Could the 'Egyptian Mummy' Discovered in German Attic be a 20th Century Murder Victim?

German police and forensic experts have been left mystified following examination of an Egyptian-style mummy discovered by a German boy in his grandmother's attic.

Many believed the mummy, discovered by 10-year-old Alexander Kettler inside a sarcophagus complete with hieroglyphic inscriptions, was a fake. It was found in August at the boy's grandmother's house in Diepholz, northern Germany.

However, X-ray and CT scans have now revealed a relatively intact skeleton wrapped up inside the bandages, including a well-preserved human skull with an arrow sticking out of the left eye socket.

To further add to the mystery, examinations also show a metal layer covering the bones of the skeleton and the cotton used to wrap the body dates from the 20th century and are machine-woven.

The bandages have not been removed for fear of damaging the remains. A death mask was also discovered inside the sarcophagus.

German police, prosecutors and forensics experts are now facing a genuine mystery as to the origins of the body.

Pathologist Andreas Nerlich of Munich's Bogenhausen hospital told Spiegel Online: "There's no way this is a typical Egyptian mummy. We're dealing with an imitation.

"But a human body, and perhaps more than one, were used to make it."

Experts are also baffled by the metal which is covering the skeleton.

"Someone went to a lot of trouble to wrap the bones in this covering," Nerlich added. "Perhaps because they anticipated an X-Ray examination, because this is definitely a hindrance."READ MORE

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Johns Hopkins researchers reverse Down syndrome in mice

U.S. researchers said Wednesday they have found a way to reverse Down syndrome in newborn lab mice by injecting an experimental compound that causes the brain to grow normally.

While the study in the journal Science Translational Medicine offers no direct link to a treatment for humans, researchers are hopeful it may someday offer a path toward future breakthroughs.

There is no cure for Down syndrome, which is caused by the presence of an additional chromosome, leading to extra copies of more than 300 genes and causing intellectual disabilities, distinctive facial features and sometimes other health problems.

The team at Johns Hopkins University used lab mice that were genetically engineered to have extra copies of about half the genes found on human chromosome 21, leading to Down syndrome-like conditions such as smaller brains and difficulty learning to navigate a maze.

On the day the mice were born, scientists injected them with a small molecule known as a sonic hedgehog pathway agonist.

The compound, which has not been proven safe for use in human, is designed to boost normal growth of the brain and body via a gene known as SHH.

The gene provides instructions for making a protein called sonic hedgehog, which is essential for development.

“It worked beautifully,” said lead author Roger Reeves of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

“Most people with Down syndrome have a cerebellum that’s about 60 percent of the normal size,” he said.

“We were able to completely normalize growth of the cerebellum through adulthood with that single injection.”

The injection also led to unexpected benefits in learning and memory, normally handled by a different part of the brain known as the hippocampus.

Researchers found that the treated mice did as well as normal mice on a test of locating a water platform while in a swimming maze.

However, adjusting the treatment for human use would be complicated, since altering the growth of the brain could lead to unintended consequences, like triggering cancer.

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Blue Alien Planet Has Molten Glass Rain & Unusual Atmosphere, New Observations Show

This super-hot glass rain is just one consequence of the close proximity between the gas giant alien planet HD189733b and its sun. which causes daytime temperatures to soar as high as 1,700 degrees Fahrenheit (930 degrees Celsius), scientists said.

A fresh set of observations of the planet in X-rays also suggest HD189733b has an outer atmosphere that is far larger than expected. [See more images of the blue alien planet HD 189733b]

These surprise finds are all signals that so-called hot Jupiter alien planets are worthy of study on their own, even though they are hostile planets to life, researchers said.

Hot Jupiters are large, roughly Jupiter-sized planets that become very hot by circling tight around their stars. These worlds have been described as planetary daredevils because they orbit so close to their parent stars that they risk being consumed. Often, one side of the planet is tidally locked to the star, exposing that side to scorching hot temperatures, while leaving the other side permanently turned away.

Hot Jupiters are easy to spot from a distance because as they pass in front of a star, their disc blots out a large portion of the star's light; HD189733b causes a three per cent drop in its star's light, for example. The planets' gravitational pull often causes their parent stars to wobble, too.

While common in the universe, however, Hot Jupiters are totally different than what denizens of Earth's solar system encounter. In our case, small, rocky planets orbit close to the star and the gas giants are much farther out.

The latest observations of HD189733b are challenging some theories of planetary formation and are just one of the reasons Hot Jupiters are earning more attention from astronomers these days.

"At first considered to be the 'chaff' researchers would have to wade through to get to the fainter Earth-like worlds, hot Jupiters are now attracting their own attention," NASA scientists wrote in a recent Science@NASA post about these planets.

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Deep-Sea Squids Tentacles Help Animal Attract Prey, New Research Shows

A few chance encounters hundreds of metres underwater seem to have solved the long-standing mystery of what one squid species does with its unusual tentacles: it pretends they are fish to lure its prey into range.

Until now, the deep-sea-dwelling squid Grimalditeuthis bonplandi had never been observed in the wild by researchers, and most of the knowledge about it came from partially digested specimens pulled from the stomachs of large fish and whales. Most squid have a pair of tentacles with hooks or suckers that they use to grasp food, but in this species the corresponding tentacles are thin, fragile things — and their function has puzzled squid researchers.

Henk-Jan Hoving, a squid researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research in Kiel, Germany, and his team obtained videos of seven of these animals seen in the Atlantic and North Pacific. One of the observations came from an expedition run by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Landing, California, and the other videos were made by commercial remotely-operated submersibles used by the oil and gas industry, and later supplied to Hoving and his team.

Hoving and his team saw the squid move the ends of their unique appendages, known as tentacle clubs, in a way that “really looked like a small fish or squid”, he says. They describe their observations in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. The movement of these tentacles attracts the crustaceans and other cephalopods that G. bonplandi eats. Thinking they are going to get dinner, the prey species move towards the flapping arms, only to be eaten themselves.

“Because nobody has ever observed Grimalditeuthis capturing its prey, we cannot say for sure that this behaviour is an aggressive mimic,” says Hoving, referring to the way in which the squid's tentacles actively mimic a prey species, rather than being used defensively for camouflage, for instance. “However, the movements were so striking and so similar to a small marine organism that we could not come up with an alternative explanation for this subtle and unique behaviour.”

G. bonplandi is commonly found at depths of 1,000 metres or more, where it is too dark for prey species to see its tentacles because no natural light penetrates that far down. Hoving’s team suggests that the squid's mimicry movements could operate by stimulating bioluminescence from surrounding organisms in the water, by creating low-frequency vibrations that other species can hear or by producing a hydrodynamic signal that a prey species would sense as coming from food or a potential mate.

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DNA Evidence Not Very Helpful In THIS Rape Case

DNA evidence normally points to one suspect in a crime -- but what happens when two people share that same DNA?

That's the case with identical twin brothers in England, Mohammed and Aftab Asghar, 22, who both face charges for raping a teenage girl.

The charges are based on DNA evidence -- which authorities believe came from at least one of the brothers -- found at the scene of the crime, The Telegraph reported.

The alleged crime occurred on November 5, 2011. The 17-year-old girl reported being attacked by a group of men in a park, according to British newspaper The Times.

DNA Evidence Not Very Helpful In THIS Rape Case

"It is an unusual case,” prosecutor Sandra Beck said during the twins' court appearance, according to Mirror News. “They are identical twins.... There is further work due and there is an indication which would tend to support that one was not at the location."

If there isn't enough evidence to implicate either brother, the charges may have to be dropped.

This isn't the first instance in which identical twins stumped detectives in a rape case. Earlier this year, twins in Marseilles, France were both suspects in a similar case.

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Cosmonauts Break Spacewalk Record For Russia In Marathon Outside International Space Station

In a record-long spacewalk, Russian cosmonauts rigged cable outside the International Space Station on Friday for a new lab that's due to arrive in a few months.

Fyodor Yurchikhin and Aleksandr Misurkin spent almost the entire seven-hour-plus spacewalk routing 120 feet of power and Ethernet cable. The cable had to be unreeled, then meticulously secured to handrails and hooks.

"Today we are the cable people," one of the spacewalkers commented in Russian as the work drew to a close.

The spacewalk lasted seven hours and 29 minutes, a full hour longer than originally planned in order for the two to get a jump on work awaiting them in yet another outing next Thursday.

Russian Cosmonauts Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin work outside the International Space Station during a spacewalk August 16.REUTERS
Russian Cosmonauts Flight Engineer Fyodor Yurchikhin and Flight Engineer Alexander Misurkin work outside the International Space Station during a spacewalk August 16.
It was the longest spacewalk ever by a pair of Russians, surpassing the former record of seven hours and 16 minutes set at the old Mir space station in 1990.

Americans hold the overall record: a nearly nine-hour spacewalk in 2001.

Friday's spacewalk occurred exactly one month after an Italian astronaut almost drowned when leaking water flooded his helmet during a spacewalk.

Luca Parmitano's spacesuit was provided by NASA. Friday's spacewalkers wore Russian-made suits that differ from the U.S. version.

NASA is still investigating last month's close call. The problem appears to be in the life-support backpack. The spacesuit will be sent back for analysis early next year. Until the trouble is identified and resolved, U.S. spacewalks are on hold.

To reach the cable work site on Friday, Yurchikhin hitched a ride on the end of a 46-foot boom operated by Misurkin.

When Yurchikhin asked if he was positioned properly on the boom, Misurkin assured him, "You look great. You look perfect."

"Thank you," Yurchikhin replied. "I don't want to blush."

"It just looks like you're in space," Misurkin said. "Everything is black around you."

The Russian Space Agency plans to launch a new science lab by year's end. It's the last major piece due at the orbiting outpost, active since 1998, and will replace a 12-year-old Russian docking compartment that doubles as an air lock.

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Insect Sex Study Reveals Surprising Reasons For Bugs' Homosexual Encounters

Insect sex may seem fairly simple: fluttering dances, clasping abdomens, a quick mount on a forest floor. But a new review of homosexual insect encounters suggests the acts may not be that straightforward for the individuals involved.

Researchers have widely examined homosexual behavior in mammals and birds, but have addressed it less frequently in insects and spiders. To assess the range of evolutionary explanations for same-sex intercourse in the invertebrate world, a team of biologists from Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland examined roughly 100 existing studies on the topic and compiled the first comprehensive review of homosexuality in invertebrates. The review was published earlier this month in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology.

The team focused on male-male interactions to simplify the analysis, and found that most of these encounters occurred as accidents. Whereas larger animals have developed more complicated homosexual motivations — like maintaining alliances, which has been found in certain primate and seagull species — insects seem to mistakenly partake in it in a hasty attempt to secure mates. [Gay Animals: Alternate Lifestyles in the Wild]
“They have evolved to mate quick and dirty,” said study co-author Inon Scharf, an evolutionary ecologist at Tel Aviv University. “They grab every opportunity to mate that they have because, if they become slow, they may give up an opportunity to mate.”

Desperate mates
In some cases, males carry around the scent of females they have just mated with, sending confusing signals to other perusing males. In other cases, males and females look so similar to one another that males cannot tell if a potential mate is a female until he mounts “her” and prepares for the act, Scharf said.
Sometimes, such extreme indiscrimination leads to mating with inanimate objects, as has been observed in beetles trying to mount glass bottles.

The glass bottle “looks like a huge female to them,” Scharf said. “They just try to mate with whatever gives them a vague impression of an opportunity.”
Other studies do, however, show evidence of more intentional and malicious motivations behind homosexual insect sex. Male butterflies, moths and wasps, for example, use same-sex encounters to distract competitors from potential female mates. Certain beetles have even been found to use same-sex mounting as a way to spread sperm to other males that may then pass it along to the next female he mounts, though this mechanism does not appear to be very effective.

Since male insect anatomy is not designed to accept male genitals, improper penetration can cause bodily damage in aggressively competing mates. This anatomy blocker is not a problem for all species, since not all insect sex involves penetration. Even so, one study found that certain male insects have developed femalelike genitals to lower the risk of damage from homosexual penetration.

Is insect sex pleasurable?
On the other hand, female-female homosexuality appears to have a separate set of motivations, and deserves a whole separate analysis, Scharf said. In general, female-female interactions seem more intentional than male-male interactions. In fact, one study found that certain female beetles mount each other to look larger and attract more male mates.

The frequency of homosexual behavior in the insect world also remains unclear; however, more cases have been observed in the lab than in the field. This could indicate that the behavior occurs during stressful or isolating conditions, Scharf said, but more work is needed to confirm this idea.
And while the possibility that any sort of sexual encounter could induce pleasure in insects may seem unlikely, Scharf does not rule it out.

“I don’t know if they enjoy things or not, or if they feel fear,” Scharf said. “They have some stress hormones — and they sense it — but whether you can define this as fear, pleasure or pain is very difficult to say.”

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Says Annual NOAA Report Global Warming Not Slowing

Last year was one of the hottest twelve months on record, according to a new report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that analyzed global temperatures and climate trends.

The US government agency’s report was assembled by over 380 scientists from 52 countries. In addition to analyzing temperature data, the annual report also gave the status of other global climate indicators and significant weather events, using data collected by monitoring stations from around the world.

“Many of the events that made 2012 such an interesting year are part of the long-term trends we see in a changing and varying climate – carbon levels are climbing, sea levels are rising, Arctic sea ice is melting, and our planet as a whole is becoming a warmer place,” said acting NOAA Administrator Kathryn D. Sullivan.

“This annual report is well-researched, well-respected, and well-used; it is a superb example of the timely, actionable climate information that people need from NOAA to help prepare for extremes in our ever-changing environment.”

According to the report, greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in 2012, a fact supported by readings taken earlier this year at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory that showed atmospheric carbon dioxide has continued rising to surpass 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time since records have been taken. This number was subsequently revised to reflect a minor miscalculation, putting the real number instead at 399.89 ppm.

Experts noted that some of the report’s most striking details were about changing Arctic conditions. For instance, Greenland’s ice sheet was found to have melted 97 percent – four times greater than the average melt from 1981 to 2010. In general, sea ice around the North Pole also “shrank to its smallest ‘summer minimum’ extent since satellite records began 34 years ago,” the report said.

The NOAA researchers also found that the temperature of permafrost reached “record-high values” in northern Alaska. Climatologists have warned that melting permafrost could release additional carbon into the atmosphere, which it has been sequestering for millennia. This type of climate feedback loop would only accelerate global warming, according to experts.

Sullivan told the Los Angeles Time that she hoped her agency’s annual report would allow private business and policymakers to make educated decisions about resource allocation and emergency preparedness.

“Many of the planning models for infrastructure rely on the future being statistically a lot like the past, and certainly the data should lead one to question if that will be so,” Sullivan said.

“Extreme weather events are more frequent and more intense than what we have presumed.”

While climate change skeptics point out that global temperatures have been leveling off in recent years, John P. Abraham, professor of thermal sciences at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota, told the LA Times that the new NOAA report revealed systemic changes to Earth’s overall climate.

“The latest ‘State of the Climate’ report shows that the Earth continues to heat, the atmosphere is heating, the worldwide ice loss continues, and other symptoms of our warming planet march forward, without cessation,” Abraham said. “A lot of people claim that global warming has magically stopped, but the facts, and the Earth, continue to disagree.”

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Pink Alien Planet Is Smallest Photographed Around Sun-Like Star

Astronomers have snapped a photo of a pink alien world that's the smallest yet exoplanet found around a star like our sun.

The alien planet GJ 504b is a colder and bluer world than astronomers had anticipated and it likely has a dark magenta hue, infrared data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii revealed.

"If we could travel to this giant planet, we would see a world still glowing from the heat of its formation with a color reminiscent of a dark cherry blossom, a dull magenta," study researcher Michael McElwain, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said in a statement from the space agency. [See Photos of the Pink Alien Planet GJ 504b]


Pin It This composite combines Subaru images of GJ 504 using two near-infrared wavelengths (shown in orange and blue). Once processed to remove scattered starlight, the images reveal the orbiting planet, GJ 504 b.
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/NOAJView full size image

"Our near-infrared camera reveals that its color is much more blue than other imaged planets, which may indicate that its atmosphere has fewer clouds," McElwain added.

The exoplanet orbits the bright star GJ 504, which is 57 light-years from Earth, slightly hotter than the sun and faintly visible to the naked eye in the constellation Virgo. The star system is relatively young at roughly 160 million years old. (For comparison, Earth's system is 4.5 billion years old).

Though it is the smallest alien world caught on camera around a sun-like star, the gas planet around GJ 504 is still huge — about four times the size of Jupiter. It lies nearly 44 Earth-sun distances from its central star, far beyond the system's habitable zone, and it has an effective temperature of about 460 degrees Fahrenheit (237 Celsius), according to the researchers' estimates.

The exoplanet's features challenge the core-accretion model of planet formation, they study's researchers say. Under this widely accepted theory, asteroid and comet collisions produce a core for Jupiter-like planets and when they gets massive enough, their gravitational pull draws in gas from the gas-rich disk of debris that circles their young star. But this model doesn't explain the formation of planets like GJ 504b that are far away from their parent star.

"This is among the hardest planets to explain in a traditional planet-formation framework," study researcher Markus Janson, a Hubble postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University in New Jersey, said in a statement. "Its discovery implies that we need to seriously consider alternative formation theories, or perhaps to reassess some of the basic assumptions in the core-accretion theory."

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