NASA solves mystery of 'jelly donut' on Mars

This before-and-after pair of images of the same patch of ground in front of NASA's Mars Rover Opportunity 13 days apart documents the arrival of a strange, bright rock at the scene. The rock, called "Pinnacle Island," is seen in the right imagNASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.

Feb. 4, 2014: This image from NASA's Mars Exploration Rover Opportunity shows where a rock called "Pinnacle Island" had been -- before it appeared in front of the rover in early January 2014.NASA/JPL-Caltech/Cornell Univ./Arizona State Univ.

A comparison of two raw Pancam photographs from sols 3528 and 3540 of Opportunity's mission (a sol is a Martian day). Notice the "jelly doughnut"-sized rock in the center of the photograph to the right. Minor adjustments for brightness and contNASA/JPL-Caltech

Steve Squyres, lead scientist for NASA's Mars rover Opportunity, points at a strange rock found by the rover on Jan. 8, 2014, where earlier there had been nothing, during a Jan. 16 presentation. The rock has been named "Pinnacle Island."NASA/JPL

It was a complete unknown -- it was a rolling stone.

A mystery rock that appeared before NASA's Opportunity rover in late January -- and bore a strange resemblance to a jelly donut -- is no more than a common piece of stone that bounced in front of the cameras, NASA said Friday.

The strange rock was first spied on Jan. 8, in a spot where nothing had sat a mere two weeks earlier. Dubbed "Pinnacle Island" by NASA scientists, it was only about 1.5 inches wide. But the rock's odd appearance -- white-rimmed and red-centered, not unlike a jelly donut -- made many sit up and take notice.

'We drove over it. We can see the track. That's where Pinnacle Island came from.'

- Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson

Now researchers with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology have finally cleared up the mystery.

Yep. It's a rock.

"Once we moved Opportunity a short distance, after inspecting Pinnacle Island, we could see directly uphill an overturned rock that has the same unusual appearance," said Opportunity Deputy Principal Investigator Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis. "We drove over it. We can see the track. That's where Pinnacle Island came from."

Examination of Pinnacle Island revealed high levels of elements such as manganese and sulfur, suggesting these water-soluble ingredients were concentrated in the rock by the action of water. 

"This may have happened just beneath the surface relatively recently," Arvidson said, "or it may have happened deeper below ground longer ago and then, by serendipity, erosion stripped away material above it and made it accessible to our wheels."

Now that the rover is finished inspecting this rock, the team plans to drive Opportunity south and uphill to investigate exposed rock layers on the slope.

Opportunity has trolled the Martian surface since Jan. 24, 2004, far outlasting its original 90-day mission. 

Steve Squyres, the rover's lead scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y said the Red Planet keeps surprising scientists, even 10 years later.

"Mars keeps throwing new things at us," he said.

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Mammoth tusk may be largest found in Seattle area

SEATTLE –  The mammoth tusk found this week at a construction site appears to be the largest and most intact mammoth fossil ever uncovered in the Seattle area, experts say.

Scientists at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture say the fossil dates back at least 16,000 years when ice swept through the Seattle area.

Although it's possible the paleontologists who began digging out the fossil on Thursday will find more than just a tusk, experts doubt that will happen.

Mammoth elephants lived all over the United States and Europe in ancient times, but finding a tusk or any part of those animals is rare, said Jack Horner of the Museum of the Rockies and Montana State University.

"We don't find them every year or even every five years," said Horner, one of the nation's most famous paleontologists.

In most cases, artifacts found at construction sites are destroyed by equipment before anyone even notices them, Horner said.

The fate of this mammoth tusk was entirely up to the landowner, because Washington has no state laws governing finds of this type. Horner said that is true anywhere in the United States.

"Americans like their private land," he said, adding that Americans don't like to pass laws putting restrictions on owners of private land, even to protect history.

Allyson Brooks, the Washington state preservation officer, said the situation would be different if construction workers had found human remains or other items of archaeological value because Washington state has laws for those situations.

With paleontological finds, the landowner can do whatever he or she wants -- sell it, destroy it, donate it or ignore it, Brooks said.

This time, the landowner decided to donate the tusk to the Burke Museum, just as Horner hoped would happen.

It's a relatively rare find and should be preserved for educational reasons, so children will know mammoth elephants once lived in Seattle, he said.

"A lot of times, people think these things are worth a lot of money," Horner said. Their true value is educational, not what someone can sell a tusk for on eBay, he said.

As paleontologists and graduate students began carefully digging away the dirt around the tusk on Thursday afternoon, Julie Stein, executive director of the Burke Museum, said AMLI Residential has been wonderful to work with.

Scott Koppelman, senior vice president of AMLI Residential, said after contractors found the fossil buried about 25 to 30 feet below street level, the company turned quickly to the museum for assistance.

He said the company's first response when hearing of the find was the community benefit.

"The excavation will cause us some construction delay, but the scientific and educational benefits of this discovery clearly outweigh the costs and delay," Koppelman said. "This is an exciting discovery for our local Northwest history."

In 2004, Washington state halted construction on a section of a major bridge project, on which $58 million had already been spent, at the request of the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe after remains of an ancient Indian village and burial ground were discovered.

Discoveries of animal remains from the Ice Age are less common than human remains in western Washington. Preservation of bone and tusks depends on the environmental conditions, such as the water table, the acidity of the soil and how deeply the object was buried, Brooks said.

"A lot of time, teeth preserve better than other bones," she said, likening tusks to teeth. She said teeth and tusks are what she and the scientists she works with consider "biological rock."

The last big find of an ancient animal of this sort in western Washington happened in 1977, when a mastodon tusk was found near Sequim, Wash., on the Olympic Peninsula.

Mammoths and mastodons are related and probably roamed the Earth around the same time. Both were very large and hairy. Mammoths and modern-day elephants are members of the same biological family.

Scientists at the Burke believe this tusk came from a Columbian mammoth, which is the Washington state fossil. The tusk, which could be as large as 8 feet long, is expected to be the largest and most intact mammoth tusk ever found in the Seattle area.

Gov. Jay Inslee did not wish to comment on the tusk discovery, but a member of his team had something to say.

"This has turned every adult in Seattle back into a 10-year-old," said the governor's spokeswoman, Jaime Smith.

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Chernobyl 2? Watching the world’s aging power plants

Satellite imagery from May 2013 of the Yongbyon Nuclear Scientific Research Center in North Korea.DigitalGlobe

The Kalinin nuclear power plant in Russia.IAEA

North Korea’s aging Yongbyon nuclear power plant will probably not lead to a nuclear catastrophe, despite an alarming report calling it the next Chernobyl -- but the danger posed by the world’s aging reactors is real nonetheless.

The defense publication Jane’s recently detailed efforts to bring the small Yongbyon reactor back online, saying they could lead to a meltdown like the  Chernobyl incident in 1986. According to the article, Yongbyon uses obsolete technology that was responsible for a 1957 accident in the United Kingdom and “could lead to a disaster worse than the Ukrainian one."

But Joel Wit, a former U.S. State Department official who manages the 38 North blog for the U.S.-Korea Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, told FoxNews.com he disagreed strongly with the Jane’s report. And when Ferenc Dalnoki-Veress, a scientist-in-residence with the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, ran an analysis, he concluded that the scale of the reactor posed a far smaller threat than Jane’s suggested.

“In the worst case scenario, the accident would release a dose 500,000 times lower than Chernobyl,” Dalnoki-Veress said.

'The Russians are running into this, the French are running into this, the Japanese are running into this. It’s a big issue.'

- Jon B. Wolfsthal, deputy director of California’s James Martin Center

Nonetheless, the average nuclear power plant is more than 20 years old and is anticipated to last no more than 30 or 40 years, leaving the world facing a potential crisis: How safe are aging nuclear power plants?

No country has a greater reliance on nuclear power than the U.S., which had 104 reactors online in 2011. But all of them have been online since 1990, and most since 1980.

“By far the largest problem is here in the U.S.,” said Jon B. Wolfsthal, deputy director of California’s James Martin Center.

“But the Russians are running into this, the French are running into this, the Japanese are running into this. It’s a big issue.”  

France had 58 nuclear reactors connected to the power grid in 2011, according to a 2012 reference work by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). Fifty-six of them have been operating since 1990, and 43 have been online since 1985, making them around 30 years old. Japan is in a similar situation, with 51 plants online in 2011 (not including the Fukushima plant), nearly all of which were in operation 20 years earlier.

There were 435 nuclear power plants online worldwide as of New Year’s Eve, 2011. As of that date, 138 others had been permanently shut down, though only 11 cited obsolescence as the reason.

Plot construction of nuclear plants on a grid and you’ll see a near perfect bell curve; most of the world’s power plants were built during the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, peaking between 1974 and 1976, a three-year span that saw construction begin on 118 plants worldwide. By comparison, ground was broken on just 29 plants throughout the ’90s.

But nuclear power is seeing a renaissance. China has 42 power plants planned for construction, according to the IAEA, and Russia has 35. As of Dec. 31, 2011, 114 were planned, and an additional 65 reactors were under construction.

Yet Chris Englefield, a senior manager in radioactive substances regulation for the U.K. Environment Agency, noted in a 2012 paper that there are no nuclear security specialists. He says there is a need to professionalize security and to facilitate minimum standards of competence and regulatory procedures.

The U.N.’s IAEA acts as a nuclear watchdog at times, but it also helps to do just that, aiding member countries in maintaining power plants to tease extra years from them while preventing incidents.

“One of the IAEA’s key missions is to support its member states in their efforts to improve nuclear safety,” said IAEA spokesman Serge Gas. “In that context, the agency does not single out individual nations, but rather encourages all of them to improve all the time.”

Jeremy A. Kaplan is Science and Technology editor at FoxNews.com, where he heads up coverage of gadgets, the online world, space travel, nature, the environment, and more. Prior to joining Fox, he was executive editor of PC Magazine, co-host of the Fastest Geek competition, and a founding editor of GoodCleanTech.

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Archaeologists find 3,600-year-old mummy in Egypt

Feb. 13, 2014: A preserved wooden sarcophagus that dates back to 1600 BC, when the Pharaonic 17th Dynasty reigned, in Egypt.AP Photo/Egypt's Supreme Council Of Antiquities

Feb. 13, 2014: A preserved wooden sarcophagus that dates back to 1600 BC, when the Pharaonic 17th Dynasty reigned, in Egypt.AP Photo/Egypt's Supreme Council Of Antiquities

Feb. 13, 2014: Egyptian men digging up a preserved wooden sarcophagus that dates back to 1600 BC, when the Pharaonic 17th Dynasty reigned, in the ancient city of Luxor, Egypt.AP Photo/Egypt's Supreme Council Of Antiquities

CAIRO –  Spanish archeologists have unearthed a 3,600-year-old mummy in the ancient city of Luxor, Egypt's Antiquities Minister said Thursday. Prosecutors accused nine people including three Germans of smuggling stone samples from pyramids.

In a statement, Mohammed Ibrahim said the rare find in a preserved wooden sarcophagus dates back to 1600 BC, when the Pharaonic 17th Dynasty reigned.

He said the mummy appears to belong to a high official. The sarcophagus is engraved with hieroglyphs and decorated with inscriptions of birds' feathers.

The exact identity of the well-preserved mummy will now be studied, Ibrahim said, adding that it was discovered by a Spanish mission in collaboration with the Egyptian antiquities ministry.

Antiquities department head Ali Al-Asfar said the two-meter sarcophagus still bears its original coloring and writings.

Meanwhile, Egypt's top prosecutor referred three Germans to criminal court on charges of smuggling and damaging antiquities and six Egyptians for acting as their accessories.

Hisham Barakat said authorities issued arrest warrants for the alleged German thieves, who fled to their country after the incident. He said authorities would communicate with Germany to restore the pieces they say were taken last April under the pretext of use for research.

The Egyptian defendants are already in detention.

Barakat says the Germans, along with their Egyptian guides, entered the famed pyramids of Giza with permits to visit but not excavate, and left with samples of stone from the ramparts of two tombs and the burial room of King Khufu.

Egyptian archaeologist Monica Hanna says the German researchers wanted to use the samples prove their hypothesis in a documentary they later filmed, which says that the pyramids were built by a people that pre-dates the ancient Egyptians.

The online documentary, removed in the wake of the controversy, showed one researcher inside the inner chambers of the Khufu pyramid, taking samples from the king's cartouche.

Egypt has experienced a security vacuum since its 2011 uprising. Thousands of artifacts have been stolen.

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Second Danish zoo plans to kill young giraffe to stop inbreeding

Not again!

Despite the death threats and worldwide disgust when the Copenhagen Zoo in Denmark killed 2-year-old giraffe Marius to prevent inbreeding on Sunday, Feb. 9, a second zoo in the country plans to kill a giraffe -- and says it’s in the animal’s best interest.

The second giraffe, coincidentally also named Marius, lives at the Danish Jyllands Park Zoo. To make room for a female giraffe it plans to acquire, the zoo plans to put down its 7-year-old male, balancing out genders in the facility.

Why kill a giraffe?

Q: How did the zoo end up with a giraffe it couldn't keep?

A: Breeding groups in zoos are made up of a single bull and a group of females. Zoo's remove female offspring to prevent inbreeding, and males to prevent fighting.

Q: Aren't there other options?

A: Zoos could design new giraffe facilities, but many don't have that option. A young bull could theoretically be sent to an all-female group as stud, but experts prefer a larger, more mature male for that, and Marius didn't fit that bill.

Q: What about contraceptives or castration?

A: Yes and no. Until recently, either would have required sedation, which is a relatively high-risk operation with giraffes. They are liable to break their necks when they fall while sedated.

Read more about the zoo's policies here

“We can't have two males and one female. Then there will be fights,” zoo keeper Janni Lojtved Poulsen told Danish news agency Ritzau. “If the breeding program coordinator decides that he should be put down, then that's what we'll do,” Poulsen said.

The first Marius was killed because his genes were already well represented in the European Association of Zoos and Aquaria, which aims to maintain biodiversity and didn’t want an excess of similar genes. Despite an online petition arguing that the zoo should spare his life, Marius was shot in the head -- according to European zoo-keeping guidelines -- before being butchered and fed to lions.

Will the second Marius face a similar fate? It might be possible for the zoo to find another place for the giraffe to live, Reuters reported, but the probability of that is small. Like the first Marius, the Jyllands Park giraffe is considered unsuitable for breeding.

Poulsen defended the zoo’s plans, despite the widespread disgust of animal lovers.

“Many places abroad where they do not do this, the animals live under poor conditions, and they are not allowed to breed either. We don't think that's OK,” she said.

'We can't have two males and one female. Then there will be fights.'

- Zoo keeper Janni Lojtved Poulsen

The Jyllands Park Zoo has not said whether it will have a public dissection of its Marius similar to the one held at the Copenhagen Zoo.

The watchdog group Animal Rights Sweden said the plight of Marius underscores what it believes zoos do to animals regularly.

"It is no secret that animals are killed when there is no longer space, or if the animals don't have genes that are interesting enough," the group said in a statement. "The only way to stop this is to not visit zoos."

"When the cute animal babies that attract visitors grow up, they are not as interesting anymore.”

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Found: Rare beetle collected by Darwin 180 years ago

A close up of the colorful beetle species Darwinilus sedarisi.Natural History Museum (London)

A brightly colored beetlecollected by Charles Darwin more than 180 years ago has been identified as a new species after hiding in museum storage for decades.

The discovery of Darwinilus sedarisi whose scientific epithet honors both Charles Darwin and the writer David Sedaris was announced Wednesday (Feb. 12) to coincide with the 205th anniversary of Darwin's birthday.

'Finding a new species is always exciting, finding one collected by Darwin is truly amazing.'

- Entomologist Stylianos Chatzimanolis

The South American beetle specimen had been considered lost for decades in a collection at the Natural History of Museum in London. It only resurfaced a few years ago when a scientist studying tropical beetles from the New World stumbled upon the insect. [StarStruck: Species Named After Celebrities]

"I received on loan several insects from the Museum in London, and to my surprise I realized that one of them was collected by Darwin," Stylianos Chatzimanolis, an entomologist at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, said in a statement. "Finding a new species is always exciting, finding one collected by Darwin is truly amazing."

This rediscovered male insect was among the specimens that Darwin an avid beetle collector picked up in 1832 at Baha Blanca in Argentina, a city about 400 miles (640 km) southwest of Buenos Aires, early into his five-year journey aboard the HMS Beagle. Darwin's observations during that fateful trip led to his theory of evolution by natural selection.

Only one other specimen of Darwinilus sedarisi has ever been collected in the wild another male found in Ro Cuarto, a city in Argentina's province of Crdoba, sometime before 1935. Chatzimanolis did not find any other members of the species after scouring the insect stockpiles at European and North American museums, but hopes that additional members might come to light either in the wild or museum collections.

"Much of the area between Baha Blanca and Ro Cuarto has been converted into agricultural fields, and it is questionable if that is a suitable habitat for the species," Chatzimanolis wrote in his description of the species. "One of course hopes that a newly described species is not already extinct."

The beetle has sawtoothed antennas anda hexagonal-shaped head that's metallic green in color. Darwinilus represents a new genus of rove beetles, the largest family of beetles that includes more than 57,000 known species.

As for the species name, sedarisi, Chatzimanolis decided to honor author and humorist David Sedaris, "as an appreciation for his fascination with the natural world."

"I spent many hours listening to Mr. Sedaris' audiobooks while preparing the specimens and the figures for this and other manuscripts," Chatzimanolis wrote. Among Sedaris' many titles is "Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk: A Modest Bestiary" (Little, Brown and Company, 2010), a book of fables starring anthropomorphized animals.

A full description of Darwinilus sedarisi is in the journal ZooKeys.

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Major Native American site found in downtown Miami leaves city in quandary

MIAMI –  As more Native American archaeological sites are being uncovered around the nation, the findings are posing difficult questions for the cities where they are found.

In Miami, a major prehistoric Native American village has been discovered at a downtown site where developers plan to construct a movie theater, condos and hotel building.

The discovery has pitted developers against archaeologists and historic preservationists who want the find preserved in its entirety. Developers say the public is better served by removing a portion and putting it on display while continuing with construction.

Little is still known about Native American architecture but more sites are being found with advances in technology and a better understanding of the subtle markers that remain.

In a vacant lot between gleaming hotels in downtown Miami are a series of holes carved into the bedrock that form eight circles.

At first glance, the site seems like an eyesore. But it's here where archaeologists say they have uncovered a major prehistoric Native American village, one of the largest and earliest examples of urban planning ever uncovered in North America.

It's also where a movie theater, condos and 34-story hotel are expected to be built.

The discovery has pitted developers against archaeologists and historic preservationists. The dispute comes as an increasing number of Native American sites are being uncovered around the country with advances in technology and a greater understanding of the subtle markers left behind to look for. The discoveries pose difficult questions for cities such as Miami that must decide whether it is best to preserve the remains of an ancient society or, often times, destroy it in hopes of revitalizing a new one.

"Let's be honest with each other," said Eugene Stearns, the attorney representing MDM Development Group, which owns the property and is eager to move forward with construction. "Every great city is built on the shards of a former great city."

At its height, archaeologist Bob Carr estimated as many as 2,000 people lived in the Tequesta village, starting around 500 B.C. It likely extended a quarter mile along the Miami River and then wrapped around Biscayne Bay.

Much of the village consisted of thatched, hut-like buildings the Tequestas, one of South Florida's earliest tribes, built by digging holes with clam shells into the soft limestone, and then inserting pine logs to hold floors, walls and roofs.

Because of the materials used -- straw, wood -- the only remnants of the buildings are the postholes, today still forming 18 to 40-foot circles in the blackened bedrock.

MDM has proposed carving out a section of the limestone containing the circle formations and placing it on display in a public plaza.

Preservations, however, say removing a piece of architecture isn't like moving a painting from one museum to another.

"The idea that you would carve out a chunk and move it to some other place and put it into exhibition sounds strange to me and sad," said Mark Jarzombek, associate dean of the Massachusetts Institute for Technology's School of Architecture and Planning. "These places are very site specific. There's a reason why they made this village or town there which has to do with orientation, landscape, access to rivers."

MDM has spent $3 million conducting an archaeological review and is now anxious to continue construction. Stearn said all of the planned commercial space has been leased and half of the residential units have been sold.

"There are enormous financial obligations and commitments that have to be met," he said. "And they need to go forward."

Miami isn't the only city grappling with how best to preserve an ancient site while allowing development to advance. Nationwide, Native American sites are being discovered at a quickening pace.

"Archaeology is really going through a bit of a golden era now with uncovering these sights," Jarzombek said.

In California, where as many as 1 million Native Americans may have once lived, Dave Singleton with the Native American Heritage Commission said he receives reports from county coroner offices regarding Native American remains about once every 10 days.

Construction crews have unearthed burial grounds, artifacts and villages in rural, desert areas to downtown Los Angeles. Any time remains are found in California, construction is halted while an archaeological review is done and a descendant identified.

With a few exceptions, however, construction has eventually resumed.

Hundreds of tools and other artifacts, along with possible burial sites, were found at a planned 250-megwatt solar energy project east of the Coachella Valley in 2011, slated to be one of the largest in the nation. Tribal leaders said federal officials had deemed the findings "unprecedented."

Construction was temporarily halted but later allowed to continue. A mitigation plan that included an extensive study and public outreach was developed.

"We, of course, like the other tribes of the area, were shocked and saddened," Jay Cravath, cultural director of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe said. "Mitigation will not change the damage that was done."

Singleton said the Native American groups are not opposed to development, but they object to the generation of plants and transmission lines that go through burial grounds and destroy sacred sites.

Miami-Dade County archaeologist Jeff Ransom, however, plans to recommend full preservation at a city meeting Friday and, if the committee members agree, MDM could be forced to redesign the site.

Ransom would like to see the huts and village reconstructed, and he believes the site could be turned into a viable heritage tourism destination.

Miami is a city vying to become an international destination not just for its nightlife and beaches but also its art and culture. Revitalizing the city's downtown with a new museum district, shops and restaurants has been seen as a central part of that.

There are some Native American within urban areas that have been successfully preserved. A Hohokam mound next to a hospital near Phoenix was purchased by the city of Mesa in 1988 and stabilized by a team of archaeologists. It is now a six-acre cultural park.

"What more human and intelligent and culturally rich way to revitalize a place than to recognize its antiquity and to celebrate its earlier native occupants?" said Peter Nabokov, an anthropology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Developers in Miami contend it would be difficult to preserve the site and promote it as an area for tourists to visit because it is on soft limestone rock, has no drainage and is corroding from rain and pollution. They also note the site is prime real estate that would cost the city about $100 million to purchase.

Stearns, MDM's attorney, said the archaeological value of preserving the postholes in their current state ultimately doesn't outweigh what could be gained in terms of education and development by carving them out and building on top.

"Archaeologists see them differently," Stearns said. "They can wax eloquently about the significance of the postholes. But I dare say that's not a view shared by most others."

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