Jan. 6, 2015—As the year’s first blanket of snow coated the Washington, D.C. area today, giant panda Bao Bao at the Smithsonian’s National Zoological Park spent much of the morning playing in it for the very first time. The 16 month-old panda cub tumbled down the hill in her outdoor enclosure, climbed trees and pounced on her mother Mei Xiang.

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This artist’s conception depicts an Earth-like planet orbiting an evolved star that has formed a stunning “planetary nebula.” Earlier in its life, this planet may have been like one of the eight newly discovered worlds orbiting in the habitable zones of their stars. (Image by David A. Aguilar)

Astronomers announced today that they have found eight new planets in the “Goldilocks” zone of their stars, orbiting at a distance where liquid water can exist on the planet’s surface. This doubles the number of small planets (less than twice the diameter of Earth) believed to be in the habitable zone of their parent stars. Among these eight, the team identified two that are the most similar to Earth of any known exoplanets to date.

“Most of these planets have a good chance of being rocky, like Earth,” says lead author Guillermo Torres of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

These findings were announced today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

The two most Earth-like planets of the group are Kepler-438b and Kepler-442b. Both orbit red dwarf stars that are smaller and cooler than our Sun. Kepler-438b circles its star every 35 days, while Kepler-442b completes one orbit every 112 days.

With a diameter just 12 percent bigger than Earth, Kepler-438b has a 70-percent chance of being rocky, according to the team’s calculations. Kepler-442b is about one-third larger than Earth, but still has a 60-percent chance of being rocky.

To be in the habitable zone, an exoplanet must receive about as much sunlight as Earth. Too much, and any water would boil away as steam. Too little, and water will freeze solid.

“For our calculations we chose to adopt the broadest possible limits that can plausibly lead to suitable conditions for life,” says Torres.

Kepler-438b receives about 40 percent more light than Earth. (In comparison, Venus gets twice as much solar radiation as Earth.) As a result, the team calculates it has a 70 percent likelihood of being in the habitable zone of its star.

Kepler-442b get about two-thirds as much light as Earth. The scientists give it a 97 percent chance of being in the habitable zone.

“We don’t know for sure whether any of the planets in our sample are truly habitable,” explains second author David Kipping of the CfA. “All we can say is that they’re promising candidates.”

Prior to this, the two most Earth-like planets known were Kepler-186f, which is 1.1 times the size of Earth and receives 32 percent as much light, and Kepler-62f, which is 1.4 times the size of Earth and gets 41 percent as much light.

The team studied planetary candidates first identified by NASA’s Kepler mission. All of the planets were too small to confirm by measuring their masses. Instead, the team validated them by using a computer program called BLENDER to determine that they are statistically likely to be planets. BLENDER was developed by Torres and colleague Francois Fressin, and runs on the Pleaides supercomputer at NASA Ames. This is the same method that has been used previously to validate some of Kepler’s most iconic finds, including the first two Earth-size planets around a Sun-like star and the first exoplanet smaller than Mercury.

After the BLENDER analysis, the team spent another year gathering follow-up observations in the form of high-resolution spectroscopy, adaptive optics imaging, and speckle interferometry to thoroughly characterize the systems.

Those follow-up observations also revealed that four of the newly validated planets are in multiple-star systems. However, the companion stars are distant and don’t significantly influence the planets.

As with many Kepler discoveries, the newly found planets are distant enough to make additional observations challenging. Kepler-438b is located 470 light-years from Earth while the more distant Kepler-442b is 1,100 light-years away.

The paper reporting these results has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal and is available online.

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This artist’s depiction shows a gas giant planet rising over the horizon of an alien waterworld. New research shows that oceans on super-Earths, once established, can last for billions of years. (Image by David A. Aguilar)

For life as we know it to develop on other planets, those planets would need liquid water, or oceans. Geologic evidence suggests that Earth’s oceans have existed for nearly the entire history of our world. But would that be true of other planets, particularly super-Earths? New research suggests the answer is yes and that oceans on super-Earths, once established, can last for billions of years.

“When people consider whether a planet is in the habitable zone, they think about its distance from the star and its temperature. However, they should also think about oceans, and look at super-Earths to find a good sailing or surfing destination,” says lead author Laura Schaefer of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

Schaefer presented her findings today in a press conference at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

Even though water covers 70 percent of Earth’s surface, it makes up a very small fraction of the planet’s overall bulk. Earth is mostly rock and iron; only about a tenth of a percent is water.

“Earth’s oceans are a very thin film, like fog on a bathroom mirror,” explains study co-author Dimitar Sasselov (CfA).

However, Earth’s water isn’t just on the surface. Studies have shown that Earth’s mantle holds several oceans’ worth of water that was dragged underground by plate tectonics and subduction of the ocean seafloor. Earth’s oceans would disappear due to this process, if it weren’t for water returning to the surface via volcanism (mainly at mid-ocean ridges). Earth maintains its oceans through this planet-wide recycling.

Schaefer used computer simulations to see if this recycling process would take place on super-Earths, which are planets up to five times the mass, or 1.5 times the size, of Earth. She also examined the question of how long it would take oceans to form after the planet cooled enough for its crust to solidify.

She found that planets two to four times the mass of Earth are even better at establishing and maintaining oceans than our Earth. The oceans of super-Earths would persist for at least 10 billion years (unless boiled away by an evolving red giant star).

Interestingly, the largest planet that was studied, five times the mass of Earth, took a while to get going. Its oceans didn’t develop for about a billion years, due to a thicker crust and lithosphere that delayed the start of volcanic outgassing.

“This suggests that if you want to look for life, you should look at older super-Earths,” Schaefer says.

Sasselov agrees. “It takes time to develop the chemical processes for life on a global scale, and time for life to change a planet’s atmosphere. So, it takes time for life to become detectable.”

This also suggests that, assuming evolution takes place at a similar rate to Earth’s, you want to search for complex life on planets that are about five and a half billion years old, a billion years older than Earth.

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Huli Wigmen in line, New Guinea. (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

The majestic feathers of the greater bird of paradise (Paradisaea apoda) have inspired people for thousands of years. Like many birds on the isolated island of New Guinea, these highly decorated creatures have evolved not only their unusual appearance but also unique relationships with indigenous communities.

To celebrate the publication of Birds of New Guinea, an essential field guide to the birds of the world’s second largest island, Smithsonian Science asks author Bruce Beehler what makes the birds of this region so remarkable. Beehler is research associate in the Division of Birds at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, and Joshua A. Bell ethnology curator in the museum’s Department of Anthropology.

Q: What makes the birds from this region so special?

Beehler: It’s earth history. New Guinea and Australia have been separated from other continents for over 100 million years. While at several points Australia and New Guinea were linked, there has never been a continuous land link between these islands and the rest of the world.

Isolation and time have enabled the few animals that somehow made their way to New Guinea to evolve into many varied and specialized species. This has resulted in some of the most diverse bird lineages and most spectacular looking species, like the greater bird of paradise.

Q: Bird of paradise feathers have been collected for a long time. Has this put these species in danger of extinction?

Beehler: The most beautiful species of birds of paradise have been collected over millennia for traditional headdresses and other uses. In the Victorian era, they were exported in large numbers to adorn the hats of stylish women in the West. Conservationists initially believed these species might be at risk of extinction. When we studied them, however, we found their mating behavior and reproductive biology protected them from overharvest—because only a few of the oldest males exhibit the most sought-after plumage adornments.

Chimbu lady dancer, New Guinea. (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

Male greater birds of paradise, for example, become sexually mature at one year old, but do not complete their plumage development until they are more than seven years old. So even if the fully mature males are collected, the younger birds can mate with the females to produce offspring. Males don’t help raise the chicks; they spend all their energy developing these impressive feathers and competing to mate with females. Males assemble in groups to display to the females. In each mating group, called a lek, the dominant male mates with up to 90 percent of all the females in that area. All the other males are just waiting, biding their time and developing their feathers, so that one of them can take his place when he dies.

Of course human males are vain just like their bird counterparts, usually only taking the most beautiful bird, the dominant male, for his feathers. The large majority of the birds in any population are not fully plumed and thus safe from traditional harvest for headdresses.

Q: How do the traditional people of New Guinea view and interact with their native birds?

Bell: While this varies across the island, generally traditional communities divided birds into those that they ate and/or those that they did not because they were deemed to be ancestors or spirit-beings. Throughout New Guinea, people utilized feathers and other parts of birds for decoration, such as headdresses, and as tools, such as a modified cassowary’s tibiotarsi  (tibia bone connected to a claw) as daggers. Using feathers and other body parts of animals was a way of displaying relationships—displaying kinship to the birds, relating one’s status in the community and making social statements through aesthetic displays.

Yam mask – woven mask used by the Abelam in the Sepik River region of PNG to decorate cultivated yams that are displayed. (Photo: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History)

Again while it varied, hunters traditionally understood the hunting of birds as part of an exchange relationship with the ancestors, and typically made some sacrifices after a successful hunt. This was an ongoing relationship of give-and-take rather than one of pure extraction.

The relationship between the people and birds of New Guinea has, however, become strained as people have increasingly converted to Christianity, and have been pulled into the global capitalist system. For example, where I work in the Purari Delta, people have increasingly come to see birds not as kin, animal manifestations of their ancestors, but as commodities to be eaten or sold. There are exceptions to this regional trend however, where communities have either maintained their traditional beliefs and/or merged them with conservation efforts.

Highlands dancer (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

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While it seems that we can find just about anything on the Internet, it doesn’t mean we know everything yet. Every year, Smithsonian scientists discover many new species around the globe and even in their own backyards.

Let’s take a look at some of this year’s interesting newcomers from the animal kingdom, found by our very own Smithsonian scientists. Scroll through to meet them.

1. Poison dart frog from Panama

If you had the chance to name a poisonous species, would you name it after your wife? That’s what Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute researcher Marcos Ponce did when he and his team discovered a bright orange poison dart frog in Donoso, Panama. His wife, Geminis Vargas, was the inspiration for the new species, Andinobates geminisae, “for her unconditional support of his studies of Panamanian herpetology.” Read more…

Andinobates geminisae (Photo: Brian Gratwicke)

2. Dragon-like mite

This new species has a face only a mother could love. But when you aren’t looking for a mate it doesn’t matter if you are attractive. Osperalycus tenerphagus, less than a millimeter long, has evolved an all-female lineage. No males and no mating. They lay eggs that don’t need to be fertilized, making little clones of themselves. The species was discovered in Ohio by Samuel Bolton, an entomologist and fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and researcher at Ohio State. Read more…

The front end of Osperalycus tenerphagus showing three of its legs and the unusual structure of its skin. (Photo courtesy Samuel Bolton)

3. Bolivia’s golden bat

Whether or not you like bats,, you can’t deny this new species is golden. Myotis midastactus, is just one of more than six species described by Ricardo Moratelli, a scientist at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Brazil) and post-doctoral fellow at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Read more…

Adult female of “Myotis midastactus” captured at Noel Kempff Mercado National Park, Department of Santa Cruz, Bolivia. Ricardo Moratelli and Don Wilson, mammalogist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History recently named this bat as a new species. (Photo courtesy Marco Tschapka)

4. Armored catfish from Colombia

Farlowella yarigui is a new species of stick catfish from South America, so called because the thin, elongated bodies of these fish mimic sticks. About 5 inches long, it lives on the bottom of clear-running streams among partially submerged vegetation and sticks. This discovery by Gustavo Ballen from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute represents the first and only species of its genus found living in the Magdalena River basin, west of the Andes Mountains in South America. Read more…

“F. yarigui” belongs to a subfamily of armored catfish and is covered in bony plates that protect it from predators, such as birds and predator fishes.

5. Poppy pollinating fly

The new fly, named Sericomyia khamensis, mimics the bumble bee to fool predators into leaving it alone. Found in the highlands of southern China by Christian Thompson, an entomologist at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, these flies are pollinators of the yellow poppy (Meconopsis integrifolia). Like bees, the female flies visit yellow poppies to drink nectar, but unlike their fellow pollinators they also eat the poppy pollen on the spot. Read more…

“Sericomyia khamensis,” a newly discovered flower fly from China

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1. Centaurus A – A split-personality elliptical galaxy

Centaurus A isn’t your typical elliptical galaxy. Its most striking feature is a dark dust lane across its middle – a sign that it swallowed a spiral galaxy about 300 million years ago. Beyond the gas and the dust, a team of Smithsonian scientists unveiled a hidden spiral within the galaxy’s core. Read more…

(Photo: ESO)

 2. The Orion Nebula, one of the star-forming regions used to measure the size and heft of our galaxy

Have you ever thought about how big our home galaxy, the Milky Way, is? Smithsonian scientists have shown that the Milky Way is bigger and more massive than previous data suggested, putting us on equal footing with our neighbor, the Andromeda spiral galaxy. Read more…

The Orion Nebula (Photo: NASA)

 3. Supermassive black hole spins super fast

Imagine a sphere more than 2 million miles across – eight times the distance from Earth to the Moon – spinning so fast that its surface is traveling at nearly the speed of light. Such an object exists: the supermassive black hole at the center of the spiral galaxy NGC 1365. Read more…

In this artist’s conception a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a hot accretion disk, while some in-spiraling material is funneled into a wispy blue jet. (Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

 4. NASA’s eye on the sun delivers stunning images

This photograph of the sun was taken by the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly. The color red shows emission from ionized helium at a temperature of 140,000 Fahrenheit, while green shows ionized iron at a temperature of 1,800,000 F. Read more…

Photo: NASA.

 5. Distant, dying star gives astronomers preview of the fate of our Sun

Some 550 light-years from Earth, a star very much like our Sun is writhing in its death throes. Chi Cygni has swollen in size to become a red giant star so large that it would swallow every planet out to Mars in our solar system. Moreover, it has begun to pulse dramatically in and out, beating like a giant heart. Close-up photos of the surface of this distant star has given scientists a look into the fate of our Sun five billion years from now, when it will near the end of its life. Read more…

Chi Cygni – artist’s conception

Want to know more about the photos featured in the video? Read the articles!

1. Alien Earths may have formed in Universe earlier than expected

2. New image of the star-forming region 30 Doradus, also known as the Tarantula Nebula

3. Astronomers in distant future might still deduce the Big Bang origin of the Universe

4. Pulverized planet dust might lie around double stars

5. Cosmic “baby photos” of distant solar systems lend insight as to how planets form

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This artist’s conception portrays the first planet discovered by the Kepler spacecraft during its K2 mission. A transit of the planet was teased out of K2’s noisier data using ingenious computer algorithms developed by a CfA researcher. The newfound planet, HIP 116454b, has a diameter of 20,000 miles (two and a half times the size of Earth) and weighs 12 times as much. It orbits its star once every 9.1 days. (Image by
David A. Aguilar)

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the report of the Kepler spacecraft’s death was greatly exaggerated. Despite a malfunction that ended its primary mission in May 2013, Kepler is still alive and working. The evidence comes from the discovery of a new super-Earth using data collected during Kepler’s “second life.”

“Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Kepler has been reborn and is continuing to make discoveries. Even better, the planet it found is ripe for follow-up studies,” says lead author Andrew Vanderburg of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA).

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft detects planets by looking for transits, when a star dims slightly as a planet crosses in front of it. The smaller the planet, the weaker the dimming, so brightness measurements must be exquisitely precise. To enable that precision, the spacecraft must maintain a steady pointing.

Kepler’s primary mission came to an end when the second of four reaction wheels used to stabilize the spacecraft failed. Without at least three functioning reaction wheels, Kepler couldn’t be pointed accurately.

NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has identified more than 996 confirmed exoplanets, ranging in size from Earth to Jupiter, in more than 400 stellar systems.  (Image credit: NASA)

Rather than giving up on the plucky spacecraft, a team of scientists and engineers developed an ingenious strategy to use pressure from sunlight as a virtual reaction wheel to help control the spacecraft. The resulting second mission, K2, promises to not only continue Kepler’s search for other worlds, but also introduce new opportunities to observe star clusters, active galaxies, and supernovae.

Due to Kepler’s reduced pointing capabilities, extracting useful data requires sophisticated computer analysis. Vanderburg and his colleagues developed specialized software to correct for spacecraft movements, achieving about half the photometric precision of the original Kepler mission.

Kepler’s new life began with a 9-day test in February 2014. When Vanderburg and his colleagues analyzed that data, they found that Kepler had detected a single planetary transit.

They confirmed the discovery with radial velocity measurements from the HARPS-North spectrograph on the Telescopio Nazionale Galileo in the Canary Islands. Additional transits were weakly detected by the Microvariability and Oscillations of STars (MOST) satellite.

The newfound planet, HIP 116454b, has a diameter of 20,000 miles, two and a half times the size of Earth. HARPS-N showed that it weighs almost 12 times as much as Earth. This makes HIP 116454b a super-Earth, a class of planets that doesn’t exist in our solar system. The average density suggests that this planet is either a water world (composed of about three-fourths water and one-fourth rock) or a mini-Neptune with an extended, gaseous atmosphere.

This close-in planet circles its star once every 9.1 days at a distance of 8.4 million miles. Its host star is a type K orange dwarf slightly smaller and cooler than our sun. The system is 180 light-years from Earth in the constellation Pisces.

Since the host star is relatively bright and nearby, follow-up studies will be easier to conduct than for many Kepler planets orbiting fainter, more distant stars.

“HIP 116454b will be a top target for telescopes on the ground and in space,” says Harvard astronomer and co-author John Johnson of the CfA.

The research paper reporting this discovery has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.

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An artist’s impression of the debris disk around HD 107146. This adolescent star system shows signs that in its outer reaches, swarms of Pluto-size objects are jostling nearby smaller objects, causing them to collide and “kick up” considerable dust.
(Graphic by A. Angelich, NRAO/AUI/NSF)

Astronomers using the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) may have detected the dusty hallmarks of an entire family of Pluto-size objects swarming around an adolescent version of our own Sun.

By making detailed observations of the protoplanetary disk surrounding the star known as HD 107146, the astronomers detected an unexpected increase in the concentration of millimeter-size dust grains in the disk’s outer reaches. This surprising increase, which begins remarkably far — about 13 billion kilometers — from the host star, may be the result of Pluto-size planetesimals stirring up the region, causing smaller objects to collide and blast themselves apart.

Dust in debris disks typically consists of material left over from the formation of planets. Very early in the lifespan of the disk, this dust is continuously replenished by collisions of larger bodies, such as comets and asteroids. In mature solar systems with fully formed planets, comparatively little dust remains. In between these two ages — when a solar system is in its awkward teenage years — certain models predict that the concentration of dust would be much denser in the most distant regions of the disk. This is precisely what ALMA has found.

ALMA image of the dust surrounding the star HD 107146. Dust in the outer reaches of the disk is thicker than in the inner regions, suggesting that a swarm of Pluto-size planetesimals is causing smaller objects to smash together. The dark ring-like structure in the middle portion of the disk may be evidence of a gap where a planet is sweeping its orbit clear of dust. Image courtesy L. Ricci, ALMA (NRAO/NAOJ/ESO) and B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)

“The dust in HD 107146 reveals this very interesting feature — it gets thicker in the very distant outer reaches of the star’s disk,” said Luca Ricci, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), and lead author on a paper accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. At the time of the observations, Ricci was with the California Institute of Technology.

“The surprising aspect is that this is the opposite of what we see in younger primordial disks where the dust is denser near the star. It is possible that we caught this particular debris disk at a stage in which Pluto-size planetesimals are forming right now in the outer disk while other Pluto-size bodies have already formed closer to the star,” said Ricci.

According to current computer models, the observation that the density of dust is higher in the outer regions of the disk can only be explained by the presence of recently formed Pluto-sized bodies. Their gravity would disturb smaller planetesimals, causing more frequent collisions that generate the dust ALMA sees.

The new ALMA data also hint at another intriguing feature in the outer reaches of the disk: a possible “dip” or depression in the dust about 1.2 billion kilometers wide, beginning approximately 2.5 times the distance of the Sun to Neptune from the central star. Though only suggested in these preliminary observations, this depression could be a gap in the disk, which would be indicative of an Earth-mass planet sweeping the area clear of debris. Such a feature would have important implications for the possible planet-like inhabitants of this disk and may suggest that Earth-size planets could form in an entirely new range of orbits than have ever been seen before.

The star HD 107146 is of particular interest to astronomers because it is in many ways a younger version of our own Sun. It also represents a period of transition from a solar system’s early life to its more mature, final stages where planets have finished forming and have settled into their final orbits around their host star.

“This system offers us the chance to study an intriguing time around a young, Sun-like star,” said ALMA Deputy Director and coauthor Stuartt Corder. “We are possibly looking back in time here, back to when the Sun was about 2 percent of its current age.”

The star HD 107146 is located approximately 90 light-years from Earth in the direction of the constellation Coma Berenices. It is approximately 100 million years old. Further observations with ALMA’s new long-baseline, high-resolution capabilities will shed more light on the dynamics and composition of this intriguing object.

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Ornate Fruit-Dove (Photo: Bruce Beehler)

The genomes of modern birds tell a story of how they emerged and evolved after the mass extinction that wiped out dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the family tree of modern birds has confused biologists for centuries and the molecular details of how they arrived at more than 10,000 species is barely known.

Now that story is coming to light, thanks to an ambitious international collaboration underway for four years that has sequenced, assembled and compared full genomes of 48 bird species. The first findings of the Avian Phylogenomics Consortium are being reported nearly simultaneously in 23 papers — eight papers today, Dec. 12, in a special issue of Science and 15 more in Genome Biology, GigaScience and other journals. The full set of papers in Science and other journals can be accessed by clicking this link www.sciencemag.org/content/346/6215/1308.full

Led by Guojie Zhang of the National Genebank at BGI in China and the University of Copenhagen, Erich D. Jarvis of Duke University and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and M. Thomas P. Gilbert of the Natural History Museum of Denmark, the consortium focused on species representing all major branches of modern birds including the crow, duck, falcon, parakeet, crane, ibis, woodpecker and eagle.

Red bellied woodpecker (Photo by Ken Thomas)

The Avian Phylogenomics Consortium has so far involved more than 200 scientists from 80 institutions in 20 countries, including the BGI in China, the University of Copenhagen, Duke University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Smithsonian Institution, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Louisiana State University and many others.

This first round of analyses suggests some remarkable new ideas about bird evolution. The first flagship paper published in Science presents a well-resolved new family tree for birds, based on whole-genome data. The second flagship paper describes the big picture of genome evolution in birds.

Six other papers in the special issue of Science describe how vocal learning may have independently evolved in a few bird groups and in the human brain’s speech regions; how the sex chromosomes of birds came to be; how birds lost their teeth; how crocodile genomes evolved; ways in which singing behavior regulates genes in the brain; and a new method for phylogenic analysis with large-scale genomic data.

The new family tree resolves the early branches of Neoaves (new birds) and supports conclusions about some relationships that have been long-debated. For example, the findings support three independent origins of waterbirds. They also indicate that the common ancestor of core landbirds, which include songbirds, parrots, woodpeckers, owls, eagles and falcons, was an apex predator, which also gave rise to the giant terror birds that once roamed the Americas.

The whole-genome analysis dates the evolutionary expansion of Neoaves to the time of the mass extinction event 66 million years ago that killed off all dinosaurs except some birds. This contradicts the idea that Neoaves blossomed 10 to 80 million years earlier, as some recent studies suggested.

Based on this new genomic data, only a few bird lineages survived the mass extinction. They gave rise to the more than 10,000 Neoaves species that comprise 95 percent of all bird species living with us today. The freed-up ecological niches caused by the extinction event likely allowed rapid species radiation of birds in less than 15 million years, which explains much of modern bird biodiversity.

(Visit Science to learn more.)

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How 3D technology is used at the Smithsonian to create world class exhibits!

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Bright orange with a distinctive call the Panamanian poison dart frog Andinobates geminisae lives in only a small area of the Caribbean Coast of Panama. It was discovered and named just a few months ago yet scientists already fear for its future from habitat loss, pet-trade collectors and chytrid fungus—a deadly disease that is decimating frog populations across the globe.

“Andinobates geminisae” (Photo: Brian Gratwicke)

At the Smithsonian’s National Zoo Brian Gratwicke leads the Panamanian Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project, a modern-day Noah’s Ark that is attempting to save endangered frog species from chytrid by raising and breeding captive populations. Gratwicke answers a few questions about the Amphibian Rescue Project and if A. geminisae might become its newest member.

Q: How do you decide to add a new species to the Amphibian Ark?

Gratwicke: We have about 12 different species now in the Amphibian Rescue and Conservation Project and our goal is to grow that to about 20. To add a new species like A. geminisae we’d need to collect at least 10 males and 10 females to be represented in its first captive generation. For species that are difficult to breed we might need to collect more animals than that to ensure that we can maintain a genetically healthy captive population.

So that’s one big unknown; A. geminisae is a fairly rare frog and we don’t know if we will be able to find more. Maybe they have already declined from chytrid, which can happen rapidly. We’ve run into a situation before where we found three frogs of a species that is highly sensitive to chytridiomycosis on our first trip, and after going back numerous times, never saw any ever again.

Limosa harlequin frogs are among the 12 frog species currently in the Amphibian Rescue Project. (Photo by Brian Gratwicke)

But before we add a species to the Amphibian Rescue Project and devote the resources and staff necessary to care for it, we also need to be in a position to make a really informed decision about adding it. So, we first try to make as many natural history observations about a potential candidate as we can. With A. geminisae we are not sure what its susceptibility is to chytrid. It seems to be a fairly terrestrial frog [chytrid is a water-borne fungus] and we are not even sure if chytrid will kill them.

We also need to figure out what environmental cues a frog needs to reproduce, where it reproduces and what habitat might be limiting for reproduction. For some species we may also turn to people who keep similar species as pets to learn about successful husbandry practices and what they have done to rear them successfully. There are a fair number of Andinobates in the pet trade because they are really attractive little frogs.

So, right now our real priority is to learn a little more about this species and whether we can breed it in captivity.

Q. Are pet-trade collectors a problem for frogs?

Gratwicke: Because of its color A. geminisae might be attractive animal to collectors. Once people know where it is some will certainly go looking for it. Panama has few collectors but they could have an impact when they harvest frogs from a very small population. For example, Panamanian golden frogs were once found in Cerro Campana National Park in Panama, but they were totally collected out of that locality, even before chytrid became an issue.

Brian Gratwicke swabs a frog in the field to test it for the deadly chytrid fungus. (Photo courtesy Brian Gratwicke)

Q. If chytrid is here to stay, what is the ultimate plan for the frogs in the ark?

Gratwicke: The ultimate plan for our existing collection is to develop some tools that we might use to help these frogs resist chytrid infection, and then reintroduce frogs that are less susceptible to the disease back into the wild. We’ve been actively researching the frog’s skin microbiome, with the hope that we could treat susceptible frogs with beneficial skin bacteria that might protect them from fungal infections, but it has proven much more difficult to manipulate the frog skin microbiome than we anticipated.

We also have been looking at the immune response of frogs to chytrid fungus and we’ve found that some frogs have very strong immune response as measured through their transcriptomes. Basically each cell has a nucleus full of DNA that is converted to RNA before making the proteins that govern cell function. So when we do a transcriptome analysis we are reading the RNA that is actually giving orders to all of the organelles to make various different kinds of proteins and ultimately get a glimpse of the genes being expressed at a single moment in time in any particular tissue.

So let’s say we actually find a frog that manages to resist a chytrid infection. We’d look to see if this group has a different genetic signature than the non-chytrid resistant group. Our ultimate aim would be to understand the frog’s immune response to chytrid infection so that we could help give them a leg up in the battle against chytrid.

“Atelopus certus,” lives Cerro Sapo (or Toad Mountain) in the Darien Region of eastern Panama, and is one of the most strikingly colored or all harlequin frogs. This species is in the Amphibian Rescue Project. (Photo by Brian Gratwicke)

Q. How long do these frogs live and are they breeding well?

Gratwicke: A frog’s lifespan depends on the species. Some species like the La Loma tree frog seems to be really short lived. The oldest frog of this species we’ve had in captivity has lived about 5 years, but on the other hand Panamanian golden frogs can live for more than 15 years!

All the frogs in our Amphibian Rescue Project pods are wild-collected founding members or their first generation offspring. Our goal is to breed all of the founders as quickly as possible. We don’t want to begin breeding a second generation until we have as many of the founders bred as we can. This way we capture as much of the genetic diversity of our founders before those animals die. If they die without being bred, they’re gone forever, so we are really racing against the clock.

Q: Are there things you can do to get captive frogs in the mood to mate?

Gratwicke: Yes, there are a lot of different potential cues to get a frog, male and female, into breeding condition. For certain species we’ve tried making it rain, we tried a simulating misting system, we tried making waterfalls, we played calls back to them at night, we tried giving them a little bit of light, we tried giving them no light, we tried giving them all different kinds of food.

Nutrition is important; you’ve got to have an animal in a really positive nutritional space before they can expend energy on reproduction. For our harlequin frogs, we breed them a special kind of moth larva that has a high fat content and we give them to the females to get them to start producing eggs.

Q: What other measures are being taken to save these frogs?

Gratwicke: We’re also doing some research to see if we can freeze frog sperm and we have pretty good results coming out of that program right now. So hopefully we could actually freeze frog sperm of all of our male founders that are not yet represented in captivity, so that if they do die before they are actually breed we can still have a plan B. Frozen sperm is kind of an insurance policy. Researchers have been trying to do this for many years and have largely failed, because frog sperm is activated in a frog’s urine and once activated it is really hard to cryopreserve, and then thaw.

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Newly hatched Cuban crocodile (Photo by Barbara Watkins, Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

The challenges of conceiving only get greater as we get older. But if you have some of the most prized genes within your entire species, then the pressure is really on.

The Smithsonian’s National Zoo is home to one of the oldest female Cuban crocodiles in captivity. For most of her life she has been a rather reluctant member of the North American breeding program tasked with ensuring the survival of her critically endangered species. However biologist Matthew Evans from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo’s Reptile Discovery Center is not about to give up on her just yet.

“She has not successfully mated or shown an interest in nest building while at the National Zoo. As she approached her mid-50s we almost gave up on her as an animal we would ever get to breed. This would have been really disappointing as she is very important genetically to the species,” explains Evans.

Cuban crocodile (Photo Credit: Smithsonian’s National Zoo)

But in 2012 Evans and the Zoo team saw a remarkable change in her behavior when they altered her diet and increased her activity.

“After we began introducing some basic training and enrichment into her normal routine she became interested in the male in mating season and began fighting with a rival female. Crocodiles are highly intelligent creatures and it seems the increased interaction we had with her got her a little more energized and active. We ended up with two male offspring from her that season and we are hoping to try again this breeding season.”

The value in this reluctant mother’s genes lies within their lack of representation in the species studbook — a giant list of who is breeding with whom among Cuban crocodiles held in captivity at zoos and parks across North America. With only two offspring to represent her genes into the future, the team of geneticists tasked with maintaining genetic diversity in the population are keen to get more babies from the National Zoo’s sexagenarian mother.

At approximately 60 years of age however, Evans concedes that the crocodile’s best reproductive years are probably over.

“Last year we got a clutch of eggs from her but a lot of the eggs she produced were not fertile. It could be an issue with the male, as he is also older, or it could be an issue with her age. Out of a clutch of 30 we would only get three or four eggs that might be fertile. Even then a lot of things can go wrong during incubation. Some embryos just stop developing for unknown reasons,” explains Evans.

With crocodilian species living up to 75 years in captivity, Evans and his team may have a few more years for breeding success. While zoos and crocodile farms are breeding Cuban crocodiles with the aim that someday they might join their wild relatives, that dream is still out of reach.

Habitat for this species is dwindling, with the 3,000 to 6,000 Cuban crocodiles left in the wild restricted to only two swamp habitats in Cuba. Widespread destruction of wetlands for agriculture, heavy hunting pressure, and the introduction of the common caiman (Caiman crocodilus), which compete for food and space, have all contributed to the Cuban crocodile’s decline. So for now, until there is more habitat in their homeland, the captive Cuban crocodiles will continue to find romance with a little human help.

Video provided by Smithsonian National Zoo

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3-D–printed bust of President Obama created by the Smithsonian using 3-D scanning technology (Photo courtesy of Digital Program Office / Smithsonian Institution)

The first presidential portraits created from 3-D scan data are now on display in the Smithsonian Castle. The portraits of President Barack Obama were created based on data collected by a Smithsonian-led team of 3-D digital imaging specialists and include a digital and 3-D printed bust and life mask. A new video released today by the White House details the behind-the-scenes process of scanning, creating and printing the historic portraits. The portraits will be on view in the Commons gallery of the Castle starting today, Dec. 2, through Dec. 31. The portraits were previously displayed at the White House Maker Faire June 18.

The Smithsonian-led team scanned the President earlier this year using two distinct 3-D documentation processes. Experts from the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies used their Light Stage face scanner to document the President’s face from ear to ear in high resolution. Next, a Smithsonian team used handheld 3-D scanners and traditional single-lens reflex cameras to record peripheral 3-D data to create an accurate bust.

The data captured was post-processed by 3-D graphics experts at the software company Autodesk to create final high-resolution models. The life mask and bust were then printed using 3D Systems’ Selective Laser Sintering printers.

3-D–printed bust of President Obama created by the Smithsonian using 3-D scanning technology (Photo courtesy of Digital Program Office / Smithsonian Institution)

The data and the printed models are part of the collection of the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. The Portrait Gallery’s collection has multiple images of every U.S. president, and these portraits will support the current and future collection of works the museum has to represent Obama.

The life-mask scan of Obama joins only three other presidential life masks in the Portrait Gallery’s collection: one of George Washington created by Jean-Antoine Houdon and two of Abraham Lincoln created by Leonard Wells Volk (1860) and Clark Mills (1865). The Washington and Lincoln life masks were created using traditional plaster-casting methods. The Lincoln life masks are currently available to explore and download on the Smithsonian’s X 3D website.

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This artist’s conception shows the super-Earth 55 Cancri e (right) compared to the Earth (left). Astronomers using a ground-based telescope have measure the transit of 55 Cancri e for the first time. It is the shallowest transit ever detected from the ground. (NASA/JPL image)

Astronomers have measured the passing of a super-Earth in front of a bright, nearby Sun-like star using a ground-based telescope for the first time. The transit of the exoplanet 55 Cancri e is the shallowest detected from the ground yet. Since detecting a transit is the first step in analyzing a planet’s atmosphere, this success bodes well for characterizing the many small planets that upcoming space missions are expected to discover in the next few years.

The international research team used the 2.5-meter Nordic Optical Telescope on the island of La Palma, Spain, a moderate-sized facility by today’s standards but equipped with state-of-the-art instruments, to make the detection. Previous observations of this planet transit had to rely on space-borne telescopes.

The host star, 55 Cancri, is located just 40 light-years away from us and is visible to the naked eye. During its transit, the planet crosses 55 Cancri and blocks a tiny fraction of the starlight, dimming the star by 1/2000th (or 0.05%) for almost two hours. This shows that the planet is about twice the size of Earth, or 16,000 miles in diameter.

“Our observations show that we can detect the transits of small planets around Sun-like stars using ground-based telescopes,” says Ernst de Mooij of Queen’s University Belfast in the United Kingdom, lead author of the study.

He continues, “This is especially important because upcoming space missions such as TESS and PLATO should find many small planets around bright stars and we will want to follow up the discoveries with ground-based instruments.”

The Nordic Optical Telescope is located at the Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma, Spain.

TESS is a NASA mission scheduled for launch in 2017, while PLATO is to be launched in 2024 by the European Space Agency; both will search for transiting terrestrial planets around nearby bright stars.

“With this result we are also closing in on the detection of the atmospheres of small planets with ground-based telescopes,” says co-author Mercedes Lopez-Morales of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “We are slowly paving the way toward the detection of bio-signatures in Earth-like planets around nearby stars.”

“It’s remarkable what we can do by pushing the limits of existing telescopes and instruments, despite the complications posed by the Earth’s own turbulent atmosphere,” says study co-author Ray Jayawardhana of York University in Canada. “Remote sensing across tens of light-years isn’t easy, but it can be done with the right technique and a bit of ingenuity.”

The planet 55 Cancri e is about twice as big and eight times as massive as Earth. With a period of 18 hours, it is the innermost of five planets in the system. Because of its proximity to the host star, the planet’s dayside temperature reaches over 3100° Fahrenheit (1700° Celsius), hot enough to melt metal, with conditions far from hospitable to life. Initially identified a decade ago through radial velocity measurements, it was later confirmed through transit observations with the MOST and Spitzer space telescopes.

Until now, the transits of only one other super-Earth, GJ 1214b circling a red dwarf, had been observed with ground-based telescopes. The Earth’s roiling air makes such observations extremely difficult. But the team’s success with 55 Cancri e raises the prospects of characterizing dozens of super-Earths likely to be revealed by upcoming surveys.

“We expect these surveys to find so many nearby, terrestrial worlds that space telescopes simply won’t be able to follow up on all of them. Future ground-based instrumentation will be key, and this study shows it can be done,” adds Lopez-Morales.

The research team also includes Raine Karjalainen and Marie Hrudkova of the Isaac Newton Group of Telescopes. Their findings appear in a paper to be published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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Yellowstone National Park is one of the world’s most protected ecosystems. But that’s still not enough to keep its grizzly bears completely safe. Click here for show times of Smithsonian Channel’s “Mass Extinction: Life at the Brink.”

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