70-million-year-old dinosaur skeleton found

Japanese and mongolian scientists have successfully recovered the complete skeleton of a 70-million-year-old young dinosaur, a nature museum announced Thursday.The scientists uncovered a Tarbosaurus ' related to the giant carnivorous Tyrannosaurus ' from a chunk of sandstone they dug up in August, 2006 in the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, said Takuji Yokoyama, a spokesman for the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Sciences, a co-organizer of the joint research project."We were so lucky to have found remains that turned out to be a complete set of all the important parts," he said.After two years of careful preparatory work, scientists found that the fossilized skeleton only lacked neck bones and the tip of the tail.Young dinosaur skeletons are hard to find in good condition because they often are destroyed by weather decay or because they were torn apart by predators. The latest find would be a major step toward discovering the growth and development of dinosaurs, Yokoyama said.The fossil, believed to have died at age 5, measured about 6.6 feet long, he said. Adult dinosaurs of the species are believed to have grown up to 40 feet.

The dinosaur, whose gender was unknown, came from a geological layer created about 70 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period.The Japanese scientists and colleagues from the Center of Paleontology under the Mongolian Academy of Sciences have been jointly conducting dinosaur excavations in the Gobi Desert since 1993.

View: Full Article Source: MSNBC

Mammoths moved 'out of America'

Scientists have discovered that the last Siberian woolly mammoths may have originated in North America. Their research in the journal Current Biology represents the largest study of ancient woolly mammoth DNA. The scientists also question the direct role of climate change in the eventual demise of these large beasts. They believe that woolly mammoths survived through the period when the ice sheets were at their maximum, while other Ice Age mammals "crashed out". The iconic Ice Age woolly mammoth - Mammuthus primigenius - roamed through mainland Eurasia and North America until about 10,000 years ago. Previous studies had hinted that the last mammoths left in Siberia were not natives - but immigrants from North America. However, more evidence was required to strengthen the case for this "out of America" theory. A team of researchers led by Professor Hendrik Poinar from McMaster University in Canada collected 160 mammoth samples from across Holarctica - a region encompassing present day North America, Europe and Asia. Well-preserved DNA material - between 4,000 and 40,000 years old - was obtained from "almost every part of the animal - even from preserved hide, skin and hair", Professor Poinar told BBC News.

They analysed DNA from mitochondria - genetic material which is passed from mother to offspring via the egg - and can be used to track the ancestry of a species back many hundreds of generations. The genetic information confirmed that a North American mammoth population overturned those endemic to Asia.

View: Full Article Source: BBC News

Will the Hadron Collider destroy the world ?

As Europe's CERN particle-physics center is counting down to the official startup of the Large Hadron Collider, a report reassuring the public that the world's largest atom-smasher won't destroy the world is getting a second wave of publicity. The report was prepared by CERN scientists and outside researchers and released in June, updating a 2003 safety study. Now the new study has been published by the peer-reviewed Journal of Physics G: Nuclear and Particle Physics. CERN used the occasion to emphasize the mainstream view that the collider won't create globe-gobbling black holes or other types of doomsday phenomena that have put folks on edge. "The LHC will enable us to study in detail what nature is doing all around us," CERN Director Robert Aymar said in today's news release. "The LHC is safe, and any suggestion that it might present a risk is pure fiction." The report concludes that if the collider could create catastrophes, the much more powerful particle collisions that continually occur in space would have wiped us out long ago. "It points out that nature has already conducted the equivalent of about a hundred thousand LHC experimental programs on Earth - and the planet still exists," said Jos Engelen, CERN's chief scientific officer.

Critics of the collider weren't satisfied when the report first came out in June, and they're not likely to change their mind now that it's been formally published in the scientific literature. The hysteria over the LHC and black-hole boogeymen has been rising with the approach of next Wednesday's low-energy startup.

View: Full Article Source: MSNBC Cosmic Log

New technique identifies people from their shadow

A computer programme has been developed to process the image of a shadow cast on the ground, and match it up with its owner. The technique, called gait analysis, works on the premise that it is extremely difficult to disguise your walking style. It could be used to monitor known criminals and suspected terrorists, such as Osama Bin Laden, using satellites or spy planes. There has been an explosion in satellite imagery and technology in recent years, but it is still virtually impossible to recognise people from pictures taken from orbit. Images from high-altitude aircraft and spacecraft only ever the tops of their heads. Aerial shots alone give little away about a person's movements, but analysing the shadows they cast can - provided their walking pattern is on file. According to Dr Adrian Stoica of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, which developed the shadow technology, video from space could provide enough data to confirm a suspect's identity. However, critics say there are doubts that images taken in orbit will be sharp enough to be used as identification. There are also concerns that weather and visibility will affect the quality. Dr Stoica has created computer software that can seek out and recognise the shadows of individuals in aerial video footage, reports New Scientist magazine. It isolates moving shadows and uses data on the position of the sun and camera angle to 'correct' the shadows if they are foreshortened or elongated.

Dr Stoica, who presented his research at a security conference in Edinburgh, said the software then applies regular gait analysis to the corrected images. The technique is still at the earliest stages of development, and it could be many years before it is used by military, police and intelligence services.

View: Full Article Source: The Telegraph

Easter Island: the future's not set in stone

Michelle Jana Chan : I wondered if the pilot sighed with relief as the wedge of land emerged on the horizon. There is only deep Pacific Ocean blue between Santiago, the capital of Chile, and Easter Island, and, after five hours in the air, the cones of three extinct volcanoes rising from the sea are as welcome as they are dramatic. They must have been even more of a surprise for the 18th-century European explorers who stumbled across this craggy outcrop, especially when, on closer inspection, the adventurers spied the forbidding backs of giant stone statues standing sentinel along the coastline. Captain Cook wrote in his journal in March, 1774: "This is the farthest we have come." The real miracle is that the first settlers, the Rapa Nui, believed to have arrived from other Polynesian islands around 400AD - and from whom the island takes its indigenous name - ever made it to these rocky shores. The nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn, nearly 1,250 miles to the west. In the other direction, at almost twice the distance, is Chile, which annexed the island more than 100 years ago.When I stood on Maunga Terevaka, one of the volcanic peaks and the island's highest point, could I really be seeing the curvature of the Earth? That's what the locals told me.Not that Easter Island is that isolated any more. There are scheduled flights from Chile most days, and more than 40,000 tourists visit each year. Visitors are mainly backpackers checking off the world's must-sees, or retirees on a do-before-you-die mission.

Few stay more than a couple of days, holing up in basic guesthouse accommodation and hiring a car or a guide to see the sights. The occasional cruise ship passes, too, shuttling passengers to shore for group tours.advertisementBut last month's opening of the first luxury accommodation will attract a different class of traveller. Santiago-based Explora, a group known for its remote, top hotels in Patagonia and the Atacama Desert, has built a sleek new property on the south coast.

View: Full Article | Source: The Telegraph

Hunter captures images of a ‘unicorn deer’

Roaming somewhere in the woods around Elma is the unicorn deer. Captured on a motion-sensitive game camera, the adult deer appears to have a long antler sticking out of its head between it’s eyes. “It looks like a unicorn deer,” said Dave Ebeling, the hunter-photographer who caught the deer on camera Oct. 16. “I thought it was some kind of joke, but how can that be?” said the 46-year-old Ebeling, who added the photo was not retouched. “I got it [on camera].” Ebeling, who has been hunting since he was 16, has never seen anything like it. He showed the picture to a select few hunter friends. They suggested that the antler might be a piece of another buck’s antler that became lodged in the deer’s head during a fight. But Ebeling said he didn’t think so, because three weeks after the camera took the first picture, it recorded another image. It appears to be the same deer because the antler is in the same spot as the first photo. “If it was something like [a piece of another deer’s antler], it would have been off or turned sideways, because they fight,” he said. Tim Spierto, senior wildlife biologist with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said he has never seen a deer quite like the one pictured, but he did have a possible explanation for the antler. “He must have bumped that antler fairly early on in development,” Spierto said, adding that such an injury may have led to the extra antler.

“Bumping it or scraping it could cause it to form another antler right at the injury point,” he said. Spierto said he has seen similar situations. But in those cases, the extra antler formed more in the center of the deer’s head, between its existing antlers. “We’ve seen antler deformations before,” he said, adding that they’re usually accompanied by another characteristic. “When I see things like this, I ask if there’s an injury to the opposite hind leg,” Spierto said.

View: Full Article | Source: Buffalo News

Giant rat discovered in Indonesia jungle

Researchers in a remote Indonesian jungle have discovered a giant rat that is about five times the size of a typical city rat and a tiny possum, scientists said Monday. Unearthing new species of mammals in the 21st century is considered very rare. The discoveries by a team of American and Indonesian scientists are being studied further to confirm their status. The animals were found in the Foja mountains rainforest in eastern Papua province in a June expedition, said U.S.-based Conservation International, which organized the trip in the Southeast Asian nation along with the Indonesian Institute of Science. "The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat," said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip." The possum was described as "one of the world's smallest marsupials." A 2006 expedition to the same stretch of jungle -- dubbed by Conservation International as a "Lost World" because until then humans had rarely visited it -- unearthed scores of exotic new species of palms, butterflies and palms. Papua has some of the world's largest tracts of rainforest, but like elsewhere in Indonesia they are being ravaged by illegal logging.

Scientists said last year that the Foja area was not under immediate threat, largely because it was so remote. "It's comforting to know that there is a place on Earth so isolated that it remains the absolute realm of wild nature," said expedition leader Bruce Beehler. "We were pleased to see that this little piece of Eden remains as pristine and enchanting as it was when we first visited."

View: Full Article | Source: Boston Globe