NASA finds a shrimp deep below Antarctic ice where nothing should live

March 28th, 2010

From the Associated Press:

This video frame grab image provided by NASA, taken in Dec. 2009, shows a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is related to a shrimp, where a NASA team lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet.

This video frame grab image provided by NASA, taken in Dec. 2009, shows a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is related to a shrimp, where a NASA team lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet.

WASHINGTON—In a surprising discovery about where higher life can thrive, scientists for the first time found a shrimp-like creature and a jellyfish frolicking beneath a massive Antarctic ice sheet.

Six hundred feet (183 metres) below the ice where no light shines, scientists had figured nothing much more than a few microbes could exist.

That is why a team from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration was surprised when they lowered a video camera to get the first long look at the underbelly of an ice sheet in Antarctica. A curious shrimp-like creature came swimming by and then parked itself on the camera’s cable. Scientists also pulled up a tentacle they believe came from a foot-long jellyfish.

“We were operating on the presumption that nothing’s there,” said NASA ice scientist Robert Bindschadler, who will be presenting the initial findings and a video at an American Geophysical Union meeting Wednesday. “It was a shrimp you’d enjoy having on your plate.”

“We were just gaga over it,” he said of the 3-inch-long (76-millimeter, orange critter starring in their two-minute video. Technically, it’s not a shrimp. It’s a Lyssianasid amphipod, which is distantly related to shrimp.

The video is likely to inspire experts to rethink what they know about life in harsh environments. And it has scientists musing that if shrimp-like creatures can frolic below 600 feet (183 metres) of Antarctic ice in subfreezing dark water, what about other hostile places? What about Europa, a frozen moon of Jupiter?

“They are looking at the equivalent of a drop of water in a swimming pool that you would expect nothing to be living in and they found not one animal but two,” said biologist Stacy Kim of the Moss Landing Marine Laboratories in California, who joined the NASA team later. “We have no idea what’s going on down there.”

Microbiologist Cynan Ellis-Evans of the British Antarctic Survey called the finding intriguing.

“This is a first for the sub-glacial environment with that level of sophistication,” Ellis-Evans said. He said there have been findings somewhat similar, showing complex life in retreating ice shelves, but nothing quite directly under the ice like this.

Ellis-Evans said it is possible the creatures swam in from far away and do not live there permanently.

But Kim, who is a co-author of the study, doubts it. The site in West Antarctica is at least 12 miles (20 kilometres) from open seas. Bindschadler drilled an 8-inch-wide (200-millimeter) hole and was looking at a tiny amount of water. That means it’s unlikely that that two critters swam from great distances and were captured randomly in that small of an area, she said.

Yet scientists were puzzled at what the food source would be for these critters. While some microbes can make their own food out of chemicals in the ocean, complex life like the amphipod can’t, Kim said.

So how do they survive? That’s the key question, Kim said.

“It’s pretty amazing when you find a huge puzzle like that on a planet where we thought we know everything,” Kim said.

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Man dives face-first into venomous jellyfish

December 5th, 2009

From Canoe.ca:

The most common Irukandji jellyfish measures just 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) in length and has tentacles as thin as a strand of hair that can grow up to 3 feet (1 metre) long.

The most common Irukandji jellyfish measures just 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) in length and has tentacles as thin as a strand of hair that can grow up to 3 feet (1 metre) long.

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA — A man dove face-first into an extremely venomous, peanut-sized jellyfish in waters off northeast Australia and medics flew him to a hospital intensive care unit to treat the potentially fatal sting, officials said Friday.

The 29-year-old man, whose name has not been released, was on a yacht Thursday off northeast Queensland state. As a precaution, he was wearing a full-length “stinger suit,” a lightweight version of a wetsuit that covers everything but the face, feet and hands and helps protect against venomous jellyfish that are common in northern Australia’s waters during the Southern Hemisphere summer.

But when he dove into the water near South Molle Island, he was immediately stung in the face by a potentially lethal Irukandji jellyfish, Central Queensland Helicopter Rescue Service spokeswoman Leonie Hansen said. He was taken back to the island, where a rescue team rushed to his aid.

“The crew said he was shivering and in shock and in a great deal of pain,” Hansen said.

The man, from the Queensland capital Brisbane, was in serious condition Friday at Mackay Base Hospital in Mackay, 600 miles (1,000 kilometres) north of Brisbane, a hospital spokeswoman said.

Australia is well-known for its myriad deadly creatures, but the Irukandji remains rather mysterious. It is a distant relative of the more notorious and widely feared box jellyfish, the sting of which can kill an adult within 2 minutes. But the Irukandji is virtually impossible to see and is tiny enough to pass through nets meant to keep jellyfish away from popular swimming spots.

The jellyfish’s sting can lead to “Irukandji syndrome,” a set of symptoms that includes shooting pains in the muscles and chest, vomiting, restlessness and anxiety. Some symptoms can last for more than a week, and the syndrome can occasionally lead to a rapid rise in blood pressure and heart failure.

In 2002, two tourists were killed in separate incidents after being stung by the tiny creatures off northeast Australia – the first recorded Irukandji fatalities. But because the jellyfish leave almost no mark on their victims, scientists believe they are responsible for many deaths that were attributed as drownings or heart attacks, said marine biologist Lisa Gershwin, who has spent 11 years studying the animals.

“It’s extremely serious,” Gershwin said. “One of the very worst stings I’ve ever seen – sting as in permanent heart damage – was just three dots on the finger.”

The most common Irukandji measures just 0.4 inches (10 millimeters) in length and has tentacles as thin as a strand of hair that can grow up to 3 feet (1 metre), Gershwin said. Scientists still don’t know whether it’s the Irukandji’s body or tentacles that cause Irukandji syndrome, she said.

Even more discomforting for swimmers: there is no antivenom, and people generally don’t realize they’ve been stung at first. The initial sting causes little pain, and it may be up to half an hour before a victim starts to feel the effects.

And those effects, Gershwin says, can be disastrous, with some stings causing blood pressures to soar as high as 280 over 180.

The creatures are found worldwide, from North Wales to Cape Town in South Africa, Gershwin said.

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Man thought to be in coma was conscious for 23 years

November 24th, 2009

From Healthzone.ca:

Brussels, Belgium — For 23 torturous years, Rom Houben says he lay trapped in his paralyzed body, aware of what was going on around him but unable to tell anyone or even cry out.

The car-crash victim had been diagnosed as being in a vegetative state but appears to have been conscious the whole time. An expert using a specialized type of brain scan that was not available in the 1980s finally realized it, and unlocked Houben’s mind again. The 46-year-old Belgian is now communicating with a special touchscreen on his wheelchair.

“Powerlessness. Utter powerlessness. At first I was angry, then I learned to live with it,” he said, punching the message into the screen during an interview with the Belgian RTBF network, aired Monday. He has called his rescue his “renaissance.”

Over the years, Houben’s family refused to accept the word of his doctors, firmly believing their son knew what was happening around him, and gave no thought to letting him die, said his mother, Fina. She was vindicated when the breakthrough came.

“At that moment, you think, `Oh, my God. See, now you know.’ I was always convinced,” she said in a telephone interview with AP.

The discovery took place three years ago but only recently came to light, after publication of a study on the misdiagnosis of people with consciousness disorders.

While a 23-year error is highly unusual, the wrong diagnosis of patients with consciousness disorders is far too common, according to the study, led by Steven Laureys of Belgium’s Coma Science Group.

The issue is fraught with ethical questions. Patients diagnosed as being in a vegetative state with no hope of recovery are sometimes allowed to die, as was done in 2005 with Terri Schiavo, the severely brain-damaged Florida woman at the centre of the biggest right-to-die case in U.S. history. Her feeding tube was removed.

Houben was injured in a car accident in 1983 when he was 20. Doctors said he fell into a coma at first, then went into a vegetative state.

A coma is a state of unconsciousness in which the eyes are closed and the patient cannot be roused. A vegetative state is a condition in which the eyes are open and can move, and the patient has periods of sleep and periods of wakefulness, but remains unconscious and cannot reason or respond.

During Houben’s two lost decades, his eyesight was poor, but the experts say he could hear doctors, nurses and visitors to his bedside, and feel the touch of a relative.

Over the years, Houben’s skeptical mother took him to the United States five times for tests before linking up with Laureys.

“We saw his brain was almost normal,” said neuropsychologist Audrey Vanhaudenhuyse.

A breakthrough came when Houben was able to indicate yes or no by slightly moving his foot to push a computer device placed there by Laureys’ team. He can now spell words using the touchscreen.

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Meteor spotted over Greater Toronto Area

September 26th, 2009

From the Toronto Star:

Frank Dempsey was driving to his observatory in North Ajax last night when he saw a bright green light illuminate the sky and road in front of him.

“It was far, far brighter than a full moon, and then disintegrated into red chunks and pieces within seconds,” he said.

Dempsey, an amateur astronomer, immediately identified the light as a meteor, or fireball. The meteor was spotted just after 9 p.m. by skywatchers across the GTA and Ontario, and lasted just a few seconds.

Astronomer Randy Attwood, president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada’s Mississauga branch, said that Friday night’s spectacle was likely a bolide meteor. Bolides are larger, brighter meteors.

“Normally when you see a meteor, there’s no time to turn to a friend and say `look at that,’ because it doesn’t last that long,” Attwood said. “A bolide lasts a little longer.”

Last night’s clear skies helped with visibility, giving witnesses an unobstructed view of the sight.

Meteors are caused by dust or debris that enters the Earth’s atmosphere and vaporizes in a burst of light.

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Butterfly antennae like GPS, study finds

September 25th, 2009

From the Toronto Star:

Researchers showed the existence of photosensitive cells in monarch butterflies antennae, which were long thought to provide them with their sense of smell alone. These cells appear to act like a GPS as the monarchs make their fall migration.

Researchers showed the existence of photosensitive cells in monarch butterflies' antennae, which were long thought to provide them with their sense of smell alone. These cells appear to act like a GPS as the monarchs make their fall migration.

A ‘huge surprise’ to Monarch researchers

Monarch butterflies reach out for the sun with their antennae to navigate their miraculous, pinpoint migrations to and from Mexico, a new study has discovered.

“It was a huge surprise,” says Dr. Steven Reppert, a University of Massachusetts neurobiologist and senior study author, of the finding.

“We thought we had it nailed,” he says of the previous theory – that the butterfly’s brain provided its sense of direction.

The study appears today in the journal Science.

In it, researchers showed the existence of photosensitive cells in the insects’ antennae, which were long thought to provide them with their sense of smell alone.

These cells, Reppert says, appear to act like a GPS as the monarchs make their fall migration.

Reppert happened on observations made 50 years ago by Canadian butterfly observer Fred Urquhart, who noted that the insects seem to lose their sense of direction when their antennae are removed.

“We thought, well, we’ll try this and see, and lo and behold it’s true.” Scientists clipped the antennae from a number of butterflies, or painted others with black enamel, tethered them and placed them in an outdoor flight simulator.

These butterflies would still fly in a straight line, but in all kinds of different directions, Reppert says.

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Carrier pigeon faster than broadband internet

September 14th, 2009

From PhysOrg.com:

In South Africa, a carrier pigeon carrying a 4GB memory stick proved to be faster than the ADSL service from the countrys biggest web firm, Telkom. Winston the pigeon took one hour and eight minutes to carry the data across the 60-mile course, and it took another hour to upload the data. During the same time, the ADSL had sent just 4% of the data.

In South Africa, a carrier pigeon carrying a 4GB memory stick proved to be faster than the ADSL service from the country's biggest web firm, Telkom. Winston the pigeon took one hour and eight minutes to carry the data across the 60-mile course, and it took another hour to upload the data. During the same time, the ADSL had sent just 4% of the data.

The race was held by an IT company in Durban, South Africa, called Unlimited IT. One of Unlimited IT’s employees complained about the slow speed of data transmission on ADSL, saying that data would get transferred faster by carrier pigeon. To highlight just how slow the broadband internet is, the company decided to test that claim.

The 11-month-old Winston flew 60 miles from Unlimited IT’s call center in Howick to another office in Durban. To make sure that the bird didn’t have an unfair advantage, Unlimited IT imposed some rules on its website, including “no cats allowed” and “birdseed must not have any performance-enhancing seeds within.” Hundreds of South Africans followed the race on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

For its part, Telkom said that it was not responsible for Unlimited IT’s slow broadband speeds. A Telkom spokesperson said that they had made several recommendations to Unlimited IT to improve its service, but none of the suggestions had been accepted.

As the BBC reports, South Africa is one of the countries that could benefit from three new fiber optic cables being laid around the African continent to improve internet service.

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Dead sea scrolls exhibit at ROM

July 4th, 2009

From The Toronto Star:

A segment of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- now at the Royal Ontario Museum.

A segment of the Dead Sea Scrolls -- now at the Royal Ontario Museum.

In times of turmoil, it is best to reflect on what unites us, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty says, and that’s what the Dead Sea Scrolls can do.

“My hope is that people of all cultures and faiths will come together to marvel at these scrolls,” McGuinty said today at a preview of the Dead Sea Scrolls exhibition opening at the Royal Ontario Museum this weekend.

The 2,000-year-old scrolls include the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament. As such, they are considered sacred texts for the world’s three major religions — Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

Too often, McGuinty says, we focus on what separates us.

“What is important is what we have in common,” he said.

Eight copies of the scroll will be on display until October, when they will be swapped with eight different scroll fragments.

The exhibit was two years in the making, and marks the relaunch of the ROM after an extensive renovation that included the controversial addition of the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal to its Bloor St. façade.

ROM chief executive William Thorsell described the scrolls today as “one of the great archaeological finds of the 20th Century,” and one of the most significant displays ever to come to the museum.

Already, he said, communities across Ontario are planning bus trips to Toronto, just to see the scrolls.

Besides the scrolls, there are numerous artifacts from the Dead Sea and Jerusalem on display to put the scrolls into context.

“It’s a show about the world from which they came,” said ROM curator Risa Levitt Kohn.

There will also be children’s activities, and more modern art to help visitors put the ancient texts and artifacts into a contemporary context, she said.

The scrolls currently on display are fragments from the books of Genesis, Daniel and Psalms, plus five non-biblical texts: the Book of War, a lease agreement, fragments describing a messianic apocalypse, apocryphal psalms that may have been hymns, and the Damascus Covenant describing a community that fled to Judea.

The show continues until Jan. 3.

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Search on for Newmarket meteorite

July 4th, 2009

From The Toronto Star:

Five cameras recorded the slow fireball which may have dropped meteorites – weighing up to a few hundred grams – in a region between Newmarket and Lake Simcoe.

Five cameras recorded the slow fireball which may have dropped meteorites – weighing up to a few hundred grams – in a region between Newmarket and Lake Simcoe.

Small meteorites may have been dropped on southern Ontario by a fireball that streaked through the sky north of Toronto last month.

Researchers are anxious to retrieve any possible fragments of what’s believed to have been a meteorite that appeared over Newmarket, at just after 8:30 p.m. March 15.

The Royal Ontario Museum and The University of Western Ontario are now asking residents in the area for their help in finding the space debris.

Five cameras recorded the slow fireball which may have dropped meteorites – weighing up to a few hundred grams – in a region between Newmarket and Lake Simcoe.

The cameras were set up by the physics and astronomy department at Western.

Dr. Kim Tait, who is in charge of meteorite collection at the museum, says the fragments could provide clues to the material in our solar system.

“We’re very excited about this,” Tait said in a release Wednesday.

“Although this is not the first time a meteorite has fallen in Ontario, we are very interested in recovering fragments.”

Residents who discover fragments on their property are asked to contact the museum’s mineralogy department.

The fragments are not dangerous to handle and often are black due to a fusion crust, a thin black rind that is sometimes shiny or dull black due to the outer surface being burned during entry into the atmosphere.

They are almost always magnetic, so people who find a suspected fragment could test for this as well.

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ROM unravels ‘monster’ mystery

March 21st, 2009

From The Toronto Star:

 

An artists depiction of the Hurdia victoria - the T. Rex of the Cambrian Seas.

An artist's depiction of the Hurdia victoria - the T. Rex of the Cambrian Seas.

Fossil analysis sheds light on pint-sized predator that stalked Canada’s seas 505 million years ago

Pity the poor Hurdia victoria – the “T. Rex” of the Cambrian seas. It has been so misunderstood.

But a newly published analysis of Royal Ontario Museum fossils has set the record straight on this “monster” arthropod that stalked the then-tropical seas above Canada’s Burgess Shale 505 million years ago.

That painstaking, jigsaw-puzzle analysis, published today in the journal Science, reveals that this razor-toothed predator was in fact one of nature’s weirdest creatures.

And, boy, was it ugly.

It had protruding, button-like eyes, set behind a large armoured plate that extended from its head like a blue whale’s snout. This bony “carpus” likely funnelled prey into a pair of grasping pincers that shoved the hapless food into a round mouth sporting at least three rows of pointed teeth.

“This mouth is kind of nasty. I always use the analogy of a pencil sharpener,” said Jean-Bernard Caron, an associate curator of invertebrate paleontology at the ROM.

“You put anything into this and you get the prey completely cut and broken into pieces,” said Caron, a paper co-author.

The rest of the body was segmented with a tiny set of propeller-like fins at the end to help move this formidable predator along.

Okay. It was a bit smaller than a submarine sandwich.

But in the aquatic Cambrian world – 300 million years before dinosaurs appeared – that was large enough, and mean enough to make it the top predator in its all-invertebrate ecosystem.

“A complete specimen is about 20 or 25 centimetres long, maybe 30 centimetres long … that’s about it,” Caron said. “But it was quite a fierce animal for something that small.”

Although it has borne its name since 1912, its appearance had remained a mystery, scattered among some 150,000 Burgess Shale fossils at museums, including the ROM, which houses the world’s largest collection of these most ancient of Canadian artifacts.

The pieces of the puzzle are faint and baffling fossil imprints, set in small slabs of sedimentary rock from the UNESCO World Heritage Site in B.C.’s Yoho National Park.

The earliest, the imprint of a snail-like body segment, dates back to 1912, when it was found by Charles Walcott, who discovered the Burgess Shale and gave the bizarre bit the Hurdia victoria moniker.

“When you find something like this, you can only guess what it is,” said Caron, holding up the original artifact.

In the last decade or so, paleontologists began assembling the Hurdia from fossils scattered between the ROM and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. “Like a giant puzzle we only had bits and pieces,” said Caron, waving his hand over the former puzzle.

What truly brought Hurdia to life, however, was the arrival at the ROM in 2005 of the paper’s lead author, Allison Daley, a PhD student from Burlington, who is studying at Uppsala University in Sweden. “Then we had time to have someone working for three years at our collections. We have hundreds and hundreds of pieces here,” Caron said.

The discovery of the Hurdia is important because it helps explain why some creatures developed the way they did, Daley said.

“It was an ancestor to the group called arthropods. This includes things like crustaceans, spiders, centipedes, millipedes, horseshoe crabs, insects,” she said. “This whole group of animals – which is one of the most diverse and one of the largest groups of invertebrates we see today – Hurdia is a very early ancestor of that whole group.”

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Tiniest meat-eating dinosaur discovered

March 21st, 2009

From The Toronto Star:

The blade-like claw of a velociraptor is displayed on a quarter. The predator was half the size of a domestic cat.

The blade-like claw of a velociraptor is displayed on a quarter. The predator was half the size of a domestic cat.

North America’s smallest meat-eating dinosaur roamed southern Alberta 75 million years ago

Alberta paleontologists are hailing a newly found pint-sized predator that is considered to be the smallest meat-eating dinosaur ever discovered in North America.

But don’t let the diminutive stature of Hesperonychus fool you. This miniature version of the two-legged velociraptor was a tiny terror in southern Alberta about 75 million years ago.

“It was half the size of a domestic cat and probably hunted and ate whatever it could for its size – insects, mammals, amphibians and maybe even baby dinosaurs,” Nick Longrich of the University of Calgary said yesterday.

The findings of Longrich and colleague Philip Currie of the University of Alberta in Edmonton were published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The paper contends such small carnivorous dinosaurs were more numerous and played a more important role in the ecosystem than scientists have realized.

The research is based on fossilized claws and a pelvis that were collected in 1982 by paleontologist Betsy Nicholls from southern Alberta. The bones were in a drawer for 25 years before Longrich and Currie began studying them.

Hesperonychus means “western claw” – a reference to a sickle-shaped claw on each of its two hind limbs that it used to impale and slash its prey. Longrich said historically there’s been more interest in large dinos because it was thought that they made more interesting display specimens.

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