Poop-Throwing Chimps Provide Hints of Human Origins

Poop-Throwing Chimps Provide Hints of Human Origins:


Pick up an object that’s close at hand. Throw it at something, or even someone (but gently, of course!) You’ve just reenacted what appears to be a pivotal stage in human evolution, when a propensity for projectiles shaped cognitive powers that later became language and symbolic thought.

That, at least, is one hypothesis for how humans became so smart. And now researchers have found support in chimpanzees, among whom the ability to throw goes hand-in-hand with increased intelligence and brain development.

“Imagine you’re an early hominid throwing at a rabbit. There’s increased selection for the cognitive demands of throwing, and that has some consequences for the development of the brain,” said psychologist Bill Hopkins of Emory University. “That’s where the throwing part becomes really interesting.”



In a study published in the January Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Hopkins and colleagues tracked several years’ worth of throwing behaviors in captive chimpanzees. (“If I was going to get s–t thrown at me, I was going to get something out of it,” said Hopkins.) Chimps are the closest living ancestor to humans, and the only species aside from ourselves in which throwing is regularly seen.

The researchers were especially interested in relationships between throwing, cognition and lateralization, or the way certain activities are concentrated in the left or right hemispheres of our brains. Language processing occurs in the left side, which also controls our right hands; and most people use their right hands to throw, as do chimpanzees.

While throwing at first might not seem demanding, coordinating it requires intensive, on-the-fly calculations. An equation for throwing a ball, for example, would include the distance to a target, the ball’s heaviness and the thrower’s strength. A moving target makes it even harder. Other psychologists and anthropologists have put throwing at the beginning of a cognitive cascade into higher-order thought, but Hopkins said his team is the first to test this proposition.

'If you imagine that throwing started off as left hemisphere-dominant, before the emergence of speech, then speech and language would have co-opted that side of the brain.'

From brain scans of chimps that threw most often and accurately, Hopkins found heightened development in and connections between the motor cortex, where physical actions are coordinated, and the Broca’s area, which in humans is central to speech production. Better throwing meant more sophisticated, left hemisphere-reliant brains.

“It supports the idea that these areas could have been selected for as a consequence of throwing,” said Hopkins. “If you imagine that throwing started off as left hemisphere-dominant, before the emergence of speech, then speech and language would have co-opted that side of the brain.”

In behavioral tests, true-throwing chimps also proved especially apt in social intelligence and communication. Intriguingly, they fared no better than poor-throwing chimps on physical problem-solving tests, suggesting that throwing behaviors emerged not for hunting, as is commonly assumed, but to interact with peers.

“Why did these chimps learn to throw in a captive context? I’ve never in my life seen a chimp be given a banana for throwing s–t at someone,” said Hopkins. “The reward is not something food-based. The reward is that they can control a person’s behavior. They get a pile of something to throw, and usually the person tries to run. The chimp learns, ‘If I can do this, I can have some control over the world outside my cage.’”

Hopkins also noted the story of Santino, a chimp at a Swedish zoo who, in a display of sophisticated planning skills, collects stones, hides them from zoo staff and throws them at visitors.

In future research, Hopkins plans to look more closely at neurological changes in chimps newly taught to throw. “It would be interesting to see how far they can go,” he said.

Image: A chimpanzee throws a PVC pipe at a viewer. (Hopkins et al./Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B)

Citation: “The neural and cognitive correlates of aimed throwing in chimpanzees: a magnetic resonance image and behavioural study on a unique form of social tool use.” By William D. Hopkins, Jamie L. Russell and Jennifer A. Schaeffer. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, Vol. 367 No. 1585, January 12, 2012.

Ravens and Magpies Use 'Hand' Gestures to Communicate

The researchers found that ravens often use their beaks like hands to make gestures, such as this male raven is doing as the bird shows two of its kin an object in its beak.Image: Thomas Bugnyar

Ravens use their beaks and wings much like humans rely on our hands to make gestures, such as for pointing to an object, scientists now find.

This is the first time researchers have seen gestures used in this way in the wild by animals other than primates.

From the age of 9 to 12 months, human infants often use gestures to direct the attention of adults to objects, or to hold up items so that others can take them. These gestures, produced before children speak their first words, are seen as milestones in the development of human speech.

Dogs and other animals are known to point out items using gestures, but humans trained these animals, and scientists had suggested the natural development of these gestures was normally confined only to primates, said researcher Simone Pika, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Seewiesen, Germany. Even then, comparable gestures are rarely seen in the wild in our closest living relatives, the great apes—for instance, chimpanzees in the Kibale National Park in Uganda employ so-called directed scratches to indicate distinct spots on their bodies they want groomed.

Still, ravens and their relatives such as crows and magpies have been found to be remarkably intelligent over the years, surpassing most other birds in terms of smarts and even rivaling great apes on some tests.

"[What] I noticed when I encountered ravens for the first time is that they are, contrary to my main focus of research, chimpanzees, a very object-oriented species," Pika said. "It reminded me of my childhood, when my twin brother and I were still little and one of us suddenly regained a favorite toy, which existence both of us had forgotten for a little while. This toy suddenly became the center of interest, fun and competition. Similar things happen, when ravens play with each other and regain objects."

Beak gestures
To see if ravens communicated using gestures, scientists investigated wild ravens in Cumberland Wildpark in Grünau, Austria. Each bird was individually tagged to help identify them.

The researchers saw the ravens use their beaks much like hands to show and offer items such as moss, stones and twigs. These gestures were mostly aimed at members of the opposite sex and often led those gestured at to look at the objects. The ravens then interacted with each other—for example, by touching or clasping their bills together, or by manipulating the item together. As such, these gestures might be used to gauge the interest of a potential partner or strengthen an already existing bond.

"Most exciting is how a species, which does not represent the prototype of a 'gesturer' because it has wings instead of hands, a strong beak and can fly, makes use of very sophisticated nonvocal signals," Pika told LiveScience.

Origin of gestures
Ravens are known to possess a relatively high degree of cooperation between partners. These findings suggest that gestures evolved in a species that demonstrates a high degree of collaborative abilities, a discovery that might shed light on the origin of gestures within humans.

"Gesture studies have too long focused on communicative skills of primates only," Pika said. "The mystery of the origins of human language, however, can only be solved if we look at the bigger picture and also consider the complexity of the communication systems of other animal groups."

As to whether or not these findings suggest that ravens are smarter than dogs, "I am not an advocate of proposing that a given species is smarter than another one," Pika said. "In my view, all species have adapted to distinct social and ecological settings and niches, and thus, a given species might behave in a distinct situation 'smarter' than another one in the same situation and vice versa. In my opinion, it is much more interesting to investigate why one species can solve a given task better than another one and how and why this behavior evolved."

Pika and her colleagues would like to further explore what other gestures ravens use and what their meaning and function might be. Pika and Thomas Bugnyar detailed their findings online Nov. 29 in the journal Nature Communications.

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Geothermal heat may be accessible via old oil and gas wells, scientists say

Since you’ve already drilled the hole . . .

Old oil and gas wells might soon be reborn as environmentally friendly geothermal power generators.

Geothermal energy holds promise as a low-carbon source of electricity because of its ubiquity: Rock temperatures increase by 25 to 50 degrees Celsius for every kilometer of depth due to heat from the Earth’s core. And as much as half the cost of geothermal power plants comes from drilling into the Earth.

Old oil and gas wells often plunge miles deep. Refitting their shafts to circulate water could provide an easy way to extract energy, say Xianbiao Bu and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Guangzho. Their article was published online last month in the journal Renewable Energy.

The team proposes a pipe-within-a-pipe design. Water would flow down one pipe to the bottom of the well, heat up and then be pumped up an inner pipe to the surface, where it would drive a turbine.

Xianbiao believes that a typical well could produce around 54 kilowatts of electricity. That’s not much compared with a full-size power plant running on coal, gas or nuclear energy. But with an estimated 2.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States alone, huge stores of energy may be going untapped.

— New Scientist

Amping Up Brain Function: Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning

WASHINGTON, D.C.—One of the most difficult tasks to teach Air Force pilots who guide unmanned attack drones is how to pick out targets in complex radar images. Pilot training is currently one of the biggest bottlenecks in deploying these new, deadly weapons.

So Air Force researchers were delighted recently to learn that they could cut training time in half by delivering a mild electrical current (two milliamperes of direct current for 30 minutes) to pilot's brains during training sessions on video simulators. The current is delivered through EEG (electroencephalographic) electrodes placed on the scalp. Biomedical engineer Andy McKinley and colleagues at the Air Force Research Laboratory at Wright–Patterson Air Force Base, reported their finding on this so-called transcranial direct current stimulation (TDCS) here at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting on November 13.

"I don't know of anything that would be comparable," McKinley said, contrasting the cognitive boost of TDCS with, for example, caffeine or other stimulants that have been tested as enhancements to learning. TDCS not only accelerated learning, pilot accuracy was sustained in trials lasting up to 40 minutes. Typically accuracy in identifying threats declines steadily after 20 minutes. Beyond accelerating pilot training, TDCS could have many medical applications in the military and beyond by accelerating retraining and recovery after brain injury or disease.

The question for the Air Force and others interested in transcranial stimulation is whether these findings will hold up over time or will land in the dustbin ofpseudoscience.

"There is so much pop science out there on this right now," says neurobiologist Rex Jung of the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque, referring to sensational media reports, the widely varying protocols and sometimes lax controls used in different studies of brain stimulation to power learning or elevate mood.

Indeed, electrical stimulation for therapeutic effect has a long and checkered history extending back to the 19th century when "electrotherapy" was the rage among adventurous medical doctors as well as quacks. Pulses of electric current were applied to treat a wide range of conditions from insomnia to uterine cancer. The placebo effect might have been at work in the case of those historical results, and although the experiments were carefully controlled, it is unclear to skeptics if it is a factor in the case of the Air Force's research on transcranial stimulation and learning.

Subjects definitely register the stimulation, but it is not unpleasant. "It feels like a mild tickling or slight burning," says undergraduate student Lauren Bullard, who was one of the subjects in another study on TDCS and learning reported at the meeting, along with her mentors Jung and Michael Weisend and colleagues of the Mind Research Network in Albuquerque. "Afterward I feel more alert," she says. But why?

Bullard and her co-authors sought to determine if they could measure any tangible changes in the brain after TDCS, which could explain how the treatment accelerates learning. The researchers looked for both functional changes in the brain (altered brain-wave activity) and physical changes (by examining MRI brain scans) after TDCS.

They used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to record magnetic fields (brain waves) produced by sensory stimulation (sound, touch and light, for example), while test subjects received TDCS. The researchers reported that TDCS gave a six-times baseline boost to the amplitude of a brain wave generated in response to stimulating a sensory nerve in the arm. The boost was not seen when mock TDCS was used, which produced a similar sensation on the scalp, but was ineffective in exciting brain tissue. The effect also persisted long after TDCS was stopped. The sensory-evoked brain wave remained 2.5 times greater than normal 50 minutes after TDCS. These results suggest that TDCS increases cerebral cortex excitability, thereby heightening arousal, increasing responses to sensory input, and accelerating information processing in cortical circuits.

Remarkably, MRI brain scans revealed clear structural changes in the brain as soon as five days after TDCS. Neurons in the cerebral cortex connect with one another to form circuits via massive bundles of nerve fibers (axons) buried deep below the brain's surface in "white matter tracts." The fiber bundles were found to be more robust and more highly organized after TDCS. No changes were seen on the opposite side of the brain that was not stimulated by the scalp electrodes.

The structural changes in white matter detected by the MRI technique, called diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), could be caused by a number of microscopic physical or cellular alterations in brain tissue, but identifying those is impossible without obtaining samples of the tissue for analysis under a microscope.

An expert on brain imaging, Robert Turner of the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in Leipzig, Germany, who was not involved in the study, speculated that the changes detected by DTI could represent an increase in insulation on the fibers (myelin) that would speed transmission of information through the fibers. "In my present view, the leading hypothesis for the observed rapid changes…is that previously unmyelinated axonal fibers within white matter become rapidly myelinated when they start to carry frequent action potentials," he says. There are, however, several other possible explanations, he cautions.

Matthias Witkowski, now at the Institute for Medicine, Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology at the University of Tübingen in Germany, described the rapid changes in white matter in these experiments as "incredible." "That [white matter changes] would not have been my first guess," he said. "It will be very interesting to see if there are cellular changes." This is the next step in research planned by Jung and colleagues. They hope to obtain brain tissue from patients who would be willing to participate in TDCS studies prior to undergoing necessary brain surgery in which tissue would be removed as a required part of their treatment.

Witkowski is convinced by these new studies and his own research that transcranial stimulation can accelerate many kinds of learning, and research on brain–machine interfacing, which he presented at the meeting, demonstrates the potential for TDCS in speeding patient rehabilitation after injury. People with paralyzed limbs can be taught to control a robotic glovelike device that will move their fingers in response to the patient's own thoughts. Electrodes on the person's scalp pick up brain waves as the person imagines moving his or her hand. The brain waves are analyzed by a computer to control the robotic artificial hand. But learning to generate the proper brain waves to control the artificial hand through thought alone requires considerable training. Witkowski found that if patients received 20 minutes of TDCS stimulation once during five days of training, they learned to control the hand with their thoughts much more rapidly.

The new studies reported at this meeting suggest that there is far more to speed learning produced by TDCS than can be explained by the placebo effect. And the evidence now shows that TDCS produces physical changes in the brain's structure as well as physiological changes in its response. TDCS increases cortical excitability, which can be measured in recordings of brain waves, and it also causes changes in the structure of the brain's connections that can be observed on an MRI. By using electricity to energize neural circuits in the cerebral cortex, researchers are hopeful that they have found a harmless and drug-free way to double the speed of learning.

12-Year-Old Boys Shower the Longest, Says British Survey on Shower Habits

Doesn't everyone know that showers waste water? When it comes to those easy lists of how-to-go-green without pain, shorter showers and fewer baths top the chart.

But not in jolly old England, where people are taking 8-minute-long showers, according to a recent survey on showering habits. What do they do in there for so long?

Performed by Unilever, the survey reveals some interesting details on the nation's private life.

A survey of 2,600 showers taken by 100 families over a 10-day period found that the average shower lasted 8 minutes--much longer than the assumed time of five minutes for a shower. At that length, the shower used almost as much water and energy as the average bath and cost twice as much a year in water and electricity costs.

Apparently, an 8 minute shower used 62 litres of hot water, compared with an average bath's 80 litres. And if people used a power shower then the 8 minute shower used twice as much water and energy as a bath.

flickr/CC BY 1.0

The findings have important implications because Unilever has estimated that around 95% of the greenhouse gases associated with shampoos, soaps and shower gels come from people using hot water when showering. It hopes that the new study will provide better understanding of shower behaviour which will help it develop solutions and products to counter this.

As for showering habits by sex: 12-year-old boys spent longest in the shower, averaging 9  minutes and 41 seconds. Girls were in and out in just 6 minutes and 34 seconds until the teenage years when their time rose to 9 minutes and 21 seconds.

Women were better multi-taskers: (what a surprise) taking shorter showers and brushing their teeth and shaving their legs at the same time. They spent 7 minutes 39 seconds on average during the week, while on Saturdays they took 8 minutes 55 seconds.

Men spent 8 minutes 5 seconds showering during the week.

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High IQ Kids Later Try Drugs More

Having a high IQ may have its drawbacks: a new study finds that highly intelligent children are more likely to try illegal drugs in their teenage and adult years. The work is published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. [James White and G. David Batty, "Intelligence across childhood in relation to illegal drug use in adulthood: 1970 British Cohort Study"]

An ongoing study that started in 1970 gathered data from 8,000 people, including their IQ test scores at ages five and 10. Participants later reported their history of illicit drug use at age 16, and then again at age 30.

Men with high childhood IQs were 50 percent more likely to use drugs than their low-scoring counterparts. And women with high scores were more than twice as likely to have tried controlled substances.

What draws children with high IQs to eventually try drugs? The study’s authors point out that drugs could serve as a coping mechanism for intelligent children who stand out from their classmates and become targets for teasing. In addition, intelligent people tend to pursue new, stimulating experiences to stave off boredom. Meaning that an IQ being high could be a gateway to getting high.

—Sophie Bushwick

Geothermal Deposits in Northern Territory

The geothermal energy industry is eyeing the Northern Territory as a key source of inexpensive and renewable energy. Susan Jeanes from the Australian Geothermal Energy Association says the introduction of the carbon tax has made it more worthwhile to invest in exploratory drilling.

Geothermal energy consultancy Hot Dry Rocks has worked with Google and hot rock experts overseas to estimate and map the planet's reserves.

The preliminary heat-flow map for Australia shows SA, Queensland and the Northern Territory have the most abundant geothermal resources in the nation - we just have to tap into the resource.

Rocks within 5km of the surface of SA could generate 58,541MW of electricity if just 2 per cent of the heat were extracted, or 585,410MW if 20 per cent of the heat were extracted.

This is up to 168 times the amount of energy currently generated by coal and gas.

HDR managing director Graeme Beardsmore says that geothermal is "clean, renewable energy that is realistically accessible today with existing drilling and power conversion technologies".

"Enhanced geothermal systems have the potential to provide base load power; it is one of the most abundant sources of renewable energy available and is more than sufficient to replace current coal and gas power supply," he said.

Geothermal electricity is produced from energy released from superheated rocks lying kilometres below the earth's surface. Ms Jeanes says drilling has already commenced in the Cooper Basin east of Alice Springs.

"What the problem for the industry is in this early exploration phase is that the rigs that we need to drill holes four and five kilometres deep cost about 50 million dollars," she said. "There's only one here in Australia and that's the rig that's owned by Geodynamics and that's currently located in the Cooper Basin. So anybody else who wants to drill a deep well has to bring one in from overseas."

Ms Jeanes says people need to embrace more clean energy sources. "The government has come and said we think this is a very important energy resource," she said.

"They've got a policy program now that's underpinned by a carbon price that will start to move some money for us. The market has to become more interested in clean energy sources. There are lot of clean energy options around but ultimately we're the only renewable energy on the horizon that is baseload."

Next-Generation Flex-Fuel Cells Ready to Hit the Market

by STEVEN ASHLEY

BLOOM BOX: The Bloom "Energy Server" is just one example of the type of solid oxide fuel cell that may become more common in the near future. Image: Courtesy of Bloom Energy

A fuel-cell power unit that can use natural gas, propane or diesel may in a couple of years provide on-site electricity to factories, computer-server farms and even your home. The solid oxide fuel cell, or SOFC, is also set to go mobile, with new systems providing auxiliary or "hotel" power to long-haul trucks. They may also keep a solar-powered surveillance drone in the sky for what could be years at a time. The latter's "two-way" fuel cell system could in addition electrolyze water to store backup energy as hydrogen to supplement intermittent solar and wind power. In time, say researchers, SOFCs might show up as range extenders—power units that augment batteries to extend distance driven electrically—in hybrid vehicles.

"Compared to any other device that converts chemical energy into electricity, the fuel cell, and in particular the solid oxide or ceramic fuel cell, is hands down the most efficient," says veteran fuel cell researcher Eric Wachsman, director of the University of Maryland Energy Research Center, who published research pointing the way to lower temperature SOFCs on November 18 in Science. That's why SOFCs can be tallied as green technology, even if their use of hydrocarbon fuels entails releases of carbon dioxide.

SOFCs have long been seen as second-string to the more well-known hydrogen-based fuel cells. That's because SOFCs run hot, too hot for cars. In the mid-1990s when the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) was selecting the technologies that would go into the green car of the future, Wachsman recalls, it chose the 80-degree Celsius polymer electrolyte membrane (PEM) fuel cells over the 1,000-degree C SOFC. But the continued lack of a hydrogen fuel distribution system means that "we placed our eggs in the wrong basket by investing billions in hydrogen PEMs instead of the type of fuel cell that runs off the fuels that we have today," Wachsman says.

That flexible-fueling advantage has, however, enabled Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Bloom Energy to sell some 120 natural gas–fuel SOFCs, stand-alone heat and power units that produce both electricity and heat for a local site to green-minded Fortune 500 corporate plants and state university facilities—notably, subsidized distributed power demonstration projects in California. The company is even building a new plant in Delaware and will sell 30 megawatts of its Bloom Box fuel-cell units to the local utility, Delmarva Power. Unfortunately, Bloom Boxes use a traditional ceramic fuel-cell design that tends to be relatively expensive to operate, a competitive disadvantage that Bloom hopes to address with a new, lower-cost power-leasing program.

Hot power box
A SOFC converts a fuel's chemical energy into electricity, says Bob Stokes, a longtime fuel-cell researcher and CEO of Versa Power Systems in Littleton, Colo., one of the up-and-coming developers of SOFCs. In general, the system consists of two electrodes sandwiching a solid oxide or ceramic membrane (or electrolyte). The electrochemical device produces electricity directly by oxidizing—read, slow burning—fuels.

"Unlike other fuel cells which transport positively charged [hydrogen, or H+,] ions through a membrane, solid oxide types use a ceramic oxide—through which negatively charged oxygen ions pass," Stokes explains. The oxygen sensor in your car is based on the same yttria-stabilized zirconium oxide ceramic. The oxygen (O–) ions, react with hydrogen from the fuel to create water, electricity and, if the fuel contains hydrocarbons, carbon dioxide.

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Fuel-flexible SOFCs don't have to use hydrogen as fuel; they can run just fine on hydrocarbon fuels, such as natural gas, propane or diesel. A system can either break down a carbon-containing fuel into hydrogen and carbon with a pretreatment steam reformer or do it internally, using its own heat and design.

And although SOFCs operate hotter than most other common fuel cell types, they can convert as much as 60 percent of the fuel into usable electricity, Stokes says. "This means that the amount of carbon dioxide it releases per unit of usable energy that it produces is half that of what a conventional engine emits." The heat also allows SOFC to run without the costly platinum-based catalysts that current polymer electrolyte membrane systems need.

Making membranes
Design and manufacturing innovations, funded in part by DoE programs, are bringing down the cost of the technology as well. Older SOFC designs use the electrolyte layer as a structural support, but the thicker component has a higher electrical resistance, which entails higher operating temperatures to avoid power losses, Wachsman explains.

Engineers have lowered operating temperatures by using electrode-supported designs with thin, more conductive electrolytes, but the new techniques needed to make the dense, gas-impermeable electrolyte layers can be problematic. "The thinner the membrane, the more unstable it is," he says. Developers manage the trade-off between thickness and conductivity by supplementing the ceramic with scandium, a transition metal rare earth that boosts conductivity, albeit at a high cost.

Many manufacturers have adopted (or adapted) a tubular configuration, which enables relatively easy and thus low-cost assembly. Reduced temperatures in addition mean cheaper steels can be used elsewhere.

Next-gen products
As a result of the design improvements, prospects for the technology are on the rise, says Brian Warshay, an analyst at Boston-based Lux Research who follows power grid–related technologies. "We see the main application for SOFCs in natural gas–fueled stationary power supplies for industrial users and those who need continuous, on-site distributed power such as Web-server farms—high-reliability base-load power systems of 100 kilowatts or larger," he says.

Heat and power units for homes may also become more common, such SOFCs can be 85 percent efficient. The fuel cell not only supplies electricity but heats the house and the hot water. These, Warshay notes, are particularly popular outside the U.S., "where energy usage is significantly lower than here," as the outsize electricity demands by American users would generally overtax the capacities of the first round of home-size heat and power models being marketed in Asia and Europe.

Stokes and other industry observers also expect even larger, megawatt-size distributed power units that are composed of modular 250-kilowatt stacks to hit the market within two to three years, having recently watched large multinational corporations such as General Electric and Rolls Royce sign supply deals with SOFC cell- and stack-makers.

Then there's trucks. Delphi engineers, using the newer electrode-supported design, have developed a five-kilowatt (maximum) SOFC auxiliary power unit (APU) for long-haul diesel rigs. The APU, which could arrive next year, would provide "hotel load power" for parked trucks.

Two-way fuel cells
Meanwhile, Versa, a solid oxide fuel cell stack supplier, is working with Boeing and "a large European company" on an innovative reversible SOFC that cycles back and forth between providing power and electrolyzing water into hydrogen and oxygen, Stokes says. The two-way system could store energy as hydrogen to back up intermittent solar or wind power installations and even the Solar Eagle, a dragonflylike unmanned aerial vehicle that is to fly multiyear missions.

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Wachsman and his research colleagues have also published details in Science on a potential path toward SOFCs that operate at temperatures as low as 350 degrees Cwith a new design that features high-conductivity electrolytes and a specially nanostructured electrode.

SOFC technology capable of lower "intermediate" temperatures ranging of 600 to 800 degrees C is the goal of a recent half-million-dollar National Science Foundation project at Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Christos G. Takoudis's interdisciplinary team plans to wield a unique atomic layer deposition/chemical vapor deposition (ALD/CVD) hybrid reactor that can lay down novel thin-film cell materials and structures that run cooler by design.

But before that research group makes its final project report three years from now, second-generation improved ceramic SOFCs should have begun to augment theBloom Box's initial success in occupying and developing a small but key niche of the energy market.

Fifth Giant Planet May Have Dwelled in Our Solar System

Artist's impression of a planet ejected from the early solar system. Image: Southwest Research Institute

Within our solar system, an extra giant planet, or possibly two, might once have accompanied Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus.

Computer models showing how our solar system formed suggested the planets once gravitationally slung one another across space, only settling into their current orbits over the course of billions of years.

During more than 6,000 simulations of this planetary scattering phase, planetary scientist David Nesvorny at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo., found that a solar system that began with four giant planets only had a 2.5 percent chance of leading to the orbits presently seen now. These systems would be too violent in their youth to end up resembling ours, most likely resulting in systems that have less than four giants over time, Nesvorny found.

Instead, a model about 10 times more likely at matching our current solar system began with five giants, including a now lost world comparable in mass to Uranus and Neptune. This extra planet may have been an "ice giant" rich in icy matter just like Uranus and Neptune, Nesvorny explained.

The computer model allowed Nesvorny to create a video of the potential extra planet's departure from our solar system.

When the solar system was about 600 million years old, it underwent a major period of instability that scattered the giant planets and smaller worlds, researchers said. Eventually, gravitational encounters with Jupiter would have flung the mystery world to interstellar space about 4 billion years ago.

As fantastic as these findings might sound, a large number of free-floating worldshave recently been discovered in interstellar space, Nesvorny noted. As such, the ejection of planets from solar systems might be common.

"The work raises interesting questions about the early history of the outer solar system," Nesvorny told SPACE.com. "For example, traditionally, most research was focused on the giant planets, their satellites, Kuiper belt objects, and their interaction — that's what we have in the outer solar system now. But how about Mars to super-Earth-size bodies? Have such objects formed on the outer solar system and were eliminated later? If not, then why?"

"This is just a beginning," Nesvorny said. "It will need quite a lot of work to see if there actually was the fifth planet. I am not fully convinced myself."

Nesvorny's research is detailed online in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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