Fish with hands

Fish With "Hands" Found to Be New Species

Sinkhole

 Sinkhole Pierces Guatemala

Exotic Plant's Once-a-Century Bloom in Pictures

"Extreme" Bloom

A man surveys a flowering Queen of the Andes plant—which blooms only once in its 80- to 100-year lifetime—near Thumi, Bolivia, (see map) in a picture taken last week.

The exotic plant blooms for a few weeks before it dies. Even before it blooms, though, the Queen of the Andes has a regal presence, towering up to 40 feet (12 meters) in its  Peru and Bolivia.

Flower Feast

Some field studies suggest that Queen of the Andes plants get additional nutrients from the droppings of birds, which feast on the plant's rare flowers, as seen in a picture taken November 10. Hungry birds sometimes get stuck in the plant's prickly foliage, which is essentially an assemblage of inward-curving "claws."

"If you stick your hand into one of these things, it can get ripped to shreds if you pull it out without great care," Lambe said. Some local people loathe the plant, because they've heard reports of sheep or other livestock becoming similarly ensnared, he added 

Solitary Queen

Queen of the Andes plants, like the ones seen above near Thumi, Bolivia, are typically found in small, isolated pockets of a few hundred individuals.

Such spotty distribution prevents the plants from mixing genes, making them more vulnerable to the arrival of diseases, parasites, and predators associated with climate change, Lambe noted .

X-Ray History--Hidden Kitten, Quackery and more

115-Year-Old X-Ray

This 115-year-old picture of fingers is one of the first images ever made with x-rays

The hand belonged to Anna Bertha, wife of German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, the discover of x-rays. The black glob on the fourth finger is a ring made of gold, which absorbs x-rays.

X-Rays Target Presidential Bullet

A medical x-ray shows the rib cage of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt after an attempted assassination in 1912 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he was campaigning. The nonfatal bullet was never removed .

X-Rays Reveal Art Under Art

Today, art historians routinely use x-rays to peer beneath the finished surfaces of paintings—such as Caravaggio's 17th-century masterpiece "Adoration of the Shepherds" (shown)—to reveal rough sketches or "underdrawings" and to discover changes that the artist made during the painting process.

X-Rays Find Inner Kitten

X-rays can also be used as a noninvasive way of peering inside priceless artifacts, such as this ancient Egyptian wooden cat coffin, which was found to hold the corpse of a kitten.

X-Rays Easy on the Eyes?

This ad from the February 1917 issue of National Geographic extols the virtue of so-called X-ray Reflectors.

There was a time shortly after their discovery that x-rays were as popular as lasers are today, according to Edwin Gerson, a radiologist in Riverdale, Georgia, who collects 19th- and 20th-century "x-ray products."

"Everyone focused on the x-ray as an unexpected technologic advancement that encouraged belief in other similar or even more miraculous advances," Gerson wrote in a 2004 article for the journal Radiographics.

wierd facts

"Flamboyant" New Squid Worm Surprises, Delights Experts

Large, "Glamorous" New Glowing Squid Species Found

New Self-Cloning Lizard Found in Vietnam Restaurant

New Snub-Nosed Monkey Discovered, Eaten

Giant Crystal Caves Yield New "Ice Palace," 

Fuzzy Critters' Crystallized Pee Changes Climate Record

"Zombie Virus" Possible via Rabies-Flu Hybrid

Chinese fossil challenges traditional early-human time line

Oldest Modern Human Outside of Africa Found

A fossil human jawbone discovered in southern China is upsetting conventional notions of when our ancestors migrated out of Africa.

The mandible, unearthed by paleontologists in China's Zhiren Cave in 2007, sports a distinctly modern feature: a prominent chin. But the bone is undeniably 60,000 years older than the next oldest Homo sapiens remains in China, scientists say.

In fact, at about a hundred thousand years old, the Chinese fossil is "the oldest modern human outside of Africa," said study co-author Erik Trinkaus, an anthropologist at Washington University in St. Louis.

(Also see "Oldest Skeleton of Human Ancestor Found.")

Popular theory states that Homo sapiens migrated out of Africa about 60,000 years ago, at which point modern humans quickly replaced early human species such as Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis across the world.

Finding such an ancient example of a modern human in China would drastically alter the time line of human migration. The find may also mean that modern humans in China were mingling—and possibly even interbreeding—with other human species for 50,000 or 60,000 years.

(Related: "Neanderthals, Humans Interbred—First Solid DNA Evidence.")

What's more, the find seems to suggest that anatomically modern humans had arrived in China long before the species began acting human.

For example, symbolic thought is a distinctly human trait that involves using things such as beads and drawings to represent objects, people, and events. The first strong evidence for this trait doesn't appear in the archaeological record in China until 30,000 years ago, Trinkaus said.

(Related: "Oldest Jewelry Found in Morocco Cave.")

Hoping for DNA Evidence

So far, genetic evidence largely supports the traditional timing of the "out of Africa" theory. But the newly described China jawbone presents a strong challenge, said anthropologist Christopher Bae of the University of Hawaii, who was not associated with the find.

"They actually have solid dates and evidence of, basically, a modern human," he said.

Still, the jaw and three molars were the only human remains retrieved from the Chinese cave, and the jaw is "within the range" of Neanderthal chins as well as those of modern humans, added paleoanthropologist John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

(Related: "Oldest Human Footprints With Modern Anatomy Found.")

"If this holds up, we have to reevaluate" the human migration time line, he said.

"Basically, I think they're right, [but] I want to see more evidence," Hawks added. "I really, really hope that there can be some sort of genetic extraction from this [fossil]."

The oldest human jawbone from China is described in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Oldest Embryo

Oldest Dinosaur Embryos Show "Big Surprises"

The sharpest look yet at the oldest known dinosaur embryos (pictured, one of the eggs and its inhabitant) has revealed some "big surprises," a scientist says.

For one thing, the 190-million-year-old babies of Massospondylus—a two-legged dinosaur that preceded the well-known sauropods, such as Diplodocus—do not resemble their parents, according to study co-author Hans-Dieter Sues, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. (See more dinosaur-embryo pictures.)

The 8-inch-long (20-centimeter-long) youngster, for example, had long front legs for walking on all fours, and its overall body proportion—such as a short snout—made it "look like a dwarf version of a sauropod dinosaur," the largest animals to walk Earth. (See a sauropod picture.) The babies would have lost these traits as they matured.

The discovery suggests Massospondylus had characteristics that "foreshadowed" the later look of the sauropods, he said. (See "New Strong-Handed Dinosaur May Shatter Assumptions.")

—Christine Dell'Amore

The oldest-dinosaur-embryo research appears in the November issue of the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.