New research shows that the second most diverse group of hard corals, called stylasterids, or lace corals, first evolved in the deep sea, and not in shallow waters as previously thought. Deep-sea corals can be spectacularly long-lived, with life spans of over 4,000 years, and they can be critical to understanding climate change in the past and future.

A team of international astronomers reports in the Feb. 15 issue of Science the discovery of a solar system nearly 5,000 light years away with scaled-down versions of Jupiter and Saturn. Their findings suggest our galaxy could conceivably contain many star systems similar to our own. The National Science Foundation (NSF) sponsored the research.

"NSF is delighted to have played a role in enabling such an exciting discovery," said Michael Briley, a program manager in NSF's Division of Astronomical Sciences. "One of the outstanding questions has been whether or not planetary systems like ours are common, and it appears they may well be."

The new solar system appearsto be a smaller analog of our own. One of its planets is 70 percent of Jupiter's mass and another is 90 percent of Saturn's mass. The sun they orbit is about 50 percent the mass of the sun. Although the star is much dimmer than our sun, temperatures at both planets are likely to be similar to that of Jupiter and Saturn because they are closer to their star.

"The fascinating part is that if we �scale' everything to the mass and brightness of the parent star, the masses of these planets relative to their star, and the amount of sunlight they receive, are close to our own Jupiter and Saturn," said lead author Scott Gaudi, assistant professor of astronomy at Ohio State University. "So what we've found is a solar system analog, or a �scaled solar system.'"

The two planets were revealed when the star they orbit crossed in front of a more distant star being observed from Earth. For a two-week period from late March through early April of 2006, the nearer star magnified the light shining from the farther star. The phenomenon is called gravitational microlensing -- the light from the more distant star was magnified 500 times.

The gravitational microlensing technique is based on a concept first discussed by Albert Einstein in the early 20th century. When astronomers observe a star, the light waves generally travel straight from the star to the telescope; however, if another star passes in between, even if great distances separate the two, the gravity of the nearer object acts like a lens and magnifies the incoming light. Telescopes cannot resolve the details of the magnified image, but they do notice a peak in light intensity -- and when a planet is present around the closer star, the planet's gravity adds a small peak of its own. Astronomers can use this occurrence to determine how large the planet is and how far way it is from its star.

"This is the first case in which a Jupiter-mass planet was detected that we had significant sensitivity to additional planets," Gaudi said. "You could call it luck, but I think it might just mean that these systems are common throughout our galaxy."

When the bat wing flaps downward, the motion produces a tiny cyclone of air called a “leading edge vortex” that pulls the animal upward. Insects are known to use these vortices while flying, but researchers have wondered whether this mechanism works for larger, heavier animals like bats, especially during slow flight or hovering. Researchers in Sweden and the United States studied small, nectar-feeding bats that were flying in a wind tunnel. With help from a fog machine, the researchers captured the movement of fog particles in the bats' wake as they flew through the tunnel. The results suggested that the vortices provided as much as 40 percent of the lift force that was helping the animals to stay in the air. This research appears in the 29 February 2008 issue of the journal Science.

Anthropologists from Wheaton College (Illinois) and The Field Museum have discovered how the ancient Maya produced an unusual and widely studied blue pigment that was used in offerings, pottery, murals and other contexts across Mesoamerica from about A.D. 300 to 1500.

First identified in 1931, this blue pigment (known as Maya Blue) has puzzled archaeologists, chemists and material scientists for years because of its unusual chemical stability, composition and persistent color in one of the world's harshest climates.

The anthropologists solved another old mystery, namely the presence of a 14-foot layer of blue precipitate found at the bottom of the Sacred Cenote (a natural well) at Chichén Itzá. This remarkably thick blue layer was discovered at the beginning of the 20th century when the well was dredged.

Chichén Itzá, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, is an important pre-Columbian archeological site built by the Maya who lived on what is now the Yucatán Peninsula of Mexico.

The findings from this research will be published online Feb. 26, 2008, by the prestigious British journal Antiquity and will appear in the print version of the quarterly journal to be released in early March.

According to 16th Century textual accounts, blue was the color of sacrifice for the ancient Maya. They painted human beings blue before thrusting them backwards on an altar (see below for image) and cutting their beating heart from their bodies. Human sacrifices were also painted blue before they were thrown into the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá. In addition, blue was used on murals, pottery, copal incense, rubber, wood and other items thrown into the well.

The new research concludes that the sacrificial blue paint found at this site was not just any pigment. Instead, it was the renowned Maya Blue - an important, vivid, virtually indestructible pigment.

Maya Blue is resistant to age, acid, weathering, biodegradation and even modern chemical solvents. It has been called "one of the great technological and artistic achievements of Mesoamerica."

Scientists have long known that the remarkably stable Maya Blue results from a unique chemical bond between indigo and palygorskite, an unusual clay mineral that, unlike most clay minerals, has long interior channels. Several studies have found that Maya Blue can be created by heating a mixture of palygorskite with a small amount of indigo, but they have not been able to discover how the ancient Maya themselves actually produced the pigment.

The new research shows that at Chichén Itzá the creation of Maya Blue was actually a part of the performance of rituals that took place alongside the Sacred Cenote. Specifically, the indigo and palygorskite were fused together with heat by burning a mixture of copal incense, palygorskite and probably the leaves of the indigo plant. Then the sacrifices were painted blue and thrown into the Sacred Cenote.

"These sacrifices were aimed at placating the rain god Chaak," said Dean E. Arnold, Professor of Anthropology at Wheaton College, Research Associate at The Field Museum and lead author of the study. "The ritual combination of these three materials, each of which was used for healing, had great symbolic value and ritualistic significance.

"The Maya used indigo, copal incense and palygorskite for medicinal purposes," Arnold continued. "So, what we have here are three healing elements that were combined with fire during the ritual at the edge of the Sacred Cenote. The result created Maya Blue, symbolic of the healing power of water in an agricultural community."

Rain was critical to the ancient Maya of northern Yucatan. From January through mid-May there is little rain - so little that the dry season could be described as a seasonal drought. "The offering of three healing elements thus fed Chaak and symbolically brought him into the ritual in the form a bright blue color that hopefully would bring rainfall and allow the corn to grow again," Arnold said.

One of the keys to solving the mystery of Maya Blue production was a three-footed pottery bowl (Field Museum catalog number 1969.189262; see below for reference to image) containing rarely preserved copal dredged from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá in 1904 and traded to The Field Museum in the 1930s. Preserved in the copal were fragments of a white substance and blue pigment. Using The Field Museum's scanning electron microscope, the authors studied these inclusions and found signatures for palygorskite and indigo. From this they concluded that the Maya produced Maya Blue as part of their sacrificial ceremonies.

"This study documents the analytical value of museum collections for resolving long-standing research questions," said Gary Feinman, Curator of Anthropology at The Field Museum and co-author of the study.

But other knowledge was necessary to understand the significance of the bowl and the hardened copal it contains.

"This study required documentary, ethnographic and experimental research to establish the full context and use of the artifacts," Feinman said. "Our work emphasizes the potential rewards of scientific work on old museum collections. It also shows that scientific analysis is necessary but not sufficient for understanding museum objects."

It is this broad knowledge coupled with the scientific analysis that has enabled the scientists to finally - after more than 100 years - explain the thick layer of blue precipitate at the bottom of the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá.

Already knowing that Maya Blue was central to Maya ritualistic sacrifices together with discovering that the pigment was produced right beside the Cenote solved the mystery of the 14-foot layer of blue precipitate: So many sacrifices - from pots to more than 100 human beings - were thrown into the Sacred Cenote that ultimately a layer of the pigment washed off the sacrifices and settled at the bottom of the well. (Although fully formed Maya Blue is extremely durable, it can be washed off with water, especially if there is no binder to help it adhere to the object on which it is placed.)

Other objects in The Field Museum's collections may reveal more information about Maya Blue, the scientists said. For example, identification of the plant materials on the bottom of the copal incense in other bowls dredged from the Sacred Cenote at Chichén Itzá could reveal which portions of the indigo plant were used to make Maya Blue.

"The Field Museum's collection was critical in solving this mystery," Arnold concluded. "This bowl has been in the collection for 75 years yet only now have we been able to use it in discovering the ancient Maya technology of making Maya Blue."

Regional prize winner in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition, sponsored by ESA's Technology Transfer Programme, the device uses satellite navigation technology to track journeys.

Concerned about global warming, many people are now looking for ways to reduce their generation of carbon dioxide (CO2). One option is to use public transport and limit journeys by car and plane; however, although this can significantly reduce each person's carbon footprint, until now the benefits have been difficult to measure.

"With Carbon Hero calculating your carbon footprint is easy," explains Andreas Zachariah, a graduate student from the Royal College of Art in London and inventor of Carbon Hero. "This easy-to-use mobile system uses satellite navigation data to calculate the environmental impact of travel. With its specialist database and algorithm, it can determine the mode of transport and its environmental impact with almost no user input."

It was back in 2006, that Andreas Zachariah came up with the idea of a small and practical device to track personal CO2 emissions during travel. It determines the carbon footprint of travellers using different modes of transport by using satellite navigation data to measure the distance, identify the type of transportation and calculate the amount of CO2 released into the atmosphere through travel.

In April 2007, Oxford graduate student Nick Burch joined Zachariah in his effort to bring Carbon Hero to life. Burch has produced a number of open source, mobile and navigation location-based applications and with this expertise the team developed the device.

"We have now tested our application using GPS and it has proved to be very efficient. Once Galileo, the European global navigation satellite system, becomes fully operational its increased accuracy will aid Carbon Hero to measure journeys and then determine their carbon footprint," says Zachariah.

Galileo, a joint initiative of the European Commission and ESA, will provide a highly accurate, guaranteed global positioning service under civilian control. The system will deliver real-time positioning accuracy down to better than one metre, a range unprecedented for a publicly available system, and by using dual frequencies Galileo will guarantee worldwide high-integrity (Safety-of-Live Service) for safety-critical applications, such as maritime, aviation and rail, where guaranteed accuracy and availability is essential.

With Carbon Hero, to see the effect a journey is having on the environment you just need to look at your mobile phone. "The feedback loop is almost immediate," says Zachariah.

It is also educational in that by giving an idea of the environmental impact of different types of transport - whether by train, plane, bike or by foot - it allows users to easily compare one kind of travel with another and calculate the environmental benefits daily, weekly and monthly.

"If you go on a diet you want to see if all that effort has made a difference so you weigh yourself. The beauty of our system is that it's easy; you have a 'weighing scale' on you all the time giving you your carbon footprint. When you make the effort to walk instead of taking the car you can immediately see the result, so it feels more worthwhile doing it and you are more likely to stick with it," says Zachariah.

Zachariah and Burch have filed a patent for their invention and they plan to have Carbon Hero ready for beta-testing in a company by the beginning of the next UK financial year in April 2008. It will then be used to track a team, a department or the whole company throughout the financial year.

"We are now in a closed beta-testing phase verifying that all works well, fixing problems and improving the application. It is a live and kicking application working on mobile cellular phones; it has already been tested on the Nokia platform now we are moving to Blackberry," says Burch.

Sustainability is an important issue for governments, consumers, businesses and employees. Companies now want to show the efforts they are taking to reduce their carbon footprint.

"Green credentials don't just attract customers; they also attract employees who may have gone elsewhere," says Zachariah. "Companies that use Carbon Hero could present the results in their annual report, together with other ways in which they are helping the environment. It is easy to document carbon emissions from heating and electricity; now with Carbon Hero, companies can also document CO2 emissions from business travel. I'm also immensely proud that the EU has shown leadership with its '20% by 2020' carbon reduction goal".

In addition to winning a regional prize in the 2007 European Satellite Navigation Competition, Carbon Hero was awarded the British Standards Institute (BSI) prize for Sustainability Design in July last year. It was a finalist in the 2007 Oxygen Awards and Deutsche Bank Pyramid Awards, and also invited to enter the Saatchi & Saatchi World-Changing Ideas Awards. It is now in the closing rounds of the 2008 St. Andrews Environmental Prize.

The men were especially vain, and the women dressed provocatively, but with the advent of Christianity, fashions changed, according to Swedish archeologist Annika Larsson.

"They combined oriental features with Nordic styles. Their clothing was designed to be shown off indoors around the fire," says textile researcher Annika Larsson, whose research at Uppsala University presents a new picture of the Viking Age.

She has studied textile finds from the Lake Mälaren Valley, the area that includes Stockholm and Uppsala and was one of the central regions in Scandinavia during the Viking Age. The findings, some of which were presented in her dissertation last year, show that what we call the Viking Age, the years from 750-1050 A.D., was not a uniform period. Through changes in the style of clothing we can see that medieval Christian fashions hit Sweden as early as the late 900s and that new trade routes came into use then as well. The oriental features in clothing disappeared when Christianity came and they started to trade with the Christian Byzantine and Western Europe.

"Textile research can tell us more about the state of society than research into traditions. Old rituals can live on long after society has changed, but when trade routes are cut off, there's an immediate impact on clothing fashions," says Annika Larsson.

She maintains that Swedish Viking women in the pre-Christian period probably dressed much more provocatively than we previously believed. She bases her theory on a new find uncovered in Russian Pskov, close to Novgorod and the eastward trade routes then plied from Sweden. The find consists of extensive remnants of a woman's attire, which Annika Larsson claims does not square with the traditional picture of how Viking women dressed.

Previously it was thought that Viking women wore a long suspender (brace) skirt, with both the front and back pieces consisting of square sections, held together by a belt. Clasps, often regarded as typical of the Viking Age, were attached to the suspenders roughly at the collar bone. Under this dress they wore a linen shift, and on top of it a woolen shawl or sweater.

"The grave plans from excavations at Birka outside Stockholm in the 19th century show that this is incorrect. The clasps were probably worn in the middle of each breast. Traditionally this has been explained by the clasps having fallen down as the corpse rotted. That sounds like a prudish interpretation," says Annika Larsson.

She maintains instead that the Birka women's skirts consisted of a single piece of fabric and were open in front. The suspenders held up the train and functioned as a harness that was fastened to the breasts with the clasps. Annika Larsson's theory is strengthened by that fact that a number of female figures have been preserved whose outfits both have trains and are open in front. But if we are to believe the archeological finds, this style of clothing disappeared with the advent of Christianity.

"It's easy to imagine that the Christian church had certain reservations about clothing that accentuated the breasts in this way and, what's more, exposed the under shift in front. It's also possible that this clothing was associated with pre-Christian rituals and was therefore forbidden," she believes.

"Removal of beaver should be considered an environmental disturbance on par with in-filling, peat mining and industrial water extraction," said researcher Glynnis Hood, lead author on the study and an assistant professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Alberta's Augustana Campus in Camrose, Canada.

In examining how beaver influenced some of Alberta's wetlands in Elk Island National Park over a 54-year period, Hood and her co-investigator, Professor Suzanne Bayley, discovered that the presence of beaver and their dams increased by up to nine times, the presence of open water.

Climate models predict the incidence of drought in parts of North America will increase in frequency and length over the next 100 years, and beaver will likely play an important role in maintaining open water and mitigating the impact, Hood said. The infilling and drainage of wetlands has increased to make way for urban and industrial expansion, and beaver colonies are being removed both inside and outside of protected areas, which means a continued loss of water resources, Hood noted.

"In times of drought they may be one of the most effective ways to mitigate wetland loss," said Hood. "Some people believe climate is driving everything, but the presence of beaver has a dramatic effect on the availability of open water in an area. Beaver are helping to keep water in areas that would otherwise be dry." Even during drought, where beaver were present, there was 60 per cent more open water than those same areas during previous drought periods when beaver were absent.

The study, published recently in the online edition of Biological Conservation, also found that temperature, precipitation and other climate variables were much less important than beaver in maintaining open water areas in the wetlands of the mixed-wood boreal forest.

The role of beaver in sustaining open water is critical for several reasons. Flooding caused by beaver dams provides habitat and water resources used by land animals and amphibians, and even provides water for livestock. It can also recharge groundwater reserves.

That's particularly true when terrain is not level, and now American and British researchers have developed a mathematical model showing that a zigzag course provides the most efficient way for humans to go up or down steep slopes.

"I think zigzagging is something people do intuitively," said Marcos Llobera, a University of Washington assistant professor of anthropology who is a landscape archaeologist. "People recognize that zigzagging, or switchbacks, help but they don't realize why they came about."

Llobera, who is interested in reconstructing patterns of movement within past landscapes, said the model and a study that describes it stem from earlier research that looked at the emergence of trail systems. That research focused on flat terrain.

"You would expect a similar process on any landscape, but when you have changes in elevation it makes things more complicated," he said. "There is a point, or critical slope, where it becomes metabolically too costly to go straight ahead, so people move at an angle, cutting into the slope. Eventually they need to go back toward the direction they were originally headed and this creates zigzags. The steeper the slope, the more important it is that you tackle it at the right angle."

Trails evolve, among other reasons, because of physical differences in people and the differences in the biomechanics and energy cost of ascending and descending a slope.

"You get a different pattern if people are going up or down and this may lead to the emergence of shortcuts. Walking downhill generally takes less energy except for braking. We would expect to see different paths going up and down, but what we end up with is a compromise and shortcuts aren't as apparent."

Llobera said many other physical factors can influence the creation and development of a trail or path, and that the new model is a simplified one and a place to start. Eventually he hopes to build a simulation engine that would allow archaeologists to plug in a terrain and explore different patterns of movement through it. He is particularly interested in using it with landscapes that have resulted from the accumulations of various societies and cultures.