Researchers looking for a novel strategy to fight pancreatic cancer say that radioactive bacteria can attack and kill diseased cells without harming healthy tissue.

With a five-year survival rate of only 4 percent, pancreatic cancer is one of the deadliest forms of the disease. The National Cancer Institute predicts more than 45,000 new cases of pancreatic cancer will be diagnosed and nearly 38,500 people will die from it this year. The disease is often difficult to fight because it is hard to detect in its early stages., The cancer has typically already spread or metastasized by the time noticeable symptoms appear, and there are currently no effective cures for its advanced form.

Scientists at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City were investigating the bacterium Listeria monocytogenes as a potential vehicle to deliver treatments for the cancer. Wild versions of the microbe are responsible for causing a dangerous form of food poisoning, but the researchers were experimenting with a weakened strain of the organism. The idea was to use a genetically modified version of the germ to carry molecules normally seen on tumors around the body so the immune system could recognize cancerous cells as threats — the biological equivalent of passing around wanted posters to police officers.

Unexpectedly, they discovered that even when weakened, Listeria could infect cancer cells. “We were very surprised to see the Listeria infecting the tumors,” says Claudia Gravekamp, an associate microbiology and immunology professor who led the research.

Fighting fire with fire

The bacterium was able to infect cancer cells because tumors pump out molecules known as cytokines that suppress immune cells. Normally cytokines help protect tumors by preventing the immune system from attacking compromised cells, but cytokines have no effect on Listeria, so the germs were able to bypass the defensive mechanism.

To make Listeria dangerous to cancers without also making the bacterium more dangerous to healthy cells, the scientists decided to attach the radioactive isotope rhenium-188 onto the microbe. This radioactive material accumulates in tumors as the bacteria infect them, killing the cancers with radiation over time. Rhenium-188 emits beta particles, a form of radiation that is highly effective against cancer. However, in healthy tissue, immune cells quickly destroy the weakened germs and clear them from the body before they have time to seriously damage healthy cells with radiation.

“The Listeria is less harmful to patients than chemotherapy,” Gravekamp says.

Promising start

In experiments, the scientists injected the radioactive bacteria into mice with pancreatic cancer once a day every day for one week, followed by one week of rest and single injections on four additional days. The bacteria grew rapidly in tumors and not at all in healthy tissues, resulting in a 90 percent reduction in the number of metastatic tumor cells and a 64 percent reduction in the primary pancreatic tumors that were the source of the metastasis compared with untreated mice. Neither the radiation nor the bacteria were detectable one week after treatment, and the mice apparently experienced no significant ill effects.

“We were very excited because it is very difficult to treat pancreatic cancer,” says researcher Ekaterina Dadachova, a radioimmunotherapy specialist at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. “We were able to eliminate metastases in this mouse model of pancreatic cancer, and we hope that this will be also possible in humans.”

The research team’s goal now is to clear 100 percent of the metastatic tumors, since any cancer cell can potentially form new tumors. The scientists plan on refining their strategy by tinkering with the injection schedule, using higher doses of radiation or loading the bacteria with extra anticancer agents.

The scientists detailed their findings online April 22 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the school has filed a patent application covering their innovation.

This article comes courtesy of The Txchnologist, GE's blog about innovation in science and technology.

Snakes. In the ancient Maya ruins where I'm working at with archaeologists, the creatures we fear most are probably the snakes.

That fact might sound like the punchline to an Indiana Jones joke, until you hear about the most dreaded serpent here in the jungles of Belize. The fer-de-lance is likely the deadliest snake in Latin America, packing an amputate-if-you're-lucky bite if it goes untreated. Its long fangs can go right through a boot, and it's aggressive - unlike many snakes that seem more afraid of us than we are of them, the fer-de-lance won't hesitate to strike.

Luckily, killing snakes is what one of our local experts Mandito knows how to do. Not with the machete, although he certainly knows how to swing his. No, this summer, when Mandito saw a snake, he cut down a nearby sapling, crafted a spear from it with one or two quick hacks of his blade, and then stabbed the serpent to death.

So why am I here with archaeologists daring the snakes of Belize? Why did I help excavate human remains this year from ruins, and hang from vines, roots and branches off the side of a giant stone pyramid last year? We're hunting clues to a longstanding mystery - the collapse of the ancient Maya empire.

The ancient Maya civilization encompassed an area twice the size of Germany, occupying what is now southern Mexico and northern Central America, including Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras. At the height of the Maya empire, known as the Classic period, which stretched from roughly 250 AD to at least 900 AD, perhaps as many as 25 million people lived there, achieving a population density greater than that of medieval Europe.

For uncertain reasons, the ancient Maya civilization apparently collapsed more than a thousand years ago, with its population declining catastrophically to a fraction of its former size. Researchers want to find out why.

The area where we excavate is known as Blue Creek in western Belize near the southern border of Mexico, which archaeologists at the Maya Research Program have investigated for more than two decades now. Researchers and volunteers such as myself dwell at base camp at Blue Creek in the summer on a hill surrounded by cattle pastures tended by cowboys.

Roughly 25,000 Maya once dwelled in Blue Creek home, making it a relatively small population center. However, it seems to have been unusually important for its size - for instance, the fifth-largest known cache of jade in Central America was found here, and even the poor were found buried with the precious stone.

Excavations involve us climbing onto pickup trucks every morning for drives that can swerve back and forth and buck up and down over very bumpy and often muddy roads, sometimes in pouring, stinging rain. Troops of howler monkeys wail in the canopies, sounding much like how you might imagine dinosaur roars would've seemed.

The work can be hard, no doubt. We have to lug buckets of equipment and jugs of water up and down slippery trails each day. Pick and shovel work to excavate dirt and rock in the hot sun can be backbreaking - there are days when I figure we've each literally moved a ton of earth. All this is no easier in the rain, which just soaks the dirt and makes it heavier to haul. Mosquito bites and monkeys throwing excrement at us don't help either.

But it all seems worth it to us when we spot a pair of jaguars on the trail in the morning. When we discover jade ear spools, or obsidian blades, or ornaments made of shell. When we clear all the dirt and foliage off pyramids and tombs to reveal what they once looked like. When we get to delicately work on human burials, we can exhume remains that directly tell us what the people here were like. We can speculate about the lifestyles they might have lived, with their teeth inlaid with jade, or filed to points like vampire fangs.

And we certainly make sure to enjoy ourselves as well. Sometimes quietly, gazing at stars on the roof at night, or dozing off in a hammock. Sometimes more raucously, such as by wearing horse pinata heads and drawing on our bodies and tying up an intern who'd fallen asleep in a hammock and spray-painting his foot orange. (Great line from him when he groggily woke up amid a tangle of tape and rope, shooting us the finger on both of his hands - "What is this witchcraft?")

For all the questions we're out here to answer, we intriguingly tend to unearth just as many enigmas. For instance, at Tulix Muul ("Dragonfly Hill," named after the dragonflies seen there when the site was discovered), over a cluster of human burials, a mystery was found in a nook in a wall - a leg bone was plastered into place like a pillar within the cubbyhole, and then a perfectly round pot rim was fitted into place into the entry of the cavity. Nothing like this has apparently been seen in the ancient Maya world before, and its meaning and significance remain entirely unclear.

Other puzzles get slowly answered over time. For instance, on a hill directly facing our base camp, a perfectly round structure was discovered - unusual, since the ancient Maya of Blue Creek didn't build round stone buildings. It turns out it may have been a shrine of a style imported from the neighboring Yucatec in the Terminal Classic, the waning days of the Classic period. A structure like this foreign-styled shrine to helps reveal that the collapse of the ancient Maya civilization did not impact everyone there equally. This area might have held out by forming ties with neighboring cultures.

There is a lack of precision when it comes to dating certain artifacts of the Late and Terminal Classic period here, such as ceramics, which can make it hard to judge how the site collapsed. However, researchers at the Maya Research Program are now seeking to improve this precision by applying cutting-edge dating techniques. This should help lead to a much more refined idea of the nature of Blue Creek's abandonment.

There are undoubtedly risks we face coming out here. In seems venomous creatures of every kind found on land lurk out here in addition to the snakes - scorpions, centipedes, army ants, and killer bees (really). First morning before working on ruins here, I saw a tarantula the size of my hand. Even the plants are no joke - one tree has a sticky black sap that can raise terrible boils on the skin.

These risks pretty much confirm what everyone's always suspected about archaeology. We all have to be like Mandito. We all have to be a bit badass.

All around the world, cities are spreading out into the surrounding land — but nature is unexpectedly asserting itself in the heart of the metropolises, as well. A number of carnivores are not just adapting to cities around the globe, but actually thriving. And meanwhile some urban trees can grow as much as eight times faster than their rural counterparts.

We talked to some experts on urban wilderness — and learned that the cities of the future may be where the wild things are.

Top image: Tom Page on Flickr.

Cities are among the most challenging realms for carnivorous mammals to live, lacking much in the way of sheltering vegetation and other natural resources. Still, as cities grow, the habitats for these animals are disappearing worldwide. As their natural homes vanish, many carnivores have rooted themselves in metropolises as a means of survival.

"If urban co-existence with humans is the future for many species of carnivore, it is important that we know as much about it as possible," behavioral ecologist Philip William Bateman at the University of Pretoria in South Africa tells io9. "Animals in urban environments will either adapt or become extinct — with the spread of urbanization, this is the future for most species."

Wild creatures in the city

The red fox, coyote, raccoon, Eurasian badger and other medium-sized carnivores not only survive in cities, but have managed to prosper, living off garbage, fruit, rodents, birds, pets, livestock, roadkill and food that people intentionally leave out for them. For instance, during the 1990s, there was a 15-fold increase in the numbers of coyotes removed annually from the Chicago metropolitan area. And Florida raccoons have reached a population density between four and 400 times greater than their rural cousins.

Meanwhile, even though large carnivores such as bears, wolves and hyenas may not live permanently within cities, they can nevertheless significantly benefit from living close to them. For example, there has been a 10-fold increase in complaints about black bears venturing into urban areas of Nevada.

Why do some carnivores fare so much better than others in cities? Having a general diet is key. Body size is another issue — large sizes can help creatures survive when traveling from one scrap of habitat to another, but getting too large can also put too much of a strain on any resources they find within these fragments.

Still, in the very long term, cities that seem good for carnivores may be very bad for them indeed. "Black bears in Nevada appear to be attracted to towns, [but they] become fatter and breed earlier there. [They] die young and cannot [breed] enough young to replace these deaths. Cities are death traps for that species," Bateman says.

Research on how animals adapt to cities could point to new ways to help us conserve these endangered carnivores. For instance, "British red foxes like urban areas with big, well-vegetated gardens," Bateman tells io9. "The trend to smaller gardens and the splitting up of old houses into apartments with more people and more cars bodes ill for foxes. Maintaining even relatively small 'green lung' areas might mean providing enough resources to keep these animals in urban areas — if, of course, people do want them there."

Conserving urban carnivores can be a tricky business. "In Australia, for example, urban environments may be important for species such as bandicoots, possums and various reptiles, but they are also good for the introduced red fox, which prey on all these," Bateman says. "Being able to identify what is good for natives and bad for invasive [species] would be invaluable."

While such work could help conserve these animals, "urban carnivores are still carnivores — best stay away from them," Bateman cautions. "They are not domesticated. They are choosing resources near humans, they are not choosing to be friendly to humans." Bateman and his colleague Patricia Fleming detailed these findings online April 19 in the Journal of Zoology.

City trees grow eight times faster.

Scientists have also analyzed how plants are faring in cities, focusing on the red oak. These trees and their close relatives dominate areas, ranging from northern Virginia to southern New England. Researchers planted red oak seedlings in northeastern Central Park, in two forest plots in the suburban Hudson Valley, and near the city's Ashokan Reservoir, in the Catskill foothills, some 100 miles north of Manhattan. All the trees were given fertilizer and weekly watering.

Large cities are hotter than surrounding countryside — a well-known phenomenon known as the urban heat island effect, that is a result of solar energy getting absorbed by pavement, buildings and other infrastructure, and then radiated back into the air. The city seedlings experienced maximum daily temperatures averaging more than 4 degrees F higher, and minimum averages were more than 8 degrees F higher.

After growing from May to August, the city seedlings had grown eight times more biomass than the country ones, mainly by putting out more leaves. "We never suspected the response would be so dramatic," researcher Kevin Griffin, a tree physiologist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, tells io9. "I'm happy to know that young native trees are doing well in the city, and that all the hard work the parks department and the Central Park Conservancy does to plant and maintain so many trees appears to be supported by a favorable growing environment."

The city also has higher levels of airborne nitrogen, a fertilizer, due to air pollution — which could have helped the trees as well. Still, temperature seemed to be the main factor behind their super-charged growth. The scientists detailed their findings online April 5 in the journal Tree Physiology.

"People should be aware that urbanization has impacts on living organisms that are not always intuitive or simple to predict," Griffin says. "For example, I'm sure most people first think of how hot the day was — the maximum temperature — when they consider the effect of temperature or temperature change, yet our work suggests that the main response may be to nighttime temperatures."

Still, "people should not think that accelerated growth in young native trees translates to larger mature trees," Griffin says. "We just don't know if that is the case, but certainly the large trees in Central Park are not eight times larger than the mature trees I work on in Black Rock Forest, one of our rural sites."

Given how half the human population now living in cities, understanding how nature will interact with metropolises is key. "With human influence spreading across the globe, nature and urban environments are inseparable," Griffin says. "Plants can adapt to these changes in their environments, and in this case, really thrive in a human environment."

Also, with temperatures projected to rise globally, "cities are special places — they might be laboratories for what the world will look like in coming years," forest ecologist Gary Lovett at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in upstate New York said in a statement. "What kinds of trees are doing well there now might be related to what kinds might do well up here, in a number of years."

Eyes move constantly when we think, when it might make more sense to look straight at whatever we are looking at. Now scientists are teasing apart what causes our eyes to move when we are thinking and not looking.

Past research suggests that rightward shifts, which are linked with the left hemisphere of the brain, were said to occur when a question elicited verbal thinking, while leftward shifts linked more with the right hemisphere were said to happen when a question elicited visual imagery. However, these findings are not always consistent.

Now, researchers at Queens College in New York found that on average, people move their eyes twice as often when sifting through their long-term memory — for instance, when they are thinking about the sounds or shapes of letters, or when asked to name words that rhyme with a specific word. This pattern occurs not only when people are in face-to-face situations with others, but even when they are in the dark or have their eyes closed.

Their work suggests that the eye movements have little functional value — asking people to move their eyes does not make them remember any better, and asking them not to move their eyes does not make them remember any worse. Instead, the investigators suggest that eye movements and long-term memory may simply share circuits in areas such as the basal ganglia, cerebellum, frontal eye fields, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, as well as others.

The scientists detailed their findings in the April issue of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

Credit: Subbotina Anna/Shutterstock.

Why fire a cannon at a model of an Israeli shipwreck? For science, naturally!

The vessel in question was found in the walled port city of Akko — known in English as Acre — the historically strategic coastal link to the Levant. The shipwreck apparently dates to the 1840 campaign the British, Austrians and Ottomans waged against the Egyptians who held Akko at the time. A direct hit by a shell on the main powder magazine in November of that year caused a giant explosion, and Akko was taken the following day.

The wreck was discovered in Akko harbor at a depth of about 12 feet and its roughly 75-foot-long hull was excavated over a span from 2006 to 2008. Researchers think it was a small armed Egyptian vessel with 16 guns in total — 11 cannonballs, several lead bullets, and six muskets were found inside, among other finds.

The sides of the ship were made of solid oak about 6.7 inches thick, raising the question of what protection they offered against cannon fire. To find out, researchers created a scale model to shoot at, assuming that a roughly 12-pound cannonball found in the shipwreck site was a typical projectile.

They found that a 12-pounder cannonball would have easily penetrated the side of the original ship, causing much internal damage. Their experiments also showed in gunners truly wanted to be nasty, they made sure cannonballs traveled slower — that increased the number and size of splinters generated, potentially inflicting more casualties.

The scientists detailed their findings online February 23 in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

Credit: National Maritime Museum, Haifa, Israel.

Were the Selk'nam the Sumos of South America? Bones of an extinct people of Tierra del Fuego, "the Land of Fire," suggest they may indeed have been the mighty wrestlers that Charles Darwin and others said they were.

Magellan came across the coastline of Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of Argentina in 1520, seeing 100 plumes of smoke. He actually named it Tierra del Fumo, "the Land of Smoke," but upon his return, the story goes that Holy Roman Emperor Charles V changed the name to Tierra del Fuego, noting that there was no smoke without fire.

In the rugged, mountainous, forested north of Tierra del Fuego dwelled the Selk'nam, a now-extinct people who hunted with bow and arrows, living nearly exclusively off a small species of llama known as the guanaco. The Selk'nam were the most feared and demonized of those living in Tierra del Fuego by both indigenous peoples and European settlers, and were often described as powerful giants, researchers said.

The diaries and logs of Charles Darwin, as well as those of Robert Fitzroy, the captain of the HMS Beagle, suggest the Selk'nam were indeed imposing — tall, broad and massively muscular. Fitzroy also recounted wrestling bouts with the Selk'nam, who easily bested his crew. A son of a Christian missionary, Lucas Bridges, wrote that Selk'nam wrestling involved holding the arms of one's opponent and attempting to throw him to the ground while never breaking the hold, fighting until one or the other could no longer continue.

Now scientists find trauma in Selk'nam bones of the kind one would expect of mighty wrestling. The researchers analyzed skeletal remains at the Museum at the End of the World in Ushuaia, Argentina. Healed fractures were seen in forearm bones of the kind expected with Selk'nam wrestling.

These findings, detailed in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology, helps reveal how good at fighting the Selk'nam might have been.

Images: WikiCommons.

Both mice and men can find vasectomies a pain. That's what grimaces on the faces of the rodents suggest, thanks to our improved understanding of how rodents express pain.

Scientists want to better know when mice feel pain. There are animal welfare issues of not causing undue suffering, and scientific reasons as well — researchers would like to know when a therapy causes or relieves pain.

Recently, scientists developed a way to measure pain called the Mouse Grimace Scale. Just as people grimace after getting hurt, so too do rodents have pained expressions — their eyes squint, their ears pull back, and their noses and cheeks bulge.

To see how well the scale works, investigators looked at mice who received vasectomies. Scientists apparently carry out the little snips on mice all the time, especially on genetically modified mice, presumably to control how they breed.

As expected, mice apparently grimaced more after vasectomies. They also grimaced less when given painkillers. Science!!!

The scientists detailed their findings online April 25 in the journal PLoS ONE.

Image credit: DJ Langford et al., Nature Methods.

Teachers who make classes stop chewing gum might be right — it can mess with your mind, research suggests. As it turns out, walking and chewing gum at the same time might be more difficult than we ever suspected.

Usually, trying to do more than one thing at once impairs at least one of those tasks. For instance, tapping your finger while trying to remember a list of digits such as a phone number makes the digits harder to recall.

A past study had suggested that chewing gum could improve short-term memory — recognizing words and numbers, for example. Researchers had suggested that perhaps the act of chewing sent more blood to the brain.

However, scientists at Cardiff University in Wales now find chewing gum can impair classic tests of short-term memory — recalling lists of words and numbers in the order in which they were seen or heard. They also saw that people were less able to spot missing items in lists — for instance, that '7' was missing the list '28149365' taken from the digit set 1 to 9.

So what might explain these contradictory results? The scientists at Cardiff noted they used flavorless gum, while the past study used minty gum. Flavor might make a key difference — the brain might better remember tasks linked with pleasant experiences such as nice flavors, they suggest in findings detailed online March 12 in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology.

Image: StockLite/Shutterstock.

People have been punching holes in each other's skulls, for medicinal purposes or magic, since at least the middle part of the Stone Age. Now, researchers have found what may be the first evidence this complex surgical operation took place in the lost civilizations in the Sahara and Nubia, too.

The surgical procedure known as trepanation is arguably the oldest known medical operation in history, with the earliest known evidence for it found dating to about 12,000 BC in Morocco. A portion of the skull was removed for therapy or thaumaturgy — for instance, to reduce pressure within the skull, or to release evil spirits.

Scientists now reveal the Garamantians — a lost civilization in what is now southwest Libya — apparently practiced trepanation, the first time the operation has been seen in the Sahara. The Garamantians, named after their capital, Garama, flourished in the harsh central Sahara for nearly 1,500 years between 1,000 BC and 700 AD. They introduced key innovations to the region, including cities, irrigated farming, trade across the Sahara and a hierarchical, probably slave-owning society.

Archaeologists digging near Garama found three male skulls with signs of trepanning, dating from approximately 1 to 700 AD. The regular shape of all these holes suggests they were made intentionally, as do scrape marks seen in certain cases. The location of most of these marks on the left side suggest they might have been caused as the result of violence with right-handed opponents.

All these patients appeared to have survived the surgery, given the presence of newly formed bone in these holes. This suggests the Garamantians had "knowledge of complex surgical procedures," researchers said in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

Archaeologists have also discovered trepanation in the ancient Nubian kingdom of Kerma. The ancient Nubians have long been thought of as rivals to the more prominent Egyptians who lay to the north of their ever changing borders. The close proximity and interaction of these two civilizations have led to the notion that Nubians copied the traditions of the ancient Egyptians, but this new find suggests the Nubians may have surpassed the Egyptians in some areas of technology and medicine.

The Kerma civilization, which dated between 2,500 and 1,500 BC, was located in what is considered to be the most fertile area along the Nile River south of Thebes. It served as the major middleman for trade between Nubian lands and the Egyptian empire.

One skull from Kerma, probably dating to between 1750 and 1550 BC, had a dime-sized circular hole with clear evidence of healing along its inside edge, the first confirmed Nubian case of trepanation to date. Similar holes have been seen on pyramids from the Egyptian Old Kingdom, suggesting a drill was used here, of the kind to hollow out stone sarcophagi.

"If this is true, it would mean that the Nubians had taken an architectural tool, which was probably introduced to them by the Egyptians years before, and adapted it for a much more sophisticated purpose. This would then imply extremely innovative capabilities and an outstanding intellect on the part of the Nubians," the researchers wrote in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

Image: D. C. Martin, International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

The Javan rhino is incredibly rare and endangered — and now we hope they'll get safeguarded better than ever, following a quadrupling of cameras used to monitor the critically endangered giants.

The World Wildlife Fund and the International Rhino Foundation recently donated 120 cameras to Ujung Kulon National Park in Indonesia. This brings the total number of cameras there to 160.

Scientists believe there are fewer than 50 Javan rhinos (Rhinoceros sondaicus) remaining. The park remains "the last fortress of the Javan rhino population in the world," International Rhino Foundation director Susie Ellis said in a statement.

Javan rhinos, like all rhino species, have been hunted mercilessly for their horns in the entirely mistaken belief that they have medicinal value. Indonesia hopes to increase the populations of the Javan rhino and 13 other endangered species by three percent by 2014.

[Via John R. Platt at Scientific American Blogs.]

Images via International Rhino Foundation, World Wildlife Fund.

Everybody hates atheists. One recent study found that atheists are trusted about as much as rapists — or maybe even less. Why do people find atheists so untrustworthy? Maybe it's because they don't believe there's an all-seeing judge monitoring their actions.

Top image: Pond5/1@henrischmit

Now new research has found that when you remind people of police, judges, courts and other earthly, secular authorities helped reduce distrust of atheists.

Scientists had volunteers watch a video talking about the many successes of the Vancouver Police Department during 2010, or had them subtly reminded about the authorities with a word game that included words such as "jury," "court," and "police." When later asked about their opinion of atheists, those who had experienced these reminders of a higher earthly authority distrusted atheists less than those who had not. The researchers will detail their findings in the May issue of the journal Psychological Science.

These findings suggest that watchful gods and watchful governments can serve similar social and psychological functions. Past research has noted that both gods and governments can give people a sense of control in an unpredictable world — and by serving as monitors to encourage cooperation, they may have served a key role in the cultural evolution of large groups.

The scientists do caution that their analysis depends on how much people actually find their governments worthy of trust. "Had the present experiments been conducted in a country where people have little trust in their government (e.g., Nicaragua or Nigeria), reminders of an inept government might instead have increased distrust of atheists, a hypothesis that we leave for future research," they wrote.

This cool video, showing the anatomy of a small aquatic beetle called Dryops from the inside, won the Best Film of the Year Award at the SkyScan Micro CT Meeting in Brussels.

These images were created via microtomography, which uses x-rays to generate micron-resolution cross-section images of a 3D object to recreate a virtual model of that item, without destroying the original model.

More videos from Javier Alba Tercedor at the University of Granada can be seen at his Youtube page.

For the latest installment of the Avengers vs. X-Men saga, its writer Jason Aaron has a commentary track on Comic Book Resources. In it, Aaron talks about the nature of the drama and its pivotal scenes, including how one scene was almost removed from the book.

A number of commentary tracks are available from comic book creators on Comic Book Resources, such as Brian Wood talking about his new "Conan the Barbarian" book.

More comic book commentary tracks are coming — you can read them here.

The way in which disorderly systems like glasses freeze could shed light on one of the greatest enigmas in mathematics today.

The mystery in question concerns prime numbers, which are essentially the elementary particles of arithmetic — a prime number such as 2 is divisible only by 1 and itself, while a composite number such as 4 is divisible by 1, 2 and 4.

One key tool for how prime numbers are distributed in the universe of numbers is the Riemann zeta function. A better understanding how the zeta function works could help mathematicians understand a mysterious pattern in how prime numbers seem to be distributed, upon which many theorems in math rest.

And now scientists are finding remarkable similarities between how disordered systems like glasses freeze and how prime numbers are distributed.

In glasses, atoms are freeze solid, arranged in a disorderly manner, while in crystals, they are arrayed in an orderly fashion. The way energy is distributed within disordered systems like glasses resembles a random landscape of hills and valleys. As the amount of energy within such a system is lowered, any travelers navigating this landscape would slow and eventually stop. The areas in which they would tend to freeze in place resemble the way numbers cluster with the Riemann zeta function.

And that means that a greater understanding of the process of freezing might help tackle one of the greatest unsolved problems in mathematics. The scientists detailed their findings online April 26 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Image: The zeroes of the Riemann zeta function. Credit: WikiCommons.

The idea that men and women see the world in different ways may be physically true... at least a little bit. It turns out the pupil — the black spot where light comes into the eye — appears wider in women than men, findings that could turn out to be linked with beauty and attraction.

Of course, your pupils can vary in size, contracting and dilating to control how much light enters. The pupil is usually about 3 to 4.5 millimeters wide in adults, although it can reach up to between 5 and 9 millimeters in the dark.

Still, taking that account, scanning the eyes of 379 adults with normal eyes without vision problems revealed that on average, men had pupils 3.5 millimeters wide while women had pupils 3.8 millimeters wide. The scientists detailed their findings in the March issue of the journal Surgical and Radiologic Anatomy.

Intriguingly, pupils not only play a role in vision, but in sex as well. For instance, men apparently unknowingly regard women with larger pupils as more attractive, and the opposite is sometimes true. In fact, over 500 years ago, women in Italy used belladonna extract to dilate their pupils because they believed it would make them more attractive.

Image credit: Valua Vitaly/Shutterstock.

Does God exist or not? That question may never be answered to everyone's satisfaction — but the question of why people become religious might be. Scientists found a way to meddle with the level of analytical thought people used, and in turn were able to influence the strength of people's religious beliefs.

Top image: CowGummy on Flickr.

Most people believe in God or some form of the supernatural, but there are hundreds of millions of atheists and agnostics worldwide. Experiments have only recently begun exploring the specific underpinnings of religious belief, said researcher Ara Norenzayan, a social psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

"When I became a professor about 10 years ago, I was surprised by how little experimental psychology had to say about religion - I grew up in Lebanon during the war, and I understood that religion was really important in people's lives," Norenzayan said in an interview.

An old idea in psychology suggests human thinking is divided between intuitive and analytical thinking. The former leads to quick-and-dirty answers via mental shortcuts and gut feelings; the latter involves more deliberate, effortful thinking. Since intuitive thinking appears to support belief in the supernatural, psychologists reasoned that analytical thinking might be one source of religious disbelief - indeed, questionnaires gauging analytical thinking and religious belief found that people who were more likely to adopt an analytical stance tended to report they were less religious.

In four experiments with more than 650 volunteers in the U.S. and Canada, Norenzayan and his colleague Will Gervais then found a number of subtle ways to influence volunteers into thinking more analytically to see how it affected religious belief. This could simply involve looking at a picture of someone who looks like they are thinking hard about something, like Auguste Rodin's sculpture The Thinker, or looking at words such as "think," "ponder" or "rational." Even reading words in difficult-to-read fonts triggered analytical thinking.

The experiments revealed that volunteers prodded into thinking analytically increased disbelief among believers and skeptics alike, compared with people who did not receive the same cues. "It's a moderate-sized effect - not trivial," says Norenzayan.

The scientists expected plenty of misconceptions and public reaction over their research. "I'm bracing for a lot of hate mail," Norenzayan says.

They emphasized this work does not suggest that either analytical thinking or intuitive thinking is innately superior, because they promote either religious disbelief or belief. "All human beings have both systems of thinking - they both have costs and benefits in any given situation," Norenzayan tells io9.

They also stressed that believers were capable of analytical thinking, and skeptics intuitive thinking. "Theologians reason over religious beliefs all the time," Norenzayan adds.

Finally, they noted that analytical and intuitive thinking are just one piece of the puzzle of why people may favor religious belief or disbelief. "For example, we know very little about how religiosity is shaped by cultural factors, although there's clear evidence it is," Norenzayan says.

Future research will explore whether the increase in religious disbelief is temporary or long-lasting, and how the findings apply to non-Western cultures. Gervais and Norenzayan detailed their findings in the April 27 issue of the journal Science.

Image credit: credit: Ryan DeBerardinis/Shutterstock.

You might think a stomach that lights up would be a liability when you're trying to avoid getting eaten — but the glowing bellies of tiny sharks are helpful in camouflaging them from predators lurking below, researchers say.

The smalleye pygmy shark (Squaliolus aliae), which lives in coastal waters of the southeastern Indian and west Pacific Oceans, only reaches up to 8.6 inches (22 centimeters) long. When silhouetted against weak light from above, these diminutive fish might appear to be easy prey. Hence the tiny light emitters that cover the undersides of these fish.

Velvet belly lantern sharks have glowing skin as well, using it for both camouflage and communication. The researchers find the pygmy sharks probably share an ancestor with the lantern sharks, since they regulate their glows in similar ways hormonally.

The way that the pygmy sharks control their light systems also resembles the way shallow-water sharks control their skin color. This may show that the pygmy shark is "the missing link in the evolution of luminescence in sharks," shark researcher Julien Claes at the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium told io9. The idea is that after shallow-water sharks evolved control over their skin pigment, pygmy sharks evolved control over glowing skin. Lantern sharks then developed even greater command.

The scientists detailed their findings online April 26 in the Journal of Experimental Biology.

Credit for images: J. Mallefet, J.Claes, FNRS/UCL.

The asteroid-mining venture recently unveiled by James Cameron, Google executives and others sounds like it comes straight out of science fiction — but science fictional asteroids have done way more than just provide raw materials.

Here are asteroids from 10 imaginary realms that did everything from provide a supervillain lair to pave the way for alien invasion.

1) The asteroid field in Empire Strikes Back: The asteroid belt near Hoth is easily what the public thinks of when it comes to asteroid fields. Our asteroid belt is nothing like it, though - the giant rocks there are typically way too far apart to pose the kind of thrilling hazard the Millennium Falcon would have to weave through. Jury's still out on giant space monster denizens, though.

2) "The Dynamics of an Asteroid": Sherlock Holmes' nemesis Professor Moriarty was more than just the Napoleon of Crime — he was, well, a professor. In the short story The Valley of Fear from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, we find out Moriarty "is the celebrated author of The Dynamics of an Asteroid, a book which ascends to such rarefied heights of pure mathematics that it is said that there was no man in the scientific press capable of criticizing it." In a number of stories written by others, Moriarty's knowledge has nefarious ends — in "The Adventure of the Russian Grave," he even tries to assassinate Holmes with the Tunguska event.

3) Asteroid M: Magneto is not only awesome because he's played by Gandalf, but because he has an asteroid as his secret villain lair. Asteroid M unfortunately crashed to Earth, but its remains now serve as the mutant sanctuary Utopia near San Francisco, which just goes to show the lengths to which people will go in order to find real estate in the Bay Area.

4) The Little Prince: In this classic, the title character lives on an asteroid named B-612 and ventures from asteroid to asteroid making discoveries about the nature of humanity and the universe. An asteroid discovered in 1993 was named 46610 Bésixdouze, or B-612.

5) Armageddon: In this 1998 film, an asteroid the size of Texas hurtles toward Earth, and NASA sends up oil drillers with a nuke and an Aerosmith prom ballad to save the planet. Lost co-creator Damon Lindelof wrote up a fake sequel idea for Armageddon 2: Armageddoner where the center of the Earth is made of oil, which would keep the level of science in the franchise about right.

6) Footfall: Aliens resembling pygmy elephants bomb Earth with an asteroid in this science fiction classic by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

7) Gateway: In Gateway and subsequent novels from sci-fi author Frederik Pohl, an asteroid in our solar system is found to hold nearly a thousand spaceships left by enigmatic aliens humanity dubs the Heechee. The asteroid, named Gateway, becomes a port from which adventurers can venture on interstellar journeys resulting in riches or death.

8) Edison's Conquest of Mars: In this 1898 magazine serial endorsed by Edison, which boasts the inventor as the hero of the tale, a fleet of spaceships from Earth counter-attacking Mars engages in battle at an asteroid Martians are mining for gold. The story apparently marks a number of firsts in science fiction - in addition asteroid mining, it includes the first space battle to ever appear in print, the first truly airtight spacesuits, the first known literary use of a disintegrator ray, and the introduction of the notion that the pyramids were constructed by extraterrestrials.

9) Gundam: In this anime series, civilization has spread itself across space, including mining asteroids that often become defensive strongholds.

10) The arcade game Asteroids: Seeing as how even the board game Battleship is coming soon to theaters near you, it'd be a good bet the same might happen with this video game classic. Indeed, a movie based on Asteroids has been under development for years.

Top image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Bats can scare people — apparently enough to inspire Bruce Wayne to dress up as one to fight crime. And now, researchers are increasingly discovering what might be good reason to fear bats — they could be the source of a dizzying array of lethal viruses.

And it could be our own fault. At least one of the deadliest viruses to affict the human race recently could have come from bat-eating. Ozzy Osbourne has a lot to answer for.

Scientists have discovered that bats can harbor paramyxoviruses, a large virus family that includes measles, mumps, pneumonias and colds. Two extremely dangerous paramyxoviruses linked with bats, nipah and hendra, can cause brain inflammation killing half of all patients. (The bats themselves apparently suffer no ill effects from the diseases.)

To learn more about the origins of these viruses, researchers tested 9,278 animals from Europe, South America and Asia, including 86 bat and 33 rodent species. They estimate they discovered more than 60 new paramyxoviruses, about doubling the known number, said researcher Christian Drosten, head of the Institute for Virology at the University of Bonn.

Analyzing how similar and different the genes for these viruses were helped the researchers to create family trees for them. "Our analysis shows that almost all of the forebears of today's paramyxoviruses have existed in bats," Drosten said in a press release.

The hendra and nipah viruses that have troubled Asia and Australia really came from Africa, scientists wrote in an April 24 article in the journal Nature Communications. "This results in an urgent need to conduct medical studies in Africa," Drosten said. In fact, many infections in Africa remain unexplained, and may well have been caused by some of the newly discovered viruses.

In addition to paramyxoviruses, bats may also be the origin of some of the most deadly emerging viruses, including SARS and Ebola. This, along with the fact that they can live in communities of millions and can range far and wide by flying, might lead to a knee-jerk desire to want to eradicate them in order to keep us safe.

Instead of demonizing bats, researchers vigorously argue that bats should be protected. They play critical ecological roles, such as eating insects and other pests. Moreover, culling bats is simply not practical, since they could just fly away from any systematic attempt to wipe them out.

The key to predicting and preventing future outbreaks may instead need to focus on human behavior. We should take care when encroaching on their natural habitats and not, say, cage or dine on them. SARS was potentially linked with animal markets. And research has shown that people living in Ebola-afflicted locales eat the bats that harbor the virus.

Knife-wielding robots are increasingly getting unleashed on prostates, a discovery likely to make men everywhere cross their legs. However, our future robot overlords may be gentle with us — it turns out surgery on your prostate that involves the machines seems much safer than surgery without them.

Top image: Spencer Platt/Getty Images.

The standard procedure for removing prostates diseased with cancer was open radical prostatectomy. This involves cuts, say, between your navel and the base of your penis, or between your scrotum and anus — fun, eh? The hope is to prevent the cancer from spreading to other parts of the body — prostate cancer is the second leading cause of cancer death in U.S. men.

A similar procedure, known as robot-assisted radical prostatectomy, has surgeons using robots to see vital anatomical structures more clearly and operate more precisely. Only tiny incisions are needed, leading to less pain and recovery time.

Investigators now find that robot-assisted surgery is now both more common and far more successful than its human-only counterpart. Between October 2008 and December 2009, they saw 11,889 patients undergoing robot-assisted radical prostatectomy, versus 7,389 for open radical prostatectomy. The patients receiving robot-assisted surgery proved less likely to need blood transfusions, have a prolonged hospital stay, and suffer complications during or after surgery, including cardiac, respiratory, and vascular problems.

The researchers detailed their findings in the current issue of the journal European Urology.

Mathematicians have now visualized abstract mathematical objects called flat tori — items resembling donuts with corrugated, fractal surfaces. These were thought to be impossible to envision in ordinary 3-D space... until now.

To imagine a flat torus, imagine a video game with a wraparound screen — for instance, if you go up the top side, you emerge from the down side. In the 1950s, mathematicians Nicolaas Kuiper and the Nobel laureate John Nash demonstrated the existence of this object, called a flat torus:

Imagine taking a square flat torus, wrapping it into a tube, and then bending its ends so they met to form a ring.

Is it possible to visualize this object in 3-D space? You might not think so — after all, a globe cannot be flattened into two dimensions, without distorting the distance between points on it. However, researchers in France have now accomplished exactly that.

The key, they explain, is to use corrugations. They piled up corrugations, until the distances between points was accurate.

The resulting surfaces of the objects are what are known as smooth fractals, which the researchers say lie halfway between fractals and ordinary surfaces:

These findings are more than just beautiful — they could open up new avenues in applied mathematics. For instance, this work could help visualize differential equations that are encountered in physics and biology.

The researchers detailed their findings online April 20 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Weird half-mile-sized objects have now been seen punching through what may be Saturn's strangest ring, leaving sparkling trails behind them. And researchers say these findings could shed light on the oddball behavior of that ring.

The Saturnian ring in question is the planet's F ring, the outermost discrete ring of the planet. The F ring is unusually active, with features changing on a timescale as short as a few hours.

"I think the F ring is Saturn's weirdest ring," said researcher Carl Murray at Queen Mary University of London.

Scientists have known that Saturn's moon Prometheus and other relatively large objects can generate channels, ripples and snowballs in the F ring. However, it was uncertain what happened to these snowballs after they were created.

Now, using the Cassini probe to Saturn, Murray and his colleagues find these snowballs can tear through the F ring, leaving behind glittering trails the researchers are calling "mini-jets." Sometimes these snowballs traveled in packs, creating exotic-looking mini-jets resembling the barb of a harpoon. (Here's a NASA video of a close-up view of a mini-jet.)

"These findings show us that the F ring region is like a bustling zoo of objects from a half-mile in size to moons like Prometheus a hundred miles in size, creating a spectacular show," Murray said. "These latest Cassini results go to show how the F ring is even more dynamic than we ever thought."

Murray's group chanced upon a tiny trail in an image from Jan. 30, 2009, and tracked it over eight hours. The footage confirmed the snowball originated in the F ring. They next went back through the Cassini image catalog to see if the phenomenon was frequent.

"The F ring has a circumference of 550,000 miles, and these mini-jets are so tiny they took quite a bit of time and serendipity to find," said Nick Attree, a Cassini imaging associate at Queen Mary. "We combed through 20,000 images and were delighted to find 500 examples of these rogues during just the seven years Cassini has been at Saturn."

These snows apparently collide with the F ring at gentle speeds of about 4 miles per hour. These collisions drag twinkling ice particles out of the F ring with them, leaving a trail typically 20 to 110 miles long. The scientists presented their findings April 24 at the European Geosciences Union meeting in Vienna, Austria.

These findings are not only an extra piece of the complex puzzle that is the F ring, but they could help shed light on dusty rings in general, including the one around the sun that Earth and the other planets were once born from, said Linda Spilker, Cassini project scientist based at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. "We can't wait to see what else Cassini will show us in Saturn's rings," she added.

It's an incredible discovery: In the rocks outside Cincinnati, paleontologists have uncovered a mysterious ancient "monster" fossil resembling a cactus nearly seven feet long, that researchers are thinking of naming "Godzillus." And they say it's a form of life that defies all known categories of organisms.

Roughly 450 million years ago, shallow seas covered the Cincinnati region. Amateur paleontologist Ron Fine discovered Godzillus - let me admit that I can't stop saying that name - in rocks near Covington, Kentucky, which lies just across the Ohio River from Cincinnati.

"I knew right away that I had found an unusual fossil," explained Fine, a member of the amateur paleontologist association known as the Dry Dredgers. "Imagine a saguaro cactus with flattened branches and horizontal stripes in place of the usual vertical stripes. That's the best description I can give."

Fossils in this area are normally quite small, "the size of a thumbnail to the size of a thumb," Fine told io9. "This new fossil is a monster that just reminded me of Godzilla stomping on Tokyo, especially with its scaly texture."

Fine excavated the fossil last summer and painstakingly cleaned and reconstructed the hundreds of pieces it was found in. "When I finally finished, it was three-and-a-half feet wide and six-and-a-half feet long," Fine said. "My personal theory is that it stood upright, with branches reaching out in all directions similar to a shrub. If I am right, then the uppermost branch would have towered nine feet high."

"Like Godzilla, this is like a giant primordial beast that found itself in a modern era," Fine said. "It doesn't look like it belongs to the period we found it in, the Ordovician, about 450 million years ago. It looks very primitive, like it comes from the Edicarian, more than a half-billion years old, when some of the most primitive multicellular life forms known came from."

What's especially amazing about this discovery is that this region has been among the best-studied in all of paleontology for more than 200 years. It's known for numerous fossils of the extinct armored critters called trilobites. The discovery of an unknown fossil of this size - what might be the largest in the Cincinnati region - is baffling.

"It's definitely a new discovery," said paleontologist David Meyer at the University of Cincinnati. "And we're sure it's biological. We just don't know yet exactly what it is."

Fine added, "We don't even know whether it's a plant or an animal, what kingdom of life to put it into. It just looks that much different from everything else."

The researchers suspect Godzillus may have been a soft-bodied organism, which may explain why nothing like it has been seen in this area until now. "Soft-bodied organisms are almost never preserved - they're incredibly rare in the fossil record," Fine said. Meyer explained that low oxygen levels may have helped preserve impressions of this life form.

Potential clues to how Godzillus might have lived have been found as well. The mystery fossil has several small trilobites latched onto it, which could help reveal simple but key details, such as which end of Godzillus is up. Trilobites are sometimes found on the underside of other fossilized animals, where they were perhaps seeking shelter after molting their shells.

The specimen was unveiled at the North-Central Section annual meeting of the Geological Society of America on April 24 in Dayton, Ohio.