Astronomers Capture the First Image of the Mysterious Web that Connects All Galaxies in the Universe

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S. Cantalupo

This deep image shows the Nebula (cyan) with a size of 2 million light-years discovered around the quasar UM287 (at the center of the image). The energetic radiation of the quasar makes the surrounding intergalactic gas glow revealing the physical structure of a cosmic web filament.

For the first time, astronomers were able to see a string of hot gas known as a filament that is thought to be part of the mysterious underlying structure that dictates the layout of all the stars and galaxies in our universe.

Scientists believe that matter in the universe is arranged into a gigantic web-like structure. This is called the cosmic web.

There are signatures of this structure in the remaining radiation from the Big Bang and in the layout of the universe itself. Without some mysterious force pulling visible matter into this web, galaxies would be randomly scattered across the universe. But they aren't.

We can see that galaxies are found in groups and those groups come together in larger clusters.

Computer models tell us that those galaxy clusters are linked by long filaments of hot gas and dark matter — a mystery substance that we can't see because it doesn't radiate or scatter light but that makes up most of the web.

It's believed that gas and dark matter flow along the filaments to form clumps of galaxies where the strands intersect. So filaments are important because they represent what the universe looks like on a large scale. The problem is that, even though we should technically be able to see hot gas filaments, they are really hard to detect.

To find this strand of gas, astronomers where able to take advantage of an extremely bright mass of energy and light known as a quasar.

The light from a quasar located 10 billion light-years-away acted like a "flashlight" to make the surrounding gas glow, researchers report Jan. 19 in the journal Nature. This boosted the Lyman alpha radiation that hydrogen gas emits to detectable levels over a huge swath of the region.

Anatoly Klypin and Joel Primack, S. Cantalupo

Computer simulations suggest that matter in the universe is distributed in a "cosmic web" of filaments, as seen in the image above from a large-scale dark-matter simulation. The inset is a zoomed-in, high-resolution image of a smaller part of the cosmic web, 10 million light-years across, from a simulation that includes gas as well as dark matter.

The researchers were able to figure out the wavelength of the Lyman alpha radiation emitted by the gas and used the Keck telescope in Hawaii to get an image at that wavelength.

What they were able to see is a cloud of gas extending two million light years across intergalactic space — the largest ever found. And it wasn't just a diffuse cloud, there are areas where there is more gas and areas of darker, emptier space. The gas-filled areas are filament, while the emptier areas are the gaps between filaments and galaxy clusters.

"This is a very exceptional object," first author Sebastiano Cantalupo, a postdoctoral fellow at UC Santa Cruz said in a statement. "It's huge, at least twice as large as any nebula detected before, and it extends well beyond the galactic environment of the quasar."

Researchers think that the gas filament is even more extended since they only see the part that is illuminated by the radiation from the quasar.

The research still "provides a terrific insight into the overall structure of our universe," co-author J. Xavier Prochaska, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz said in statement, since the "quasar is illuminating diffuse gas on scales well beyond any we've seen before, giving us the first picture of extended gas between galaxies."

The Scary Side Effect of One Sleepless Night

Forget hits to the head--just one night of sleep deprivation creates changes in the brain similar to a mild concussion, according to new research from Sweden. 

The small study was done on 15 healthy guys. One night they got 8 hours of sleep in the lab, and another night, total sleep deprivation. The men played games, read, or watched movies to stay awake.

After the all-nighter, blood samples revealed that certain levels of neurochemical markers associated with brain cell damage rose by 20 percent compared to when the guys snagged a full night's rest.

"Dysfunctional sleep has been linked with a range of health problems, and it looks like that's because we're injuring our brain by not getting enough sleep," says Men's Health sleep medicine advisor W. Chris Winter, M.D., medical director of the Martha Jefferson Sleep Medicine Center in Charlottesville, Virginia. Why? Your lymphatic system is 10 times more active when asleep in order to get rid of cell debris and toxins, he says. When you don't sleep, your brain can't clean itself up and you deal with brain fogginess or feel sick the next day.

The good news: Your brain was built to bounce back from the occasional night up--it's long-term repeated nights of little sleep that may cause future damage. So ditch the perception that you might be really good at going without sleep--"it's not a badge of courage," says Dr. Winter. Make clocking the 7 to 8 hours you need every night a priority. If not for your brain, do it for your body: After a sleepless night, you're more likely to crave junk food and skip workouts, according to a 2013 study.

Biggest Spider Fossil Now Has a Mate — But It's Complicated

The largest known fossil spiders (left: male, right: female) belong to a newly described species.

A few years ago, scientists uncovered the largest-ever fossil of spider: a female representative of a never-before-seen species that was buried in volcanic ash during the age of the dinosaurs.

Now the researchers say they have found an adult male spider to match, but the discovery complicates the original interpretation of the species. The scientists have proposed a new genus — Mongolarachne — to describe the extinct creature.

When researchers first found the female spider in northern China, they named it Nephila jurassica, putting it in the Nephila genus of golden silk orb-weavers, which still exist today and have been known to ensnare birds and bats in their huge wheel-shaped webs.

"It was so much like the modern golden orb weaver," said Paul Selden, a paleontologist with the University of Kansas. "We couldn't find any reason not to put it in the same genus of the modern ones."

With soft, squishy bodies, spiders don't typically turn up in the fossil record, but several hundred have been found in the volcanic deposits at the Daohugou fossil beds in Inner Mongolia, Selden said.

Volcanic ash is famous for preserving more ephemeral pieces of the past, from bodies buried in their death poses at Pompeii to 2.7-billion-year-old raindrop impressions found in South Africa. Researchers think these spiders were likely swept to the bottom of a sub-tropical lake and covered in fine ash after a volcano blew its lid.

Unlike insects, spiders are typically pretty good at staying away from water, Selden explained.

"It would take something like a volcanic eruption to blow them into the bottom of the lake and bury them," Selden told LiveScience. "That's the sort of scenario we imagine."

And in that volcanic rock layer at Daohugou, the researchers found another spider that looked remarkably similar to Nephila jurassica, except it was male. There were several clues in the newfound fossil, however, that suggest this ancient arachnid just doesn't fit the bill for Nephila.

First of all, the male was remarkably quite similar in size to the female, with a body that measures 0.65 inches (1.65 centimeters) long and a first leg stretching 2.29 inches (5.82 cm).

"This is rather strange," Selden said. "In the modern orb weavers, there is quite a lot of sexual dimorphism," with a huge female and a tiny male.

Compared with Nephila male spiders, this newfound fossilized male had more primitive-looking pedipalps — the sex appendages between a spider's jaws and first legs that it uses to transfer sperm to the female. And it had a more feathery hairstyle: The fossil was preserved so well that Selden could look at imprints of the spider's hair under an electron microscope. Instead of one or two scales along each bristle, Selsen said he saw evidence that this spider had "spirals of hairlets" along the strands covering its body.

The researchers think the fossilized spiders may actually be more closely related to spiders in theDeinopoidea genus, also called ogre-faced spiders. Arachnids in this group are considered orbicularians. They also make orb-shaped webs, but their silk is more "woolly," Selden said, with a stickiness that's more like Velcro than glue.

Revising their original labeling of the giant fossilized female spider, the researchers created a new genus and species name for the pair: Mongolarachne jurassica. Selden and colleagues also created a branch for Mongolarachne on a phylogenic tree, placing it quite close to the stem where orbicularians originate.

The study was published online Dec. 7 in the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Algae to Biofuels in 60 minutes

Algae to crude oil: Million-year natural process takes minutes in the lab

December 17, 2013 

• Process simplifies transformation of algae to oil, water and usable byproducts

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  Algae Slurry

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RICHLAND, Wash. – Engineers have created a continuous chemical process that produces useful crude oil minutes after they pour in harvested algae — a verdant green paste with the consistency of pea soup.

The research by engineers at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory was reported recently in the journalAlgal Research. A biofuels company, Utah-based Genifuel Corp., has licensed the technology and is working with an industrial partner to build a pilot plant using the technology.

In the PNNL process, a slurry of wet algae is pumped into the front end of a chemical reactor. Once the system is up and running, out comes crude oil in less than an hour, along with water and a byproduct stream of material containing phosphorus that can be recycled to grow more algae.

With additional conventional refining, the crude algae oil is converted into aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. And the waste water is processed further, yielding burnable gas and substances like potassium and nitrogen, which, along with the cleansed water, can also be recycled to grow more algae.

While algae has long been considered a potential source of biofuel, and several companies have produced algae-based fuels on a research scale, the fuel is projected to be expensive. The PNNL technology harnesses algae's energy potential efficiently and incorporates a number of methods to reduce the cost of producing algae fuel.

"Cost is the big roadblock for algae-based fuel," said Douglas Elliott, the laboratory fellow who led the PNNL team's research. "We believe that the process we've created will help make algae biofuels much more economical."

PNNL scientists and engineers simplified the production of crude oil from algae by combining several chemical steps into one continuous process. The most important cost-saving step is that the process works with wet algae. Most current processes require the algae to be dried — a process that takes a lot of energy and is expensive. The new process works with an algae slurry that contains as much as 80 to 90 percent water.

"Not having to dry the algae is a big win in this process; that cuts the cost a great deal," said Elliott. "Then there are bonuses, like being able to extract usable gas from the water and then recycle the remaining water and nutrients to help grow more algae, which further reduces costs."

While a few other groups have tested similar processes to create biofuel from wet algae, most of that work is done one batch at a time. The PNNL system runs continuously, processing about 1.5 liters of algae slurry in the research reactor per hour. While that doesn't seem like much, it's much closer to the type of continuous system required for large-scale commercial production.

The PNNL system also eliminates another step required in today's most common algae-processing method: the need for complex processing with solvents like hexane to extract the energy-rich oils from the rest of the algae. Instead, the PNNL team works with the whole algae, subjecting it to very hot water under high pressure to tear apart the substance, converting most of the biomass into liquid and gas fuels.

The system runs at around 350 degrees Celsius (662 degrees Fahrenheit) at a pressure of around 3,000 PSI, combining processes known as hydrothermal liquefaction and catalytic hydrothermal gasification. Elliott says such a high-pressure system is not easy or cheap to build, which is one drawback to the technology, though the cost savings on the back end more than makes up for the investment.

"It's a bit like using a pressure cooker, only the pressures and temperatures we use are much higher," said Elliott. "In a sense, we are duplicating the process in the Earth that converted algae into oil over the course of millions of years. We're just doing it much, much faster."

The products of the process are:

• Crude oil, which can be converted to aviation fuel, gasoline or diesel fuel. In the team's experiments, generally more than 50 percent of the algae's carbon is converted to energy in crude oil — sometimes as much as 70 percent.
• Clean water, which can be re-used to grow more algae.
• Fuel gas, which can be burned to make electricity or cleaned to make natural gas for vehicle fuel in the form of compressed natural gas.
• Nutrients such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium — the key nutrients for growing algae.

Elliott has worked on hydrothermal technology for nearly 40 years, applying it to a variety of substances, including wood chips and other substances. Because of the mix of earthy materials in his laboratory, and the constant chemical processing, he jokes that his laboratory sometimes smells "like a mix of dirty socks, rotten eggs and wood smoke" — an accurate assessment.

Genifuel Corp. has worked closely with Elliott's team since 2008, licensing the technology and working initially with PNNL through DOE's Technology Assistance Program to assess the technology.

"This has really been a fruitful collaboration for both Genifuel and PNNL," said James Oyler, president of Genifuel. "The hydrothermal liquefaction process that PNNL developed for biomass makes the conversion of algae to biofuel much more economical. Genifuel has been a partner to improve the technology and make it feasible for use in a commercial system.

"It's a formidable challenge, to make a biofuel that is cost-competitive with established petroleum-based fuels," Oyler added. "This is a huge step in the right direction."

The recent work is part of DOE's National Alliance for Advanced Biofuels & Bioproducts, or NAABB. This project was funded with American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds by DOE's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. Both PNNL and Genifuel have been partners in the NAABB program.

In addition to Elliott, authors of the paper include Todd R. Hart, Andrew J. Schmidt, Gary G. Neuenschwander, Leslie J. Rotness, Mariefel V. Olarte, Alan H. Zacher, Karl O. Albrecht, Richard T. Hallen and Johnathan E. Holladay, all at PNNL.

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Reference: Douglas C. Elliott, Todd R. Hart, Andrew J. Schmidt, Gary G. Neuenschwander, Leslie J. Rotness, Mariefel V. Olarte, Alan H. Zacher, Karl O. Albrecht, Richard T. Hallen and Johnathan E. Holladay, Process development for hydrothermal liquefaction of algae feedstocks in a continuous-flow reactor, Algal Research, Sept. 29, 2013, DOI: 10.1016/j.algal.2013.08.005.

Bacterial Competition In Lab Shows Evolution Never Stops

The plate on the left contains about equal numbers of colonies of two different bacteria. After the bacteria compete and evolve, the lighter ones have taken the lead in the plate on the right.  

Evolution is relentless process that seems to keep going and going, even when creatures live in a stable, unchanging world.

That's the latest surprise from a unique experiment that's been underway for more than a quarter-century.

Evolution is so important for biology, medicine and a general understanding of our world that scientists want to understand it as fully as possible. That's why, in 1988, biologist Richard Lenski took a dozen glass flasks and added identical bacteria to each of them. Those 12 populations have been evolving ever since, letting scientists watch evolution in real time.

Michigan State's Richard Lenski pulls cultures of bacteria from a lab freezer.

Day after day — including holidays and weekends — workers in Lenski's lab at Michigan State University in East Lansing feed and care for the E. coli bacteria. The bacteria eat and divide again and again. The original microbes have produced more than 50,000 generations over the last 25 years.

Random mutations have allowed them to get fitter, meaning they reproduce faster. "In evolutionary biology, fitness is this representation of the ability of an organism to survive and reproduce," says Lenski. He explains that all else being equal, organisms that reproduce more quickly will have an advantage when competing with those that reproduce more slowly.

Early on, Lenski predicted his bacteria would adapt and adapt but eventually hit a wall — that they would reach a peak level of fitness they couldn't improve on.

"Evolutionary biologists have long thought of evolution as a process that continues indefinitely because the world is constantly changing," says Lenski. But his bacteria live in an unchanging world — their glass bottles stay at a steady temperature and they constantly are fed the same food.

It turns out, though, that the bacteria haven't stopped evolving, and it looks like they never will, according to a report Lenski's group has now published in the journal Science.

Lenski, along with colleagues Michael Wiser and Noah Ribeck, dug into a freezer that holds samples of the bacteria that were taken every few months over the course of the whole experiment. The researchers can pull out, say, the 10,000th or 40,000th generation and bring these frozen bacteria back to life.

"We can actually compete organisms that lived at different points in time, so we can compete the evolved bacteria head to head against their ancestors," says Lenski.

What they've found is that the bacteria just keep getting fitter and fitter and fitter. The pace of improvement is slowing down, but shows no sign of stopping.

In their tests, the original ancestor doubles its population in about an hour, says Lenski, but the 50,000th generation can do that in around 40 minutes. And the researchers calculate that future generations will reproduce even faster. "We predicted that in about a million years, their doubling time might be on the order of about 20 minutes," says Lenski.

He says some bacteria can actually achieve that, in environments more rich in nutrients than the flasks in his lab, so it doesn't seem like a crazy, ridiculous prediction.

Still, that would be a lot of change for creatures living in an unchanging world, and it offers a new insight on how evolution can just keep on going and going.

Does Lenski think his long-term experiment will still be around in million years, to test his predictions? "I doubt it," he says.

But he would love to see it last another 25 years, at least. "I think it's still got a lot to teach us about how evolution works under these very idealized but very transparent conditions," says Lenski, who eventually plans to pass the experiment on to a younger scientist.

Ancient Seawater Found in the Chesapeake Bay

Seawater discovered near the Chesapeake Bay is up to 150 million years old

Not only is the Chesapeake Bay so enormous it can be seen from space, it essentially came from outer space.

An asteroid or huge chunk of ice slammed into Earth about 35 million years ago, splashing into the Early Cretaceous North Atlantic, sending tsunamis as far as the Blue Ridge Mountains and leaving a 56-mile-wide hole at the mouth of what is now the bay.

But a newly published research paper written by U.S. Geological Survey scientists shows that wasn’t the end of it. While drilling holes in southern Virginia to study the impact crater, the scientists discovered “the oldest large body of ancient seawater in the world,” a survivor of that long-gone sea, resting about a half-mile underground near the bay, according to the USGS.

Gas bubbles in groundwater flowing from the open drill-stem casing during the drilling project. Very high helium concentrations were used to help identify the saline water’s origin as Early Cretaceous North Atlantic sea water. Credit: Herbert Pierce

“What we essentially discovered was trapped water that’s twice the salinity of [modern] seawater,” said Ward Sanford, a USGS hydrologist. “In our attempt to find out the origin, we found it was Early Cretaceous seawater. It’s really water that’s from the North Atlantic.”

The findings showing that the water is probably between 100 million and 150 million years old were published Thursday in the journal Nature.

The Chesapeake Bay Impact Crater was discovered in 1999 by a tandem of USGS and Virginia Department of Environmental Quality scientists.

They theorized that a huge rock or chunk of ice slammed into an ancient ocean, sending enormous pieces of debris skyward and forcing monster tsunamis hundreds of miles inland.

Over centuries, the crater became hidden under 400 to 1,200 feet of sand, silt and clay, hampering its discovery for decades.

“It’s the largest crater discovered so far in the United States, and it’s one of only a few oceanic impact craters that have been documented worldwide,” USGS hydrologist David Powars said at the time.

The bay crater is shallower and smaller than another off the coast of Mexico, which most scientists believe caused the extinction of dinosaurs, Powars said.

Five years after the Chesapeake crater’s discovery, Sanford’s USGS team started drilling at Cape Charles, Va., under a $1.5 million grant from the International Continental Drilling Program to study how the earth’s crust absorbed the blow. “We weren’t looking for ancient seawater,” he said.

As the team drilled a half-mile from the surface, it encountered standing water. They first thought it was salty water that occasionally shows up at coastal drill sites. Saltwater is found underground all over the world all the time, often because of huge salt deposits in the ground.

In this case, “we didn’t hit any salt while drilling” at the Cape Charles site, a mile from the bay, Sanford said.

So researchers considered the possibility of boiling, when a meteor impact is so forceful that it heats water and increases its salinity. But after further tests, the boiling theory also didn’t make sense.

Results from more testing showed the water was twice as salty as today’s ocean water. When they analyzed its chemistry, they found high levels of chlorides and bromides, the fingerprint of sea­water from another time, Sanford said.

More tests and digging through research established that the chemistry was consistent with the “vast halite deposits created during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods in the Gulf of Mexico and South Atlantic Basins,” the research paper said.

In other words, the groundwater at Cape Charles, about 220 miles south of the District, had the same salinity as the long-gone Early Cretaceous North Atlantic. When the meteor or whatever it was struck North America and disfigured the landscape, “the ancient seawater was preserved like a prehistoric fly in amber,” the USGS said in a statement.

“This was a surprising site discovery,” Sanford said. “This was not something we were looking for or even expected.”

It wasn’t the first time teams drilling for oil or geologic studies have come across deep groundwater with strangely high salinity, said Jerad Bales, acting USGS associate director for water.

Bales said numerous theories had been offered to help explain those findings. “But, up to this point, no one thought that this was North Atlantic ocean water that had essentially been in place for about 100 million years,” Bales said.

The USGS said the discovery would help scientists to better understand the hydrology of the area, at the very least.

Fourteen years ago, when the crater itself was found, Bales made a prescient statement. He said the discovery would help explain a few strange features in the region, including earthquakes around the crater’s perimeter, a higher rate of sea-level rise around Norfolk and “salty groundwater.”

New Tyrannosaur Discovered in Southern Utah

Paleontologists on Wednesday unveiled a new dinosaur discovered four years ago in southern Utah that proves that giant tyrant dinosaurs like the Tyrannosaurus rex were around 10 million years earlier than previously believed.

A full skeletal replica of the carnivore — the equivalent of the great uncle of the T. rex — was on display at the Natural History Museum of Utah alongside a 3-D model of the head and a large painted mural of the dinosaur roaming a shoreline.

It was the public's first glimpse at the new species, which researchers named Lythronax argestes (LY'-throw-nax ar-GES'-tees). The first part of the name means "king of gore," and the second part is derived from poet Homer's southwest wind.

The fossils were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in November 2009, and a team of paleontologists spent the past four years digging them up and traveling the world to confirm they were a new species.

Paleontologists believe the dinosaur lived 80 million years ago in the late Cretaceous Period on a landmass in the flooded central region of North America.

The discovery offers valuable new insight into the evolution of the ferocious tyrannosaurs that have been made famous in movies and captured the awe of school children and adults alike, said Thomas Holtz Jr., a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Maryland department of geology.

This photo released by the Natural History Museum of Utah shows the fossilized skeleton of a newly-d …

"This shows that these big, banana-tooth bruisers go back to the very first days of the giant tyrant dinosaurs," said Holtz, who reviewed the findings. "This one is the first example of these kind of dinosaurs being the ruler of the land."

The new dinosaur likely was a bit smaller than the Tyrannosaurus rex but was otherwise similar, said Mark Loewen, a University of Utah paleontologist who co-authored a journal article about the discovery with fellow University of Utah paleontologist Randall Irmis.

It was 24 feet long and 8 feet tall at the hip, and was covered in scales and feathers, Loewen said. Asked what the carnivorous dinosaur ate, Loewen responded: "Whatever it wants."

"That skull is designed for grabbing something, shaking it to death and tearing it apart," he said.

The fossils were found by a seasonal paleontologist technician for the Bureau of Land Management who climbed up two cliffs and stopped at the base of a third in the national monument.

This image released by the Natural History Museum of Utah shows a model of a newly-discovered dinosa …

"I realized I was standing with bone all around me," said Scott Richardson, who called his boss, Alan Titus, to let him know about the fossils.

Loewen and others spent three years traveling the world to compare the fossils to other dinosaurs to be absolutely sure it was a new species. The findings are being published in the journal PLOS One.

The fossils were found in a southern Utah rock formation that also has produced the oldest-known triceratops, named "Diabloceratops," and other dome-headed and armored dinosaurs.

There are about 1 million acres of cretaceous rocks that could be holding other new species of dinosaurs, said Titus, the BLM paleontologist who oversees the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. Only about 10 percent of the rock formation has been scoured, he said. Twelve other new dinosaurs found there are waiting to be named.

"We are just getting started," Titus said. "We have a really big sandbox to play in."

Holtz said the finding is a testament to the bounty of fossils lying in the earth in North America. He predicts more discoveries in Utah.

"It shows we don't have to go to Egypt or Mongolia or China to find new dinosaurs," Holtz said. "It's just a matter of getting the field teams out."