Animals that live without oxygen have been discovered for the first time, deep under the Mediterranean Sea.

A wide variety of single-celled organisms that live anaerobically, or without oxygen, had been found in the past, usually deep underwater or deep underground. But researchers had not found a multi-cellular or metazoan animal that did so until now — the giant tube worms that live by hydrothermal vents, for instance, rely on dissolved oxygen.

In the past decade or so, researcher Roberto Danovaro at the Polytechnic University of Marche in Ancona, Italy, and his colleagues conducted three expeditions off the south coast of Greece looking for signs of life in samples of mud from deep, hyper-salty basins in the Mediterranean Sea more than 10,000 feet (3,250 meters) deep. These basins are completely anoxic, or oxygen-free, and loaded with toxic levels of sulfides.

In these extremes, the investigators were only expecting to see viruses, bacteria and other microbes. The bodies of multi-cellular animals had previously been discovered in these sediments, “but were thought to have sunk there from upper, oxygenated, waters,” explained Danovaro.

Instead, “our results indicate that the animals we recovered were alive,” Danovaro said. “Some, in fact, also contained eggs.”

These creatures, which measure less than 1 millimeter long, are known as loriciferans. They somewhat resemble jellyfish sprouting from a conical shell.

Electron microscopy revealed the three new species of loriciferans the researchers discovered lack mitochondria, the energy-making organelles or components in our cells that allow us to generate energy from oxygen among other functions. Instead, they possess large numbers of organelles resembling hydrogenosomes — anaerobic forms of mitochondria — that were previously seen in single-celled organisms inhabiting no-oxygen environments.

These new animals could shed light on what life might have looked like before the rise of oxygen levels in the deep ocean and the appearance of the first large animals in the fossil record roughly 550 million to 600 million years ago, the scientists noted.

The implications of this discovery might also reach far beyond the Mediterranean Sea, explained biological oceanographer Lisa Levin of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, who did not take part in this research.

This new, unexpected finding “offers the tantalizing promise of metazoan life in other anoxic settings — for example, in the subsurface ocean beneath hydrothermal vents, or subduction zones, or in other anoxic basins,” Levin said, referring to the subduction zones where one slab of Earth called a tectonic plate dives beneath another and sometimes leads to earthquakes.

“Good places to look might be the Cariaco Basin and the Black Sea, as well as the many borderland basins off southern California and Baja California.”

“Are there metazoans on other planets with atmospheres different from our own?” Levin added. “Our ability to answer this question would be strengthened considerably by more intensive studies of animal-microbe interactions in extreme settings of our own inner space — the deep ocean.”

Danovaro and his colleagues detailed their findings online April 6 in the journal BMC Biology.

Ali Sabat was supposed to die last week.

Sabat, the Lebanese host of a popular TV show, for years gave his viewers psychic advice and predictions. This may cost him his life.

Many people around the world claim to foretell the future, talk to the dead, and do other amazing (if scientifically unproven) feats. So what’s the problem?

Sabat is a Shiite Muslim, and many Muslims—like many fundamentalist Christians—consider fortunetelling occult and therefore evil. Making a psychic prediction is seen as invoking diabolical forces, perhaps even entering into a pact with Satan. Fortunetelling, prophecy, and other forms of divination have been condemned by Saudi Arabia’s religious leaders.

In 2008, while on a pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia, Ali Sabat was arrested by that country’s religious police, the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. His crime: sorcery. Yes, people can still be accused of practicing witchcraft and condemned to death for it nowadays.

According to the human rights group Amnesty International, a court last month upheld Sabat’s death sentence, with the judges deciding “he deserved to be sentenced to death because he had practiced ‘sorcery’ publicly for several years before millions of viewers.”

He was scheduled to be publicly executed last Friday, but his beheading was deferred.

Sabat is not out of trouble; he did not receive a reprieve, merely a temporary stay of execution.

In an ironic twist, Sabat might save his life if he confessed that his psychic predictions and powers were all a hoax (or an act merely for entertainment) and therefore not a true exhibition of occult powers. Hopefully Sabat’s death sentence will be repealed, but it does seem odd that his psychic powers didn’t predict this travesty in the first place.

Sticks and stones can break your bones, but words … well, the old adage might need a revision. New research shows that the brain’s pain matrix gets activated by pain-related words.

When people hear or read words such as “plaguing,” “tormenting” and “grueling,” the section of the brain that retains memories of painful experiences is triggered.

Psychologists from Friedrich Schiller University of Jena in Germany had 16 subjects read pain-related words while imagining situations that corresponded to each word. They were then asked to repeat the exercise, but were distracted by a brain-teaser as they read the words. During the experiments, participants had their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI).

“There was an activation in the pain matrix to pain words,” Dr. Thomas Weiss told LiveScience.

The pain matrix is the brain’s storage place for past memories of painful experiences, acting as a reminder to avoid painful situations in the future. The results held in both experiments, regardless of whether the participants were distracted.

“In both cases, we could observe a clear activation of the pain matrix in the brain by pain-associated words,” said study author Maria Richter.

The study size was small, but that’s typical of brain-imaging research.

The psychologists noted that negative words that are not pain-related, such as “disgusting,” “terrifying” and “horrible,” did not activate those brain regions. Reading neutral and positive words also did not produce activity patterns comparable to the pain-related words.

Scientists have created a flat surface patterned after the body hair of spiders that refuses to get wet.

The surface also has the added benefit of being self-cleaning, since water does a pretty good job of picking up and carrying off dirt as it is being repelled.

This makes the material ideal for some food packaging, windows, or solar cells that must stay clean to gather sunlight, scientists say. Boat designers might someday coat hulls with it, making boats faster and more efficient.

But what makes the new surface really unique is that unlike other similar products out there, such as shoe wax and car windshield treatments, the new material doesn’t rely on chemicals with water-repellent properties to stay dry. Instead, its surface blocks out water by mimicking the shape and patterns of a spider’s body hair. In other words, physics, not chemistry, is what keeps it dry.

Spiders “have short hairs and longer hairs, and they vary a lot. And that is what we mimic,” said Wolfgang Sigmund, a professor of materials science and engineering at the University of Florida.

It’s been long known that spiders use their water-repelling hairs to stay dry or avoid drowning. Water spiders use their hairs to capture air bubbles and tote them underwater to breathe. But it was only five years ago that Sigmund began experimenting with microscopic fibers, turning to spiders for inspiration.

At first, Sigmund’s natural tendency was to make all his fibers the same size and distance apart. But he later learned that the pattern of hairs on a spider’s body consists of both long and short hairs that are both curved and straight. So he decided to mimic Nature and replicate this random pattern using plastic hairs varying in size but averaging about 600 microns, or millionths of a meter.

“Most people that publish in this field always go for these perfect structures, and we are the first to show that the bad ones are the better ones,” Sigmund said.

The technique, detailed in the science journal Langmuir, can be applied to keep even absorbent materials like sponges from getting wet. It may also be safer than other forms of water-proofing since the method doesn’t involve the use of chemicals.

Sigmund says that he has even developed a variation of the surface that repels oil. However, he noted that the process is not reliable enough to continually create good working surfaces, and different techniques need to be developed to produce such surfaces in commercially available quantities and size.

“We are at the very beginning,” Sigmund said. “But there is a lot of interest from industry, because our surface is the first one that relies only on surface features and can repel hot water, cold water, and if we change the chemistry – both oil and water.”

Few inventions have lent themselves to as little improvement over the years as the simple fan, with its whirring blades that blow air across a desk or through a room.

But now even the conventional fan has been transformed.

James Dyson, the British inventor behind the vacuums that bear his name, has come up with an incredibly simple-looking, circular fan that has no blades. It uses “Air Multiplier” technology to push 119 gallons of smooth air out every second.

The conventional fan relying on blades has been largely unchanged for about two centuries; the first mechanical fans are said to have been built in the Middle East in the early 19th century. Ceiling fans blew onto the scene in the 1860s, powered by running water and a setup that turned a series of belts with the ability to operate several fans at once (some of these still exist in old buildings). A personal electric fan hit the market in the 1880s.

But the traditional design is not perfect, Dyson figured. Fan blades chop the air, creating an uneven airflow with buffeting bursts and moments of weaker flow.

Here’s how the new setup works:

Air is pulled into the machine’s cylindrical base with an impeller that draws from jet-engine technology. The air rushes up into a hollow ring. The air is then forced out of a 1.3-millimeter-wide slit (less than 1/16th of an inch) that runs all around the ring.

Here’s the tricky part, developed during four years of testing:

As the air exits through the slit in the ring, it flows over the inner edge of the ring, which was modeled after an airplane wing. Imagine an airplane wing bent around into a loop. The air encounters what would be the leading edge of the wing, said Dyson engineer Andy Samways. When it hits the wing-like structure, the air speeds up, creating an area of low pressure.

“Air or any fluid will tend to hug a smooth surface,” Samways explained in a telephone interview. “Air over a wing follows the profile, and that creates lift.”

As the air exits the loop, the lower pressure pulls air from behind the fan along with it, and air around the front of the fan also gets pulled into the stream. That’s simple physics. But it was the wing-like ramp that served as a breakthrough.

“We realized that this inducement, or amplification, effect could be further enhanced by passing airflow over a ramp,” said James Dyson. “This was the point where the idea of a bladeless fan became a real possibility. Here was a way to create turbulent-free air and finally do away with blades.”

Getting rid of blades has visible benefits: The new fan needs no safety grill, and what few parts there are can be easily cleaned. It runs on a small motor, and airflow can be fully regulated with a dimmer switch.

The 10-inch fan is available now starting at $299.99.

Ship tracks discovered in space by NASA satelite

Although ships sail on the ocean, they can leave tracks in the sky. On Oct. 5, a NASA satellite snapped a shot of this phenomenon forming in a bank of clouds off North America’s west coast.

The white trails look vaguely like the condensation trails, or contrails, left behind by airplanes, but they actually result from ship exhaust.

The exhaust trails appear whiter than the surrounding clouds because the “tracks” contain smaller cloud droplets, NASA’s Earth Observatory explained in a statement.

Compared to surrounding air, ship exhaust has more particles, and each particle can act as a nucleus around which water vapor condenses. Because the available water is divided up among a greater number of particles, the resulting ship tracks consist of cloud droplets that are smaller and more abundant than those of the surrounding clouds.

A cloud-free area to the east in the new image apparently holds drier air, which lacks sufficient moisture to lead to cloud formation, the researchers said.

The true-color image was captured by NASA’s Terra Satellite, launched in 2000 as part of NASA’s Earth Observing System.