STORMS have clouded Uranus's normally placid face. In the past year, the gas planet has played host to huge cloud systems so bright that even amateur astronomers can see them from Earth – and their cause is a mystery.
"We have no idea. It's very unexpected," says Imke de Pater at the University of California, Berkeley.
De Pater observed Uranus on 5 and 6 August, 2014, and was surprised to spot unusually bright features, the hallmark of clouds condensing in the planet's upper atmosphere. "It was brighter than anything we had ever seen in Uranus's atmosphere before," she says. The planet's weather generally picks up at its spring and autumn equinoxes every 42 years, when the sun shines on the equator. But the last equinox was 7 years ago, so the recent spike in activity is difficult to explain.
De Pater's group spread the word, and amateurs around the globe trained their telescopes on Uranus. Coincidentally, the amateurs spotted a storm that de Pater had imaged at a different wavelength on 5 August. Using the Hubble Space Telescope, de Pater and her colleagues saw storms spanning a variety of altitudes (arxiv.org/abs/1501.01309), which could be linked to a vortex deep in Uranus's atmosphere.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Why the temper tantrum, Uranus?"
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THIS photo first made me think of the desolation of Hiroshima after the atomic bomb. Then, seeing the woman walking through the ruins of her former home town, it made me think of Cormac McCarthy's novel The Road, set in a post-apocalyptic North America.
What disaster has befallen this place? It is Villa Epecuén, once a thriving and popular tourist town in Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. People would visit from Buenos Aires to bathe in the apparently therapeutic waters of Lago Epecuén, the salt lake the town was based on. Then changing weather patterns caused the lake to swell.
On November 10, 1985, a dam protecting the town burst and a gradual, seeping flood began. By 1986 the streets were 1 metre under water. By 1991, it was 10 metres.
Finally, in 2009, the waters began to recede. Only one man – 85-year-old Pablo Novak – returned to live there. The image below contrats the town now with its 1970s heyday, showing the changes wrought by the flood.
(Image: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)
This article appeared in print under the headline "Back to a drowned town"
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Video: Big Brother map instantly spots illegal fishing
Big Brother is now watching fishing fleets. A giant map of the world displayed on a video wall can instantly detect if fish are being stolen from the ocean.
Developed by Satellite Applications Catapult in the UK and The Pew Charitable Trusts, the technology cost £1 million to build and displays the location of large fishing vessels on top of satellite images combined with a topographical map of the ocean floor. Ships, which are tracked by transponder, are represented by glowing blue dots.
Although it is against the law to switch off the tracking device, a vessel may do so to fish illegally in a protected area, causing it to vanish from the display. The disappearance sends an alert to the system in 18 milliseconds, whereas previously it took a team of analysts up to 18 hours to pick up on a suspicious ship.
Displaying features of the ocean floor helps determine the type of fish in a given area, which can be cross-referenced with the species a vessel's fishing licence permits it to catch.
Illegal and unreported fishing is rampant, amounting to about $23.5 billion a year. Up to 9000 kilograms of seafood is stolen from the ocean every second.
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A global grassroots effort to map the genetic riches of soil is under way. It may sound mundane, but the aims are lofty: to turn up bacteria that yield new types of antibiotics. Already, the hard work is paying off. Participants have identified an area in New Mexico and an Atlantic forest region in Brazil as being particularly rich in potentially useful bacterial genes.
Scientists and volunteers from five continents are helping Sean Brady of the Rockefeller University in New York and his colleagues with their Drugs from Dirt project. So far, they have collected 185 soil samples and extracted DNA from them. To work out which samples are the most biochemically diverse, they compared the DNA with that from lab-grown bacteria known to produce a wide range of important and interesting chemicals.
Bacterial hotspots
The project forms part of Brady's mission to map interesting microbial DNA worldwide, so that the search for much-needed new antibiotics can home in on the most promising regions. "We'd like to use this info to target the best sites," says Brady.
Brady says around a quarter of their samples so far have been contributed by citizen scientists, without which the project would be too expensive to run. Volunteers are asked to take a couple of spoonfuls of earth, bag them and send them to Brady's lab.
The collection of samples currently numbers a few hundred – far fewer than the thousands Brady aims to collect – but they have already yielded some interesting results. Genes found in samples from both New Mexico and Brazil may encode alternative versions of known anti-cancer molecules, including bleomycin, an important antibiotic used to kill cancerous cells.
Hunt for the best
The preliminary map of bacterial biodiversity follows the discovery of teixobactin, a new antibiotic discovered in a soil bacterium by Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues. They identified the substance after developing a method that coaxes bacteria previously thought to be unculturable to grow in the lab.
Brady says his microbial map can help researchers like Lewis find the best versions of new antibiotic compounds. "They found a rare compound that does a really neat thing – but maybe it's not the best one that nature made," says Brady.
To get involved with the project, sign up at drugsfromdirt.org
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Carry on, Cleo (Collage: K. Brazier. Photographs: 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection/Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman)
Ancient cosmetic recipes often claimed the endorsement of celebrities such as Cleopatra. But could they really have made her complexion so famously milky?
Peer pressure led Laurence Totelin to try to recreate a beauty regime as Cleopatra might have known it. A classicist at Cardiff University, UK, specialising in the history of medicine, she often gave talks on ancient cosmetic recipes. Some, like modern-day beauty products, claimed to have a celebrity endorsement – often of Egypt's famously milky-skinned queen.
"People would always say, have you tried what you are talking about?" Totelin says. "I would give convoluted explanations like, it's very difficult to get the ingredients, we can't judge the efficacy, is it safe, and so on. I could tell that wasn't cutting it."
A period of maternity leave finally gave her the ...
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A global grassroots effort to map the genetic riches of soil is under way. It may sound mundane, but the aims are lofty: to turn up bacteria that yield new types of antibiotics. Already, the hard work is paying off. Participants have identified an area in New Mexico and an Atlantic forest region in Brazil as being particularly rich in potentially useful bacterial genes.
Scientists and volunteers from five continents are helping Sean Brady of the Rockefeller University in New York and his colleagues with their Drugs from Dirt project. So far, they have collected 185 soil samples and extracted DNA from them. To work out which samples are the most biochemically diverse, they compared the DNA with that from lab-grown bacteria known to produce a wide range of important and interesting chemicals.
Bacterial hotspots
The project forms part of Brady's mission to map interesting microbial DNA worldwide, so that the search for much-needed new antibiotics can home in on the most promising regions. "We'd like to use this info to target the best sites," says Brady.
Brady says around a quarter of their samples so far have been contributed by citizen scientists, without which the project would be too expensive to run. Volunteers are asked to take a couple of spoonfuls of earth, bag them and send them to Brady's lab.
The collection of samples currently numbers a few hundred – far fewer than the thousands Brady aims to collect – but they have already yielded some interesting results. Genes found in samples from both New Mexico and Brazil may encode alternative versions of known anti-cancer molecules, including bleomycin, an important antibiotic used to kill cancerous cells.
Hunt for the best
The preliminary map of bacterial biodiversity follows the discovery of teixobactin, a new antibiotic discovered in a soil bacterium by Kim Lewis at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts, and his colleagues. They identified the substance after developing a method that coaxes bacteria previously thought to be unculturable to grow in the lab.
Brady says his microbial map can help researchers like Lewis find the best versions of new antibiotic compounds. "They found a rare compound that does a really neat thing – but maybe it's not the best one that nature made," says Brady.
To get involved with the project, sign up at drugsfromdirt.org
If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.
A gigantic but fleeting burst of radio waves has been caught in the act for the first time, helping to narrow down the vast array of things that might cause them. Figuring out what these fast radio bursts are or where they come from could help answer some of the biggest cosmological questions.
They last about a millisecond but give off as much energy as the sun does in a day, all seemingly in a tight band of radio-frequency waves.
Their source is a mystery, but whatever causes them must be huge, cataclysmic and up to 5.5 billion light years away, says Emily Petroff of Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia.
A top contender is the collapse of an oversized neutron star that should have given way to a black hole long ago, but was spinning so fast that relativity made it seem lighter. But other possibilities include a flare from a magnetar, a type of neutron star with an extremely strong magnetic field.
A total of nine fast radio bursts have been reported since the first was discovered in 2007, but all of them were found weeks or years after the actual event by sifting through old data.
No afterglow
Now, using the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, Petroff has caught one in the act.
"This is a major breakthrough," says Duncan Lorimer of West Virginia University in Morgantown, who was part of the team that discovered the first fast radio burst.
Within about seven hours, other telescopes around the world started to point towards the source, which was near the constellation Aquarius. None of them saw any afterglow at all, which is itself an interesting finding, Petroff says. That rules out some of the less likely sources like long gamma-ray bursts or supernovae.
The Parkes Telescope data alone revealed a new property of the bursts: the waves appear to be circularly polarised rather than linearly polarised, which means they vibrate in two planes, rather than one. "It's something nobody has ever measured before," Petroff says. But it's hard to know how to interpret it, she says.
Cosmic rainbow
Keith Bannister from the CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, in Sydney agrees. "Nobody knows what to make of it," he says. "All the ideas are very exotic so ruling them out is all you can do at the moment."
Lorimer hopes that soon astronomers will detect a burst in another frequency range, allowing it to be conclusively associated with something – a galaxy, a region of a galaxy, or even a region of intergalactic space.
If the source can be found, it will help to calculate the density of the interstellar medium for the first time, Petroff says. As the signal passes through the free electrons between stars, it is dispersed like a rainbow, with "bluer" or higher frequency waves hitting us first. The denser the medium, the greater the dispersion. Knowing the density of this medium and how it has changed over time will be a key test for theories of how the universe evolved.
Journal reference: Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, accepted, arxiv.org/abs/1412.0342
Corrections, 20 January 2014:When this article was first published, it referred to fast radio bursts as "blitzars", but blitzars are just one possible account of what FRBs might be. And the figure we initially gave for the amount of energy that the blasts give off in a millisecond was significantly overblown. Both things have now been corrected.
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(Image: AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko)
(Image: Juan Mabromata/AFP/Getty Images)
Carry on, Cleo (Collage: K. Brazier. Photographs: 20th Century Fox/The Kobal Collection/Universal History Archive/UIG/Bridgeman) 