Study shows humans are evolving faster than previously thought

Photograph: Imagno/Getty Images

By Hannah Devlin

Humans are evolving more rapidly than previously thought, according to the largest ever genetics study of a single population.

Scientists reached the conclusion after showing that almost every man alive can trace his origins to one common male ancestor who lived about 250,000 years ago. The discovery that so-called “genetic Adam”, lived about 100,000 years more recently than previously understood suggests that humans must have been genetically diverging at a more rapid rate than thought.

Kári Stefánsson, of the company deCODE Genetics and senior author of the study, said: “It means we have evolved faster than we thought.”

The study also shows that the most recent common male ancestor was alive at around the same time as “mitochondrial Eve” – the last woman to whom all females alive today can trace their mitochondrial DNA.

Unlike their biblical counterparts, genetic Adam and Eve were by no means the only humans alive, and although they almost certainly never met, the latest estimate which gives a closer match between their dates makes more sense, according to the researchers.

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New lobster-like predator found in 508 million-year-old fossil-rich site

Credit: Jean-Bernard Caron/Royal Ontario Museum

By Phys.org

What do butterflies, spiders and lobsters have in common? They are all surviving relatives of a newly identified species called Yawunik kootenayi, a marine creature with two pairs of eyes and prominent grasping appendages that lived as much as 508 million years ago – more than 250 million years before the first dinosaur.

The fossil was identified by an international team led by palaeontologists at the University of Toronto (U of T) and the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto, as well as Pomona College in California. It is the first new species to be described from the Marble Canyon site, part of the renowned Canadian Burgess Shale fossil deposit.

Yawunik had evolved long frontal appendages that resemble the antennae of modern beetles or shrimps, though these appendages were composed of three long claws, two of which bore opposing rows of teeth that helped the animal catch its prey.

“This creature is expanding our perspective on the anatomy and predatory habits of the first arthropods, the group to which spiders and lobsters belong,” said Cedric Aria, a PhD candidate in U of T’s Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and lead author of the resulting study published this week in Palaeontology. “It has the signature features of an arthropod with its external skeleton, segmented body and jointed appendages, but lacks certain advanced traits present in groups that survived until the present day. We say that it belongs to the ‘stem’ of arthropods.”

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NASA’s Curiosity rover finds fresh signs of ingredients for life on Mars

Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

By Amina Khan

Mars’s life-friendly past just got friendlier. Using samples previously collected by the NASA rover Curiosity, scientists have discovered evidence of nitrates in Martian rock: nitrogen compounds that on Earth are a crucial source of nutrients for living things.

The findings, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, lend further support to the idea that the Red Planet, now barren and dry, could once have hosted habitable environments.

Although planetary scientists have been on the hunt for organic carbon – the type of carbon-containing molecules that could be used and produced by living things – nitrogen also plays an essential role in life as we know it, said lead author Jennifer Stern, a planetary geochemist at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

For example, nitrogen is a key component of nucleobases that make up RNA and DNA, and of amino acids, the building blocks of proteins.

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No Child Left Behind Law Faces Its Own Reckoning

Michael F. McElroy for The New York Times

By Motoko Rich and Tamar Lewin

Ginn Academy, the first and only public high school in Ohio just for boys, was conceived to help at-risk students make it through school — experimenting with small classes, a tough discipline code and life coaches around the clock.

Its graduation rate was close to 88 percent last year, compared with 64 percent for the Cleveland Metropolitan School District as a whole. And it has enjoyed some other victories. There is the junior whose test scores are weak but who regularly volunteers at a food bank. And the senior proudly set to graduate this spring who used to attend school so irregularly that he had to be collected at home each morning by a staff member.

But under No Child Left Behind, the signature education initiative of the George W. Bush administration, the academy, which opened in 2007, was consistently labeled low performing because it did not make the required “adequate yearly progress” in raising test scores.

Nicholas A. Petty, the principal, said, “I wouldn’t say stop making us be judged by the tests at all, but get a better system that really monitors students on more of an individual basis.”

As Congress debates a rewrite of the No Child Left Behind law, Mr. Petty may well see that happen.

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NASA discovers an underground ocean on Jupiter’s largest moon

Image credit: NASA, ESA and A. Feild

By Rachel Feltman

NASA announced evidence on Thursday that Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, has a saltwater ocean under its icy surface. The ocean seems to have more water than all the water on Earth’s surface, according to new Hubble observations.

Scientists estimate that the ocean is 60 miles thick, which is about 10 times deeper than Earth’s oceans. But unlike our salty waters, Ganymede’s ocean is buried under 95 miles of ice.

While scientists have speculated since the 1970s about the presence of an ocean on Ganymede — the largest moon in our solar system — until now the only observational evidence came from a brief flyby by the Galileo spacecraft, which didn’t observe the moon long enough to confirm a liquid ocean.

“This discovery marks a significant milestone, highlighting what only Hubble can accomplish,” John Grunsfeld, assistant administrator of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, said in a statement. “In its 25 years in orbit, Hubble has made many scientific discoveries in our own solar system. A deep ocean under the icy crust of Ganymede opens up further exciting possibilities for life beyond Earth.”

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No religious text should be Tennessee’s official book

Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto

By David Plazas

Tennessee lawmakers have filed unconstitutional, divisive and misguided bills that would make the Holy Bible the official state book.

Both Tennessee and United States’ constitutions expressly respect the rights of individuals to worship freely, but also prohibit the state from favoring one religion over another.

This protects all of us, whether we choose to belong to a religious congregation or not.

We can live peacefully in society without religious tests and choose which religious institutions to attend and which scriptures to honor.

Making a religious text the state’s official tome isn’t like the innocuous act of choosing a state beverage (milk), fruit (tomato) or rock (limestone). This sends a message of exclusion and divisiveness in a state that is becoming more and more diverse.

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Flower-friendly farms ‘boost bee populations’

By Helen Briggs

Planting farmland with strips of flowers can boost the number of wild bumblebees, a study has confirmed.

Not only does it attract foraging bees, but it also encourages nesting, say researchers at University of Sussex.

In past decades, many bumblebee species have declined, due to a number of factors, including intensive farming.

The study, published in Molecular Ecology, suggest farms given funding to improve the environment can increase the size of wild bumblebee populations.

However, rarer species, which forage over shorter distances, may need special attention, as the method of management appeared to have no effect, said scientists.

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The Friendly Atheists Next Door

Photo via screengrab

By Daniel Burke

It’s two weeks before Christmas, which means the Shaughnessys are deep into their December rituals.

Cookies have been baked and sprinkled with enough sugar to give a gingerbread man diabetes. A Christmas tree, sparkling with colored lights and surrounded by a small troop of Santa Clauses, stands in the corner of the living room, waiting.

Harry and Charlotte Shaughnessy watch their children dip into a stash of ornaments: a Welsh flag from Grace’s semester abroad; a bauble from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington, where Todd is a freshman; a trinket embroidered with Brennen’s name and 1998, the year the youngest Shaughnessy was born.

Harry, nursing a rum and Coke, smiles at the sight of an even older ornament: a stocking that says “Charlotte and Harry, 1988,” their first Christmas as a couple.

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Priest questioned over 13 exorcisms allegedly performed on anorexic teen

Photograph: Ian Dagnall/Alamy

By Ashifa Kassam

A priest has been summoned to court to answer questions about more than a dozen exorcisms he allegedly carried out on an teenage girl with anorexia.

The investigation began after the girl and members of her extended family complained to the Spanish authorities in August that she had been put through at least 13 exorcisms.

The girl, from the northern city of Burgos, told police that she began having problems with anorexia and anxiety when she was 16, which her parents saw as a “sign of her possession by the devil”.

She was undergoing psychiatric treatments at the time, in May 2012, but her parents, convinced that exorcisms would help, took her to a priest from Valladolid, who carried out several of them on her over a three-month period.

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Germany court orders measles sceptic to pay 100,000 euros

By BBC News

A German biologist who offered €100,000 (£71,350; $106,300) to anyone who could prove that measles is a virus has been ordered by a court to pay up.

Stefan Lanka, who believes the illness is psychosomatic, made the pledge four years ago on his website.

The reward was later claimed by German doctor David Barden, who gathered evidence from various medical studies. Mr Lanka dismissed the findings.

But the court in the town of Ravensburg ruled that the proof was sufficient.

Reacting to the verdict by the court in the southern town, Mr Lanka said he would appeal.

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Earth’s climate is starting to change faster, new research shows

Image courtesy of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

By Science Daily

An analysis of changes to the climate that occur over several decades suggests that these changes are happening faster than historical levels and are starting to speed up. The Earth is now entering a period of changing climate that will likely be faster than what’s occurred naturally over the last thousand years, according to a new paper in Nature Climate Change, committing people to live through and adapt to a warming world.

In this study, interdisciplinary scientist Steve Smith and colleagues at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory examined historical and projected changes over decades rather than centuries to determine the temperature trends that will be felt by humans alive today.

“We focused on changes over 40-year periods, which is similar to the lifetime of houses and human-built infrastructure such as buildings and roads,” said lead author Smith. “In the near term, we’re going to have to adapt to these changes.”

See CMIP run

Overall, the Earth is getting warmer due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that trap heat. But the rise is not smooth — temperatures bob up and down. Although natural changes in temperature have long been studied, less well-understood is how quickly temperatures changed in the past and will change in the future over time scales relevant to society, such as over a person’s lifetime. A better grasp of how fast the climate might change could help decision-makers better prepare for its impacts.

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Breakthrough in energy harvesting could power life on Mars

By Phys.org

Martian colonists could use an innovative new technique to harvest energy from carbon dioxide thanks to research pioneered at Northumbria University, Newcastle.

The technique, which has been proven for the first time by researchers at Northumbria, has been published in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.

The research proposes a new kind of engine for producing energy based on the Leidenfrost effect – a phenomenon which happens when a liquid comes into near contact with a surface much hotter than its boiling point. This effect is commonly seen in the way water appears to skitter across the surface of a hot pan, but it also applies to solid carbon dioxide, commonly known as dry ice. Blocks of dry ice are able to levitate above hot surfaces protected by a barrier of evaporated gas vapour. Northumbria’s research proposes using the vapour created by this effect to power an engine. This is the first time the Leidenfrost effect has been adapted as a way of harvesting energy.

The technique has exciting implications for working in extreme and alien environments, such as outer space, where it could be used to make long-term exploration and colonisation sustainable by using naturally occurring solid carbon dioxide as a resource rather than a waste product. If this could be realised, then future missions to Mars, such as those in the news recently, may not need to be ‘one-way’ after all.

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White Oak principal receives support following religious controversy

Photo: Michael Cavazos

By Bridget Ortigo

White Oak ISD has come under fire after high school Principal Dan Noll was recorded by a student quoting a Bible verse during the morning announcements.

The recording was sent to an atheist blogger who then forwarded it to the Freedom From Religion group in Wisconsin. Sam Grover, attorney for the group, said the readings violate the separation of church and state.

“We are confident that an investigation will reveal that Mr. Noll’s Bible readings have in fact taken place,” Grover stated in a letter to the district. “If confirmed, the practice is flatly unconstitutional and cannot continue.”

White Oak ISD Superintendent Michael Gilbert, who serves as the district’s spokesman, said he was fully aware of Noll’s use of Scripture during morning announcements.

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Widow of blogger Avijit Roy defiant after Bangladesh attack

By BBC

The widow of a blogger who was hacked to death in Bangladesh says she will continue to speak out on the causes of secularism and science.

Rafida Bonya Ahmed was also badly injured when her US-Bangladeshi husband Avijit Roy was killed after leaving a book fair in Dhaka last month.

Speaking to the BBC from a safe location, she said fundamentalism had “taken deep roots” in Bangladesh.

She said she was recovering slowly and had few memories of the attack.

Mr Roy’s family said he had received threats after publishing articles promoting secular views, science and social issues on his Bengali-language blog, Mukto-mona (Free Mind).

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Gamma Rays May Be Clue on Dark Matter

Geringer-Sameth & Walker/Carnegie Mellon University

By Dennis Overbye

A small, newly discovered galaxy orbiting the Milky Way is emitting a surprising amount of electromagnetic radiation in the form of gamma rays, astronomers reported Tuesday. The finding may be the latest in a long string of cosmic false alarms, they said, or it might be that the mysterious dark matter that permeates the universe is finally showing its face.

If confirmed, the results could mean that most of the matter of the universe is in the form of as-yet-unidentified elementary particles, 20 to 100 times as heavy as a proton, that have been drifting and clumping like fog in space ever since the Big Bang.

But while the gamma-ray signal is “tantalizing,” in the words of Alex Geringer-Sameth of Carnegie Mellon University and colleagues from Brown and Cambridge Universities, “it would be premature to conclude it has a dark matterorigin.” Their analysis appears in a papersubmitted to the journal Physical Review Letters.

The group used data from NASA’s Fermi Large Area Telescope, which orbits the Earth, to search for gamma rays from a loose-looking accumulation of stars known as Reticulum-2, in the southern constellation of the same name. It is one of a rare breed known as dwarf galaxies, which can have fewer than a hundred stars and are only a billionth as luminous and a millionth as massive as the Milky Way.

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New NHS guidance requires hospitals to provide pastoral care to non-religious

By National Secular Society

New guidance published by NHS England will require hospitals in England to consider the needs of non-religious patients by ensuring they have access to appropriate pastoral care.

The National Secular Society has cautiously welcomed the new guidance, after previously criticising an earlier draft for failing to adequately recognise the needs of patients who do not identify with a religious faith. The NSS has longstanding concerns about the inappropriate and unsustainable nature of faith-based chaplaincy in the NHS.

The report, Promoting Excellence in Pastoral, Spiritual and Religious Care , sets out to “respond to changes in the NHS, society and the widening understanding of spiritual, religious and pastoral care.”

The guidance states that “it is important to note that people who do not hold a particular religious affiliation may still require pastoral support in times of crisis” and defines chaplaincy as “intended to also refer to non-religious pastoral and spiritual care providers who provide care to patients, family and staff”.

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First direct observation of carbon dioxide’s increasing greenhouse effect at Earth’s surface

Credit: Jonathan Gero

By Science Daily

Scientists have observed an increase in carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect at Earth’s surface for the first time. The researchers, led by scientists from the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), measured atmospheric carbon dioxide’s increasing capacity to absorb thermal radiation emitted from Earth’s surface over an 11-year period at two locations in North America. They attributed this upward trend to rising CO₂ levels from fossil fuel emissions.

The influence of atmospheric CO₂ on the balance between incoming energy from the Sun and outgoing heat from Earth (also called the planet’s energy balance) is well established. But this effect has not been experimentally confirmed outside the laboratory until now. The research is reported Feb. 25 in the advance online publication of the journal Nature.

The results agree with theoretical predictions of the greenhouse effect due to human activity. The research also provides further confirmation that the calculations used in today’s climate models are on track when it comes to representing the impact of CO₂.

The scientists measured atmospheric carbon dioxide’s contribution to radiative forcing at two sites, one in Oklahoma and one on the North Slope of Alaska, from 2000 to the end of 2010. Radiative forcing is a measure of how much the planet’s energy balance is perturbed by atmospheric changes. Positive radiative forcing occurs when Earth absorbs more energy from solar radiation than it emits as thermal radiation back to space. It can be measured at Earth’s surface or high in the atmosphere. In this research, the scientists focused on the surface.

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Researchers develop the first-ever quantum device that detects and corrects its own errors

Credit: Julian Kelly

By Sonia Fernandez

When scientists develop a full quantum computer, the world of computing will undergo a revolution of sophistication, speed and energy efficiency that will make even our beefiest conventional machines seem like Stone Age clunkers by comparison.

But, before that happens, quantum physicists like the ones in UC Santa Barbara’s physics professor John Martinis’ lab will have to create circuitry that takes advantage of the marvelous computing prowess promised by the quantum bit (“qubit“), while compensating for its high vulnerability to environmentally-induced error.

In what they are calling a major milestone, the researchers in the Martinis Lab have developed quantum circuitry that self-checks for errors and suppresses them, preserving the qubits’ state(s) and imbuing the system with the highly sought-after reliability that will prove foundational for the building of large-scale superconducting quantum computers.

It turns out keeping qubits error-free, or stable enough to reproduce the same result time and time again, is one of the major hurdles scientists on the forefront of quantum computing face.

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Homeopathy Is Not An Effective Treatment For Any Health Condition, Australian Government Declares

Image credit: Pixabay

By Amy Nordrum

The remedies that homeopathic practitioners mix from plant and animal tissues do not work for treating any medical condition, says Australia’s leading health agency. Such treatments have not proven effective for any of the 61 health problems that the agency evaluated in a large review published Wednesday.

Australia’s National Health and Medical Research Council examined 176 studies of homeopathic treatments for 61 medical conditions including asthma, anxiety, headaches, arthritis, ulcers and warts. The agency found that about half the treatments were no more effective than placebos, and ruled that the studies on the other half were not robust enough to determine whether the treatments worked. The agency concluded that homeopathy should not be considered an effective treatment for any condition.

Though it’s difficult to come by accurate estimates of the market for homeopathy, data from the World Health Organization indicate that it is likely an industry worth more than a billion dollars. France and Germany led the world in spending on homeopathic treatments in 2007 by handing over $408 million and $346 million, respectively. Australians spent about $7.3 million on treatments that year while Americans doled out $2.9 million.

Though Australia’s health agency did not evaluate the potential danger of treatments, officials did warn patients about relying solely on these methods. “People who choose homeopathy may put their health at risk if they reject or delay treatments for which there is good evidence for safety and effectiveness,” the report stated.

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Alien search won’t doom planet Earth, say scientists who want to contact ET

Photograph: T. Pyle/JPL-CALTECH/NASA

By Ian Sample

Fears that a major program to contact alien life could spell disaster for planet Earth were dismissed as “paranoid” on Thursday by scientists who hope to beam messages to distant worlds from powerful radio telescopes.

Researchers at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (Seti) Institute in California want to broadcast greetings to potentially habitable planets in the hope of receiving a reply, but the proposal has met with serious objections from critics, including the cosmologist Stephen Hawking, who claim that yelling into space is reckless.

Astronomers have listened for signals from alien civilisations since 1960, when the Cornell University astronomer Frank Drake co-opted the national observatory at Green Bank, West Virginia, to launch Project Ozma. In more than 50 years since, no convincing signals have been picked up.

Faced with half a century of silence, Seti astronomers have decided it is the time to change tack. They propose to use radio telescopes, such as the Arecibo telescope in Puerto Rico, to beam repeated signals at nearby planets selected for their odds of harbouring life. They claim the approach is more promising than earlier attempts to gain alien attention, such as the plaques attached to Pioneer probes launched in 1972 and 1973 that depicted a naked couple waving hello.

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Does Thinking About God Increase Our Willingness to Make Risky Decisions?

By Jalees Rehman

There are at least two ways of how the topic of trust in God is broached in Friday sermons that I have attended in the United States. Some imams lament the decrease of trust in God in the age of modernity. Instead of trusting God that He is looking out for the believers, modern day Muslims believe that they can control their destiny on their own without any Divine assistance. These imams see this lack of trust in God as a sign of weakening faith and an overall demise in piety. But in recent years, I have also heard an increasing number of sermons mentioning an important story from the Muslim tradition. In this story, Prophet Muhammad asked a Bedouin why he was leaving his camel untied and thus taking the risk that this valuable animal might wander off and disappear. When the Bedouin responded that he placed his trust in God who would ensure that the animal stayed put, the Prophet told him that he still needed to first tie up his camel and then place his trust in God. Sermons referring to this story admonish their audience to avoid the trap of fatalism. Just because you trust God does not mean that it obviates the need for rational and responsible action by each individual.

It is much easier for me to identify with the camel-tying camp because I find it rather challenging to take risks exclusively based on the trust in an inscrutable and minimally communicative entity. Both, believers and non-believers, take risks in personal matters such as finance or health. However, in my experience, many believers who make a risky financial decision or take a health risk by rejecting a medical treatment backed by strong scientific evidence tend to invoke the name of God when explaining why they took the risk. There is a sense that God is there to back them up and provide some security if the risky decision leads to a detrimental outcome. It would therefore not be far-fetched to conclude that invoking the name of God may increase risk-taking behavior, especially in people with firm religious beliefs. Nevertheless, psychological research in the past decades has suggested the opposite: Religiosity and reminders of God seem to be associated with a reduction in risk-taking behavior.

Daniella Kupor and her colleagues at Stanford University have recently published the paper “Anticipating Divine Protection? Reminders of God Can Increase Nonmoral Risk Taking ” which takes a new look at the link between invoking the name of God and risky behaviors. The researchers hypothesized that reminders of God may have opposite effects on varying types of risk-taking behavior. For example, risk-taking behavior that is deemed ‘immoral’ such as taking sexual risks or cheating may be suppressed by invoking God, whereas taking non-moral risks, such as making risky investments or sky-diving, might be increased because reminders of God provide a sense of security. According to Kupor and colleagues, it is important to classify the type of risky behavior in relation to how society perceives God’s approval or disapproval of the behavior. The researchers conducted a variety of experiments to test this hypothesis using online study participants.

One of the experiments involved running ads on a social media network and then assessing the rate of how often the social media users clicked on slightly different wordings of the ad texts. The researchers ran the ads 452,051 times on accounts registered to users over the age of 18 years residing in the United States. The participants either saw ads for non-moral risk-taking behavior (skydiving), moral risk-taking behavior (bribery) or a control behavior (playing video games) and each ad came either in a ‘God version’ or a standard version.

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Bias and Spin

By Mark Crislip

We all construct our narrative based on our biases and spin the facts so that the narrative confirms our biases. Among other characteristics, what separates an SBM provider from a SCAM provider is realizing that biases are always active and apply to me as well as everyone else.

My biases are simple: I am skeptical that humans can reliably understand reality without assistance and the best source of assistance is science.

I have a job where the expectation is that I will change practice as information changes. How I practiced medicine 30 years ago is very different from how I practice it today. Still, I note it is harder and harder to change my approaches as I get older. I get more set in my ways and it takes more effort to change as new studies are published. Sometimes it seems almost physically difficult.

Again, it is expected that not only will I change my mind over time, as the sole ID doctor at my hospitals, I will be the one to lead the change. Imagine how much harder it would be to change your mind if you were committed to a universal truth such as those that are alleged to underlie reiki or chiropractic. Years committed to a pseudo-medicine probably renders changing one’s mind virtually impossible.

I will admit there is one bias I cannot fathom, the conspiracy/pharmaceutical shill world view. The idea that those of us concerned with pseudo-medicine are doing so because we are paid by big pharma is just so weird. There are a number of articles on Pubmed concerning medical conspiracies, but the search term “pharmaceutical shill’ yields nothing on either Google scholar or Pubmed. It is a bias that evidently has no research to help understand why people have that opinion. I suspect it is derived in part from the often-remarkable sums paid to some doctors to pimp medications to other doctors. But I can’t even find how common the belief is.

I can kind of understand why people practice and/or participate in the various SCAMs given my understanding of the various fallacies and dysfunctional ways the mind works. It is easy to see how both the practitioners and patients misjudge the efficacy of pseudo-medicine. We have evolved to survive reality, certainly not to understand it.

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Earliest Human Species Possibly Found in Ethiopia

Credit: Kaye Reed

By Charles Q. Choi

An ancient jawbone fragment is the oldest human fossil discovered yet, a bone potentially from a new species that reveals the human family may have arose a half million years earlier than previously thought, researchers say.

This find also sheds light on the kind of landscape where humans first originated, scientists added.

Although modern humans are the only human lineage alive today,other human species once roamed the Earth. These extinct lineages were members of the genus Homo just as modern humans are.

For decades, scientists have been searching Africa for signs of the earliest phases of the human family, during the shift from more apelikeAustralopithecus species to more human early Homo species. Until now, the earliest credible fossil evidence of the genus Homo was dated to about 2.3 million or 2.4 million years ago.

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First ever photograph of light as a particle and a wave

Credit: Fabrizio Carbone/EPFL

By Science Daily

Light behaves both as a particle and as a wave. Since the days of Einstein, scientists have been trying to directly observe both of these aspects of light at the same time. Now, scientists at EPFL have succeeded in capturing the first-ever snapshot of this dual behavior.

Quantum mechanics tells us that light can behave simultaneously as a particle or a wave. However, there has never been an experiment able to capture both natures of light at the same time; the closest we have come is seeing either wave or particle, but always at different times. Taking a radically different experimental approach, EPFL scientists have now been able to take the first ever snapshot of light behaving both as a wave and as a particle. The breakthrough work is published in Nature Communications.

When UV light hits a metal surface, it causes an emission of electrons. Albert Einstein explained this “photoelectric” effect by proposing that light — thought to only be a wave — is also a stream of particles. Even though a variety of experiments have successfully observed both the particle- and wave-like behaviors of light, they have never been able to observe both at the same time.

A new approach on a classic effect

A research team led by Fabrizio Carbone at EPFL has now carried out an experiment with a clever twist: using electrons to image light. The researchers have captured, for the first time ever, a single snapshot of light behaving simultaneously as both a wave and a stream of particles particle.

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Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for Doubtful Climate Researcher

Image credit: Pete Marovich

By Justin Gillis and John Schwartz

For years, politicians wanting to block legislation on climate change have bolstered their arguments by pointing to the work of a handful of scientists who claim that greenhouse gases pose little risk to humanity.

One of the names they invoke most often is Wei-Hock Soon, known as Willie, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who claims that variations in the sun’s energy can largely explain recent global warming. He has often appeared on conservative news programs, testified before Congress and in state capitals, and starred at conferences of people who deny the risks of global warming.

But newly released documents show the extent to which Dr. Soon’s work has been tied to funding he received from corporate interests.

He has accepted more than $1.2 million in money from the fossil-fuel industry over the last decade while failing to disclose that conflict of interest in most of his scientific papers. At least 11 papers he has published since 2008 omitted such a disclosure, and in at least eight of those cases, he appears to have violated ethical guidelines of the journals that published his work.

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Big, bright quasar from ancient universe stuns scientists

Photo: Zhaoyu Li / Shanghai Astronomical Observatory

By Amina Khan

Deep in the universe’s past, astronomers have discovered a luminous quasar powered by an enormous black hole that contains the mass of 12 billion suns. The incredibly bright object is ancient — shining when the universe was only 875 million years old — and way bigger than it should be for an object its age.

The unusual quasar, described Wednesday in the journal Nature, is the biggest and brightest one known to have formed within 1 billion years of the Big Bang. The find could cause researchers to alter their understanding of how such super-massive black holes form — and shed light (literally) on the conditions in the early universe.

The quasar, named J010013.02+280225.8, or J0100+2802 for short, is powered by a massive black hole that’s pulling in so much stuff that the material accelerating toward it produces an incredible amount of light. There are about 40 known quasars spotted within a billion years of the Big Bang, and they weigh in around a billion solar masses. Compared with its peers, this quasar is a monster — by far the biggest and the brightest.

“We were surprised,” said study coauthor Xiaohui Fan, an astronomer with the Steward Observatory at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

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American atheist blogger hacked to death in Bangladesh

Photograph: Munir Uz Zaman/AFP/Getty Images

By Agence France-Presse

A prominent American blogger of Bangladeshi origin has been hacked to death with machetes by unidentified assailants in Dhaka, after he allegedly received threats from Islamists.

The body of Avijit Roy, founder of the Mukto-Mona (Free-mind) blog site – which champions liberal secular writing in the Muslim-majority nation – was found covered in blood after an attack that also left his wife critically wounded.

“He died as he was brought to the hospital. His wife was also seriously wounded. She has lost a finger,” local police chief Sirajul Islam said.

The couple were on a bicycle rickshaw, returning from a book fair, when two assailants stopped and dragged them on to the pavement before striking them with machetes, local media reported, citing witnesses.

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