NPR– When you think archeology, you think shovels, brushes, brooms and other time-honored tools used to uncover archeological treasures. Now a new way to peer beneath the Earth’s surface may have made an exciting find: more pyramids, buried deep under an ancient Egyptian city.

By studying infrared images taken by NASA satellites, Sarah Parcak and her team from the University of Alabama at Birmingham identified the suspected pyramids in Tanis, Egypt. The ancient city, abandoned centuries ago, is famous as the fictional home of the Lost Ark from the Indiana Jones movies. Satellite images also showed other lost structures, like tombstones and houses, buried for thousands of years.

“What these satellites do is they record light radiation that’s reflected off the surface of the Earth in different parts of the light spectrum,” Parcak explains to NPR’s Rachel Martin. “We use false color imaging to try to tease out these very subtle differences on the ground.”

Those subtle differences are an archaeologist’s clues to what might lie under a rice paddy or a city street. “You just pull back for hundreds of miles using the satellite imagery, and all of a sudden this invisible world become visible,” Parcak says. “You’re actually able to see settlements and tombs — and even things like buried pyramids — that you might not otherwise be able to see.”

What Parcak’s team actually found was 17 structures that had a similar size, shape and orientation to other pyramids in the area. Initial excavations indicate that at least two of the structures are most likely pyramids, but Parcak warns, “we’re not going to be able to say with a 100-percent certainty that they are pyramids until they’re excavated.”

Read full article and transcript of broadcast at 17 Hidden Pyramids Discovered with Satellite.

© 2011 NPR

Photo by Flickr user apdk

5/18/11

NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC– If you look to the stars tonight, consider this: No matter how innumerable they may seem, there are far more planets than stars lurking out there in the darkness, a new study suggests.

The study uncovered a whole new class of worlds: Jupiter-like gas giants that have escaped the gravitational bonds of their parent stars and are freely roaming space.

What’s more, “our results indicate that such planets are quite common,” said study team member David Bennett, an astronomer at Notre Dame University in Indiana.

“There’s a good chance that the closest free-floating planet is closer to Earth than the closest star.”

Ohio State University astronomer Scott Gaudi added, “It’s not surprising that free-floating planets are out there”—they’ve been predicted by planet-formation theories for years—”it’s just how many of them that they’re finding.”

The findings, detailed in this week’s issue of the journal Nature, indicate there are about two free-floating planets per star in our galaxy—and perhaps in other galaxies, too.

Read full article about Alien Planets Outnumber Stars, Study Says.

© 2011 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Photo by Flickr NASA

BIO SCHOLAR– Scientists have discovered a regulator of gene activity that tells epidermal stem cells when it”s time to grow more skin, as well as a “crowd control” molecule that can sense cell crowding and turn the growth off.

The study, in mice and in human cancer cells, provides clues to new therapeutic strategies for cancer, particularly squamous cell carcinoma, the second most common skin cancer, in which epidermal cell growth is inappropriately turned on.

The findings could also aid efforts to grow skin grafts and treat burn patients.

We have found a molecular switch that tells your skin to keep growing or stop growing,” said Fernando Camargo at Children’s Hospital Boston.

Read more on Scientists Find Molecular Switch That Controls Skin Growth.

© 2011 BioScholar News

Photo by flickr user kaibara87

THE GLOBE AND MAIL INC – In September, a privately held and highly secretive U.S. biotech company named Joule Unlimited received a patent for “a proprietary organism” – a genetically adapted E. coli bacterium – that feeds solely on carbon dioxide and excretes liquid hydrocarbons: diesel fuel, jet fuel and gasoline.

This breakthrough technology, the company says, will deliver renewable supplies of liquid fossil fuel almost anywhere on Earth, in essentially unlimited quantity and at an energy-cost equivalent of $30 (U.S.) a barrel of crude oil. It will deliver, the company says, “fossil fuels on demand.”

We’re not talking “biofuels” – not, at any rate, in the usual sense of the word. The Joule technology requires no “feedstock,” no corn, no wood, no garbage, no algae. Aside from hungry, gene-altered micro-organisms, it requires only carbon dioxide and sunshine to manufacture crude. And water: whether fresh, brackish or salt. With these “inputs,” it mimics photosynthesis, the process by which green leaves use solar energy to convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds. Indeed, the company describes its manufacture of fossil fuels as “artificial photosynthesis.”

Joule says it now has “a library” of fossil-fuel organisms at work in its Massachusetts labs, each engineered to produce a different fuel. It has “proven the process,” has produced ethanol (for example) at a rate equivalent to 10,000 U.S. gallons an acre a year. It anticipates that this yield could hit 25,000 gallons an acre a year when scaled for commercial production, equivalent to roughly 800 barrels of crude an acre a year.

Continue reading about A Brave New World of Fossil Fuels on Demand.

Article by Neil Reynolds

© The Globe and Mail, Inc., 2011. All Rights Reserved.

Photograph by flickr user Ben Seidelman

HUFFINGTON POST – 34,000 year-old bacteria were found in Death Valley… alive.

A new paper published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today tells the story of the bacteria, which remained in a virtual “suspended animation” for millennia. “They’re alive, but they’re not using any energy to swim around, they’re not reproducing,” Brian Schubert, the bacteria’s discoverer, told OurAmazingPlanet. “They’re not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves.”

From Live Science:

“It was actually a very big surprise to me,” said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.

“It’s permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules,” said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert’s advisor at the time.

In a Seussian twist to the discovery, the tiny ecosystems discovered in this salt crystals seem to be able to maintain themselves, creating a microscopic, self-sustaining environment, according to LiveScience. However, researchers don’t quite know how the bacteria managed to stay alive so long, as DNA typically degrades over time.

Article by Dean Praetorius

© Huffington Post, 2011

Photograph by flickr user Murat Ertürk