Meteorite Hunter Discovers New Mineral

Hidden within a rock from space is a mineral previously unknown to science: panguite.

The new mineral was found embedded in the Allende meteorite, which fell to Earth in 1969. Since 2007, geologist Chi Ma of Caltech has been probing the meteorite with a scanning electron microscope, discovering nine new materials, including panguite.

Ma and his team have determined that panguite was one of the first solid materials to coalesce in our solar system, roughly 4.567 billion years ago. The mineral’s name is a reference to Pan Gu, a primitive, hairy giant from Chinese mythology who separated yin and yang with a swing of his enormous axe, thereby creating the Earth and sky.

Panguite’s primordial nature means that it was actually around before the Earth and other planets formed, meaning it can help scientists learn more about the conditions in the cloud of gas and dust that gave rise to our solar system.

Geology geeks can note that the mineral’s chemical name is (Ti4+,Sc,Al,Mg,Zr,Ca)1.8O3, meaning that it contains some familiar elements like oxygen, magnesium, and aluminum, but also some more exotic ones like zirconium and scandium. Zirconium in particular is a key element that can help scientists decipher the environment before and during the solar system’s formation.

The International Mineralogical Association’s Commission on New Minerals, Nomenclature, and Classification has approved the new mineral and its name and a paper describing its properties was published online June 26 in American Mineralogist.

Image: Chi Ma/Caltech

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Lords of the Rings: Oldest Tree Species on Earth

Trees are among the oldest living organisms on the planet. Some individual trees have lived for several thousand years, and connected groves of trees can sometimes live for tens of thousands of years. Living that long requires a combination of steady climate, solitude, luck, and of course, genetics. Some tree species consistently outlive the others. Based on tree rings (which form at the rate of one per year), these are the longest-lived tree species.

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Astronomers Discover Galaxy They Thought Couldn’t Exist

Astronomers have spotted one of the rarest and most extreme galaxy clusters in the universe and, behind it, an object that shouldn’t exist.

Galaxy clusters are collections of galaxies that orbit one another and are the most massive objects in the universe. The newly discovered cluster, first detected by the Hubble space telescope, is over 500 trillion times the mass of the sun. It is located approximately 10 billion light-years away. Because looking out into the distant cosmos means also looking back in time, the cluster formed during an era when the universe was a quarter its present age.

The cluster, named IDCS J1426.5+3508, is extreme because during this period in cosmic history, massive collections of galaxies were just beginning to form. Only one other cluster of comparable size has been seen at this distance and it is a lightweight compared to IDCS J1426.5+3508.

Adding to the object’s strangeness, a mysterious arc of blue light was seen just behind the galaxy cluster. Astronomers think this indicates another massive star-forming galaxy located even further away at an even earlier epoch.

Light from this more distant — and yet unnamed – galaxy has been highly distorted by an effect known as gravitational lensing. The gargantuan mass of the galaxy cluster bends and twists light coming from the distant galaxy, creating the strange blue arc.

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Google’s Artificial Brain Learns to Find Cat Videos

By Liat Clark, Wired UK

When computer scientists at Google’s mysterious X lab built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections and let it browse YouTube, it did what many web users might do — it began to look for cats.

Wired U.K.
The “brain” simulation was exposed to 10 million randomly selected YouTube video thumbnails over the course of three days and, after being presented with a list of 20,000 different items, it began to recognize pictures of cats using a “deep learning” algorithm. This was despite being fed no information on distinguishing features that might help identify one.

Picking up on the most commonly occurring images featured on YouTube, the system achieved 81.7 percent accuracy in detecting human faces, 76.7 percent accuracy when identifying human body parts and 74.8 percent accuracy when identifying cats.

“Contrary to what appears to be a widely-held intuition, our experimental results reveal that it is possible to train a face detector without having to label images as containing a face or not,” the team says in its paper, Building high-level features using large scale unsupervised learning, which it will present at the International Conference on Machine Learning in Edinburgh, 26 June-1 July.

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Have Your Genome Made Into a Piece of Art

Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine went, at least in part, to the victors in a battle of aesthetics.

Roughly 10 years prior, during the race to uncover the structure of DNA — the molecule of life — researchers bickered over how its strands fit together in three-dimensional space. James Watson, Francis Crick and Maurice Wilkins emerged as winners, but had pored over several models and designs before finding that a twisting ladder called a double helix held the structural key.

Sixty years later, we’re still captivated by viewing our genetic footprint. But instead of zeroing in on how one DNA pair connects to another, genetics pioneers are offering us the 30,000-foot view –- how the sum total of our DNA factors in to making us, well, us. While many companies are focused on what large-scale genome studies might tell us about health, disease, or ancestry, Ottawa-based DNA11 is moving molecules out of the lab and into the home, creating personalized works of DNA art and uncovering a modern version of DNA’s functional beauty, which Watson, Crick and Wilkins unlocked decades ago.

“Genomics is revolutionizing the way we live, from curing genetic diseases to the advancement of personalized drugs,” Nazim Ahmed, co-founder of DNA11, told Wired in an email. “However, we are not exposed to the field on a daily basis because it lives mostly inside our research labs.”

In 2005, Ahmed and his business partner Adrian Salamunovic formed DNA11 as a way to fuse their passions of genomics and art and expose more people to genomics.

“We wanted to combine art and science in a way that’s had never been done before,” Salamunovic said. So rather than trying to entice people to buy a stock image showing what a stranger’s genes look like, Nazim and Salamunovic have personalized the experience, asking the customer to supply a sample of their own DNA.

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