Star of Bethlehem Probably Jupiter-Regulus Conjunction
phenomenica - The appearance of the Star of Bethlehem, which in the Bible guides the three wise men to Jesus' birthplace, can be backed up by science, according to an astronomer.
Mark Thompson of the Royal Astronomical Society and Astronomy Presenter on BBC's "The One Show" has conducted research that can explain the story, told in the Gospel of Matthew, about the star leading the travellers to Bethlehem.
Using historical records and computer simulations that allow the position of the stars and planets to be charted back to around the time when Jesus is believed to have been born, Thompson claims there was an unusual astronomical event, reports the Telegraph.
He said that between September 3BC and May 2BC there were three "conjunctions" where the planet Jupiter and a star called Regulus passed close to each other in the night sky.
Thompson, who is due to present the BBC's new astronomy programme "Stargazing Live" with Brian Cox, said: "The three wise men were believed by some to be Zoroastrianist priests, who were renowned astrologers at the time, so the king of planets passing so close to the king of stars on three occasions would have been hugely significant and could have been interpreted as the birth of a new king."
"Interestingly, in the world of astrology Jupiter is considered to be the king of planets and Regulus, which is the brightest star in the constellation Leo, is considered to be the king of stars."
Thompson said he looked at "all the possibilities" before coming to his conclusion.
The three conjunctions, which took place 14 September 3BC, 17 February 2BC and 8 May 2BC, were caused by an astronomical phenomenon called retrograde motion, in which a planet will appear to stop its normal eastward drift through the night and instead drift back towards the west for a period of several weeks.
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Space Rock Surprise...Amino Acids
sciencenews - Planetary scientists have found amino acids, building blocks of life, in an unexpected place: a meteorite whose parent asteroid formed at temperatures so high that such fragile organic compounds should have been destroyed. One explanation for the surprising discovery is that some amino acids might form through a mechanism that does not require the presence of water, upping the chances of finding life beyond the solar system, says Daniel Glavin of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
“Amino acids are forming in environments that we really didn’t think were possible,” Glavin says. He and his colleagues found the material in a fragment of the asteroid 2008 TC3, the first celestial object that has ever been spotted before slamming into Earth’s atmosphere and raining meteorites onto the planet’s surface (SN: 4/25/09, p. 13). The researchers describe their discovery in an article posted online December 13 in Meteoritics & Planetary Science.
Asteroid 2008 TC3 has an unusually violent history, notes Glavin and study coauthor Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute in Mountain View, Calif. The roughly 4-meter-long asteroid is believed to be a fragment of a fledgling planet that formed at the birth of the solar system and was heated to temperatures exceeding 1,100° Celsius — hot enough to melt iron. The rich amalgam of materials in the chunks of the asteroid that fell to Earth suggests that 2008 TC3 was then subject to a series of violent collisions with other asteroids that fused different pieces of space rocks.
That’s why Glavin and his collaborators didn’t expect to find anything but terrestrial amino acids in the gram of material they got when 2008 TC3 broke apart in Earth’s atmosphere in October 2008, leaving remnants scattered in the Nubian desert in Sudan. The sample they analyzed was classified as a ureilite meteorite, a type that comes from parent asteroids devoid of water, and thus unable to form amino acids by known mechanisms.
But the team did discover amino acids in the sample that are either rare or nonexistent on Earth. More importantly, the two possible forms of the compounds — a left-handed structure and its mirror image — were equally common. In contrast, amino acids made by life on Earth are predominantly left-handed.
“The pattern of amino acid abundances … are hard to explain via terrestrial contamination,” comments Conel Alexander of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C. Because of the high heat, Glavin adds, the extraterrestrial origin of these amino acids also can’t be explained by a familiar process in which two types of highly reactive organic compounds — aldehydes and ketones — interact with ammonia, hydrogen cyanide and water to produce the protein building blocks.
One possibility, favored by Glavin, is that once the asteroid cooled below 500° C, carbon monoxide, molecular hydrogen and ammonia gases could have reacted with grains of iron or nickel to produce amino acids. That mechanism has long been speculated to occur in asteroids but has never been documented outside the laboratory.
A new way of naturally producing amino acids “really increases the likelihood, in my opinion, of life existing elsewhere in the universe” and may have also helped seed the solar system’s terrestrial planets with prebiotic compounds, Glavin says.
A less likely possibility, he notes, wouldn’t require a new mechanism to explain the amino acids. In this scenario, collisions would vaporize and then transfer amino acids from other asteroids to 2008 TC3.
Alexander cautions that the new results may not be directly applicable to the origin of life, especially because the concentrations of the amino acids in the sample are low and because ureilite meteorites constitute a minority of the meteorites that fall to Earth. Nevertheless, he adds, “it does show that synthesis of amino acids in nature can occur in unexpected places and ways, and that we should keep a very open mind about how and where prebiotic chemistry can occur.”
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Scientists Breed Singing Mouse
news.au.com - Japanese scientists have produced a mouse that tweets like a bird in a genetically engineered "evolution" which they hope will shed light on the origins of human language.
A team of researchers at the University of Osaka created the animal in their "Evolved Mouse Project", in which they use genetically modified mice that are prone to miscopying DNA and thus to mutations.
"Mutations are the driving force of evolution. We have cross-bred the genetically modified mice for generations to see what would happen," lead researcher Arikuni Uchimura said.
"We checked the newly born mice one by one... One day we found a mouse that was singing like a bird," he said, noting that the "singing mouse" was born by chance but that the trait will be passed on to future generations.
"I was surprised because I had been expecting mice that are different in physical shape," he said by telephone, adding that in fact the project had also produced "a mouse with short limbs and a tail like a dachshund".
The laboratory, directed by professor Takeshi Yagi at the Osaka University's Graduate School of Frontier Biosciences in western Japan, now has more than 100 "singing mice" for further research.
The team hopes they will provide clues on how human language evolved, just as researchers in other countries study songbirds such as finches to help them understand the origins of human language.
Scientists have found that birds use different sound elements, put them together into chunks like words in human languages and then make strings of them to sing "songs", that are subject to certain linguistic rules.
"Mice are better than birds to study because they are mammals and much closer to humans in their brain structures and other biological aspects," Dr Uchimura said.
"We are watching how a mouse that emits new sounds would affect ordinary mice in the same group... in other words if it has social connotations," he said, adding that ordinary mice squeak mainly under stress.
Considering that mutant mice tweet louder when put in different environments or when males are put together with females, Dr Uchimura said their chirps "may be some sort of expressions of their emotions or bodily conditions".
The team has found that ordinary mice that grew up with singing mice emitted fewer ultrasounds than others, which could indicate that communication methods can spread in the same group like a dialect.
Dr Uchimura dreams of further "evolution" of mice through genetic engineering.
"I know it's a long shot and people would say it's 'too absurd'... but I'm doing this with hopes of making a Mickey Mouse some day," he said.
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Groom kills bride, best man and himself at Brazilian wedding
telegraph - Witnesses reported that 29-year-old sales manager Rogerio Damascena did not give any previous indication that anything was wrong at his wedding reception, police investigator Joao Brito said.
Mr Brito would not speculate on a possible motive, saying family members were in shock and he had not interviewed them yet.
He did say the killings were believed to be premeditated because of the groom's announcement and because he had hidden a gun in his father's pickup truck.
Twenty-five-year-old bride Renata Alexandre Costa Coelho and best man Marcelo Guimaraes both died in the murder-suicide. A brother of the bride was also treated at a hospital and released.
The website Globo.com quoted a sister of the bride who left before the shootings as saying she didn't believe it was a crime of passion.
"My sister was a wonderful person who loved and wanted to be loved," Lucia Helena Coelho was quoted as saying.
"He was happy, she was happy, the party was beautiful. His family adored her and doesn't understand this," she told Globo.com. "He revealed himself as a sociopath who fooled the entire family and killed his best friend, who was ... the best man."
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New Zealand releases government UFO files
BBC - New Zealand's military has released hundreds of documents detailing claims of sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs).
The files, dating from 1954 to 2009, include drawings of flying saucers and alleged samples of alien writing.
The files include details of New Zealand's most famous UFO sighting when strange lights were filmed off the South Island town of Kaikoura in 1978.
An official report from the time said natural phenomenon could explain it.
Although the incident made international headlines at the time, the military report suggested it could be lights from boats reflected in clouds or an unusual view of the planet Venus.
Following the release of the files, New Zealand Air Force spokesman Kavae Tamariki said the military did not have the resources to investigate UFO sightings and would not be commenting on the documents' contents.
"We have just been a collection point for the information. We don't investigate or make reports, we haven't substantiated anything in them," he told the Dominion Post newspaper.
The reports have been released under freedom of information laws after officials removed names and other identifying material.
The files - which run to about 2,000 pages - include accounts by members of the public, military personnel and commercial airline pilots describing close encounters, mostly involving moving lights in the sky.
All the original documents on which the reports were based are to remain sealed in the national archive.
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