Changes: Dinosaurs came to rule the world as a direct result of a mass extinction similar to the one that killed them off
From The Daily Mail:
Dinosaurs came to rule the world as a direct result of a mass extinction similar to the one that killed them off and allowed mammals to take over the planet, research has revealed.
History was repeating itself when a climate change disaster ended the 200million year reign of the 'terrible lizards', evidence suggests.
A massive asteroid impact is believed to have altered the world's climate and wiped out the dinosaurs, giving mammals the opportunity they had been waiting for to flourish.
A young star with planets forming, illustrated here, may retain chemical clues about the worlds that surround it. ESO/L. Calçada
From Discover Magazine:
Astronomers Discover 2 Shortcuts for Locating Earth-Like Planets.
Since the discovery of planets outside our solar system in the 1990s, astronomers have tallied more than 400 extrasolar worlds, many unlike anything known before. Two recent studies show that the formation of planets may leave detectable chemical signatures in their host stars, a finding that could help scientists zero in on planetary systems even more quickly and speed the search for worlds similar to Earth.
Opportunity Target Selection Opportunity scans the Martian terrain for rocks meeting specific criteria – shape, size, coloration – set by scientists on the ground. When it finds what it's looking for, it sets a course for the point of interest. NASA/JPL-Caltech
From Popular Science:
NASA's Opportunity Rover, now in its seventh year of roaming the Martian surface, just got a little smarter. Like parents giving their growing child a little more autonomy, engineers updated Opportunity with artificial intelligence software this past winter that allows the rover to make its own decisions about where to stop and which rocks to analyze during its travels. Now the first images of Opportunity picking and choosing where to investigate have been released.
(Image: NASA / JHU-APL / Southwest Research Institute)
From New Scientist:
Moons may bow to planets in terms of size, but in character they often outshine their stolid parents. The named moons of the solar system outnumber planets by more than 20 to 1, and they display a remarkable diversity. There are fully fledged worlds such as Titan, as complex as any planet. There are possible havens for life, such as the ice-crusted water world Europa. New mysteries surround even the smallest satellites, most recently the apparent flying saucers orbiting Saturn.
This year it will be four centuries since Galileo discovered Jupiter's four large satellites, at a stroke quintupling the number of moons then known to humanity.
Join Stephen Battersby for a tour of some of te most frigid, violent and downright strange worlds we have discovered since then.
The puzzling migration of matter in deep space – dubbed "dark flow" – has been observed at farther distances than ever before, scientists have announced.
Distant galaxy clusters appear to be zooming through space at phenomenal speeds that surpass 1 million mph. The clusters were tracked to 2.5 billion light-years away – twice as far as earlier measurements.
This motion can't be explained by any known cosmic force, the researchers say. They suspect that whatever's tugging the matter may lie beyond our observable universe.
CAVE OF MYSTERIES: Mitochondrial DNA analysis of a finger bone found in Denisova Cave in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia suggests that a group of unknown hominids ventured out of Africa less than a million years ago. J. Krause
From Science News:
Genetic data unveil a shadowy, previously unknown Stone Age ancestor.
A new member of the human evolutionary family has been proposed for the first time based on an ancient genetic sequence, not fossil bones. Even more surprising, this novel and still mysterious hominid, if confirmed, would have lived near Stone Age Neandertals and Homo sapiens.
How do you force criminals to change their behavior?
Over the last 35 years, the US criminal justice system has been spectacularly bad at answering this question. America is the most punitive nation in the world, with 2.4 million of its citizens behind bars and another 5.1 million on probation or parole. Yet according to the latest national statistics, two-thirds of released prisoners commit another serious offense within three years. After a generation of draconian crime policy, America’s crime rates are still among the highest in the Western world. Instead of one costly problem, we now have two: crime and mass incarceration.
The "Venus of Brassempouy," a tiny ivory figurine, is among artifacts that scientists could analyze with a new method for determining the age of an object without damaging it. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 23, 2010) — Scientists have developed a new method to determine the age of ancient mummies, old artwork, and other relics without causing damage to these treasures of global cultural heritage. Reporting at the 239th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS), they said it could allow scientific analysis of hundreds of artifacts that until now were off limits because museums and private collectors did not want the objects damaged.
After 72 hours of exposure to ambient light, strands of nanoparticles twisted and bunched together. Credit: Nicholas Kotov
From Live Science:
Light can twist matter, according to a new study that observed ribbons of nanoparticles twisting in response to light.
Scientists knew matter can cause light to bend – prisms and glasses prove this easily enough. But the reverse phenomenon was not shown to occur until recently.
For Instapaper Pro developer Marco Arment, the lure of being first out of the gate with his iPad app outweighs the risk of imperfection.
Arment's gone ahead with development of Instapaper for Apple's iPad, an app that presents newspaper and magazine articles in simple black-on-white text and lets you flag interesting stories for later reading. But he's doing it without seeing how his creation works on an actual iPad, which doesn't launch until April 3.
Livestock's Long Shadow calculated meat-related emissions from field to abattoir
From The BBC: UN specialists are to look again at the contribution of meat production to climate change, after claims that an earlier report exaggerated the link.
A 2006 report concluded meat production was responsible for 18% of greenhouse gas emissions - more than transport.
The report has been cited by people campaigning for a more vegetable-based diet, including Sir Paul McCartney.
But a new analysis, presented at a major US science meeting, says the transport comparison was flawed.
Image: Rentalic, which lets people rent stuff to each other with security deposits and blackout dates for when owners wants to use their items, claimed top honors in the PayPal X Developer Challenge.
From Epicenter:
PayPal has spent nearly a decade mainly as the payment-fulfillment arm of its parent company, eBay. But with the explosion of the mobile internet and the endless opportunities to leverage smartphones as personal piggy banks, the company is positioning itself — again — as the virtual wallet you can’t leave home without.
Last week it upgraded its own iPhone app to allow two people to exchange money with a fist bump. That initiative was a broadside at Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s Square, a startup that makes it possible to use your smartphone to swipe credit cards.
Geothermal Hot Spots: Many hot spots sit in seismically active areas. Paul Wootton
From Popular Science:
A new energy method could trigger a risky side effect.
On December 8, 2006, Markus Häring caused some 30 earthquakes -- the largest registering 3.4 on the Richter scale -- in Basel, Switzerland. Häring is not a supervillain. He's a geologist, and he had nothing but good intentions when he injected high-pressure water into rocks three miles below the surface, attempting to generate electricity through a process called enhanced geothermal. But he produced earthquakes instead, and when seismic analysis confirmed that the quakes were centered near the drilling site, city officials charged him with $9 million worth of damage to buildings.
Distant galaxy SMM J2135-0102 went through a massive 'growth spurt' Photo: ESO/PA
From The Telegraph:
A newly-discovered galaxy which went through a massive "growth spurt" has been dubbed the astronomical equivalent of 6ft 7in footballer Peter Crouch by scientists.
Researchers found that the galaxy created stars up to 100 times faster than the Milky Way does today.
Scientists could look back to how the galaxy appeared 10 billion years ago – three billion years after the Big Bang – due to the length of time its light took to reach Earth. Read more ....
Happy: But money counts for little unless you are richer than your friends
From The Daily Mail:
Money makes you happy - but only if you have lots more than your friends and neighbours.
Owning the house of your dreams, the car you always longed for and having millions in the bank doesn't stop that desire to keep up with the Joneses, researchers have found.
And if the Joneses have more than you do, you'll be miserable.
It seems envy at being lower in the social pecking order tarnishes the satisfaction of being well off.
Keep moving to fix a position (Image: Chad Hunt/Corbis)
Motion Sensors Could Track Troops When GPS Cuts Out -- New Scientist
KNOWING where troops are during combat operations can be a matter of life and death - but GPS technology used to track troops is fragile, the signal easily lost. Now a UK company is developing a lightweight, wearable tracker that can provide location cover when GPS is down.
The system uses novel software to decipher position data from the signals generated by cheap microchip-based motion sensors - like those used in the Nintendo Wii and Apple iPhone.
John Hoopes, University of Kansas associate professor of anthropology and director of the Global Indigenous Nations Studies Program, recently returned from a trip to Costa Rica where he and colleagues evaluated ancient stone spheres for UNESCO, the United Nations cultural organization that might grant the spheres World Heritage Status. (Credit: Courtesy of John Hoopes)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 23, 2010) — The ancient stone spheres of Costa Rica were made world-famous by the opening sequence of "Raiders of the Lost Ark," when a mockup of one of the mysterious relics nearly crushed Indiana Jones.
So perhaps John Hoopes is the closest thing at the University of Kansas to the movie action hero.
The June 12, 1991 eruption column from Mount Pinatubo, Philippines, as seen from Clark Air Base. credit: Richard P. Hoblitt/USGS
From Live Science:
The eruption of a volcano on the island nation of Iceland on Saturday is a result of the tectonic processes that have continuously shaped and re-shaped the Earth's surface for billions of years. These processes are responsible for some of the biggest, deadliest eruptions in history.
Google’s hopes of retaining a foothold in China remained intact yesterday after the Chinese Government played down its row with the company over censorship.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry said that Google’s closure of its search engine on mainland China should not damage wider Sino-US relations. Google’s other web services in China, such as Gmail, maps and a popular music search feature, remained unblocked.
The iPad is the first embodiment of an entirely new category, one that Apple CEO Steve Jobs hopes will write the obituary for the computing paradigm that Apple itself helped develop. Photo: Dan Winters; tablet: Stan Musilek
From Wired:
Everyone who jammed into the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on January 27, 2010, knew what they were there for: Apple CEO Steve Jobs’ introduction of a thin, always-on tablet device that would let people browse the Web, read books, send email, watch movies, and play games. It was also no surprise that the 1.5-pound iPad resembled an iPhone, right down to the single black button nestled below the bright 10-inch screen. But about an hour into the presentation, Apple showed something unexpected — something that not many people even noticed. Read more....
Bio-terror A versatile material that neutralizes a range of biological and chemical agents could save time and lives in the event of a terrorist attack or accident.
New Versatile Polymer Counters Both Chemical and Biological Threats -- Popular Science
Because terrorists rarely announce the technical details of their nefarious intentions beforehand, the threat posed by weapons of mass destruction is not only great, it's multifaceted. So a team from the McGowan Institute of Regenerative Medicine has synthesized a polyurethane fiber mesh that is as variable as the terrorist threat. By mimicking biological tissues like the skin that respond to shifting environments, the a multifunctional polymer can decontaminate a range of both biological agents and chemical toxins.
From The Telegraph: Loneliness can increase blood pressure if you are over 50, according to a new university study.
Lack of connection with others not only makes us unhappy but it is also bad for the wellbeing of your body, research finds.
The psychologists found that there is a direct relation between loneliness and larger increases in blood pressure four years later—a link that is independent of age and other factors such as smoking and obesity. Read more ....
Study: Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years.
From The Daily Mail:
Strong winds and not global warming are to blame for much of the record-breaking loss of ice in the Arctic Ocean in recent years, new research reveals.
Ice blown out of the Arctic area by winds can explain the one-third drop of sea ice since 1979, scientists believe.
The study helps to explain the huge loss of ice in the region during the summers of 2007 and 2008, after which some commentators suggested the Arctic Ocean would be ice-free during the summertime within a decade.
Matching Russian rides to the International Space Station after the space shuttle retires will be difficult without "extraordinary" US government help, a senior NASA insider said on Thursday. But the private space firm SpaceX of Hawthorne, California, says it is ready to step into the breach by undercutting the current $50 million-per-astronaut round-trip ticket for travelling to the ISS aboard the Russian Soyuz craft.
Forty years ago, Richard O'Barry watched Kathy, a dolphin in the 1960s television show Flipper, kill herself. Or so he says. She looked him in the eye, sank to the bottom of a steel tank and stopped breathing. The moment transformed the dolphin trainer into an animal-rights activist for life, and his role in The Cove, the Oscar-winning documentary about the dolphin-meat business in a small town in Japan, has transformed him into a celebrity.
"The suicide was what turned me around," says O'Barry. "The [animal entertainment] industry doesn't want people to think dolphins are capable of suicide, but these are self-aware creatures with a brain larger than a human brain. If life becomes so unbearable, they just don't take the next breath. It's suicide."
You may want to start keeping a closer eye on where you click if you live in Seattle.
Among 50 U.S. cities studied for their vulnerability to cybercrime, Seattle came out on top as the riskiest place, followed by Boston, Washington, D.C., and San Francisco, according to the report "Norton's Top 10 Riskiest Online Cities," released Monday.
Central Atlantic Magmatic Province Massive lava flow (top brown layer) sits atop end-Triassic (white) and Triassic (red) layers at a site in Five Islands Provincial Park, Nova Scotia. (Credit: Jessica. H. Whiteside/Brown University)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 23, 2010) — A shade more than 200 million years ago, the Earth looked far different than it does today. Most land on the planet was consolidated into one continent called Pangea. There was no Atlantic Ocean, and the rulers of the animal world were crurotarsans -- creatures closely related to modern crocodiles.
Nutrition experts have analyzed the food depicted in some of the best-known paintings of the biblical Last Supper and found that the portion and plate sizes depicted in them increased substantially from older paintings to those painted more recently.
The findings suggest the trend of bigger plates and portions that has been noticed recently and linked to obesity may have been in the works for much longer, the researchers suggest.
Researchers retrieve sperm from the abdomen of an ant. Credit: Boris Baer/UWA
From Cosmos:
SYDNEY: The queen of a social insect colony has one sexual encounter during her life, which involves many males, then controls which sperm will die off, researchers said.
A social insect queen only experiences a single day of sexual activity in her lifetime yet she must obtain all the sperm necessary to create an entire colony within that time frame. This means that social insect females store a large amount of sperm in their storage organ.
"A honeybee queen mates with many more males than she has to, thereby collecting much more sperm than she actually needs," said Boris Bear, from the University of Western Australia in Crawley.
The Sabreliner 65 and Her Swiss Crew Emmanuel Joffet - Sipa Press
From Popular Science:
First time the record has been set with refueling stops.
Piloting a plane older than two of the three crew on board, a Swiss team shattered Steve Fossett's around-the-world flight record by almost ten hours over the weekend, the first time the record has been set in this weight class with refueling stops. But the pilots didn't just have to negotiate the usual headwinds and bad weather -- their flight was nearly derailed by a volcanic eruption in Iceland that forced them to make an extra refueling stop and add an unexpected 12th leg to their journey.
Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo made its first captive carry flight early this morning at the Mojave Air and Space Port. SpaceShipTwo, which was christened the VSS Enterprise at its unveiling in December, is being carried by WhiteKnightTwo on its first test flight.
Image: Although "all-round" editors helped contribute to high-quality articles, the study's findings don't negate the importance of fact-checkers, copy editors and other contributors. Wikimedia Foundation
From Discovery News:
Wikipedians who can perform a range of roles -- rather than possess a single expertise -- are key to quality articles.
It takes a village of contributors -- adding paragraphs here, inserting references there -- to craft a quality Wikipedia article, according to a new study that identifies the types of contributors who initiate and dominate the process to separate the Wikipedia wheat from chaff.
Artist's schematic impression of the distortion of spacetime by a supermassive black hole at the centre of a galaxy. The black hole will swallow dark matter at a rate which depends on its mass and on the amount of dark matter around it. (Credit: Felipe Esquivel Reed)
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 22, 2010) — About 23 percent of the universe is made up of mysterious 'dark matter' -- invisible material only detected through its gravitational influence on its surroundings. Now two astronomers based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have found a hint of the way it behaves near black holes.
One key to happiness might be whether you make more than your peers, regardless of whether that income is six figures or just a mediocre take-home, a new study finds.
This concept of "doing better than the Joneses" is well established among children: A toy gets ditched as soon as a shinier toy in the hands of another child is spotted. But some researchers have often thought that when it comes to adults and money, things works differently, in that the more money one has, regardless of how it stacks up, the more resources can be acquired to generate happiness.
Sun Spots Solar storms, like this one captured by NASA’s STEREO satellite, could knock out the power grid. NASA
From Popular Science:
It depends on the source of the pulse. Electromagnetic pulses (EMPs) large enough to cause you trouble come in two varieties: those produced by the sun, and those created by a nuclear bomb or another military-grade emitter device. With the sun-related variety, specifically coronal mass ejections (CMEs), your gear will probably be fine. But a really large CME could take down the power grid, says Bill Murtagh, the program coordinator of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Space Weather Prediction Center. Power lines transmit electricity as an alternating current, but a pulse from a CME can introduce a direct current into the system, says Luke van der Zal, a technical executive at the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute. This can cause transformers to overheat and work sluggishly, or fail altogether.
Colossal: This ice formation is a portion of the wall terraces of the Mojave Crater on Mars. It has barely suffered any erosion so offers scientists a tantalising glimpse of what a very large complex crater looks like
From The Daily Mail:
It looks like a filmmaker's apocalyptic vision of Earth following a devastating natural disaster.
But this colossal ice formation is actually a portion of the wall terraces of a huge crater on Mars.
Approximately 37 miles in diameter, a section of the Mojave Crater in the planet's Xanthe Terra region has been digitally mapped by Nasa scientists.
The result is this digital terrain model that was generated from a stereo pair of images and offers a synthesized, oblique view of a 2.5-mile portion of the crater's wall terraces.
Iceland Volcano Could Have World Consequences -- MSNBC
1783 eruption changed weather patterns, sent poisoned air to British Isles
REYKJAVIK, Iceland - Blasts of lava and ash shot out of a volcano in southern Iceland on Monday and small tremors rocked the ground, a surge in activity that raised fears of a larger explosion at the nearby Katla volcano.
Scientists say history has proven that when the Eyjafjallajokull volcano erupts, Katla follows — the only question is how soon. And Katla, located under the massive Myrdalsjokull icecap, threatens disastrous flooding and explosive blasts when it blows.
My Comment: It is an uncomfortable thought to realize that even with our huge military arsenals, sophisticated technology, and all the tools that a modern and sophisticated society can bring to any problem .... when it comes to mother nature and the power that it can unleash we are powerless to do anything.
As to the 1783 eruption, a long time ago I did a university paper on the impact that the American revolution had on Canada. What struck me from the literature and news reports that I was reading was the impact that the 1783 eruption had on everyday life. Spring only came to Montreal late May, and winter returned by October. Growing crops was difficult and sporadic, and sickness was prevalent throughout the cities. The American Revolution was a major event, but the aftereffects of the 1783 volcanic explosion were just as serious.
If a repeat of the 1783 eruption was to occur today .... with the population centers that we have today .... there is no question in my mind the impact would be catastrophic.
Google has made its decision on China: it's moving search to Hong Kong.
Google has shut down its Google.cn site and is redirecting users to Google.com.hk, where it will offer uncensored Chinese-language search services. The company will maintain a research and development organization in China as well as a sales office, it announced Monday.
Scientists Say to Plant Milkweed to Help Save the Butterflies.
Monarch butterflies normally find sanctuary in the mountains of Mexico, away from the cold winters of North America, but a harsh winter of torrential rain and mudslides has decimated the monarch butterfly population.
"We saw a number of things happen in Mexico this winter that shouldn't be happening but are probably due to climate change in some way," said Chip Taylor, director of Monarch Watch at the University of Kansas.
This Triassic exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science helps to illustrate the battle between crocodiles and dinosaurs. Larry O'Hanlon
From Discovery News:
A massive volcanic eruption 200 million years ago tipped the scales in the battle between dinosaurs and crocodiles for global dominance.
Some 200 million years ago, Earth was on the verge of either an age of dinosaurs or an age of crocodiles. It took the largest volcanic eruption in the solar system -- and the loss of half of Earth's plant life -- to tip the scales in the dinos' favor, say researchers.
The idea is not new, but connecting the eruption to a 200-million-year-old mass extinction event has not been easy. Now that link is confirmed in an exhaustive new study published in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Facebook recently surpassed Google as the top destination on the Web. Granted, the victory only represents one week, but with traffic on par with Google, and membership exceeding 400 million users, Facebook is primed to challenge the vast Google empire for online advertising dollars.
According to a blog post from Heather Dougherty, research director at Hitwise, "The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185 percent last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9 percent during the same time frame."
Glossy and greedy: Bluefin tuna is one of the world's most highly prized foodstuffs.
From The BBC:
"Welcome to the strange world of globalisation."
That is Roberto Mielgo's response to the fact that it is commercially viable to catch and keep live tuna in off-shore pens - or ranches - in the Spanish Mediterranean and feed them vast amounts of expensive caught fish (around 10kg of feed fish serve to make the tuna put on 1kg of body weight).
And to cull them by hand using divers, ship them to shore, package them in a purpose-built factory and fly them whole - on the same day - to market on the other side of the world.
Roberto Mielgo calls himself an independent fisheries consultant.
Atomic bombs changed carbon content in grapes. Credit: Wikimedia
From Cosmos:
WASHINGTON: Up to 5% of fine wines are not from the year the label indicates, according to Australian researchers who have carbon dated some top dollar wines.
The team of researchers think "vintage fraud" is widespread, and have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from - its vintage.
The test works by comparing the amount of carbon-12 and carbon-14 in grapes.
This image from the Advanced Camera for Surveys aboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope highlights the large and bright elliptical galaxy called ESO 306-17 in the southern sky. In this image, it appears that ESO 306-17 is surrounded by other galaxies but the bright galaxies at bottom left are thought to be in the foreground, not at the same distance in the sky. In reality, ESO 306-17 lies fairly abandoned in an enormous sea of dark matter and hot gas. (Credit: NASA, ESA and Michael West (ESO))
From Science Daily:
Science Daily (Mar. 21, 2010) — Located half a billion light-years from Earth, ESO 306-17, is a large, bright elliptical galaxy in the southern sky of a type known as a fossil group. Astronomers use this term to emphasize the isolated nature of these galaxies. However, are they like fossils -- the last remnants of a once active community -- or is it more sinister than that? Did ESO 306-17 gobble up its next-door neighbors?
Being around a pretty woman can make men take more risks, a new study finds.
Researchers looked at the risk-taking behaviors of 96 young adult men, with an average age of nearly 22, by asking them to do both easy and difficult tricks on skateboards.
First, the young men performed the tricks in front of another man, then in front of a young, attractive female. (The attractiveness of the woman was independently assessed by 20 male raters.)
From The Independent: By tweaking our DNA, we could soon survive for hundreds of years – if we want to. Steve Connor reports on a breakthrough that has the science world divided.
A genetically engineered organism that lives 10 times longer than normal has been created by scientists in California. It is the greatest extension of longevity yet achieved by researchers investigating the scientific nature of ageing.
If this work could ever be translated into humans, it would mean that we might one day see people living for 800 years. But is this ever going to be a realistic possibility?
Steve Jobs demonstrates the movie function of the new iPad with a scene from Pixar's Up at the launch of the tablet computer in San Francisco Photograph: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
From The Guardian:
It might be a while before Britain gets to see the iPad, but it's just weeks away from launch in the United States - and Apple is beginning to crank up the gears.
The latest move? The company is now accepting submissions for iPad applications to be released on April 3, the date when the gadget starts shipping. If developers submit their wares in the next week (the deadline is actually Saturday 27th of March), they'll get told whether they pass Apple's approval process - with an eye to being available through iTunes to iPad owners on day one.
The company plans to sell the 12C in 19 countries, with North America expected to account for around 30 to 40 per cent of the market.
From The Daily Mail:
A gull-winged 200mph supercar dubbed 'an F1 car for the road' was launched yesterday by UK racing specialists McLaren.
The cars will be made in a new £40million factory designed by Sir Norman Foster and will create 300 jobs.
The £150,000 McLaren MP4-12C is Britain's answer to Italy's legendary Ferrari and is the long-held dream of boss Ron Dennis to produce an 'affordable' supercar with the greenest credentials.
Changes: Dinosaurs came to rule the world as a direct result of a
