A pair of skulls dug up in a Florida backyard aren’t linked to an unsolved murder mystery after all — they’re ancient artifacts that could date back to as far as 1200.

When the skulls, belonging to a 10-year-old boy and an adult male, were discovered in January, investigators thought they might be dealing with a 1970s murder case, according to MyFoxOrlando.com. But archeologists say the bones show signs of being from Peru or South America, and are actually centuries-old, from between 1200 and 1400.

“The mystery is how they ended up there,” medical examiner Jan Garavaglia said, according to ABC News. “We don’t have any way of finding out.”

Garavaglia, host of “Dr. G: Medical Examiner” on the Discovery Channel, is working with archeologists from the University of Florida to learn more about the skulls’ history, according to MyFoxOrlando.com.

She says the skulls featured an “Inca bone,” linking them to the Incan culture of Peru, according to ABC News.

What’s not clear is how the skulls made it from South America to Winter Gardens, Fla. …

CONTINUED at NY Daily News.

Physicists from the University of Zurich have discovered a previously unknown particle composed of three quarks in the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator. A new baryon could thus be detected for the first time at the LHC. The baryon known as Xi_b^* confirms fundamental assumptions of physics regarding the binding of quarks.

In particle physics, the baryon family refers to particles that are made up of three quarks. Quarks form a group of six particles that differ in their masses and charges. The two lightest quarks, the so-called “up” and “down” quarks, form the two atomic components, protons and neutrons. All baryons that are composed of the three lightest quarks (“up,” “down” and “strange” quarks) are known. Only very few baryons with heavy quarks have been observed to date. They can only be generated artificially in particle accelerators as they are heavy and very unstable.

In the course of proton collisions in the LHC at CERN, physicists Claude Amsler, Vincenzo Chiochia and Ernest Aguiló from the University of Zurich’s Physics Institute managed to detect a baryon with one light and two heavy quarks. The particle Xi_b^* comprises one “up,” one “strange” and one “bottom” quark (usb), is electrically neutral and has a spin of 3/2 (1.5). Its mass is comparable to that of a lithium atom. The new discovery means that two of the three baryons predicted in the usb composition by theory have now been observed.

CONTINUED at Science Daily.

An amazing purple crab is one of four new species of the creature that have been discovered on the Philippine island of Palawan.

They are all variants of the colourful Insulamon freshwater crab and are unique to the island.

However, various mining projects pose a huge threat to them.

Around 50 per cent of the species living on Palawan are defined as endemic, which means they are exclusively native to the island.

‘In the Aqua Palawana research programme I am head of, we have been investigating the biodiversity of Palawan’s inland waters for over 10 years’, says Dr Hendrik Freitag from the Senckenberg Natural History Collections in Dresden.

‘This also included taking a closer look at the Insulamon crabs and we discovered four new species in the process.’

The reddish violet species of the Insulamon crab genus are the only varieties that are endemic to only one or a few islands.

The sea means these creatures are unable to spread elsewhere, as they depend on freshwater at all stages of their development.

Having been completely separated from their relatives, they have developed their own separate species and genera over tens of thousands of years.

‘We have proved that the only previously known type of Insulamon is restricted to the Calamian group of islands to the north of Palawan. The four newly discovered species live exclusively on the actual island of Palawan and make it a unique habitat’, says Freitag.

But this unique biodiversity is under threat. Several mining projects are to be conducted despite massive protests by people from all walks of life and against the resistance of indigenous peoples, according to a statement from Senckenberg.

Freitag adds: ‘The smaller the remaining natural habitat the greater is the risk to endemic fauna and flora. Even minor environmental changes can lead to extinctions.

‘It is all the more important to do research in this region and show that the biodiversity of these islands is unique and worth protecting. That’s why our next step is to investigate Palawan’s species-rich freshwater prawns’.

The study was recently published in the scientific journal Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.

Source: The Daily Mail.

His species is renowned for its ability to blend in, but this tiny critter is even better than most as the world’s smallest chameleon.

Balanced on the tip of a scientist’s fingernail in Madagascar, the-three centimetre reptile is no bigger than the flies that form his average-sized cousin’s lunch.

Scientists discovered four new species – called Brookesia micra – on a small islet just off the main island.

This particular chameleon is now thought to be one of the smallest reptiles on the planet.

Ted Townsend, of San Diego State University, carried out genetic testing on the new species.

He said: ‘Their size suggests that chameleons might have evolved in Madagascar from small and inconspicuous ancestors, quite unlike the larger and more colourful chameleons most familiar to us today.’

Source: The Daily Mail.

A team of rock hounds is in chilly pursuit of meteorites, scouring their snowy surroundings as part of the 2010-11 field season of theAntarctic Search for Meteorites (ANSMET) program.

In a recent blog post fromAntarctica’s LaPaz ice sheet, members of the search team reported the hunting is good.

“We’ve been camping on the icehere for two weeks and they have gone by fast,” wrote Melissa Lane of the Planetary Science Institute, which is based in Tucson, Ariz. “In all, we found 170 meteorites here and the most interesting one,petrologically, seems to be the last one found!”

Lane is a planetary geologist on the Reconnaissance Team, which also includes John Schutt, an ANSMET veteran of 30 years serving as the science lead and safety officer, Serena Aunon, astronaut and physician from NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, and geologist StephenBallou of Beloit College in Wisconsin.

“We’ve all grown accustomed to the stark beauty here,” Lane wrote. “The flatness, the wind, the snow, and even (sort of) the cold are all special here. The team is going to miss this place, but we are excited for new scenery, too. We are moving our camp to the Patuxent Range that is over 100 miles to our NE. We’ll describe it once we see it.”

Better suited for Houdini

The Recon Team arrived at the LaPaz ice sheet Dec. 16, delivered along with its tents, sleeping gear and cooking stoves aboard a Twin Otter aircraft. Two other aircraft delivered snowmobiles the next day, allowing the eager scientists to begin their first meteorite hunt.

“The beauty of the area and sheer fun of navigating our snow machines over endless frozen oceanwaves? was a thrill for all,” said Ballou. “Spirits are high and we are all thrilled to be here, but every facet of our lives here is work. It is challenging to do normal everyday things like dress, eat — and just leaving the tent is often an act better suited for Houdini.”

The Reconnaissance Team is gearing up for 25 more days of camping in Antarctica, coupled with the change of scenery in the Patuxent Range, ”where we can continue our new passions ofmeteorite hunters and huntresses extraordinaire,” Ballou noted.

NASA’s Aunon described in a recent blog what the team faces.

“Winds, winds…and more winds,” Aunon wrote. “In Antarctica the winds are relentless and forced the Recon Team to spend yesterday and this morning inside the tent.

“We did manage to get out in the afternoon, however, and found an additional four meteorites in the field.”

Aunon said preparing to go out on the ice takes the better part of an hour. Team members put on multiple layers of thermal clothing, apply sunscreen, gather equipment and warm up the snowmobiles.

“The Ski-Doos are our best friend out in the field as they carry a survival kit for four people, meteorite gathering equipment, multiple liters of water, food, medical kits, iridium phones and GPSdevices,” Aunon said. “We take extra care in the mornings examining the Ski-Doo engines to ensure peak performance.”

Collection process

ANSMET field work has been supported since 1976 by grants from the Office of Polar Programs of the National Science Foundation and NASA’s Planetary Science Division.

Meteorites have been found in Antarctica since the continent was first explored. The first one was found in 1912, by a member of an expedition from Australia.

So what happens when a team member spots a meteorite?

The collection process starts by using the meteorite hunter’s toolkit, a relatively simple collection of gear: sterile bags to contain the rocks, numbered tags to label them, tape to close and seal the bags, a notebook to take down any distinguishing features of the sample, and scissors to cut the tape or the bags open.

Great care is taken not to touch the meteorite or even breathe on it. Above all, a dripping nose hovering over a specimen is a no-no!

The meteorite is placed in a sterile bag as quickly as possible, usually by putting the bag over it. The meteorite is measured and sometimes photographed, and its size and color and possible classification are noted.

A small aluminum tag with an ID number is also inserted into the bag, and the whole thing is then sealed up tight.

At the end of a good day, a hunter’s backpack can be full of these meteorite samples.

Collected meteorites are shipped still frozen to the Antarctic Meteorite Curation labs at Johnson Space Center. There the samples are carefully dried and cracked open, and small pieces are broken off for study as thin sections.

A day of rest

With the team ready to be transported to its new location, it was informed by briefers at South Pole Station Dec. 29 that weather over the Patuxent Range was not good and that the Twin Otters would be unable to fly out.

“Could it be true? A day off? As much as we would like to continue the search for meteorites, a day of rest was welcome,” Aunon said. “We were able to catch up on phone calls with family and friends, write postcards, wash our hair (very refreshing but time consuming), write in our journals and enjoy a matinee showing of ‘Nacho Libre‘ with the team.”

Now well rested, the Recon Team is primed to continue its meteorite adventure at the PatuxentRange.

“In all, this will require four flights to transfer tents, food, Ski-Doos, fuel, and people. If we?re luckywe?ll have two Twin Otters at our disposal and get everything transferred in one day. We?ll keep you updated,” Aunon said, signing off.

If you’d like to keep tabs on the intrepid explorers and their Antarctic field work, check their blogs by going to: http://humanedgetech.com/expedition/ansmet1011/

Source: Space.

An article published in the Solar System Research magazine reported Several objects resembling living beings were detected on photos made by a Russian landing probe in 1982 during a Venus mission.

Leonid Ksanfomaliti of the Space Research Institute of Russia’s Academy of Sciences published research that analyzed the photos from the Venus mission made by a Soviet landing probe, Venus-13, in 1982.

The photos feature several objects, which Ksanfomaliti said, resembled “a disk,” “a black flap” and “a scorpion.” All of them “emerge, fluctuate and disappear,” the scientist said, referring to their changing location on different photos and traces on the ground.

“What if we forget about the current theories about the nonexistence of life on Venus, let’s boldly suggest that the objects’ morphological features would allow us to say that they are living,” Solar System Research quoted Ksanfomaliti as saying.

No data proving the existence of life on Venus, where the ground temperature is 464 degrees Celsius (867 degrees Fahrenheit), has ever been found.

Source: RIA Novosti.

Species: Mesodinium chamaeleon

Habitat: seawater around Scandinavia and North America, chowing down on a new generation of slaves

Many animals transform themselves almost beyond recognition in the course of their lives. Caterpillars become butterflies and tadpoles become frogs, and if we couldn’t watch them do so we might not even suspect that the two stages were the same creature.

Spectacular as these shifts are, they are only shape-shifting. A tadpole and a frog are both animals, so both must take in food from their surroundings.

Not so Mesodinium chamaeleon. This newly discovered single-celled organism is a unique mixture of animal and plant.

M. chamaeleon is a ciliate – a kind of single-celled animal covered in hundreds of tiny “hairs” called cilia. It was discovered in Nivå bay in Denmark by Øjvind Moestrup of the University of Copenhagen, also in Denmark, and his team. Other specimens have since been found off the coasts of Finland and Rhode Island.

Ciliates using their hair-like cilia to motor around rapidly in water. Most get their food by eating other organisms, rather than by synthesising the nutrients themselves. This marks them as quite animal-like.

Some Mesodinium species are different, though. They engulf other microorganisms, generally algae called cryptomonads. The two then form a partnership: the algae produce sugars by photosynthesis, while the Mesodinium protects them and carries them around.

Such hybrid organisms are animals and plants at the same time. One such species, M. rubrum, only eats red algae and is often found in the algal blooms that form the famous red tides.

These hybrids play merry hell with our attempts to classify organisms into neat groups. “The division between plants and animals is collapsing completely,” Moestrup says. Instead, many microorganisms may be animal and plant at once, or switch between the two, like M. rubrum.

The new M. chamaeleon breaks yet another barrier. It is halfway between a pure animal and a hybrid.

M. chamaeleon takes in algal cells, just like M. rubrum, but it doesn’t keep them permanently. Nor does it digest them immediately, as a hungry animal-like organism might. Instead, the cells remain intact for several weeks before being broken down, during which time they keep producing sugar by photosynthesis. M. chamaeleon also changes colour depending on whether it is hosting red or green algae or both.

“It is quite unusual,” says Moestrup. Other Mesodinium species either retain their captured cells for ages or digest them immediately.

The ability to take in other cells and put them to work is called endosymbiosis, and is one of the most important inventions in the history of life. Some 2 billion years ago, a single cell swallowed a bacterium and used it as an energy source. The descendants of the enslaved bacterium eventually became the mitochondria that now power all complex cells, including ours. Without endosymbiosis, there wouldn’t be any multicellular life.

While the first endosymbiosis may have been a lucky chance, the process now seems to be common, at least among the more complex single-celled organisms. Some are so good at taking in cells that over the years they have switched symbionts. “It happens quite regularly,” Moestrup says.

M. chamaeleon may offer a snapshot of how endosymbiosis developed: the organism is still on the road from simply eating other cells to keeping them alive within itself.

Source: New Scientist.

Two planets orbiting a star 950 light-years from Earth are the smallest, most Earth-size alien worlds known, astronomers announced Tues., Dec. 20. One of the planets is actually smaller than Earth, scientists say.

These planets, while roughly the size of our planet Earth, are circling very close to their star, giving them fiery temperatures that are most likely too hot to support life, researchers said. The discovery, however, brings scientists one step closer to finding a true twin of Earth that may be habitable.

“We’ve crossed a threshold: For the first time, we’ve been able to detect planets smaller than the Earth around another star,” lead researcher François Fressin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., told SPACE.com. “We proved that Earth-size planets exist around other stars like the sun, and most importantly, we proved that humanity is able to detect them. It’s the beginning of an era.”

To discover the new planets, Fressin and his colleagues used NASA’s Kepler space telescope, which noticed the tiny dips in the parent star’s brightness when the planets passed in front of it, blocking some of its light (this is called the transit method). The researchers then used ground-based observatories to confirm that the planets actually exist by measuring minute wobbles in the star’s position caused by gravitational tugs from its planets.

“These two new planets are the first genuinely Earth-sized worlds that have been found orbiting a sunlike star,” University of California, Santa Cruz astronomer Greg Laughlin, who was not involved in the new study, said in an email to SPACE.com. “For the past two decades, it has been clear that astronomers would eventually reach this goal, and so it’s fantastic to learn that the detection has now been achieved.” [Gallery: Smallest Alien Planets Ever Seen]

Chances for life

The two Earth-size planets are among five alien worlds orbiting a star called Kepler-20 that is of the same class (G-type) as our sun, and is slightly cooler.

Two of the star system’s planets, Kepler-20e and Kepler-20f, are 0.87 times and 1.03 times the width of Earth, respectively, making them the smallest exoplanets yet known. They also appear to be rocky, and have masses less than 1.7 and 3 times Earth’s mass, respectively.

Kepler-20e makes a circle around its star once every 6.1 days at a distance of 4.7 million miles (7.6 million kilometers) — almost 20 times closer than Earth, which orbits the sun at around 93 million miles (150 million km).

CONTINUED at Fox News.

*Taken from Geekologie.

If eyes really are the windows to the soul YOU’VE GOT TWO GIANT GAPING HOLES IN THE SIDE OF YOUR HOUSE BRO.

These are the mummified remains of an alien found in Peru. Sure you might think they’re just the remains of a person born with a really unfortunate dome, but no, they’re from an alien. Spanish and Russian doctors agree, yo. You can’t argue with that level of international consensus!

Website RPP is claiming that Renato Davila Riquelme, an anthropologist working at the Privado Ritos Andinos museum in Cusco, has discovered remains of something that isn’t human. Measuring at 20 inches tall, the tiny remains were originally believed to be that of a child, but Spanish and Russian doctors disagree, saying:

*Taken from Fox News.

A giant sea monster, the likes of the mythological kraken, may have swum Earth’s ancient oceans, snagging what was thought to be the sea’s top predators — school bus-size ichthyosaurs with fearsome teeth.

The kraken, which would’ve been nearly 100 feet (30 meters) long, or twice the size of the colossal squid, Mesonychoteuthis, likely drowned or broke the necks of the ichthyosaurs before dragging the corpses to its lair, akin to an octopus’s midden, according to study researcher Mark McMenamin, a paleontologist at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts.

There is no direct evidence for the beast, though McMenamin suggests that’s because it was soft-bodied and didn’t stand the test of time; even so, to make a firm case for its existence one would want to find more direct evidence.

CONTINUED..