ALBUQUERQUE (UPI) — U.S. and French scientists say they have discovered the origin of carbon-based lavas erupting from a Tanzanian volcano.

The researchers, led by the University of New Mexico, analyzed gas samples collected from inside the active crater of Tanzania’s Oldoinyo Lengai volcano — the only volcano that is actively producing carbon-based lavas. The geochemical analyses revealed a very small degree of partial melting of minerals in the Earth’s upper mantle is the source of the rare carbon-derived lava.

Although carbon-based lavas, known as carbonatites, are common, the Oldoinyo Lengai volcano, located in the East African Rift in northern Tanzania, is the only place on Earth where they are actively erupting. The researchers said the lava expelled from the volcano is highly unusual in that it contains nearly no silica and greater than 50 percent carbonate minerals. Typically lavas contain high levels of silica, which increases their melting point to above 1,652 degrees Fahrenheit. The lavas of the Oldoinyo Lengai volcano erupt as a liquid at approximately 1,004 degrees Fahrenheit.

The research by the scientists from the University of New Mexico, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California-San Diego and the Research Center for Petrographics and Geochemicals in Nancy, France, appears in the journal Nature.

Copyright 2009 by United Press International

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 18th May 2009

People were enjoying chocolate 3000 years ago, but in the form of alcoholic brews or beers drunk at births and weddings (Source: iStockphoto)

People in Central America were drinking beverages made from cacao before 1000 BC, hundreds of years earlier than once thought, a new study shows.

These early cacao beverages were probably alcoholic brews, or beers, made from the fermented pulp of the cacao fruit.

These beverages were around 500 years earlier than the frothy chocolate-flavored drink made from the seed of the cacao tree that was such an important feature of later Mesoamerican culture.

But in brewing this primitive beer, or chicha, the ancient Mesoamericans may have stumbled on the secret to making chocolate-flavoured drinks, the paper says.

“In the course of beer brewing, you discover that if you ferment the seeds of the plant you get this chocolate taste,” says John Henderson, a professor of anthropology at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and lead author of the paper.

“It may be that the roots of the modern chocolate industry can be traced back to this primitive fermented drink.”

The cacao bean played an important role in Mesoamerican civilisation, the native civilisation in parts of Mexico and Central America prior to the Spanish exploration and conquest of the 16th century.

The bean was a form of currency in Aztec society, and the frothed chocolate drink made from fermented beans or seeds was central to social and ritual life throughout Mesoamerica.

In the 16th century, invading Europeans acquired a taste for the beverage and brought it back to Europe, which led to the rise of the modern chocolate industry.

An elite drink

The archaeological evidence recovered by Henderson and colleagues from a site in Puerto Escondido in modern-day Honduras suggests that the beer that probably preceded the chocolate beverage was popular among wealthy people at least as early as 1100 BC.

Chemical analysis of residues found on fragments of pottery vessels recovered from the site tested positive for theobromine, a compound found in cacao trees that were limited to Central America.

The vessels were found in the “fancier, bigger houses” in the village of Puerto Escondido in the Ulua Valley in northern Honduras, says Henderson.

He suggests the elite members of society would have drunk the beverage to mark special occasions such as births and marriages.

beer

The beer has been made using a yeast that has a unique metabolism (Source: iStockphoto)

A tiny colony of yeast trapped inside a Lebanese weevil covered in ancient Burmese amber for up to 45 million years, has been brought back to life in barrels of beer.

Emeritus Professor Raul Cano of the California Polytechnic State University, originally extracted the yeast a decade ago, along with more than 2000 different kinds of microscopic creatures.

Today, Cano uses the reactivated yeast to brew barrels of pale ale and German wheat beer.

“You can always buy brewing yeast, and your product will be based on the brewmaster’s recipes,” says Cano. “Our yeast has a double angle: We have yeast no one else has and our own beer recipes.”

The beer received good reviews at the Russian River Beer Festival and from other reviewers. The Oakland Tribune beer critic, William Brand, said the beer has “a weird spiciness at the finish,” and The Washington Post said the beer was “smooth and spicy.”

Part of that taste comes from the yeast’s unique metabolism. “The ancient yeast is restricted to a narrow band of carbohydrates, unlike more modern yeasts, which can consume just about any kind of sugar,” says Cano.

Eventually the yeast will likely evolve the ability to eat other sugars, which could change the taste of the beer. Cano plans to keep a batch of the original yeast to keep the beer true to form.

If this has a ring of deja vu, it could be because Cano’s amber-drilling technique is the same one popularised in the movie Jurassic Park, where scientists extracted ancient dinosaur DNA from the bellies of blood-sucking insects trapped in fossilised tree sap.

Cano’s original goal was to find ancient microscopic creatures that might have some kind of medical value, particularly pharmaceutical drugs.

Going to sleep

While that particular avenue of research didn’t yield significant results, the larger question of how microscopic creatures survived for millions of years could help scientists understand certain diseases, says Professor Charles Greenblatt, a scientist at Hebrew University in Jerusalem who studies ancient bacteria.

“We’ve got cases of guys who contracted [tuberculosis] during World War II and lived with it for 60, 70 years,” says Greenblatt. “Then suddenly they get another disease, the TB wakes up from its dormancy and kills them.”

Inducing dormancy could be a new way to fight disease and infection, says Greenblatt.

Instead of outright killing infectious creatures, doctors could instead put them to sleep. The infection would still be present in the patient’s body, but it wouldn’t hurt the patient.

Neither Cano nor Greenblatt can say what the upper limit for hibernating yeast or bacteria is – it could be hundreds of million years.

But while other scientists work on that, Cano plans to spend his time tossing back a few cold ones, and hoping others will too.

“We think that people will drink one beer out of curiosity,” says Cano. “But if the beer doesn’t taste good, no one will drink a second.”

Sourced and produced by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009

ancient amber

The researchers believe the discovery will deepen our understanding of these now extinct species (Source: Laboratoire géosciences Rennes)

Scientists have discovered a menagerie of perfectly intact marine microorganisms trapped in tree resin at least 100 million years ago, according to a new study.

The unexpected find in the Charente region of southwestern France pushes back by at least 20 million years the period when a type of single-cell algae called diatoms are known to have appeared on earth, say the study’s authors.

The study, carried out by the National History Museum in Paris and the National Centre for Scientific Research in Strasbourg, appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

But the finding creates a mystery: how did sea creatures wind up trapped in a glob of resinated amber that oozes out of trees?

The most likely scenario, the scientists conclude, is that the forest producing the amber was very near the coast, and that the tiny organisms, which also included primitive plankton, were either carried inland by strong winds or flood waters during a storm.

“This discovery will deepen our understanding of these lost marine species as well as providing precious data about the coastal environment of western France during the Cretaceous Period,” which spanned from 145 to 65 million years ago, say researchers.

It also challenges certain theories about the evolution of these organisms, and vindicates the research of molecular geneticists, says study co-author and National History Museum scientist Jean-Paul Saint Martin.

Using “molecular clocks,” biochemists move backward in time to figure out at what point in the evolutionary process certain plant and animal species split off into different branches.

“We had no record of these microorganisms over a period of 20 million years. These fossils have filled that void in the most extraordinary manner,” Saint Martin says.

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009

posture

Seahorses evolved their upright posture some 25 million years ago, thanks in part to an expansion of vertical seagrass habitat, Australian researchers have found.

Associate Professor Luciano Beheregaray of Flinders University and Dr Peter Teske of Macquarie University report their findings in the journal Biology Letters today.

Seahorses are unique fish with a horse-shaped head and a habit of swimming upright.

Beheregaray says it has been hard for scientists to work out when exactly seahorses evolved to swim upright.

This is because there are only two known fossils of seahorses – the oldest dating back to 13 million years – and no link between these and horizontally-swimming fish had been found.

“When you look back in time, you don’t see intermediate seahorse-like fish,” says Beheregaray.

But, he says, there are fish alive today that look like horizontally-swimming seahorses and these could provide clues as to when seahorses evolved to be upright.

Pygmy pipehorses

Beheregaray and Teske compared the DNA of seahorses and other species from the same family to find out which was the closest living relative to seahorses.

“The pygmy pipehorses are by far the most seahorse-like fish on earth. They do look like the seahorses, but they swim horizontally,” says Beheregaray.

He and Teske used molecular dating techniques, which relies on the accumulation of differences in the DNA between the two species to work out when they diverged.

The researchers used the two existing fossil seahorses to calibrate the rate of evolution of DNA in their molecular clock.

And they discovered that the last common ancestor of seahorses and pygmy pipehorses lived around 25 to 28 million years ago.

Seagrass habitat

Beheregaray says at the time that seahorses arose during the Oligocene epoch coincided with the formation of vast areas of shallow water and expansion of seagrass in Australasia – where Teske has previously showed seahorses first evolved.

Seagrass was the perfect habitat for an upright-swimming seahorse, which could camouflage itself in the vertical seagrass blades, he says.

The horizontal-swimming pygmy pipehorses, by contrast, thrived in large algae on reefs and didn’t have the need to evolve the upright posture.

“The two groups split in a period when there were conditions favouring that split,” says Beheregaray.

“It’s like us. We started walking upright when we moved to the savannahs. On the other hand, the seahorses invaded the new vast areas of seagrass.”

Sourced and published by Henry Sapiecha 13th May 2009