Northern Ireland’s ‘healing soil’
The residents of the Boho Highlands in rural Northern Ireland have long believed that the soil from a local churchyard has powerful medicinal properties. Modern science suggests they’re onto something, reports The Times (U.K.). Researchers have discovered a previously unknown strain of streptomyces bacterium in the alkaline dirt of the Sacred Heart church that can halt the growth of four of the top six superbugs resistant to conventional antibiotics, including MRSA. They now intend to find out just how this useful bacterium does it. Sacred Heart soil has been used for more than 200 years as a folk remedy. Parish residents would wrap small packets of the “sacred clay” in cloth and place it under their pillows to treat minor ailments such as toothaches and sore throats. The researchers say that with a growing number of pathogens developing resistance to common drugs, scientists hunting for new antibiotics should investigate more folk remedies and traditional medicines. “Some of these cures might have been perfectly effective,” study co-author Gerry Quinn says; the people “just didn’t have any knowledge of the scientific principles or biochemistry behind them.”
teries: What happened to a massive, missing layer of Earth’s crust? The Great Unconformity—a gap in the geological record of anywhere from 250 million years to 1.2 billion years—can be observed at the Grand Canyon, where the rocky layers offer a window into Earth’s history. One strata is made up of sedimentary rocks from the Cambrian period, which started some 540 million years ago, and below is a layer of crystalline rock that formed about 1 billion years ago. The new study suggests the missing layer or layers vanished during a hypothesized period known as Snowball Earth, when most of the planet was covered in ice, reports NationalGeographic .com. Researchers believe that roaming glaciers ground up a 3-mile-deep layer of the crust. Using a chemical analysis of ancient zircons—hardy minerals that lock in the geochemical conditions of their environment during formation—the scientists concluded the resulting sediment was dumped into the oceans and then sucked into Earth’s mantle by moving tectonic plates. “Earth does a really good job at erasing the tracks of its past,” says study co-author Bill Bottke, of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder.
binary,” is the result of two objects slowly fusing together. Researchers say the image supports a theory that planets build up gradually and are not born from catastrophic collisions. Because the Kuiper Belt is so cold, with surface temperatures of roughly minus-400 degrees Fahrenheit, scientists think Ultima Thule has changed little since it was formed 4.6 billion years ago. “What we think we’re looking at,” Jeff Moore, head of the New Horizons geology team, tells The Washington Post, “is the end product of a process that took place at the very beginning of the formation of the solar system.”