or gravity, for example, but the fluctuations in all-pervasive energy fields in the intervening empty space between the objects and is one reason atoms stick together, also explaining a “dry glue” effect that enables a gecko to walk across a ceiling.

Now, using a special lens of a kind that has already been built, Prof Ulf Leonhardt and Dr Thomas Philbin report in the New Journal of Physics they can engineer the Casimir force to repel, rather than attact.

Because the Casimir force causes problems for nanotechnologists, who are trying to build electrical circuits and tiny mechanical devices on silicon chips, among other things, the team believes the feat could initially be used to stop tiny objects from sticking to each other.

Prof Leonhardt explained, “The Casimir force is the ultimate cause of friction in the nano-world, in particular in some microelectromechanical systems.

Such systems already play an important role - for example tiny mechanical devices which triggers a car airbag to inflate or those which power tiny 'lab on chip’ devices used for drugs testing or chemical analysis.

Micro or nano machines could run smoother and with less or no friction at all if one can manipulate the force.” Though it is possible to levitate objects as big as humans, scientists are a long way off developing the technology for such feats, said Dr Philbin.

The practicalities of designing the lens to do this are daunting but not impossible and levitation “could happen over quite a distance”.

Prof Leonhardt leads one of four teams - three of them in Britain - to have put forward a theory in a peer-reviewed journal to achieve invisibility by making light waves flow around an object - just as a river flows undisturbed around a smooth rock.

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Robert Ballard: Exploring the ocean's hidden worlds

(TED) -- Ocean explorer Robert Ballard takes us on a mindbending trip to hidden worlds underwater, where he and other researchers are finding unexpected life, resources, even new mountains. He makes a case for serious exploration and mapping. Google Ocean, anyone?

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