Colossal Squid Caught off Antarctica!

In Antarctica's Ross Sea, a fishing boat has caught what is likely the world's biggest known colossal squid (yes, that's the species' name), New Zealand officials announced today.

Heavier than even giant squid, colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) have eyes as wide as dinner plates and sharp hooks on some of their suckers. The new specimen weighs in at an estimated 990 pounds (450 kilograms). The sea monster had become entangled while feeding on Patagonian toothfish caught on long lines of hooks. The crew then maneuvered the squid into a net and painstakingly hauled it aboard—a two-hour process. The animal was frozen and placed in a massive freezer below decks. Now in New Zealand, the carcass awaits scientific analysis. "Even basic questions such as how large does this species grow to and how long does it live for are not yet known," said New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton in a statement. The deep-sea species was first discovered in 1925, though the only evidence was two tentacles found in a sperm whale's stomach. The new specimen is likely the first intact male ever recovered, Anderton said. Squid expert Steve O'Shea told local press, "I can assure you that this is going to draw phenomenal interest." For one thing, added the Auckland University of Technology professor, the squid would yield calamari rings the size of tractor tires.

World's Longest Underground River Discovered in Mexico

Divers exploring a maze of underwater caves on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula have identified what may be the longest underground river in the world.

The waterway twists and turns for 95 miles (153 kilometers) through the region's limestone caverns, said British diver Stephen Bogaerts, who made the discovery with German colleague Robbie Schmittner. In a straight line, the system would span about six miles (ten kilometers) of land. Bogaerts and Schmittner spent four years exploring using underwater scooters and specially rigged gas cylinders to find a connection between the Yucatán region's second and third longest cave systems, known respectively as Sac Actun and Nohoch Nah Chich. "We expected to have done it by December 2004," Bogaerts said. "But, unfortunately, we were unable to make the connection in the area we were looking in, so we had to look somewhere else." The team scoured the passages, marking each new twist and turn with carefully labeled rope. On January 23 the pair headed toward the final connection from opposite sides and used an unopened bottle of champagne to make the final tie-off between the two systems. "It's a little bit like planting a flag on the moon or the top of Everest," Bogaerts said. The pair celebrated with a second bottle of champagne on the surface.
Explorer's Paradise
Gene Melton is chair of the Lake City, Florida-based National Speleological Society's Cave Diving Section. He said the connection caps 20 years of exploration and mapping in the Yucatán's underground labyrinth. "Bogaerts and Schmittner saw the trending of certain passages going together, and they started making a major effort to explore it," he said.

Stonehenge Settlement Found

A major prehistoric village has been unearthed near Stonehenge in southern England.

The settlement likely housed the builders of the famous monument, archaeologists say, and was an important ceremonial site in its own right, hosting great "feasts and parties" Excavations also offer new evidence that a timber circle and a vast earthwork where the village once stood were linked to Stonehege—via road, river, and ritual. Together, the sites were part of a much larger religious complex, the archaeologists suggest. "Stonehenge isn't a monument in isolation. It is actually one of a pair—one in stone, one in timber.'' said Mike Parker Pearson. The Late Stone Age village—the largest ever found in Britain—was excavated in September 2006 at Durrington Walls, the world's largest known "henge," a type of circular earthwork. A giant timber circle once stood at Durrington, which is 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometers) from the celebrated circle of standing stones on Salisbury Plain. At Durrington the archaeologists discovered foundations of houses dating back to 4,600 years ago around the time construction began on Stonehenge. Excavations revealed the remains of eight wooden buildings. Surveys of the landscape have identified up to 30 more dwellings, Parker Pearson said. "We could have many hundreds of houses here," he added. The initial stone circle at Stonehenge—the so-called sarsen stones—has been radiocarbon-dated to between 2600 and 2500 B.C. The dates for the village are "exactly the same time, in radiocarbon terms, as for the building of the sarsens," Parker Pearson said. Six of the houses so far unearthed measured about 250 square feet (23 square meters) each and had wooden walls and clay floors. Fireplaces and furniture—such as cupboards and beds—could be discerned from their outlines in the earth, Parker Pearson said.

The Invisible Warship

It will be almost silent, nearly invisible to enemy radar—and capable of dropping six powerful missiles simultaneously on a single target up to 95 miles away. But the most important feature of the DDG1000 Zumwalt, the Navy's first new destroyer in 30 years, could be its versatility. The 600-foot-long ship will be just as comfortable in the deep ocean as in the mine-infested shallows of the Persian Gulf.
Yesterday’s big boats were designed for open-water standoffs, not hostile coastlines. They show up like giant bull’s-eyes on land-based radar installations. And the ships lack sufficient sensor systems to dodge the waterborne mines common to enemy harbors.
That’s not going to cut it for the fleet of the future. Captain Jim Syring, the DDG1000’s program manager, says the need for littoral dominance is obvious if you consider the shallow waters near potential conflict regions: “All you’ve got to do is look at the areas of interest: the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Japan, the Korean Peninsula.”
Whether it’s dropping off a SEAL team or launching missiles inland, the Zumwalt is going to have to slip in unnoticed. It will be quiet—the diesel engine’s noise will be stifled by an inch-thick rubber coating that Syring likens to elephant skin—and stealthy. The spinning dishes and antennas common to today’s ships easily register on enemy radar, so the DDG1000 will instead feature communications hardware that lies flat, embedded in the skin of the deckhouse. This sleek design, combined with a hull that slopes inward from sea level up, rather than outward like most ships, will scatter the energy from an enemy’s radar. According to Syring, on scanners the Zumwalt will look like a fishing boat.
Though hard to find, the DDG1000 will announce its presence with a bang. The Advanced Gun System will be able to fire 600 GPS-guided Long Range Land Attack Projectiles in only 30 minutes—or plant six of them in the same spot at the same time. Staggered around the ship’s perimeter, 80 launchers packed with Tomahawks and other missiles will provide additional power.
For added protection, a new dual-band radar system that searches both the sky and the sea surface will be able to locate something as small as a terrorist speeding in on a Jet Ski, and the ship’s bulbous front protrusion sports a super-sensitive sonar array for identifying underwater minefields. All that’s left now is to start cutting metal. Construction on the first of seven ships is expected to start early next year, with a planned delivery date of 2012.

DDG1000 ZumwaltPurpose: Multi-mission destroyer designed for shallow-water dominance Manufacturer: Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Dimensions [feet]: 600 (length); 80.7 (beam); 27.6 (draft)

Weapons: Two 155-millimeter Advanced Gun System launchers; 80 Advanced Vertical Launch System cells; two 57-millimeter close-range guns

Cost: $2.3 billion

Clues to Human Origin

One of the more embarrassing mysteries of human evolution is that people are host to no fewer than three kinds of louse while most species have just one.
Even bleaker for the human reputation, the pubic louse, which gets its dates and residence-swapping opportunities when its hosts are locked in intimate embrace, does not seem to be a true native of the human body. Its closest relative is the gorilla louse. (Don’t even think about it.)
Louse specialists now seem at last to have solved the question of how people came by their superabundance of fellow travelers. And in doing so they have shed light on the two major turning points in the history of fashion: when people lost their body hair, and when they first made clothing.

Three kinds of louse call Homo sapiens their home, but each occupies a different niche on the human body. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives in the forest of fine hairs on the scalp. Its cousin, the body louse, lives not on the skin but in clothes. And the exclusive territory of the pubic louse, Phthirus pubis, is the coarser hairs of the crotch.
Lice are intimately adapted to their hosts and cannot long survive away from the body’s blood and warmth. If their host evolves into two species, the lice will do likewise. So biologists have long been puzzled over the fact that the human head louse is a sister species to the chimpanzee louse, but the pubic louse is closely related to the gorilla louse.
By comparing louse DNA, a team led by David L. Reed of the University of Florida has now reconstructed how this strange situation probably came about. Dr. Reed’s team collected pubic lice from a public health clinic in Salt Lake City. Samples of gorilla lice were obtained by members of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, which provides free health care to gorillas in the wild.
The number of DNA differences between the gorilla louse and the pubic louse indicates that they diverged some 3.3 million years ago, Dr. Reed and colleagues report in today’s issue of the journal Biomed Central Biology. Among people, the pubic louse is usually spread by sexual contact, but the gorilla louse could have been contracted in some other way.
“We’ll never know if it was sex or something more tame,” Dr. Reed said. What can be said about the transfer, he believes, is that it signals human ancestors had already lost their body hair by 3.3 million years ago, confining the human louse to the head and leaving the groin open to invasion by the gorilla louse.
Archaeologists contend that human ancestors lost their standard ape body hair when they left the shade of the forests for the hot, open savanna and needed bare skin for efficient sweating. Adaptation to the savanna was well in place by 1.7 million years ago. But loss of body hair could have begun earlier, and Dr. Reed’s result suggests a time for when people first became naked.
If people first became nudists 3.3 million years ago, when did they start to wear clothes? Surprisingly, lice once again furnish the answer. Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs.
In 2003, Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated from DNA differences that the body louse evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago. The first sewn clothes were presumably made shortly before this time.
Probing back even earlier in louse evolution, Dr. Reed and his colleagues report that the two species of primate lice, Pediculus and Phthirus, probably diverged from each other on an ape host 13 million years ago. The divergence may have happened after the lice started to specialize in different parts of the body.
Some seven million years ago, this ancient ape species split into gorillas and the ancestors of humans and chimps, with both lineages infected by both species of lice. But Pediculus then fell extinct in its gorilla hosts, according to Dr. Reed’s reconstruction, and Phthirus vanished from the chimp-human ancestor. Next, chimps and humans diverged, and their joint louse diverged with them into Pediculus humanus and Pediculus schaeffi.
The last event in this history of human-louse cohabitation was the transfer of the gorilla’s Phthirus louse to people.
Dr. Stoneking said Dr. Reed’s reconstruction was “pretty reasonable” and said he agreed that acquisition of the gorilla’s louse indicated people had lost their body hair by then. “The transfer doesn’t have to be sexual,” he said, “but presumably it does require reasonably close contact.”

Future Flights

All Sonic, No BoomLong hampered because the planes were too loud to fly over land, supersonic air travel is now on its way back—without the big bang By Eric Hagerman March 2007

If you’re ever lucky enough to fly a Quiet Supersonic Transport between New York and Los Angeles, you’ll have just enough time to get through a movie—a short one. Instead of the usual six hours, it will be a 1,100mph, two-hour hop. The QSST, as the proposed luxury private jet is known, could be the first civilian supersonic plane approved for overland routes, thanks to aerodynamics designed to muzzle its sonic boom. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has been developing the project for six years under a $25-million contract from Supersonic Aerospace International (SAI), founded by Michael Paulson, son of Gulfstream founder Allen Paulson. The 12-passenger QSST would fly at between 47,000 and 57,000 feet with a range of 4,600 miles (Chicago to Rome, for example), and it doesn’t need an extended runway. Configured with 12 club chairs, a spacious bathroom and a sweet A/V system, the QSST is aimed at diplomats or executives with plenty of money—but little time—to spare.
Designed to fly between Mach 1.6 and 1.8 (1,056 to 1,188 mph), the two-engine gull-wing aircraft would leave a sonic wake that’s only one hundredth the strength of the Mach 2–capable Concorde, the 100-seat speed demon that wound up permanently grounded following a fatal accident in 2000. (High maintenance costs for the aging fleet and a struggling airline industry also contributed to its demise.)
Eliminating bone-rattling sonic booms is a major feat of aerodynamic hocus-pocus. When an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound, it creates pressure waves in the air that collide with one another faster than they can dissipate, resulting in a loud crack, or sonic boom. The QSST, though it shares its general shape with the Concorde is less than half the size and uses fine-tuned aerodynamics to control the pressure generated as the plane displaces air at supersonic speeds. With air disturbances along the craft evened out, the QSST generates more shockwaves of smaller magnitude rather than two explosive reports. Tom Hartmann, the program manager at Lockheed, expects the boom to be imperceptible—quieter than a kite flying overhead.
Another key to quiet flight is its broad distribution of lift-generating surfaces. The QSST’s canards—the small wings near the front of the fuselage—and swept-V tail provide substantial lift, preventing the sharp, loud-boom-generating pressure change typical of larger, wider wings. Hartmann says the QSST is so sleek that it can fly 10 percent farther on its fuel supply supersonically than it can at subsonic speeds. “We could easily design a low-sonic-boom aircraft if it didn’t have to fly anywhere,” he says—that is, if the design didn't have to take fuel efficiency into consideration. “The challenge is to fly a long way. The hard part of this was to develop a low-drag design.”
The inverted-V tail also allows the two engines to be mounted far aft— a design feature that further separates the pressure waves and keeps them from crashing into one another. Normally, this engine placement would require extra material to support the cantilevered weight, but the inherent strength of the V tail's truss shape compensates.
The Federal Aviation Administration restricted the Concorde to transoceanic flights because that craft created sonic booms strong enough to rattle dishes on the ground below. Paulson says the QSST will meet the FAA’s stringent new noise regulations, which took effect at the beginning of 2006, and he’s hopeful that the quiet design will prompt a lifting of the ban on overland supersonic flights.
SAI is evaluating engine designs from General Electric, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce for a unit that produces 33,000 pounds of thrust (on par with a midsize airliner), for 66,000 pounds of total thrust from two engines. Paulson plans to settle on a design in the next year, assemble an international consortium to manufacture the jet, and put it on the market by 2014 for about $80 million. He’d like to roll out a fleet of 300 to 400 in the next 20 years. “The Concorde was a magnificent aircraft,” Paulson says, “but basically, it was 1960s technology. This is an idea whose time is overdue.”

Quiet Supersonic Transport (QSST)
Purpose: High-speed private flights over land and sea
Manufacturer: Lockheed Martin and Supersonic Aerospace International
Range: 4,600 miles
Speed: Mach 1.6 to 1.8 (approx. 1,056 mph to 1,188 mph)
Dimensions: 132.1 ft. length, 63 ft. wingspan
Capacity: 12 passengers, 3 crew
Cost (projected): $2.5 billion development cost; $80 million per aircraft
First flight (projected): 2011

The Future Of Work

You Snooze, You Lose!

Want to keep pace with the competition? Forget coffee—a new class of FDA-approved stimulants will keep you working harder, better, faster and stronger


As a species, we’ve hit the bedtime barrier. You can eat at your desk, socialize in the break room, and answer text messages on a date, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to sleep. “After 18, 19 hours awake, your brain function starts to fail,” says Dallas, Texas, sleep-medicine specialist Andrew O. Jamieson. Coffee might keep you up, “but you’re not going to be focused.”
Coffee? You might as well be commuting by buggy. Old-school stimulants like caffeine, amphetamines and the drug Ritalin are about to be marginalized by eugeroics. This emerging breed of “wakefulness” pills promises to keep the workers of tomorrow not just awake, but alert, on-task and feeling fine through the night and well into the next day. Remember these names, because they’re your future: Modafinil, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy and marketed in the U.S. as Provigil, is already giving a competitive edge to everyone from Air Force pilots on 40-hour missions to (less legally) college students cramming for exams. The drug’s maker, Cephalon in Frazer, Pennsylvania, is awaiting FDA approval for armodafinil, which promises even longer periods of wakefulness on a single dose, and Irvine, California–based Cortex is working on its own drug, code-named CX717 and developed with funding from the military. The drugs are targeted at sleep disorders like narcolepsy, but it’s their dramatic potential influence on the workplace that has researchers and efficiency experts buzzing.
Scientists understand how the drugs work only broadly. Unlike traditional stimulants, eugeroics don’t simply jazz up the whole body. Instead they tweak specific sleep-related mechanisms in the brain, so users don’t feel jittery or wired, just alert. And in experiments with CX717, sleep-deprived rhesus monkeys on the drug often outperformed their own well-rested but undrugged best efforts on mental-performance tests. Modafinil, too, “is definitely a cognitive enhancer,” says cognitive psychopharmacologist Barbara Sahakian of the University of Cambridge. In her studies of alert human volunteers, the drug improved planning, concentration and impulse-control skills, and even boosted some forms of memory.
Here’s the rub: The drugs don’t replace sleep, and decades of research show that sleep deprivation prompts immune dysfunction, depression and other disorders. Sleep isn’t something we should be looking to phase out of our lives.Yet the economic pressure to stay out of bed is intense. Cutting out four hours of sleep a night would free up almost 1,500 extra hours a year. That’s an additional nine months’ worth of standard 40-hour workweeks—plenty of time to earn a promotion or start your own company on the side (or, worst case, slog away in obscurity). From Napoleon to Edison to Churchill, many of history’s most notable figures got by on only a few hours of sleep a night. Give an entire workforce the energy of a Thomas Edison, and you’ve got a new Industrial Revolution.
For better or worse, when the trend takes hold, there will be no going back. Imagine sticking to double lattes while everyone else in the office—or at the start-up down the road—is juicing on the latest eugeroic, and you’ll seem as naive and obsolete as the NFL linesman who swears by protein shakes alone. Any worker could benefit, says University of Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, author of the recent book Mind Wars. “But for consultants or contractors, people who aren’t on a salary? The incentives are ridiculous.”