VOLCANO FOUND BURRIED UNDER 1 KM THICK ICE IN ANTARCTIKA

It's like a detective mystery with an explosive climax. Scientists investigating the Antarctica ice sheet for something else came across a series of unexplained clues that finally led to the discovery of a brand new volcano emerging from under a kilometer of ice, according to a Washington University statement.

The discovery of the as yet unnamed volcano was announced in the November 17 online issue of Nature Geoscience.

It all started back in January 2010 when a team of scientists set up two crossing lines of seismographs - instruments that measure vibrations in the Earth's surface, like when an earthquake occurs - across Marie Byrd Land in West Antarctica. The instruments used disturbances created by distant earthquakes to make images of the ice and rock deep within West Antarctica.

The goal, says Doug Wiens, professor of earth and planetary science at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the project's principle investigators, was to weigh the ice sheet to help reconstruct Antarctica's climate history, the statement said. But to do this accurately the scientists had to know how the earth's mantle would respond to an ice burden, and that depended on whether it was hot and fluid or cool and viscous. The seismic data would allow them to map the mantle's properties.

In the meantime, automated-event-detection software was put to work to comb the data for anything unusual. When it found two bursts of seismic events between January 2010 and March 2011, Wiens' PhD student Amanda Lough looked more closely to see what was rattling the continent's bones. Was it rock grinding on rock, ice groaning over ice, or, perhaps, hot gases and liquid rock forcing their way through cracks in a volcanic complex?

ALL ABOUT SATURN

1. Saturn is the second largest planet in the Solar System after Jupiter. It is so big that Earth could fit into it 755 times.
 
2. Saturn is a slightly smaller version of Jupiter, with similar, but less distinctive, surface patterns. Like Jupiter, it is mostly made up of hydrogen and helium gas. Saturn's main difference to Jupiter is the amazing set of rings that orbit it.

3. Saturn's rings may be particles of an old moon orbiting the planet, smashed apart in a collision millions years ago. 


4. Saturn's rings orbit the planet at different tilts. Sometimes, they can appear like 'ears' sticking out of the planet. At other times, they are flat on when seen from Earth and are hardly visible. This shows how thin they can be.


5. It is believed that Saturn's rings will one day disappear. They will either disperse (spread out) into space or get sucked into the planet by its pull of gravity. This isn't likely to happen anytime soon, more than likely occurring in ten of millions of years time.


6. Despite its similarities to Jupiter, there is no great spot on Saturn, although the planet does have stormy weather.


7. Saturn is twice as far away from the Sun as Jupiter is.


8. Saturn's largest moon, Titan, is the only moon in the Solar System to possess an atmosphere.


9. Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who discovered Saturn's moon Titan in 1655, also invented the pendulum clock.


10. It is thought that Titan's atmosphere is so thick, and its gravity so weak, that humans beings could strap on a set of wings and fly through its skies. Of course, it's too cold to survive there but it's an interesting thought!


11. The first sounds to be recorded from any other world in the solar system were recorded from Saturn's moon Titan by the Huygens space probe in 2005.


12. Saturn has such a low density (meaning that its particles are far apart) that, if there was an ocean big enough, Saturn would float on it. In comparison, Earth and Mercury would sink to the bottom quickest.


13. A year on Saturn would take almost thirty Earth years. However, a day on Saturn is about 10 and a half hours.


14. If Earth had rings than spanned as far out as Saturn's, they would reach about three quarters of the way to the Moon.

MOUTH BACTERIA COULD BE YOUR NEW PASSWORD

The bacteria in the human mouth is unique and can be as powerful as a fingerprint to identify a person, a new study led by an Indian-origin scientist has found. Scientists have used oral bacteria - particularly those nestled under the gums - to identify a person's ethnicity. 
Scientists identified a total of almost 400 different species of microbes in the mouths of 100 study participants belonging to four ethnic affiliations: non-Hispanic blacks, whites, Chinese and Latinos. 

Only two per cent of bacterial species were present in all individuals - but in different concentrations according to ethnicity - and 8 per cent were detected in 90 per cent of the participants. 

Researchers found that each ethnic group in the study was represented by a "signature" of shared microbial communities. 

"This is the first time it has been shown that ethnicity is a huge component in determining what you carry in your mouth," said Purnima Kumar, associate professor of periodontology at The Ohio State University.

"No two people were exactly alike. That's truly a fingerprint," said Kumar, senior author of the study.
Kumar used a DNA deep sequencing methodology to obtain an unprecedented in-depth view of these microbial communities in their natural setting. When the scientists trained a machine to classify each assortment of microbes from under the gums according to ethnicity, a given bacterial community predicted an individual's ethnicity with 62 per cent accuracy.

The classifier identified African Americans according to their microbial signature correctly 100 per cent of the time. The research also confirms that one type of dental treatment is not appropriate for all, and could contribute to a more personalized approach to care of the mouth. 
"The most important point of this paper is discovering that ethnicity-specific oral microbial communities may predispose individuals to future disease," Kumar said.

Though it's too soon to change dental practice based on this work, she said the findings show that "there is huge potential to develop chair-side tools to determine a patient's susceptibility to disease." Kumar and colleagues collected samples of bacteria from the saliva, tooth surfaces and under the gums of the study participants.

More than 60 per cent of bacteria in the human mouth have never been classified, named or studied because they won't grow in a laboratory dish, so the researchers identified the different species - or species-level operational taxonomic units - by sequencing their DNA.

The study was published in the journal PLOS ONE

THE TIMES OF INDIA 

PROOF OF ALIEN LIFE ON EARTH

A team of British scientists is convinced it has found proof of alien life, after it harvested strange particles from the edge of space.

The scientists sent a balloon 27km into the stratosphere, which came back carrying small biological organisms which they believe can only have originated from space.
Professor Milton Wainwright told The Independent that he was "95 per cent convinced" that the organisms did not originate from earth.

 "By all known information that science has, we know that they must be coming in from space," he said. "There is no known mechanism by which these life forms can achieve that height. As far as we can tell from known physics, they must be incoming."
Some of the samples were captured covered with cosmic dust, adding further credence to the idea that they have originated from space.
"The organisms are not usual," said Professor Wainwright, who works at the University of Sheffield’s Department of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology. "If they came from earth, we would expect to see stuff that we find on earth commonly, like pollen."
"We're very, very confident that these are biological entities originating from space," he said, acknowledging that absolutely certainty is hard to achieve in science.

The team believes that the entities are coming from comets, which are big balls of ice shooting through space. The samples were collected during a meteorite shower from a comet. As they hit the earth's atmosphere, the comets melt - ablate, to give it a technical term - releasing the organisms as they break down.
"The particles are very clean," added Prof Wainwright. "They don't have any dust attached to them, which again suggests they're not coming to earth. Similarly, cosmic dust isn't stuck to them, so we think they came from an aquatic environment, and the most obvious aquatic environment in space is a comet.
"They're very unusual beasts, not your normal kind of life from earth."
 

MINI COMPUTER IN BRAIN FOUND

Scientists have found that dendrites, the branch-like projections of neurons, act as mini-neural computers - actively processing information to multiply the brain's computing power.
Dendrites were thought to be passive wiring in the brain but researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with their colleagues have shown that these dendrites do more than relay information from one neuron to the next.

"Suddenly, it's as if the processing power of the brain is much greater than we had originally thought," said Spencer Smith, an assistant professor in the UNC School of Medicine.

The findings could change the way scientists think about long-standing scientific models of how neural circuitry functions in the brain, while also helping researchers better understand neurological disorders.

Axons are where neurons conventionally generate electrical spikes, but many of the same molecules that support axonal spikes are also present in the dendrites.
Previous research using dissected brain tissue had demonstrated that dendrites can use those molecules to generate electrical spikes themselves, but it was unclear whether normal brain activity involved those dendritic spikes. For example, could dendritic spikes be involved in how we see?

Smith's team found that dendrites effectively act as mini-neural computers, actively processing neuronal input signals themselves.
Researchers used patch-clamp electrophysiology to attach a microscopic glass pipette electrode, filled with a physiological solution, to a neuronal dendrite in the brain of a mouse. The idea was to directly "listen" in on the electrical signalling process.

DEVICE THAT CAN STORE DATA FOR 10 MILLION YEARS

Scientists have designed a nearly indestructible data storage disc that can store data for a million years — even if you barbecue it. Although the amount of data that can be stored has increased immensely during the past few decades, it is still difficult to actually store data for a long period. 

Jeroen de Vries from the University of Twente MESA + Institute for Nanotechnology , Netherlands, has developed an optical information carrier that can store information for extremely long periods, with each bit being written using etching techniques.

The chosen information carrier is a wafer consisting of tungsten encapsulated by silicon nitride. Tungsten was chosen because it can withstand extreme temperatures . A QR code — a type of is 2D barcode — etched into the tungsten and is protected by the nitride. Each pixel of the large QR code contains a smaller QR code that, in turn, stores different information . In order to ensure the stability of the data , an energy barrier that separates the information from the non-information is required.

Current hard disk drives have the ability to store vast amounts of data but last roughly ten years.

To prove that the data is still legible after millions of years, an aging test is required . "According to the Arrhenius model, the medium should keep working for at least 1 million years if it is heated to a temperature of 200 degrees Celsius and kept in the oven for an hour," said De Vries. After the test, it was still easy to read the information .