King Tut Was Disabled, Malarial, and Inbred, DNA Shows

King Tut may be seen as the golden boy of ancient Egypt today, but during his reign, Tutankhamun wasn't exactly a strapping sun god.

Instead, a new DNA study says, King Tut was a frail pharaoh, beset by malaria and a bone disorder—and possibly compromised by his newly discovered incestuous origins. 

The report is the first DNA study ever conducted with ancient Egyptian royal mummies. It apparently solves several mysteries surrounding King Tut, including how he died and who his parents were.

"He was not a very strong pharaoh. He was not riding the chariots," said study team member Carsten Pusch, a geneticist at Germany's University of Tübingen. "Picture instead a frail, weak boy who had a bit of a club foot and who needed a cane to walk."

Regarding the revelation that King Tut's mother and father were brother and sister, Pusch said, "Inbreeding is not an advantage for biological or genetic fitness. Normally the health and immune system are reduced and malformations increase," he said.

Tutankhamun was a pharaoh during ancient Egypt's New Kingdom era, about 3,300 years ago. He ascended to the throne at the age of 9 but ruled for only ten years before dying at 19 around 1324 B.C

Despite his brief reign, King Tut is perhaps Egypt's best known pharaoh because of the wealth of treasures—including a solid gold death mask—found during the surprise discovery of his intact tomb in 1922. 

The new study, published this week in the Journal of the American Medical Association, marks the first time the Egyptian government has allowed genetic studies to be performed using royal mummies.

"This will open to us a new era," said project leader Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) and a National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence. 

"I'm very happy this is an Egyptian project, and I'm very proud of the work that we did."

In the new study, the mummies of King Tut and ten other royals that researchers have long suspected were his close relatives were examined. Of these ten, the identities of only three had been known for certain.

Using DNA samples taken from the mummies' bones, the scientists were able to create a five-generation family tree for the boy pharaoh.

The team looked for shared genetic sequences in the Y chromosome—a bundle of DNA passed only from father to son—to identify King Tut's male ancestors. The researchers then determined parentage for the mummies by looking for signs that a mummy's genes are a blend of a specific couple's DNA.

In this way, the team was able to determine that a mummy known until now as KV55 is the "heretic king" Akhenaten—and that he was King Tut's father. Akhenaten was best known for abolishing ancient Egypt's pantheon in favor of worshipping only one god.

Furthermore, the mummy known as KV35 was King Tut's grandfather, the pharaoh Amenhotep III, whose reign was marked by unprecedented prosperity.

Preliminary DNA evidence also indicates that two stillborn fetuses entombed with King Tut when he died were daughters whom he likely fathered with his chief queen Ankhensenamun, whose mummy may also have finally been identified. 

Also, a mummy previously known as the Elder Lady is Queen Tiye, King Tut's grandmother and wife of Amenhotep III.

King Tut's mother is a mummy researchers had been calling the Younger Lady.

While the body of King Tut's mother has finally been revealed, her identity remains a mystery. DNA studies show that she was the daughter of Amenhotep III and Tiye and thus was the full sister of her husband, Akhenaten.

Some Egyptologists have speculated that King Tut's mother was Akhenaten's chief wife, Queen Nefertiti—made famous by an iconic bust (Nefertiti-bust picture). But the new findings seem to challenge this idea, because historical records do not indicate that Nefertiti and Akhenaten were related.

Instead, the sister with whom Akenhaten fathered King Tut may have been a minor wife or concubine, which would not have been unusual, said Willeke Wendrich, a UCLA Egyptologist who was not involved in the study.

"Egyptian pharaohs had multiple wives, and often multiple sons who would potentially compete for the throne after the death of their father," Wendrich said.

Inbreeding would also not have been considered unusual among Egyptian royalty of the time.

The team's examination of King Tut's body also revealed previously unknown deformations in the king's left foot, caused by the necrosis, or death, of bone tissue.

"Necrosis is always bad, because it means you have dying organic matter inside your body," study team member Pusch told National Geographic News.

The affliction would have been painful and forced King Tut to walk with a cane—many of which were found in his tomb—but it would not have been life threatening.

Malaria, however, would have been a serious danger.

The scientists found DNA from the mosquito-borne parasite that causes malaria in the young pharaoh's body—the oldest known genetic proof of the disease.

The team found more than one strain of malaria parasite, indicating that King Tut caught multiple malarial infections during his life. The strains belong to the parasite responsible for malaria tropica, the most virulent and deadly form of the disease.

The malaria would have weakened King Tut's immune system and interfered with the healing of his foot. These factors, combined with the fracture in his left thighbone, which scientists had discovered in 2005, may have ultimately been what killed the young king, the authors write.

Until now the best guesses as to how King Tut died have included a hunting accident, a blood infection, a blow to the head, and poisoning.

UCLA's Wendrich said the new finding "lays to rest the completely baseless theories about the murder of Tutankhamun." 

Another speculation apparently laid to rest by the new study is that Akhenaten had a genetic disorder that caused him to develop the feminine features seen in his statutes, including wide hips, a potbelly, and the female-like breasts associated with the condition gynecomastia.

When the team analyzed Akhenaten's body using medical scanners, no evidence of such abnormalities were found. Hawass and his team concluded that the feminized features found in the statues of Akenhaten created during his reign were done for religious and political reasons.

In ancient Egypt, Akhenaten was a god, Hawass explained. "The poems said of him, 'you are the man, and you are the woman,' so artists put the picture of a man and a woman in his body."

Egyptologist John Darnell of Yale University called the revelation that Akhenaten's appearance was not due to genetic disorders "the most important result" of the new study.

In his book Tutankhamun's Armies, Darnell proposes that Akhenaten's androgynous appearance in art was an attempt to associate himself with Aten, the original creator god in Egyptian theology, who was neither male nor female.

"Akenhaten is odd in his appearance because he belongs to the time of creation, not because he was physically different," said Darnell, who also did not participate in the DNA research.

"People will now need to consider Akenhaten as a thinker, and not just as an Egyptian Quasimodo."

The generally good condition of the DNA from the royal mummies of King Tut's family surprised many members of the team.

Indeed, its quality was better than DNA gathered from nonroyal Egyptian mummies several centuries younger, study co-author Pusch said.

The DNA of the Elder Lady, for example, "was the most beautiful DNA that I've ever seen from an ancient specimen," Pusch said.

The team suspects that the embalming method the ancient Egyptians used to preserve the royal mummies inadvertently protected DNA as well as flesh. 

"The ingredients used to embalm the royals was completely different in both quantity and quality compared to the normal population in ancient times," Pusch explained.

Preserving DNA "was not the aim of the Egyptian priest of course, but the embalming method they used was lucky for us."

Lost Roman Codex Fragments Found in Book Binding

Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books.

The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors' laws in a single manuscript.

The Codex Gregorianus covered the laws of Hadrian, who ruled from A.D. 117 to 138, to those of Diocletian, ruler from A.D. 284 to 305.

Later codices excerpted the laws that were still relevant and added new ones, so only parts of the first codex survived as passages in other editions. All copies of the original collection of laws were thought to have been lost.

Luckily, in the 16th century it was common to use scraps of paper to reinforce the bindings of new books.

Seventeen such fragments—each smaller than 2 square inches (13 square centimeters)—were recovered from a set of books decades ago. The scraps were eventually acquired by a private owner, who recently loaned them to Roman-law experts at University College London.

A preservation librarian who examined the scraps told the researchers that the shapes of the pieces and the patterns of wear suggest the ancient papers had been wrapped around cords that went over the books' spines.

"We saw a couple key phrases and realized this was a kind of legal text," said study leader Benet Salway. "We matched it against the database of legal pronouncements we had, and found it didn't match anything."

But a few of the phrases matched passages in the Justinian Code, compiled in the sixth century, leading the team to conclude that the unfamiliar sections were from a source text: the Codex Gregorianus.

The paper fragments themselves are not from the original codex, but they could be from a copy that dates back as far as A.D. 400, the researchers said.

Only the fragments containing text that overlaps with known parts of the Justinian Code could be translated, and that text deals with appeals and the statute of limitations for an unknown matter.

But the fragments were annotated between the lines in Greek, a commonly spoken language by the end of the fifth century, implying that this particular copy of the Codex Gregorianus was used heavily, Salway said.

"The language of the law was Latin, but a lot of users of this text [would have been] Greek speakers, and they'd need to be able to understand it."

Since the pieces were found inside an unrelated book, the find doesn't increase the researchers' chances of locating the rest of the Codex Gregorianus. But "what I would hope is that it raises awareness of the possibility of this still being out there," Salway said.

"I'm not advocating that all [16th-century] books' bindings be ripped off—though we might find all sorts of interesting things in there—but when these books are conserved, care should be taken to see what is inside."

New "Destroyer" Dinosaur Found, Was T. Rex Relative

A 29-foot-long (9-meter-long) "destroyer" dinosaur once reigned over the Wild West, according to a new study of a fossil T. rex relative found in New Mexico.

Two nearly complete skeletons of the new species, Bistahieversor sealeyi—eversor means "destroyer" in Latin—were discovered in the desolate badlands of New Mexico's Bisti/De-na-zin Wilderness.

A "teenager's" skeleton was found between 1989 and 1990, and an adult was unearthed in 1998, researchers say. The fossils had been on display at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History until recently, so scientists hadn't previously had a chance to study the remains.

Discovering that B. sealeyi is a primitive Tyrannosaurus rex relative—and, like T. rex, part of a group called the tyrannosauroids—is a "big deal," said study co-author Thomas Carr, director of the Carthage College Institute of Paleontology in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

"In and of itself, a relatively complete dinosaur from 75 million years ago in New Mexico is not common," he said. But "it's doubly rare to have a predator like this."

Scant tyrannosauroid teeth and scraps of bone had previously been found in the Southwest. But they all had come from tyrannosauroid species known to live in the northern Rocky Mountain region.

But B. sealeyi is a completely new species, found nowhere else—proving that the Southwest had its own top predator stalking the tropical forests and rivers of the late Cretaceous period.

When Carr first heard a new tyrannosauroid fossil had been found, "I was very excited, because I knew that if it was complete, we would actually finally know tyrannosauroids were living in the Southwest," he said.

What's more, finding the teenaged B. sealeyi skeleton and partial skull gives the scientists "a really unique snapshot of the biological development of this particular dinosaur," he said.

For instance, the team found that a hole above the adult's eyes—one of many air sacs common in tyrannosaur skulls—was not present in the young dinosaur's skeleton.

This suggests that the hole developed in adulthood, he said, although scientists aren't sure what the hole's function might have been.

B. sealeyi also had a deep snout like T. rex, though the two species are not closely related, Carr said.

Deeper—or shorter—snouts may have evolved in concert with a more powerful bite and smaller forearms in tyrannosauroids in western North America andAsia, which were connected during the Cretaceous.

"The main implement of killing was the head, and they needed the power for that," Carr said. 

But for some reason, tyrannosauroids in eastern North America retained the more primitive features of shallow snouts and large arms.

For B. sealeyi to have a deep snout suggests that the adaptation evolved early in tyrannosauroids—opening up new mysteries in tyrannosaur evolution.

"We can answer what happened, and if we're lucky, we can answer how things happened," Carr said, but "we can't answer why."

Green "Volcano" to Power U.K. Town

Most people wouldn't want to live within a stone's throw of a volcano. But the residents of Stockton-on-Tees in the northeastern U.K. may soon rely on their friendly neighborhood "peak" for green power.

With construction due to start in late 2010, a proposed tower of power (pictured above in a design by Heatherwick Architecture) would produce energy and heat for more than a hundred thousand homes, organizers say.

The volcano-shaped biomass station was designed to blend into the surrounding grasslands close to Middlehaven, a derelict former industrial area that is being "regenerated" into a community with striking architecture, said Matthew Day, project director for development at Bio Energy Investments.

Rather than building a small, inconspicuous station, Day said, "we thought, no, we're going to celebrate our power station and do something big and bold."

Palm kernel shells—waste from palm-oil plantations in Malaysia—would run the 279-foot-high (85-meter-high) biomass plant, ensuring that no existing agricultural land is switched to growing biofuels rathern than food.

The waste shells would be delivered by ship to the riverside plant, reducing traffic on local roads.

The plant's entire operations—including fuel transportation from Malaysia—would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by up to 80 percent as compared with running a coal-powered plant, Day said, and no black cloud of smoke would be visible from the "dead quiet" station. (Learn more about biofuels.)

Being so close to a residential area also has a key advantage: Waste heat thrown off during electricity generation can be captured and used to heat nearby houses. This would also be a step in creating lower-carbon communities, Day said, adding that local people have been extensively consulted for the project.

"What we're trying to do is put in a power station that is connecting with an urban area in a much more engaging way than trying to hide it and put it to the side," he said.

Antarctic "Time Capsule" Hut Revealed

Nearly a century after Capt. Robert Falcon Scott explored the southern continent, experts are working to save the British explorer's wooden hut (pictured on Ross Island, Antarctica, in August 2006) and three others in the area from slipping under the snow forever.

The sanctuary measures 50 feet (15 meters) long and 25 feet (7.6 meters) wide and was built to house up to 33 men.

Scott and his crew stayed at the hut before their ill-fated Terra Nova expedition to the South Pole in January 1912. Scott and four others died after being beaten to the pole by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen.

"Had we lived," Scott wrote in March 1912 in a message found with his body, "I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman.”

Surprise! Radioactive Water Jugs Not as Healthy as Advertised

In the early 1900s, a radioactive ceramic water jar marketed to the U.S. public as a health boon turned out to be, well, a load of crock.

But according to a new study, radiation from the jug wasn't the biggest problem. Makers of the Radium Ore Revigator promised the jug would enrich drinking water left inside overnight with "the lost element of original freshness—radioactivity." The "treated" water was supposed to relieve everything from arthritis and senility to flatulence.

Such a seemingly wacky belief came from the fact that spring water naturally contains radioactive radon gas, said study leader Michael Epstein, an analytic chemist at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, Maryland.

It wasn't too big a leap to assume that radioactive water would be an organic pick-me-up, Epstein said. In the early 20th century, the Revigator sold by the hundreds of thousands in the U.S.

"Unfortunately for them, they were wrong," Epstein said. By the 1930s scientists had realized that exposure to radiation can cause cells in the body to go haywire, triggering cancer.

However, Epstein and colleagues were curious just how big a risk radiation played compared to the ore itself.

What they found is that the jar's uranium-ore lining released surprising amounts of toxic elements, such as arsenic and lead, into the drinking water.

Arsenic can also cause cancer, and lead can severely damage the nervous, urinary, and reproductive systems.

For their study, Epstein and colleagues bought four Revigators from antique stores or on eBay. The jars still exude the same amount of radiation as they did in the early 1900s.

Uranium ore contains some amounts of the highly radioactive metal radium, which decays into radon gas.

The team first used a Geiger counter to measure the amount of radon gas the jars emitted. Though radon levels were higher than an average person's exposure, the risk of death from the jars' radiation was relatively low.

Epstein's team also used a highly sensitive instrument called a mass spectrometer to analyze the concentration of toxic elements in the radon-infused water.

If a person had followed the Revigator company's advice to "drink freely when thirsty and upon arising and retiring," the toxic water would have drastically exceeded healthy exposure levels currently recommended by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

For instance, the maximum level of exposure to uranium set by the EPA is 0.030 parts per billion—one of the Revigators expelled up to 0.056 parts per bllion of the substance.

What's more, if people added a slightly acidic beverage such as wine or fruit juice to the jar, the resulting fluid contained 300 times more than the maximum arsenic intake recommended by the EPA.

There's no data on whether Revigator users were more sickly than non-users, mostly because people died from so many poorly understood ailments in the early 20th century, Epstein said.

But in a way, the Revigator is a forerunner to modern-day alternative medicines peddled on the Web, some of which could also be dangerous, Epstein said.

"The world doesn't change," he said. "We're always looking for something to make our lives better—and sometimes we make mistakes."

Commentary: "Hell on Earth" in Zimbabwe

Author Alexandra Fuller grew up in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia, where her family still lives. She now resides in Wyoming with her husband and three children. Fuller is the author of three works of non-fiction, including the memoir Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood. On the 60th anniversary of the United Nations' Declaration of Universal Human Rights, she reflects on the disease devastating her former home of Zimbabwe.

If it was President Robert Mugabe's intention to organize hell on Earth, he has succeeded. It's December in Zimbabwe, and that means the rains are frequent and the sun is at its hottest. The harvest—predicted to be ridiculously inadequate—is half a year away. Electricity is sporadic. No garbage has been collected for months. There has been no running water in many cities for days. Zimbabwe is a steam-bath of infection. Cholera, that most medieval of diseases, and the ultimate indication of a state that has failed her people, is rampant. Violence spills over. I follow every new development because those are my people, in that hell.Zimbabweans are not strangers to violence and terror. We once fought a bloody civil war to decide who would control the land. Brother turned on brother. We all lost someone in those years, and many of us learned to live with death; it was the background noise to our lives. Villages were razed to the ground. Yes, there were atrocities.

It was war, but it wasn't hell.

People risked death, endured heartbreak, rather than turn their backs on the country. Always, there was an understanding that the land was worth the fight. And in the end, when peace came, Mugabe himself put it best: "To us the time has come for those who fought each other as enemies to accept the reality of a new situation by accepting each other as allies."

Most Zimbabweans settled down and did just that, brought together by a common loyalty to the earth beneath their feet. But in the last few years, with Mugabe and his crazed henchmen in control of a diabolically orchestrated free-fall, an estimated four million people have fled their country. Above all, Zimbabweans are lovers of their land. No, that does not go far enough—they are their land. For many Zimbabweans the blur between soul and land begins in this way: They are born, and then the umbilical cord is taken straight from the mother and planted in the earth, so that it can take root and grow.

Pulling away from that ground causes some kind of death, a suffocation of exile. Deprive Zimbabweans of their land, and you deprive them of air, water, food.

And now that land has become a madman's torture chamber.

What makes this horror something we will all have to live with one day is that we can hear the cries from Zimbabwe, and from her borders, and yet we do nothing. News reports and desperate letters from inside the country have been circulating around the Internet for months. In tone and in content they sound eerily similar to the letters and warnings we have heard from other hells on Earth: Darfur; Bosnia; Cambodia; Nazi Germany; Rwanda—before that awful April in 1994.

In October, Hans-Gert Pöttering, President of the European Parliament, issued this unequivocal warning: "If we do not act, we will have the lives of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people on our conscience. Did we not commit that Rwanda/Burundi must never happen again? However, this is exactly the situation the average Zimbabwean is experiencing right now."

There will be an end to the crisis in Zimbabwe one day. Then we will count that country's disappeared, her diseased, her displaced, her dead. We will ask, "How did this happen?"

But we already know how it happened. It happened because we stood by.

Re-engineering Venice

The beautiful piazzas and famous canals of Venice are in trouble — they’ve got more water than they know what to do with. The thousand-year-old city is sinking into its famous lagoon, a few inches at a time. The water level is nine inches higher than it was a hundred years ago, 40 inches higher than 250 years ago.

The high water damages brick walls never intended to be in the water. There’s a lot of salt from the Adriatic Sea, too. Between the water and the salt, a lot of the city’s beautiful historic buildings are rotting.

A team of Italian engineers is working on a gigantic government-funded construction project they say will save Venice from the rising water. At its heart is a high-tech system of 300-ton concrete barriers that will be raised and lowered to protect the city from damaging tidal surges. Plus thousands of steel poles and other barriers on the floor of the lagoon to slow down the water.

They also plan to re-establish vanished wetlands and reinforce damaged foundations in the city itself. Altogether, the project will cost more than $4 billion and take seven years to complete.

Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea — or that it will help. But the engineers think it will. And it’s better than letting the city sink, they say.

The Coldest Thing You've Ever Seen

Where is the coldest place in the universe? Siberia? Deep space? Not even close. In vacuum chambers around the world, atomic physicists use clever arrangements of magnetic fields and laser beams to trap dilute clouds of atoms and cool them to ridiculously cold temperatures only a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. To give you an idea how cold this is, consider that deep space is a balmy 2.7 Kelvin or -454.8 degrees Farenheit.One of the interesting properties of these gases is that you can see them with the naked eye. The inset picture shows a glass vacuum chamber with an ultra-cold blob of rubidium atoms in its center. The laser beams used to confine and cool the gas interact strongly with the hotter atoms while ignoring the colder ones to produce what is aptly named optical molasses. The lasers used in this process lie in the red part of the spectrum, so the atom cloud naturally appears reddish in color.

The rubidium cloud pictured has a temperature around ten millionths of a degree above absolute zero and is almost certainly the coldest thing you have ever seen. It seems kind of strange that something this cold would not instantly solidify, but the density is so low that this is not possible. The rubidium cloud contains about a billion atoms whereas the same volume of air would contain about a billion times more atoms and a normal solid a million times more atoms still.

You get the idea--the gas is crazy cold and there are not many atoms. So, what are they good for? These ultra cold gases were originally created to study a novel form of matter called Bose-Einstein condensate in which all of the atoms are so cold that they move in lockstep with each other. It was an incredible feat when this new state of matter was first created in 1995, but now these gases are used mainly as tools to study a number of phenomena.The group I work for takes these condensates and loads them into an optical lattice, this is just an array of interfering laser beams used to create a periodic array of little wells in the gas. When these wells are prepared properly, just a few of the atoms will sit in each well, and the system as a whole will behave like a normal crystal. This opens an incredible number of possibilities for understanding materials. In traditional material science, powerful microscopes are used to look at a surface of atoms, but as the saying goes, that is just scratching the surface. Our crystal of ultra cold gases are much more dilute than normal materials, and we can actually look inside them to study materials in the bulk.

It turns out that the crystals made with an optical lattice are actually more perfect than those that exist in nature. You would think this would be great, but everything in the real world has imperfections and a lot of interesting phenomena arise from have these imperfections. The novel thing my lab does is introduce a small level of disorder into the optical lattice to simulate the disorder in traditional systems. With this you can emulate a number of interesting material properties such as superfluidity and high-temperature superconductivity and learn how disorder affects these systems.

Nanotech Risks Need More Study, Group Says

The government needs a more comprehensive plan for studying the risks of nanotechnology, the National Research Council said Wednesday.
While the committee that prepared the report did not evaluate the safety of nanomaterials, it was critical of current research efforts into the health and environmental safety of the technology.
Nanomaterials are made of extremely tiny particles -- some thousands of times finer than a human hair -- which have come increasingly into use in recent years, often in products such as skin care and cosmetics.
Consumer advocates and others have raised questions about potential risks from these materials and the National Nanotechnology Initiative was set up to coordinate safety research.But the research council report said the NNI plan fails to provide a clear picture of the current understanding of these risks or where it should be in 10 years.
In addition, the NNI plan does not include research goals to help ensure that nanotechnologies are developed and used as safely as possible. And though the research needs listed in the plan are valuable, they are incomplete, the report said.
It called for a new plan going beyond federal research to include research from universities, industry, consumer and environmental groups and others."The current plan catalogs nano-risk research across several federal agencies, but it does not present an overarching research strategy needed to gain public acceptance and realize the promise of nanotechnology," David Eaton, professor of environmental and occupational health sciences at the University of Washington and chairman of the committee that prepared the report, said in a statement.
David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies, welcomed the report.
"It is disappointing that the Bush administration did not listen to PEN experts" and others calling for an improved research plan, he said. "But I am encouraged that the NRC assessment will provide a roadmap for the next administration to make up for this lost time. It's time to get the job done and to get it done right," Rejeski said in a statement.
The Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies is an initiative of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and The Pew Charitable Trusts.
The National Research Council is an arm of the National Academy of Sciences, an independent agency chartered by Congress to advise the government on science and technology.

North America Warming Unevenly

Climate change caused by greenhouse gases is warming the United States, though unevenly, government researchers said Thursday.
"The continent as a whole is warming, mostly as a result of the energy sources we are using," William J. Brennan, acting administrator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, asaid at a briefing on the nation's climate since 1951.
But there is a "warming hole" where no change occurred in the center of the country, roughly between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians, added Martin Hoerling of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.
Last year the International Panel on Climate Change, studying the planet as a whole, concluded that global warming is "unequivocal, is already happening, and is caused by human activity."Thursday's report localized the analysis, concluding that average surface temperatures over the United States have increased 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit since 1951, nearly all in the last 30 years.
Weather observations are the Rosetta stone, Hoerling said, "We see a cause-effect relationship in data."
He said that human-induced warming is the overall driving factor and also is the major cause of changes in sea-surface temperature.
Sea temperatures, in turn, result in the uneven changes over land by affecting wind and storm movement. Climate experts have learned a lot about this effect in recent years by studying the periodic El Nino and La Nina patterns of unusual warming or cooling of the tropical Pacific Ocean and how those changes alter weather.
Currently the Pacific is in a neutral condition between the two extremes, and in a separate report Thursday NOAA's Climate Prediction Center said neutral conditions are likely to continue through early next year.
And in yet a third report released Thursday, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center reported that November's average temperature for the contiguous United States was 44.5 degrees, 2.0 degrees warmer than average. It was the warmest November on record for the Western states.
For the January-November period, the average temperature of 54.9 degrees F was 0.3 degree above the 20th century average.
The nation's January-November temperature has increased at a rate of 0.12 degrees per decade since 1895, and at a faster rate of 0.41 degrees each decade during the last 50 years.
NCDC said precipitation across the contiguous United States in November averaged 1.93 inches, which is 0.20 inch below the 1901-2000 average.Meanwhile, in Poznan, Poland, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Thursday warned the world against backsliding in the fight against climate change as it battles financial crisis. He called for a renewed sense of urgency in facing "the defining challenge of our era."
Ban spoke as some 145 environment ministers and other top officials gathered to help push efforts to secure agreement next year on a new worldwide treaty to cut greenhouse gas emissions, which would take effect in 2013.
In addition to the 1.6 degree warming since 1951, key findings of the North America climate change report included:
Six of the 10 warmest summers in the continental United States since 1951 occurred between 1997 and 2006.
The largest yearly average regional temperature increases have occurred over Northern and Western North America, with up to 3.6 degrees warming in 56 years over Alaska, the Yukon Territories, Alberta, and Saskatchewan.
No significant yearly average temperature changes have occurred in the Southern United States and Eastern Canada.
More than half of the warming averaged over all of North America is probably the result of human activity.
Regional temperature trends are likely to have been influenced by regional variations in sea surface temperature.
There has not been a significant trend, either up or down, in North American precipitation since 1951, although there have been substantial changes from year to year and even decade to decade.
It is unlikely that a fundamental change has occurred in either how often or where severe droughts have occurred over the continental United States during the past half-century.
However, overall drought impacts over North America have become more severe in recent decades.
It is likely that warming resulting from human activity has increased drought impacts over North America in recent decades through increased water stresses associated with warming land surface temperatures.

Found: 2,000-Year-Old Brain, Preserved

British archaeologists have unearthed an ancient skull carrying a startling surprise -- an unusually well-preserved brain.
Scientists said Friday that the mass of gray matter was more than 2,000 years old -- the oldest ever discovered in Britain. One expert unconnected with the find called it "a real freak of preservation."
The skull was severed from its owner sometime before the Roman invasion of Britain and found in a muddy pit during a dig at the University of York in northern England this fall, according to Richard Hall, a director of York Archaeological Trust.
Finds officer Rachel Cubbitt realized the skull might contain a brain when she felt something move inside the cranium as she was cleaning it, Hall said. She looked through the skull's base and spotted an unusual yellow substance inside. Scans at York Hospital confirmed the presence of brain tissue.Hall said it was unclear just how much of the brain had survived, saying the tissue had apparently contracted over the years. Parts of the brain have been tentatively identified, but more research was needed, he said.
He said it was a mystery why the skull was buried separately from its body, suggesting human sacrifice and ritual burial as possible explanations.
The existence of a brain where no other soft tissues have survived is extremely rare, according to Sonia O'Connor, an archaeological researcher at the University of Bradford in northern England who helped authenticate the discovery.
"This brain is particularly exciting because it is very well preserved, even though it is the oldest recorded find of this type in the U.K., and one of the earliest worldwide," she said.
The old brain is unlikely to yield new neurological insights because human brains aren't thought to have changed much over the past 2,000 years, according to Chris Gosden, a professor of archaeology at Oxford University unconnected with the find.
He confirmed it was the oldest brain found in Britain. He noted that far older preserved brains, thought to be approximately 8,000 years old, were found in 1986 when dozens of intact human skulls were uncovered buried in a peat bog in Windover Farms in Florida.
"It's a real freak of preservation to have a brain and nothing else," Gosden said. "The fact that there's any brain there at all is quite amazing."
Hall said the brain found at York University was being kept in its skull in an environmentally controlled storage facility for further study.

Brain Drugs Fine for Healthy People, Says Group

Healthy people should have the right to boost their brains with pills, like those prescribed for hyperactive kids or memory-impaired older folks, several scientists contend in a provocative commentary.
College students are already illegally taking prescription stimulants like Ritalin to help them study, and demand for such drugs is likely to grow elsewhere, they said.
"We should welcome new methods of improving our brain function," and doing it with pills is no more morally objectionable than eating right or getting a good night's sleep, these experts wrote in an opinion piece published online Sunday by the journal Nature.
The commentary calls for more research and a variety of steps for managing the risks.As more effective brain-boosting pills are developed, demand for them is likely to grow among middle-aged people who want youthful memory powers and multitasking workers who need to keep track of multiple demands, said one commentary author, brain scientist Martha Farah of the University of Pennsylvania.
"Almost everybody is going to want to use it," said Farah.
"I would be the first in line if safe and effective drugs were developed that trumped caffeine," another author, Michael Gazzaniga of the University of California, Santa Barbara, declared in an e-mail.
The seven authors, from the United States and Britain, include ethics experts and the editor-in-chief of Nature as well as scientists. They developed their case at a seminar funded by Nature and Rockefeller University in New York. Two authors said they consult for pharmaceutical companies; Farah said she had no such financial ties.
Some health experts agreed that the issue deserves attention. But the commentary didn't impress Leigh Turner of the University of Minnesota Center for Bioethics.
"It's a nice puff piece for selling medications for people who don't have an illness of any kind," Turner said.
The commentary cites a 2001 survey of about 11,000 American college students that found 4 percent had used prescription stimulants illegally in the prior year. But at some colleges, the figure was as high as 25 percent.
"It's a felony, but it's being done," said Farah.The stimulants Adderall and Ritalin are prescribed mainly for people with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but they can help other people focus their attention and handle information in their heads, the commentary said.
Another drug called Provigil is approved for sleep disorders but is also prescribed for healthy people who need to stay alert when sleep-deprived, the commentary says. Lab studies show it can also perk up the brains of well-rested people. And some drugs developed for Alzheimer's disease also provide a modest memory boost, it said.
Ritalin is made by Switzerland-based Novartis AG, but the drug is also available generically. Adderall is made by U.K.-based Shire PLC and Montvale, N.J.-based Barr Pharmaceuticals Inc., and some formulations are also available generically. Provigil is made by Cephalon Inc. of Frazer, Pa.
While supporting the concept that healthy adults should be able to use brain-boosting drugs, the authors called for:
More research into the use, benefits and risks of such drugs. Much is unknown about the current medications, such as the risk of dependency when used for this purpose, the commentary said.
Policies to guard against people being coerced into taking them.
Steps to keep the benefits from making socio-economic inequalities worse.
Action by doctors, educators and others to develop policies on the use of such drugs by healthy people.
Legislative action to allow drug companies to market the drugs to healthy people if they meet regulatory standards for safety and effectiveness.

Dr. Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, said she agreed with the commentary that the non-prescribed use of brain-boosting drugs must be studied.
But she said she was concerned that wider use of stimulants could lead more people to become addicted to them. That's what happened decades ago when they were widely prescribed for a variety of disorders, she said.
"Whether we like it or not, that property of stimulants is not going to go away," she said.
Erik Parens, a senior research scholar at the Hastings Center, a bioethics think tank in Garrison, N.Y., said the commentary makes a convincing case that "we ought to be opening this up for public scrutiny and public conversation."
One challenge will be finding ways to protect people against subtle coercion to use the drugs, the kind of thing parents feel when neighbor kids sign up for SAT prep courses, he said.
And if the nation moves to providing a basic package of health care to all its citizens, it's hard to see how it could afford to include brain-boosting drugs, he said. If they have to be bought separately, it raises the question about promoting societal inequalities, he said.

Go Nuts for Good Health

Here's a health tip in a nutshell: Eating a handful of nuts every day for a year -- along with a Mediterranean diet rich in fruit, vegetables and fish -- may help undo a collection of risk factors for heart disease.
Spanish researchers found that adding nuts worked better than boosting the olive oil in a typical Mediterranean diet. Both regimens cut the heart risks known as metabolic syndrome in more people than a low-fat diet did.
"What's most surprising is they found substantial metabolic benefits in the absence of calorie reduction or weight loss," said Dr. JoAnn Manson, chief of preventive medicine at Harvard's Brigham and Women's Hospital.
In the study, appearing Monday in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the people who improved most were told to eat about three whole walnuts, seven or eight whole hazelnuts and seven or eight whole almonds. They didn't lose weight, on average, but more of them succeeded in reducing belly fat and improving their cholesterol and blood pressure.Manson, who wasn't involved in the study, cautioned that adding nuts to a Western diet -- one packed with too many calories and junk food -- could lead to weight gain and more health risks. "But using nuts to replace a snack of chips or crackers is a very favorable change to make in your diet," Manson said.
The American Heart Association says 50 million Americans have metabolic syndrome, a combination of health risks, such as high blood pressure and abdominal obesity. Finding a way to reverse it with a diet people find easy and satisfying would mean huge health improvements for many Americans, Manson said.
Nuts help people feel full while also increasing the body's ability to burn fat, said lead author Dr. Jordi Salas-Salvado of the University of Rovira i Virgili in Reus, Spain.
"Nuts could have an effect on metabolic syndrome by multiple mechanisms," Salas-Salvado said in an e-mail. Nuts are rich in anti-inflammatory substances, such as fiber, and antioxidants, such as vitamin E. They are high in unsaturated fat, a healthier fat known to lower blood triglycerides and increase good cholesterol.
More than 1,200 Spaniards, ranging in age from 55 to 80, were randomly assigned to follow one of three diets. They were followed for a year. The participants had no prior history of heart disease, but some had risk factors including Type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and abdominal obesity.
At the start, 751 people had metabolic syndrome, about 61 percent, distributed evenly among the three groups.
Metabolic syndrome was defined as having three or more of the following conditions: abdominal obesity, high triglycerides, low levels of good cholesterol (HDL), high blood sugar and high blood pressure.
The low-fat group was given basic advice about reducing all fat in their diets. Another group ate a Mediterranean diet with extra nuts. The third group ate a Mediterranean diet and was told to make sure they ate more than four tablespoons of olive oil a day.
Dietitians advised the two groups on the Mediterranean diet to use olive oil for cooking; increase fruit, vegetable and fish consumption; eat white meat instead of beef or processed meat; and prepare homemade tomato sauce with garlic, onions and herbs. Drinkers were told to stick with red wine.
After one year, all three groups had fewer people with metabolic syndrome, but the group eating nuts led the improvement, now with 52 percent having those heart risk factors. In the olive oil group, 57 percent had the syndrome. In the low-fat group, there was very little difference after a year in the percentage of people with the syndrome.
The nut-rich diet didn't do much to improve high blood sugar, but the large number of people with Type 2 diabetes -- about 46 percent of participants -- could be the reason, Salas-Salvado said. It's difficult to get diabetics' blood sugar down with lifestyle changes alone, he said.
To verify that study volunteers ate their nuts, researchers gave some of them a blood test for alpha-linolenic acid found in walnuts.
The study was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Health and the government of Valencia, Spain.
Salas-Salvado and another co-author disclosed in the publication that they are unpaid advisers to nut industry groups. Salas-Salvado said all of their research "has been conducted under standard ethical and scientific rules" and that peer-review journal editors determined the study results were not influenced by food industry ties.

Humans 80,000 Years Older Than Previously Thought?

Modern humans may have evolved more than 80,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to a new study of sophisticated stone tools found in Ethiopia.

The tools were uncovered in the 1970s at the archaeological site of Gademotta, in the Ethiopian Rift Valley. But it was not until this year that new dating techniques revealed the tools to be far older than the oldest known Homo sapien bones, which are around 195,000 years old.
Using argon-argon dating—a technique that compares different isotopes of the element argon—researchers determined that the volcanic ash layers entombing the tools at Gademotta date back at least 276,000 years.

Many of the tools found are small blades, made using a technique that is thought to require complex cognitive abilities and nimble fingers, according to study co-author and Berkeley Geochronology Center director Paul Renne.

Some archaeologists believe that these tools and similar ones found elsewhere are associated with the emergence of the modern human species, Homo sapiens.

"It seems that we were technologically more advanced at an earlier time that we had previously thought," said study co-author Leah Morgan, from the University of California, Berkeley.

The findings are published in the December issue of the journal Geology.

Desirable Location

Gademotta was an attractive place for people to settle, due to its close proximity to fresh water in Lake Ziway and access to a source of hard, black volcanic glass, known as obsidian.

"Due to its lack of crystalline structure, obsidian glass is one of the best raw materials to use for making tools," Morgan explained.

In many parts of the world, archaeologists see a leap around 300,000 years ago in Stone Age technology from the large and crude hand-axes and picks of the so-called Acheulean period to the more delicate and diverse points and blades of the Middle Stone Age.

At other sites in Ethiopia, such as Herto in the Afar region northeast of Gademotta, the transition does not occur until much later, around 160,000 years ago, according to argon dating. This variety in dates supports the idea of a gradual transition in technology.
"A modern analogy might be the transition from ox-carts to automobiles, which is virtually complete in North America and northern Europe, but is still underway in the developing world," said study co-author Renne, who received funding for the Gadmotta analysis from the National Geographic Society's Committee for Research and Exploration.
Morgan, of UC Berkeley, speculates that the readily available obsidian at Gademotta may explain why the technological revolution occurred so early there.

Complicated family tree

The lack of bones at Gademotta makes it difficult to determine who made these specialist tools. Some archaeologists believe it had to be Homo sapiens, while other experts think that other human species may have had the required mental capability and manual dexterity.

Regardless of who made the tools, the dates help to fill a key gap in the archaeological record, according to some experts.

"The new dates from Gademotta help us to understand the timing of an important behavioral change in human evolution," said Christian Tryon, a professor of anthropology from New York University, who wasn't involved in the study.

If anything, the story has now become more complex, added Laura Basell, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford in the U.K.

"The new date for Gademotta changes how we think about human evolution, because it shows how much more complicated the situation is than we previously thought," Basell said.

"It is not possible to simply associate specific species with particular technologies and plot them in a line from archaic to modern."

'RoboClam' Anchor Holds Ships Steady

Ships have changed dramatically over the last few thousand years, but one piece of technology -- the heavy, metal anchor -- has remained largely untouched. But scientists have now created a light-weight, cigarette-sized anchor that burrows itself into the sea floor, anchoring anything from small unmanned submersible to maybe even huge oil platforms.
The new anchor is based on one of nature's faster diggers, the oblong-shaped razor clam, Ensis directus.
"It turns out that clams are actually very fast diggers," said Anette "Peko" Hosoi of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "One of my students, Amos Winter, actually calls the razor clams we looked at something like the Ferreri of the clam world."
The RoboClam, as the device is called, digs itself into the ground in two ways, similar to how a razor clam digs.
First, the RoboClam vibrates, changing the relatively solid seabed into a quicksand-like fluid that is easier to dig through. Then the two "shells" of the machine expand, locking the anchor in place, while a worm-like foot pushes down. Once the foot is embedded, the shells contract and the foot pulls the rest of the machine down.
The team is still testing and refining the machine. For now, the RoboClam can push down with about 80 pounds of force, 36 times greater than a razor clam, and dig up to 15 inches deep. The researchers hope the RoboClam will eventually dig twice as far as a razor clam, which can reach depths of more than 28 inches at a rate of about 0.4 inches per second.
Once deep enough, the RoboClam is more than 10 times stronger and an order of magnitude more energetically efficient at burrowing than other vibration-based anchors. It is several orders of magnitude more efficient than traditional anchors, and, if necessary, can even dig itself out.
"I was amazed when I saw those numbers," said Hosoi. "I thought we were onto something great then."
The MIT scientists originally developed the RoboClam to anchor a small submersible known as the Bluefin, which was designed to gather information from the seabed. A traditional anchor would weigh too much and other vibration-based anchors took too much energy to use, both of which limited the use of the Bluefin. The RoboClam should solve these problems.
That's the theory, at least, said Wolfgang Lohsert, an expert in granular media at the University of Maryland who is testing the RoboClam to more fully explain the burrowing abilities of the RoboClam and razor clams.
"If you can dig more directly into sandy soil and also control the direction of the digging, there are a number of applications, including exploration of natural resources," said Lohsert. Oil giant Chevron is considering using the RoboClam as a new way to anchor its huge off-shore oil platforms. It might even be possible to use the drill on dry land.