Smartphone-toting pilgrims regularly stream into northern Cambodia from all over the world. Their destination: Angkor Wat, a medieval temple that’s famous for massive towers and majestic stone carvings of Hindu gods, spirits and mythological battle scenes. The site, considered the world’s largest religious monument, drew more than 2.3 million visitors in 2014.

Angkor Wat’s sightseers encounter a study in contrasts. This architectural wonder of human civilization ascends skyward, on the verge of being engulfed by nature below. Tourists walk along a path that crosses over a moat and through the temple’s western side, the one entrance cleared of vegetation. Lush forest stops just short of the rest of the structure. Outside the moat, trees, thick ground cover and ponds dominate the landscape.
While adventurous visitors snap pictures, scientists are using high-tech approaches to uncover Angkor Wat’s hidden side, long obscured by all that vegetation. After more than a century of research on the parts of Angkor Wat that are visible with the naked eye, many scientists assumed that the site was a sacred city contained within the bounds of a square moat. But even though its name roughly translates as “temple city,” new finds show that Angkor Wat was not a sacred city at all. It was a gigantic temple connected to residential districts, canals and other structures that stretched beyond the moat and blended into a sprawling city called Greater Angkor, which covered about the same area as Berlin or Columbus, Ohio.
Angkor Wat’s unveiling by modern laser technology began in April 2012. Archaeologist Damian Evans of Cambodia’s Siem Reap Center and several colleagues made daily helicopter flights for almost two weeks over a 370-square-kilometer area around the temple. The helicopter carried $250,000 worth of special equipment that fired millions of laser pulses every few seconds at the forest below. A small percentage of those pulses zipped in between trees and foliage to the forest floor. The Earth’s hard surface bounced those laser shots back to a sensor on the helicopter. This technique, known as light detection and ranging, or lidar for short, picked up differences in the contours of the land now obscured by jungle. With the findings, researchers could draw a picture of city blocks, residential areas, dried-out ponds and other archaeological remains. Results gleaned from lidar and from new ground-based investigations appeared in the December 2015 Antiquity.

Lidar has been around since the early 1960s. Scientists have used it to measure pollutants in the atmosphere, map shorelines and guide robotic and manned vehicles around obstacles. Lower costs over the last decade have made the technology accessible to archaeologists.

With their laser eye in the sky, Evans and colleagues uncovered big surprises at Angkor Wat. Just beyond one side of the roughly 1.3-kilometer-square moat surrounding the temple, the researchers found six massive and mysterious lines of earth arranged in precise coils — as well as adjacent areas where later canal construction had apparently destroyed two more coiled mounds. These Khmer creations resemble the spiraling paths of labyrinths. Lidar-guided excavations within the moat’s boundary upended ideas about who lived on temple grounds. Rather than religious or political bigwigs, residents were workers who kept the place running. And on-the-ground research found evidence of unexplained towers, built and then demolished during Angkor Wat’s construction, as well as defensive platforms used, perhaps, to fight off invaders.
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“It’s an embarrassingly exciting time for archaeologists who study Angkor Wat,” says University of Sydney archaeologist Roland Fletcher. “Researchers have driven and walked over many of these new discoveries for a century.” Fletcher directs the Greater Angkor Project, which combines remote sensing technology with archaeological digs.

If Angkor Wat blended into Greater Angkor’s 1,000 square kilometers of urban sprawl, so did hundreds of other temples and shrines of lesser grandeur built by rulers of Southeast Asia’s Khmer Empire from the ninth to 15th centuries, he says.

“There was nothing like Greater Angkor until the advent of 19th century industrial cities,” says Fletcher, who estimates it held about 750,000 residents in the 12th and 13th centuries. Cities of around 1 million people arose in China by the ninth century, but those metropolises covered one-half or less the area of Greater Angkor. Spread-out cities in the mold of Greater Angkor became more common in the 1800s as trains and cars made long-distance travel easier. But discoveries at Greater Angkor shatter a long-standing assumption that urban sprawl was impossible without mechanical forms of transportation, he says.
City sprawl
Lidar technology revealed new structures in and around the Angkor Wat temple complex.
Tap red dots for details
Big grids
Carved inscriptions at Angkor Wat describe the structure as the pet project of Suryavarman II, who ruled the Khmer Empire from 1113 until his death in 1149. Serving first as a temple dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, Angkor Wat also became a mausoleum for Suryavarman II when he died.

The temple hosted Hindu ceremonies into the 13th century. In the 14th or 15th century, it became a Buddhist temple. Like tourists and scientists, Angkor Wat’s modern-day Buddhist monks had no idea that the site was once so extensive.

Lidar revealed a grid of pathways forming four rectangular blocks, each the size of a small town, that encircle the main temple inside the moat. Earthen mounds and an estimated 250 to 300 ponds — now dried-out depressions on the forest floor — dotted these gridded areas.

Excavations in 2010 and 2013, the latter guided by lidar findings, uncovered remains of modest wooden dwellings and household goods, such as pots and a ceramic cooking device, in the mounds. Archaeologist Miriam Stark of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu led that work.

Radiocarbon dating conducted by Stark’s team indicates that houses situated around the ponds appeared at least as early as the sixth century near the eventual site of Angkor Wat. Other residences date to after the 15th century, supporting evidence — including a 17th century Japanese map of the Angkor Wat temple — of the structure becoming a Buddhist religious center.
No more than 4,500 people lived within Angkor Wat’s moated boundary in the 12th century, Fletcher estimates. His calculation is based on the account of a 13th century Chinese emissary to Greater Angkor, who wrote that one to three families shared each pond in the area around the tample.

Stone inscriptions at nearby Ta Prohm, a late–12th century Greater Angkor temple, record a workforce of 12,640 people that included only about 2,000 on-site residents. Another 66,625 people were described as being “in service” to the temple, delivering food and other supplies.

At roughly twice the size of Ta Prohm, Angkor Wat probably relied on a workforce of about 25,000, Fletcher suspects. An additional 125,000 people must have shuttled in supplies. Each Greater Angkor temple apparently supported a vast economy.

If that’s true, it makes sense that crisscrossing roads forming residential blocks fan out far beyond Angkor Wat’s moat on the 2012 lidar map. “Urban grids stretched beyond temple walls into the hinterlands,” Evans says.

Lidar data showed a comparable street network at a nearby 12th century temple, Angkor Thom. Here too, “to our complete surprise, the layout of houses and streets continues beyond the moated confines of the temple,” says archaeologist Charles Higham of the University of Otago in New Zealand. He studies Greater Angkor and is familiar with the lidar results.

Religious and political big shots lived somewhere in the urban sprawl outside Angkor Wat and other temples, Fletcher suspects. Why they did so is unclear.

Mystery coils
Finding that Angkor Wat extended far beyond its moat was unexpected. But a discovery just south of the temple’s moat was unprecedented.

Lidar unveiled long banks of earth that formed six well-preserved coiled or spiral-shaped patterns. Each formation is roughly 1 kilometer long and 0.5 kilometers wide, or about 10 times the length and width of a football field. The precise alignment of these earthworks with the moat suggests they were assembled around the time of Angkor Wat’s construction.
A ground survey in late 2012 and early 2013 determined that the coils consisted of 18-meter-wide sandbanks separated by 12-meter-wide channels. After using laser maps to locate the spirals on the ground, investigators walked through the channels searching for signs of human activity. They found no pottery or other artifacts to suggest that anyone had lived or worked there.

“Nothing like the shape and design of these spirals has been seen anywhere else,” Fletcher says.

Suryavarman II’s reasons for building the coils are unknown. These mounds might have served as raised fields for growing herbs used in temple rituals. Or the coils might have been sites of formal gardens that would have been unrivaled in size and complexity until the construction of 18th century palace gardens in Europe, Evans suggests.

Rainwater could have flowed through channels between the coils. Evans doubts, however, that enough water collected to support farming.

It’s also possible that Angkor Wat’s spiral structures held special spiritual meaning for Khmer people and had no practical use. Yet Fletcher says that nothing resembling these coiled forms appears in Hindu writings and art.
After what must have been several decades of construction coinciding with work on the temple, “the spirals may never have been completed and might never have become operational,” Evans says.

Researchers are now examining fossilized pollen recovered from the coils for signs of cultivation or gardening.

Buried towers
Another surprising discovery at Angkor Wat comes not from lidar but from ground-penetrating radar. While lidar reveals characteristics of the ground’s surface covered by vegetation, ground-penetrating radar can detect objects buried deep under several dozen meters or more of soil.

In December 2009, a team led by archaeologist Till Sonnemann of Leiden University in the Netherlands dragged a wheeled device reminiscent of a lawn mower over Angkor Wat’s vast outer section for two weeks. High-frequency radio waves emitted by the contraption bounced off buried objects, signaling locations of possible archaeological remains.

Sonnemann was looking for remnants of houses or administrative buildings from the 12th century or later. Something far more intriguing turned up.

At Angkor Wat’s western entrance, where visitors enter the grounds of the temple, the radar machine identified what looked like the foundations of eight towers. Excavations in 2010 and 2012 confirmed their existence. Foundation remains lie roughly 21 meters belowground, about 10 times as deep as an Olympic swimming pool.

Each cross-shaped foundation, held in place by walls made of a reddish rock called laterite, had a square central section bound by porches jutting out on each side. Intact shrine towers from other Khmer Empire sites, which were dedicated to various gods, feature side porches.

Angkor Wat’s former towers were intentionally destroyed, Sonnemann says. Radiocarbon dating of burned wood from the foundations suggests the towers were built around the time that work started on Angkor Wat. Demolition occurred when Angkor Wat’s outer wall and western gate were completed, Sonnemann suspects.

Perhaps 12th century residents of Greater Angkor used the gateway towers as a temporary religious shrine to the Hindu god Vishnu while erecting Suryavarman II’s temple, which was dedicated to the same deity, Sonnemann says. Of the eight towers, four formed a square that stood within a larger square formed by the four others. Angkor Wat itself features four towers arranged in a square around a central tower.

The gateway towers may have served as an outline of Angkor Wat’s permanent towers, Sonnemann speculates. But they were not identical. Remote sensing identified no remnants of a central tower at the western entrance.
Wall defenses
Tourists and researchers have long gazed at Angkor Wat’s impressive stone outer wall without realizing it holds clues to warfare between the Khmer Empire and regional foes, says archaeologist David Brotherson of the University of Sydney.

Archaeologist Christophe Pottier of the Bangkok Center in Thailand first noticed holes that had been intentionally carved in parts of the wall constructed later. When Brotherson took a closer look, he speculated that those openings once supported wooden platforms and fences.

Angkor Wat’s defenders stood on the platforms and positioned themselves between the fences to repel attacks by nearby Thai kingdoms, Brotherson proposes. Those confrontations probably took place sometime between the late 13th and early 17th centuries.

Brotherson studied 6,257 wall cavities. Most consist of groups of seven square holes, at the same height, running across the inside of the wall near its top. Sets of holes, notches and grooves also run across adjacent areas on top of the wall.
These alterations appear at spots where six nearly 20-meter-wide gaps in the wall — which probably framed wooden gates — were later filled in with stone blocks. Differences in detailing and finish distinguish original masonry from filled-in sections.

Holes on the inner part of the wall held wooden beams that supported platforms about 3.5 to 4 meters above the ground that must have had stairs at each end, Brotherson says. Angkor Wat’s fighters would have stood on platforms while raining down arrows or other weapons on attackers. Wall-top holes probably held fence posts for additional protection, he suspects. Yet researchers have found no arrowheads or other weapons and no evidence of military damage to Angkor Wat, such as wall marks from catapulted boulders or remnants of torched wooden buildings.

Still, it’s more likely that the wall’s inside holes held platforms for temple defenders to stand on than wooden roofs that sheltered people or animals underneath, Brotherson says. Gateway spaces would not have been filled in simply to construct shelter roofs, he contends. And roofs would not have required holes carved on top of the wall.

“There are no historical references to defensive fortifications at Angkor Wat,” Fletcher says. “Sometimes archaeology tells us things that history cannot.”

Tropical trajectories
Lidar’s bird’s-eye view of forest floors has guided archaeologists not only to lost parts of Angkor Wat, but to a greater appreciation of similarities between Greater Angkor and other ancient tropical cities.

Lidar surveys of west-central Belize in 2009 and 2013 showed that the ancient Maya city of Caracol sprawled across now-forested landscape much as Greater Angkor did. A dense urban area, incorporating agricultural fields into a planned city, spread 10 kilometers in all directions from central Caracol in 650. Researchers estimate that more than 140,000 people lived at Caracol (SN: 12/15/12, p. 14).

Laser maps revealed farming terraces, housing tracts and roads leading to public plazas that ranged far beyond Caracol’s urban center. Anthropologists Arlen and Diane Chase of the University of Central Florida in Orlando directed lidar research at Caracol.

At 1,000 square kilometers, Greater Angkor covered a much larger area than Caracol. “Lidar surveying has just begun, but we now know that Maya cities were shrimps compared with mighty Angkor,” says Yale University anthropologist Michael Coe, a long-time investigator of the Maya and other ancient American civilizations.
Nothing like Angkor’s street grids stretching with geometric precision toward the horizon appears at Caracol, adds Coe, who is familiar with work at both sites.

Still, common factors inspired the rise and fall of Greater Angkor, Maya urban centers such as Caracol and the tropical city of Anuradhapura in Sri Lanka between the ninth and 16th centuries, Fletcher and two colleagues concluded in the October 2015 Antiquity.

Rulers in each region directed the construction of reservoirs and canals that allowed spread-out cities to flourish. Effective water management cemented the power of kings by enabling masses of farmers to make a steady living.

Severe periods of drought, indicated by analyses of tree rings and lake sediments, strained water supplies in each tropical setting, Fletcher says. Periodic monsoon rains in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka added insult to injury, overwhelming reservoirs and damaging canals.

Unable to supply enough water, political systems at Greater Angkor and other tropical cities crumbled, Fletcher argues. But societies didn’t vanish. Farmers reorganized into smaller communities based near coasts and along major rivers. Cultivation continued in fields that had once been part of massive cities.

Laser quest
Fletcher’s rise-and-disperse scenario for ancient tropical cities is being put to a broader test. From March to May 2015, a second set of lidar flights expanded laser mapping of northern Cambodia to a total area of 2,000 square kilometers. Researchers want to see if, like Angkor Wat, other ancient temples in the region sat in the center of dispersed settlements tied together by reservoirs, canals and ponds. Archaeological investigations based on the new lidar data are under way. Evans plans to announce initial findings in June.

Over the next 10 to 15 years, lidar technology will become smaller and cheaper, Evans predicts. Laser-wielding drones will replace lidar-toting helicopters. But laser mapping is already a game changer for tropical archaeology.

Around Angkor, “the impact of lidar data is like turning on a light after groping in the dark for over a century,” says archaeologist John Miksic of the National University of Singapore.

Suryavarman II, a politically ambitious warrior who tried to expand his kingdom by launching wars and allying himself with Imperial China, would surely celebrate Angkor Wat’s laser revival if he was around today. It’s a revival of sorts for the once-mighty king, as well.

Venus flytraps (Dionaea muscipula) make carnivory look cool. But the genes that make it possible have roots in herbivory.

Though modern flytraps eat insects, their ancestors probably didn’t. In search of clues to this transition, Rainer Hedrich of the University of Wurzburg in Germany and his colleagues looked at protein production patterns in in different parts of the plant.

Unstimulated traps seem to decode genes for similar proteins to those found in leaves, which supports the theory that traps originally evolved from foliage. Glands inside the trap, which help with digestion, share common gene expression patterns with roots — perhaps because both process nutrients.

Sensory hairs signal traps to close on prey. When an unsuspecting spider trips those trap hairs, gene expression patterns shift dramatically. Traps start producing signaling hormones and digestive enzymes. Some of these same protein pathways also help plants heal wounds inflicted by herbivores. Venus flytraps may have rewired traditional plant defense machinery to eat insects in nutrient-poor soils, Hedrich’s team writes May 4 in Genome Resarch.

The galaxy is starting to feel a little crowded. Over 1,000 planets have just been added to the roster of worlds known to orbit other stars in the Milky Way, researchers announced May 10 at a news briefing. This is the largest number of exoplanets announced at once.

Most of the 1,284 worlds are larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune. Many of those are probably big balls of gas. But over 100 of the new discoveries are smaller than 1.2 times the diameter of Earth. “Those are almost certainly rocky in nature,” said Timothy Morton, an astrophysicist at Princeton University. Nine planets also lie within the habitable zone, the distance from the star where liquid water could conceivably collect on the surface of the planet. Morton and colleagues detail their findings in the May 10 Astrophysical Journal.
This announcement roughly doubles the number of planets discovered by NASA’s planet-hunting workhorse, the Kepler space telescope, which has now found 2,325 exoplanets. Kepler spent nearly four years staring at about 150,000 stars in the constellations Cygnus and Lyra, watching for subtle dips in starlight as planets crossed in front of their suns. While Kepler has since moved on to other investigations (SN: 6/28/14, p. 7), this latest haul comes from those first four years of observing.

The planet bonanza comes courtesy of a new statistical calculation that allows researchers to feel confident that a detection is a real world. Impostors such as companion stars can mimic the signal from a planet. Traditionally, each planet candidate must be followed up with intensive observations from ground-based telescopes. But with over 4,000 candidates in the queue, confirming each one would take a long time. The calculation takes into account the details of how a passing planet should dim and brighten the starlight along with how common impostors should be and provides a reliability score for each candidate. Planets in this study are those whose score is greater than 99 percent.

Techniques such as these should help confirm planets detected by upcoming missions such as the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite, scheduled to launch in late 2017. Some of those planets found by TESS will in turn come under the gaze of the James Webb Space Telescope, which will launch in 2018 and investigate their atmospheres (SN: 4/30/16, p. 32).

Editor’s Note: This story was updated May 17, 2016, to correct the key in the graphic to indicate that previously detected planets include all transiting planets discovered, not just the ones found by Kepler.

Giraffes’ genes tell a not-so-tall tale about growing necks to great lengths.

Tweaks to genes important for development may account for both the giraffe’s stature and turbocharged cardiovascular system, researchers report May 17 in Nature Communications.

Researchers compiled the genetic instruction book, or genome, for both the giraffe and the okapi, its short-necked closest living relative. Those two species’ most recent common ancestor lived about 11.5 million years ago, says Douglas Cavener, a geneticist at Penn State University. Overall, giraffes and okapis still have very similar genes, with 19.4 percent that are identical.
The researchers compared giraffe, okapi and cattle genomes to see what sets giraffes and okapis apart from other ungulates. About 400 genes differ between those species and cattle.

Further comparisons of those genes with DNA from other animals revealed 70 genes in which giraffes had DNA differences from all other mammals. Those uniquely tweaked genes could be responsible for giraffes’ unusual height and physiology, the researchers reasoned.

Among the giraffe’s most distinctively altered genes are some that are well known to regulate embryo development. For instance, the team found alterations in several genes that govern skeletal development, including the gene FGFRL1.

FGFRL1 encodes a protein that helps regulate the size of body segments. Giraffes have the same number of vertebrae in their necks as okapi and other animals do, but the bones are bigger. The giraffe version of the FGFRL1 protein contains seven amino acids that are different than those found in other mammals. Those amino acid differences may change the way the protein works and allow giraffes’ body parts to grow larger than those of other animals.

Some of the same genes that gave the giraffe its long neck — FGFRL1 included — may also be involved in strengthening the cardiovascular system in order to pump blood all the way to the giraffe’s lofty brain, the researchers found. Such multifunctional genes would have allowed coordination of giraffes’ adaptations, Cavener says.
The researchers “provide some very compelling candidates” for genes that shaped giraffe evolution, says Michael Hiller, an evolutionary genomicist at the Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics in Dresden, Germany. More research is needed to show that fiddling with those genes really could turbocharge giraffes’ hearts and supersize their bones. Hiller says he doubts the researchers have found all the genetic secrets to giraffes’ many evolutionary innovations.

Although giraffes have a unique appearance, the statuesque leaf eaters didn’t invent any new genetic tricks to change their hearts and necks, says Cavener. “Giraffes’ novelties almost certainly weren’t created by new genes or pathways, but by modifications of genes and pathways universal to all mammals.”

A form of multicellular life visible to the naked eye may have emerged nearly a billion years earlier than scientists once thought.

At 1.56 billion years old, fossils discovered in north China represent the best evidence yet for the early existence of large eukaryotes, paleobiologist Maoyan Zhu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing and colleagues report May 17 in Nature Communications.

Eukaryotes, which have cells containing nuclei and other membrane-wrapped machinery, include everything from plants to people. The new find could mark when single-celled eukaryotes became multicellular organisms capable of drawing energy from the sun, says geobiologist Shuhai Xiao of Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, who was not involved in the research. “That’s why it’s important,” he says. “The fossils represent one of the major transitions in evolution.”
Remains of early life on Earth are scarce and sometimes hard to interpret (SN: 2/8/14, p. 16). Some scientists point to evidence of life from as early as 3.8 billion years ago; rocks in Greenland, for example, contain traces of carbon that could be cellular remnants. Harder evidence for microbes comes from what appear to be fossils of actual cells speckling 3.4-billion-year-old sandstone in Australia.

Signs of multicellular life crop up later in the fossil record, roughly 1.2 billion years ago, Zhu says. But until now, clear evidence for large-scale multicellular organisms, like the ones Zhu’s team reports, date back just 635 million years. The team’s new find — consisting of 167 fossils, some up to 30 centimeters long and 8 centimeters wide (roughly the size of a man’s footprint) — places these life-forms much further back in time, when Earth was hot and oxygen was scarce.

The fossils are compressions: cells squashed flat into ribbons — like a garden hose crushed beneath a car’s tire, or like kelp. In fact, the organisms may have looked “very similar to some algae living in the shallow sea today,” Zhu says.

After stretching ropy bodies along the shore, the ancient sea life was preserved in layers of mudstone. Inside the stone, the researchers found closely packed cells and organic carbon, evidence of cellular remains. Zhu can’t explain why such a large time gap exists between his find and similar large-scale fossils, but he suspects the problem may be with preservation of such old material.

Scientists once considered the time period when these organisms lived to be the “boring billion,” though that view seems to be shifting (SN: 11/14/15, p. 18). People thought that “there was very little evolutionary change, and not much going on geochemically,” Xiao says. The new work “tells us a different story.”

A notorious Alzheimer’s disease villain may also be a germ-busting superhero. Amyloid-beta gums up the brains of people with Alzheimer’s but also takes out dangerous brain invaders, scientists report May 25 in Science Translational Medicine.

As strong as steel, tough strands of A-beta protein imprison pathogens that threaten the body and brain, experiments in mice and worms show. Those results raise the possibility that A-beta plays a role in the immune system and its accumulation in Alzheimer’s might be prompted by an infection.
Earlier studies have shown that A-beta can bust germs in cells in dishes, but the new experiment shows A-beta protection in living mice and worms. Mice engineered to have the human form of A-beta better survived a brain infection of Salmonella bacteria than mice without the human A-beta, Robert Moir and Rudolph Tanzi, both of Harvard Medical School, and colleagues found. And in the bodies of worms, A-beta helped stave off the dangerous yeast Candida.

When researchers injected Salmonella into mice’s hippocampi, a brain area damaged in Alzheimer’s, A-beta quickly sprang into action. It swarmed the bugs and formed aggregates called fibrils and plaques. “Overnight you see the plaques throughout the hippocampus where the bugs were, and then in each single plaque is a single bacterium,” Tanzi says. That rapid response was surprising, he says. “No one expected that.”
And those prisons are probably permanent, Moir says. “In A-beta, those fibrils set like concrete and the bugs have no chance of ever getting out.”

Alzheimer’s has been linked to a host of bacterial, fungal and viral infections, says immunologist Kevan Hartshorn of Boston University School of Medicine. That work, along with the new study, raises the possibility that Alzheimer’s could be spurred by an immune response to a pathogen.

That’s “an extremely provocative and interesting hypothesis,” says neuroscientist Berislav Zlokovic of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, who says the new data are convincing. But it remains to be seen whether the results are relevant for people with Alzheimer’s. Zlokovic and colleagues recently found that the barrier between brain and blood weakens with age — a situation that could let more microbes into the brain and perhaps spur A-beta accumulation.
A-beta appears to be a general immune system fighter that’s effective against many enemies, says Moir. “This is a classical innate immune response, which means that whatever gets thrown at it, it does the same thing,” he says. “So whether it’s a herpesvirus, a spirochete or chlamydia, it’s going to generate A-beta plaques.”

Moir also raises the possibility that the amyloid’s germ-busting job might play a role in other diseases that come with amyloid accumulation, such as diabetes or heart disease. “I think we may have stumbled across an underlying theme in a lot of major diseases,” he says.

Finding this helpful role for A-beta may complicate a therapeutic approach for Alzheimer’s that attempts to reduce levels of the protein with antibodies, says molecular pharmacologist Marina Ziche of the University of Siena in Italy. “I have always been very skeptical about that approach,” and the new results suggest that people benefit from some A-beta, Ziche says.

The next step is to see whether pathogens are entombed in A-beta plaques in the human brain, Tanzi says. “Now it’s time to start looking for them in patients.” To start, he and colleagues have just begun a project to catalog the collection of microbes in healthy brains and brains with Alzheimer’s.

Finding a strong link between pathogens and Alzheimer’s could suggest new ways to prevent the disease, Tanzi says. Vaccines that fight infections, for instance, might be one way to prevent A-beta pileup.

Two more of the ingredients for life as we know it have turned up in space, this time from a comet orbiting the sun. While hints of both have been seen in comets before, this is the clearest evidence to date.

Glycine, the smallest of the 20 amino acids that build proteins, is floating in the tenuous atmosphere of comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, researchers report online May 27 in Science Advances. Comet 67P’s atmosphere also holds phosphorus, which is essential to DNA and RNA. Both detections support the idea that comets are at least partly responsible for seeding early Earth with material needed for life.
The phosphorus, glycine and a handful of other organic molecules were detected by the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft, which has been in orbit around 67P since August 2014 (SN: 9/6/14, p. 8). Kathrin Altwegg, a planetary scientist at the University of Bern in Switzerland, led the study.

Previous searches for glycine in comets Hale-Bopp and C/1996 B2 (Hyakutake) turned up nothing. Glycine was seen in samples from the Stardust mission, which flew through the tail of comet Wild 2 in 2004 and brought comet dust back to Earth, but those measurements were complicated by lab contamination. Scientists have detected hints of phosphorus in comet Halley.

Life’s ingredients keep turning up in cosmic environments. Meteorites carry amino acids and simple sugars have been seen in interstellar clouds(SN: 10/9/04, p. 237). And several of the essential molecules for DNA and RNA, such as ribose, have been created in laboratory experiments that simulate ice grains exposed to ultraviolet radiation from young stars (SN: 4/30/16, p. 18).

Giant squid are the stuff of nightmares. They were even one of the deadly dangers in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, attacking the Nautilus in a group and carrying off one of the crew:

Just as we were crowding each other to reach the platform, two more arms lashed the air, swooped on the seaman stationed in front of Captain Nemo, and carried the fellow away with irresistible violence…. What a scene! Seized by the tentacle and glued to its suckers, the unfortunate man was swinging in the air at the mercy of this enormous appendage. He gasped, he choked, he yelled: ‘Help! Help!’ … The poor fellow was done for.

What makes Verne’s giant squid all the more frightening is that he didn’t invent the creatures; giant squid strandings had been documented in Europe since at least 1639, and scientists informally described the animals in the late 1850s.

But even if we don’t really have to worry about the huge invertebrates snatching people off boats, giant squid remain mysterious. They weren’t even photographed in the wild until 2004. And many questions remain unanswered about them. The biggest: Just how giant can the giants get? A new study has come up with an estimate — and also highlights the many reasons why it’s so difficult to come up with one.

Charles Paxton of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland starts by laying out five ways that it should be possible to estimate squid length, and why the first four aren’t great measures. Anecdotal accounts — which claim giant squid reaching lengths of 30 meters and 53 meters, not counting the two long tentacles — are often riddled with inaccuracy and exaggeration. Estimating maximum length based on squid growth rate won’t work because squid growth rates just aren’t well known. Some scientists have tried to determine lengths based on the sucker scars found on whales, but since scientists don’t know how whale growth affects the sizes of those scars, those aren’t a good measure either.

Direct measurement of dead squid would seem to be a good option, except that the two long tentacles of a squid — which extend far beyond the animal’s arms and determine its full length — are elastic and can change in length when a squid is preserved, Paxton notes. That leaves the fifth method — estimating length based on the size of the hard beak. Beak size and squid body length are related.

Paxton combined the last two methods to come up with a maximum length for a giant squid of about 20 meters, from the top of its mantle, or body, to the tip of its long tentacles. His estimate appears May 17 in the Journal of Zoology.
The longest squid ever reported was 17.37 meters long, and Paxton questions its veracity, as does another paper published last year in PeerJ. Craig McClain of Duke University and colleagues note that the “longest scientifically verified giant squid” measured a mere 12 meters. “What limits the large size of [giant squid] is unclear,” McClain and colleagues write. But metabolic demands may play a role, keeping squid from getting much bigger than what have washed up onto shore (and also keeping them in the cold depths where they’re so difficult for us to find).

But perhaps the focus on the largest and biggest of species is the wrong approach, McClain and his colleagues argue (in, ironically, a paper all about large marine species). The longest, most giant individuals are, after all, just a tiny fraction of a species — and, these researchers write, “these individuals may reach these extraordinary large sizes through developmental or genetic defects and may not represent the healthiest or, in evolutionary terms, the fittest.”

They are, though, among the most mysterious creatures to inhabit our planet.

From California to China, desert moss (Syntrichia caninervis) braves life in hot deserts and still stays hydrated. What’s its secret? The moss gathers water via a topsy-turvy collection system in its leaves.

Moss leaves have tiny hairlike points at their ends called awns. Previous evidence pointed to a potential role for the awns in water collection and prompted Tadd Truscott of Utah State University and his colleagues to zero in on the structures.

Imaging exposed a system of barbs that line the awns and catch tiny airborne water droplets, the team reports June 6 in Nature Plants. When the air is misty, foggy or the least bit humid, trapped dewdrops move up grooves in the moss leaves by capillary action. The tiny drops form a bigger drop to be absorbed and stored by the plant. When it rains, moss awns reduce splash and capture raindrops by the same mechanism.

Most desert plants, especially cacti, get their water from roots, but moss may not be the only plant that uses unique leaf structures to stock up on water, the team argues.

For the second time, scientists have glimpsed elusive ripples that vibrate the fabric of space. A new observation of gravitational waves, announced by scientists with the Advanced Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, LIGO, follows their first detection, reported earlier this year (SN: 3/5/16, p. 6). The second detection further opens a new window through which to observe the universe.

“The era of gravitational wave astronomy is upon us,” says astronomer Scott Ransom of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Va., who is not involved with LIGO. “Now that there’s two, you can’t get around that anymore.”

Both sets of cosmic quivers were wrought in cataclysmic collisions of black holes. But the latest observation indicates that such merging pairs of black holes are a varied bunch — the newly detected black holes were much smaller than the first pair. And this time, scientists concluded that one in the pair was spinning like a top.
“The most important thing is that it’s a second one,” says LIGO spokesperson Gabriela González of Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. “But it’s important that it’s different, because it shows that there’s a spectrum of black hole systems out there.”

The two black holes in the most recent detection were about eight and 14 times the mass of the sun and were located roughly 1.4 billion light-years from Earth, the scientists estimate. When the pair fused, they formed one bloated black hole with a mass 21 times that of the sun. One sun’s worth of mass was converted into energy and carried away by the gravitational waves, LIGO scientists announced June 15 in San Diego during a meeting of the American Astronomical Society.
“Gravitational astronomy is real,” LIGO laboratory executive director David Reitze said in a news conference. “The future is going to be full of binary black hole mergers for LIGO.”

A paper describing the finding was published online June 15 in Physical Review Letters.

As the two black holes spiraled around each other and slammed together, they churned up cosmic undulations that stretched and squeezed space — as predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity. These waves careened across the universe, reaching LIGO’s twin detectors in Hanford, Wash., and Livingston, La., on December 26, 2015.

Each L-shaped LIGO detector senses the minuscule stretching and squeezing of space across its two 4-kilometer arms. As a gravitational wave passes through, one arm lengthens while the other shortens. Laser light bouncing back and forth in the arms serves as an ultrasensitive measuring stick that can pick up those subtle length changes (SN: 3/5/16, p. 22). As the gravitational waves rumbled past Earth in December, they stretched and squeezed the arms by less than a thousandth the width of a proton. “That’s very, very small,” González said. “That’s like changing the distance between Earth and the sun by a fraction of an atomic diameter.” This tiny deviation, appearing in both detectors nearly simultaneously, was enough to pick out the telltale ripples.

Compared with LIGO’s previously detected black hole merger, this one was a more minor dustup. These black holes were less than half the size of those in the first merger (30 and 35 solar masses according to a recently revised estimate). And the signal of their coalescence was more subtle, hiding under the messy wiggles in the data that result from random fluctuations or unwanted signals from the environment.
The first detection stunned scientists, due to the surprisingly large masses of the black holes and the whopping signals their gravitational waves left in the data. But the new black hole merger is more in line with expectations.
“This is comfort food,” says physicist Emanuele Berti of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, who is not involved with LIGO. “If you had asked me before the first detection, I would have bet that this would have been the first kind of binary black hole to be observed, not the monster we saw.”

There’s little question about whether the signal is real — a false alarm of this magnitude should occur only once in 200,000 years. “It’s very, very exciting,” says physicist Clifford Will of the University of Florida in Gainesville. It “looks like a very solid discovery.”

In a new twist, the scientists found that one of the two merging black holes was spinning. It was rotating at a speed at least 20 percent of its maximum possible speed. Using gravitational waves to study how pairs of black holes twirl could help scientists understand how they form.

The scientists used their data to put general relativity through its paces, looking for deviations from the theory’s predictions. But the black holes’ behavior was as expected.

LIGO also saw hints of a third black hole collision on October 12. The evidence was not strong enough to claim a definitive detection, though.

LIGO is currently offline, undergoing improvements that will allow the detectors to peer even further out into space. Scientists expect it to be back up and running this fall, churning out new detections of gravitational waves. “Now we know for sure that we’ll see more in the future,” González says.