New Brain Cells

Strange New Type of Brain Cell Discovered

The discovery of a new shape of brain cell has neuroscientists scratching their heads over what the function of these neurons might be.

Ice Baby DNA

DNA signature found in ice storm babies

Prenatal maternal stress exposure to natural disasters predicts epigenetic profile […]

18 Of The Most Beautiful Gardens In The World

A beautiful garden is a feast for the eyes.
Here are pictures of 18 of the most beautiful gardens in the world.

Surreal Places To Visit Before You Die

Here are 27 surreal and beautiful places you have to visit before you die.

Archaeologists discover 'Dracula's Dungeon' in Turkish castle

Archaeologists have discovered what they believe is the dungeon that held Vlad the Impaler — the inspiration for Bram Stoker's character Dracula.
The team found dungeons, tunnels, and a military shelter in Turkey's Tokat Castle, where Vlad the Impaler was reportedly held in the beginning of the 15th century. The archaeologists discovered two dungeons during the castle's restoration work, which began in 2009. The restoration work led to the discovery of secrets tunnel between the castle, a military shelter, and the Pervane Baths.
The archaeologists believe Vlad the Impaler — a.k.a. Wallachian Prince Vlad III — was held in the dungeons by the Ottoman Turks in 1442. Tokat was conquered by the Seljuk Turks in the 12th century, and it became a part of the Ottoman empire in 1392. Tokat Castle, a ruined citadel, is in the hills above the city.
"The castle is completely surrounded by secret tunnels. It is very mysterious," archaeologist Ibrahim Cetin said in a statement. "It is hard to estimate in which room Dracula was kept, but he was around here."

Random Photos

Thought Sandy Was Bad?

Thought Sandy Was Bad? Revisit This 1821 Hurricane

For all the talk of 2012's Hurricane Sandy being a superstorm, a new report warns that a future repeat of the hurricane that struck New York City in 1821 would be far more devastating.

Mysterious Colorado Rock Formation May Be Result of 'Natural Fracking'

An ancient, catastrophic flood or earthquake may explain how a bewildering rock formation in Colorado's Rocky Mountains formed, a new study finds.

For more than 120 years, geologists have wondered how giant chunks of Tava sandstone, a sedimentary rock, had become inserted into a section of the igneous rocks that shape the backbone of the Front Range, within the southern Rockies. Scientists call formations where one rock is inserted into another "intrusions."

The rocks within the formation are "reversed from what we would ordinarily expect," said the study's lead author, Christine Siddoway, a professor of geology at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. Typically, it is igneous rocks, such as granite, that intrude into sedimentary stone.

It's extremely unusual to find sandstone that has forced its way into granite, making the Colorado formation a rare find, Siddoway said.

Intrusions of sedimentary rock into granite-type rock "speak of a catastrophic event," she said, such as an earthquake or flood. An earthquake can cause sediment to liquefy, as it did during the 6.0-magnitude earthquake that hit Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2011. It could have been another large earthquake that forced the sedimentary sandstone into the granite in Colorado, she said.

Or, it could have been rapid-moving floodwaters that lodged the Tava sandstone sediment into a fracture in the granite, explaining the intrusion, Siddoway added.

Whether it was an earthquake or a flood that set the formation into motion, the intrusion as we see it today can be explained by "natural fracking," she said. The fracking that we usually hear about is human fracking, in which machines are used to pump water underground to create enormous pressure to crack open rocks deep in the ground, so that fossil fuels can be extracted. But nature can cause fracking too — rocks crack open underground and then particles such as sand fill in the spaces.

"On a very grand scale, what allowed the Tava sandstone dikes to form is analogous to what happens on a small scale by human-induced pressure fracturing," Siddoway said.

The Tava sandstone, shown here, is likely between 680 million and 800 million years old  

Rock of ages

The new study also hinted at how old the Tava sandstone may be, another riddle that has perplexed geologists.

The researchers analyzed samples from the sandstone that consisted mostly of quartz, with pieces of feldspars, micas, magnetite and zircon, which is both a mineral and a semiprecious gem.

"[Zircon] is the workhorse for isotopic dating of rocks to find out their age," Siddoway said. "The wonderful thing about zircon, that makes it a good gemstone, is that it's very hard and difficult to cut. It remains in the sedimentary record for a long time."

As soon as zircon forms, radioactive elements in its structure start to decay at a known rate, allowing scientists to date it. In this study, the geologists looked at tiny zircons in each sample, and then compared them to zircons in other sedimentary rock samples of a known age, Siddoway said.  

The Tava sandstone zircons, however, did not match those from 65 million years ago or 500 million years ago, as other researchers had suggested.

"I was utterly shocked to find that," Siddoway said.

Instead, the zircons in the Tava sandstone matched those from rocks from California's Death Valley and the Grand Canyon, the researchers found.

By comparing the Tava sandstone zircon to these other samples, the researchers determined its age is between 680 million years old and 800 million years old. That means that at the time the Tava formed, the continents were in a supercontinent called Rodinia, which had nothing but single-celled microbes. Colorado may have been near or south of the equator.

"Earth would have looked like an unvegetated, rocky planet, like some of our neighbors in the solar system," Siddoway noted.

She plans to continue to study the sandstone. "And as work continues, I'm very confident we'll be able to refine that to a more narrow range of age," Siddoway said.

The study was published online Aug. 27 in the journal Lithosphere.

Mysterious feature on Saturn's moon baffles NASA scientists

NASA's Cassini spacecraft has discovered a "mysterious feature" on Saturn's moon Titan. Scientists are working to determine, what, exactly, this feature might be.NASA reports that the feature is roughly 100 square miles, and it lies in Ligeia Mare, one of Titan's hydrocarbon seas. Cassini's radar has observed the feature twice, but its appearance changed between the two sightings. Scientists suspect the feature's change in appearance could be the result of Titan's changing seasons, which Cassini's current extended mission will monitor.

The feature's first sighting was in July 2013, and the radar images depicted a bright spot, which stood out from the dark sea. Scientists were "perplexed" when the feature couldn't be located with follow-up radar experiments, but they found it again on August 21, 2014.
Though the scientists aren't sure what the feature is, NASA reports that they are "confident" the feature is not a "flaw in their data." Some of their current explanations for the feature include "surface waves, rising bubbles, floating solids, solids suspended just below the surface, or perhaps something more exotic."
Titan's hydrocarbon lakes have long been a source of curiosity for scientists who speculate that life may be able to survive on the moon's surface. "But if life exists on Titan, it would be very different than life on Earth, which is intimately tied to liquid water," Space.com notes.
"Science loves a mystery, and with this enigmatic feature, we have a thrilling example of ongoing change on Titan," Stephen Wall, the deputy team lead of Cassini's radar team, said in a statement. "We're hopeful that we'll be able to continue watching the changes unfold and gain insights about what's going on in that alien sea."

Autumn Stars

The Stars of Autumn's Night Sky: What to Look For

Autumn is under way in the Northern Hemisphere, and if you are an avid sky gazer you just might have noticed signs of the season's change.

Inside A Black Hole

What Would Happen if You Fell into a Black Hole?

Are you ready to get "spaghettified"? Julian has the gooey, stretchy, bizarro physics behind a human's leap into a supermassive black hole. 

White Orca

Rare White Orca Seen Off Coast of Russia

Only the second known sighting of pale killer whale in the wild.

Otter retrieved iPhone dropped into pool by visitor at animal sanctuary

An otter fished out an unusual catch for a woman who dropped her iPhone into his pool at an animal sanctuary.
The visitor feared the phone would be lost for good after it fell into the murky depths, until Starsky the Asian short-clawed otter dived into action. He swam down to the bottom of his tank before hauling the handset to the surface between his paws. Starksy calmly handed it back to speechless animal care assistant Jenny Lewis at the Cornish Seal Sanctuary, in Gweek, near Helston, Cornwall.
Nine-year-old Starsky arrived at the sanctuary in January 2009, along with his brother Hutch. Starsky's usual tricks include juggling stones and climbing up the mesh sides of his enclosure - although he's too afraid to come down by himself.

Mysterious New Poison Dart Frog Found The Size Of A Fingernail

A new species of poison dart frog so teeny it can fit on a fingernail has been discovered in a rain forest in Panama. Scientists from the University of the Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, found the toxic, electric-orange amphibian in a single hilly area near the Caribbean coast.
Measuring just 12.7 millimeters (0.47 inches) in length, the newly described Andinobates geminisae remains something of a mystery, according to the study team. For one, the mini-amphibian 'looks nothing like' its closest genetic relatives in the region, mainly because of its orange color.

The Spiders That Decorate Their Own Webs

Spider webs - possibly the most beautiful and intricate animal structures of the natural world. However, some spiders are not content with a simple web. They go one step further. Take a look at some of these arachnid designs and come to your own conclusions.

Cowbells Make Cows Miserable

A field of cowbell-equipped-cows may create a soothing soundscape of wind and chimes, but the actual bovine after which the bells are named really hate the things. A study was performed for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich where scientist Julia Johns and a colleague measured the decibel levels of cowbells.
The cowbells can reach decibel levels of 113 - far above the legal limit of 85. Cows exposed to the sound chew their food for significantly less time than the cows without the bells, and some cows have even proven to have their hearing severely impaired.

Animal Pictures

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Today in History

1399		Richard II is deposed.
1568		Eric XIV, king of Sweden, is deposed after showing signs of madness.
1630		John Billington, one of the original pilgrims who sailed to the New World on the Mayflower, becomes the first man executed in the English colonies. He is hanged for having shot another man during a quarrel
1703		The French, at Hochstadt in the War of the Spanish Succession, suffer only 1,000 casualties to the 11,000 of their opponents, the Austrians of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I.
1791		Mozart's opera The Magic Flute is performed for the first time in Vienna
1846		The first anesthetized tooth extraction is performed by Dr. William Morton in Charleston, Massachusetts.
1864		Confederate troops fail to retake Fort Harrison from the Union forces during the siege of Petersburg.
1911		Italy declares war on Turkey over control of Tripoli.
1918		Bulgaria pulls out of World War I.
1927		Babe Ruth hits his 60th homerun of the season off Tom Zachary in Yankee Stadium, New York City.
1935		George Gershwin's opera Porgy and Bess opens at the Colonial Theatre in Boston.
1938		Under German threats of war, Britain, France, Germany and Italy sign an accord permitting Germany to take control of Sudetenland–a region of Czechoslovakia inhabited by a German-speaking minority.
1939		The French Army is called back into France from its invasion of Germany. The attack, code named Operation Saar, only penetrated five miles.
1943		The Women's Army Auxiliary Corps becomes the Women's Army Corps, a regular contingent of the U.S. Army with the same status as other army service corps.
1949		The Berlin Airlift is officially halted after 277,264 flights.
1950		U.N. forces cross the 38th parallel separating North and South Korea as they pursue the retreating North Korean Army.
1954		The first atomic-powered submarine, the Nautilus, is commissioned in Groton, Connecticut.
1954		NATO nations agree to arm and admit West Germany.
1955		Actor and teen idol James Dean is killed in a car crash while driving his Porsche on his way to enter it into a race in Salinas, California.
1960		Fifteen African nations are admitted to the United Nations.
1962		U.S. Marshals escort James H. Meredith into the University of Mississippi; two die in the mob violence that follows.
1965		President Lyndon Johnson signs legislation that establishes the National Foundation for the Arts and the Humanities.
1965		The 30 September Movement unsuccessfully attempts coup against Indonesian government; an anti-communist purge in the aftermath results in over 500,000 deaths.
1966		Bechuanaland ceases to be a British protectorate and becomes the independent Republic of Botswana.
1972		Pro baseball great Roberto Clemente hits his 3,000th—and final—hit of his career.
1975		The AH-64 Apache attack helicopter makes its first flight.
1994		Aldwych tube station (originally Strand Station) of the London Underground transit system closes after 88 years.
1999		Japan's second-worst nuclear accident occurs at a uranium processing facility in Tokai-mura, killing two technicians.
2009		Earthquakes in Sumatra kill more than 1,115 people.

"Shellshock"

A scary new computer bug

From the BBC:

The flaw has been found in a software component known as Bash, which is a part of many Linux systems as well as Apple's Mac operating system. The bug, dubbed Shellshock, can be used to remotely take control of almost any system using Bash, researchers said...

"Whereas something like Heartbleed was all about sniffing what was going on, this was about giving you direct access to the system," Prof Alan Woodward, a security researcher from the University of Surrey, told the BBC.

"The door's wide open."

Some 500,000 machines worldwide were thought to have been vulnerable to Heartbleed. But early estimates, which experts said were conservative, suggest that Shellshock could hit at least 500 million machines...

"Using this vulnerability, attackers can potentially take over the operating system, access confidential information, make changes, et cetera," said Tod Beardsley, a Rapid7 engineer...

For general home users worried about security, Prof Woodward suggested simply keeping an eye on manufacturer websites for updates - particularly for hardware such as broadband routers.