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

New method enables scientists to see smells

Animals and insects communicate through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than when they detect them with one. “Having two eyes allows us to have depth perception and two ears allows us to pinpoint a noise precisely,” says Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. “Sensing odors in stereo is equally important.” In research to be published in the December 23 online issue of Nature Neuroscience, Vosshall and her colleagues show that odor information is easier to perceive when it is smelled with both olfactory organs. By genetically manipulating flies to express odorant receptors in one olfactory organ or both, they show that the brains of Drosophila melanogaster larvae not only make use of stereo cues to locate odors but also to navigate toward them — a behavior called chemotaxis. To study this behavior, Vosshall and her colleagues had to figure out which direction the larvae move with respect to the source of the odor. But since odors are invisible, the researchers could neither predict how the flies would move in relation to these scents nor guess whether the odors were concentrated in patches or along a gradient. To complicate matters, odors whisk to and fro at the mercy of the slightest stir, making it impossible to determine their concentrations at particular locations.

“We needed to create an environment in which we knew something about the spatial arrangement of the odors,” says Vosshall. “We needed to see the smells.” In collaboration with colleagues in Thomas P. Sakmar’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, the researchers used a novel spectroscopic technique that exploited infrared light to create environments where they could see, control and precisely quantify the distribution of these smells.

View: Full Article | Source: PhysOrg.com

New computer can 'translate' a dog's bark

What would a dog say if it could talk? "Stranger", "fight", "walk", "alone", "ball" and "play", according to scientists who have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks. The special programme analysed more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations. In a series of tests the team of scientists, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary led by Csaba Molnár, discovered that a computer could recognise whether a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario. Computer can tell what kind of situation a dog is in by how it barks The barks were tape recorded and then digitized on a computer, which used software to study their differences. The computer correctly identified the different situations 43 per cent of the time. Although it was not a high success rate it was far better than human recognition, the researchers said. The computer was most accurate in identifying the "fight" and "stranger" contexts, and was least effective at matching the "play" bark. The results appear in the journal Animal Cognition, and suggest that dogs have acoustically different barks depending on their emotional state. The researchers also performed a second test, in which the computer identified individual dogs by their bark.

The software correctly identified the dogs 52 per cent of the time, again much better than the human result, suggesting there are individual differences in barks even though humans are not able to recognize them. The team also plans to compare the barks of different breeds to discover what they have in common.

View: Full Article | Source: Daily Mail

Death by chocolate

It was a sorry end. Cut down in his prime, the cunning thief lay on the slab, his cold body offering pathologist Brett Gartrell no outward sign of how he had met his maker. Once Gartrell had wielded his scalpel, however, the cause became clear: a belly stuffed with sticky brown gunk. Diagnosis? Death by chocolate. Divine - yes. Delicious - absolutely. But deadly? For some it certainly is. The corpse on Gartrell's slab belonged not to a human but to a kea, an endangered New Zealand parrot. Like many animals, keas are acutely sensitive to chemicals in chocolate that are harmless to humans in all but huge doses. Scientists are now studying these chemicals, along with other substances in cocoa, hoping to exploit their toxic effects to control pests or microbes. If you're reading this after scoffing your fifteenth chocolate Santa, don't panic: we humans have been safely enjoying the beans of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, for millennia. Theobroma is Greek for "food of the gods", reflecting the Mayan belief that cocoa had divine origins. Every April, they sacrificed a dog with cacao-coloured markings in honour of Ek Chuah, the god of cacao. Knife-wielding priests aside, chocolate is still bad news for many animals. Cocoa beans are naturally rich in caffeine and its chemical relatives theobromine and theophylline, collectively called methylxanthines. To humans these are little more than benign stimulants, but to a number of animals they are highly toxic. Just 240 grams of unsweetened dark chocolate contains enough methylxanthines to kill a 40-kilogram dog, about the size of a German shepherd.

It was methylxanthines that did for the kea too. Gartrell, a wildlife pathologist at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, is wearily familiar with keas' propensity to poison themselves. Besides being arguably the world's smartest birds, keas are extraordinarily inquisitive foragers, using their beaks to rip open tents and backpacks, open garbage bins and even pry pieces off cars in their quest for food.

View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist

100,000-year-old human skull found

An almost complete human skull fossil that could date back 100,000 years was unearthed in Henan last month, Chinese archaeologists announced Tuesday. "It is the greatest discovery in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skull fossils were found in Beijing early last century, and will shed light on a critical period of human evolution," said Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. All the fossils from Beijing were lost during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45). The Henan find was made after two years of excavation at the site in Xuchang. Archaeologists have worked on an area of 260 sq m, merely one-hundredth of the Paleolithic site. "We expect more discoveries of importance," said Li Zhanyang, archaeologist with the Henan cultural relics and archaeology research institute, who leads the excavation. The fossil consisted of 16 pieces of the skull with protruding eyebrows and a small forehead. More astonishing than the completeness of the skull is that it still has a fossilized membrane on the inner side, so scientists can track the nerves of the Paleolithic ancestors, Li said. The pieces were fossilized because they were buried 5 m near the mouth of a spring, whose water had a high content of calcium. Besides the skull, more than 30,000 animal fossils, and stone and bone artifacts were found in the small area in the past two years. The pieces of the human skull showed up just when archaeologists were going home for the Spring Festival.

"It was freezing cold and digging was difficult. We planned to leave the next day when one of us saw something like part of a human skull," said Li. "It was 9 am, and only an hour earlier we joked and said: 'Let's get a skull today'. "And there it was." The Paleolithic site was discovered in 1965, when IVPP scientists found animal fossils and stone artifacts from soil dug for a well.

View: Full Article | Source: China Daily

Turtle migrates 12,774 miles

A leatherback turtle was tracked by satellite traveling 12,774 miles (20,558 kilometers) from Indonesia to Oregon, one of the longest recorded migrations of any vertebrate animal, scientists announced in a new report on sea turtle conservation. Leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) are the largest of all living turtles and are widely distributed throughout the world's oceans. They have been seen in the waters off Argentina, Tasmania, Alaska and Nova Scotia. Adult leatherbacks periodically migrate from their temperate foraging grounds to breeding grounds in the tropics. Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) tracked one female nester, who was tagged on Jamursba-Medi beach in Papua, Indonesia, on her journey back to her foraging grounds off the coast of Oregon. She was tracked for 647 days covering a distance about equal to two round trips between New York and Los Angeles. The turtle's trip set a new record for sea turtles, and is among the longest documented migrations for any marine vertebrate. The longest measured annual migration for any animal is the 40,000-mile (64,000-kilometer) journey between New Zealand and the North Pacific of the sooty shearwater (Puffinus griseus), a medium-sized seabird. The leatherback tracked by the NMFS belongs to one of two distinct breeding populations in the Pacific, the western group. Other research has shown that nesters from this population migrate through areas in the Philippines, South China Sea, Japan, and the waters around many other countries, spurring conservationists to call for an international effort to protect the species, which is listed as Critically Endangered on the World Conservation Union's Red List.

The turtle's journey is featured in an article in the third annual volume of the State of the Worlds' Turtles Report, written by NMFS scientists Peter Dutton and Scott Benson and Creusa Hitipeuw of WWF-Indonesia.

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

One common ancestor behind blue eyes

People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research. A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes. "Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin. "A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said. The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue. If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism. "It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study. Baby blues: Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey.

This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages. They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production. Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes.

View: Full Article | Source: Live Science

NASA astronaut claims alien presence

columbia during STS-80 took a crew of five astronauts into a 17 day, 15 hour and 54 minute mission around the earth, the longest flight in the history of this vehicle. During this lengthy flight a very strange event occurred that even had crewman Dr. Story Musgrave unable to explain what he observed from the shuttle windows. A large disc shaped object appeared below the Columbia. The shuttle was approximately, 190 Nautical miles high. The disc was first observed to miraculously appear from out of nowhere, flying through the clouds below and progressing from right to left as the astronauts stared in utter amazement. The outer rim of the craft appeared to be rotating counter-clockwise. It was very large (compared to common space junk and breakaway ice), approximately 50 to 150 feet in diameter. Astronaut Dr. Story Musgrave, a Payload Specialist on the STS-80 Mission, was interviewed following the flight. As he viewed a videotape of the incident which showed lightning flashes in the atmosphere, the city lights of Denver, Colorado and other earthbound sights, he stated: "I don't know what it is. Whether it's a washer, debris, ice particles, I don't know. But it's characteristic of the thousands of things which I've seen. What is not so characteristic is it appears to come from no where. You would think that if it's facing the dark side or facing a side towards you which is not reflecting the sun, you would think that you would see something there. It's really impressive." During an earlier interview, Dr. Musgrave stated he attempted to communicate with ET life forms during each of his six missions.

He actually asked them to take him with them. Now that's an astronaut with a lot of courage. Dr. Musgrave retired after this flight from NASA. Since then he's been spreading his considered opinion that alien life exists. When Musgrave speaks of this, it's no great leap for one to assume he's admitting knowledge of alien life. As the final slide of a "Grey" ET was shown during a recent astronomy presentation by Dr. Musgrave, he made this surprising comment: "These guys are real.

View: Full Article | Source: Agoras Cosmopolitan