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Wandering Albatrosses Follow Their Nose


Science Daily
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 08:41 UTC
The first study of how individual wandering albatrosses find food shows that the birds rely heavily on their sense of smell. The birds can pick up a scent from several miles away, U.S. and French researchers have found.

Albatrosses
©iStockphoto
Albatrosses and other sea birds feeding. Wandering albatrosses fly for thousands of miles across the ocean, usually gliding a few feet above sea level. Floating carrion, especially squid, make up a large part of their diet.

"This is the first time anyone has looked at the odor-tracking behavior of individual birds in the wild using remote techniques," said Gabrielle Nevitt, professor of neurobiology, physiology and behavior at UC Davis and an author on the study with UC Davis graduate student Marcel Losekoot of the Bodega Marine Laboratory and Henri Weimerskirch of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France.
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Hourglass

Mysterious pits shed light on forgotten witches of the West

Simon de Bruxelles
The Times
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 06:53 UTC


Witches
©Unknown

Evidence of pagan rituals involving swans and other birds in the Cornish countryside in the 17th century has been uncovered by archaeologists.

Since 2003, 35 pits at the site in a valley near Truro have been excavated containing swan pelts, dead magpies, unhatched eggs, quartz pebbles, human hair, fingernails and part of an iron cauldron.
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Display

Computer program decides what's considered attractive


Agence France-Presse/Canada.com
Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:36 UTC
Paris - To the likely dismay of those who argue beauty is in the eye of the beholder, biostatisticians said Wednesday they had devised a computer program to predict whether a face will be considered attractive.

The software crunches a mass of calculations on the geometry and symmetry of the face, including so-called "golden ratios" of proportions between the eyes, nose, ears and lips singled out in previous research into the mystery of beauty.

The team put the program through its paces in tests on 18 male and 18 female volunteers aged 19 to 61. The human guinea pigs were shown pictures of 420 people drawn from the general population, equally divided among men and women, and were asked to rate the faces for attractiveness on a scale of one to 10.
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Book

Renaissance chess master and the Da Vinci decode mystery

Raymond Keene
The Times
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 05:55 UTC
A masterpiece from the early literature of chess has recently resurfaced after being thought lost for five centuries.

The rediscovery of this book is of much more than scholarly or antiquarian interest, for it has been suggested that its chess puzzle diagrams were not only designed by Leonardo da Vinci, but also drawn by him and, the most tantalising prospect of all, perhaps even composed by him.

Da Vinci chess
©Unknown
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Ark

Ancient Graves Found in Greece


Associated Press
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:27 UTC
Athens, Greece - Greek workers discovered around 1,000 graves, some filled with ancient treasures, while excavating for a subway system in the historic city of Thessaloniki, the state archaeological authority said Monday.
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Star

Sun's Corona Is Both Hot And Kinky


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:09 UTC
Astrophysicists are having a heated debate over the wave structure of the Sun's Corona - a debate which may one day influence solar weather forecasting and the theory behind fusion reactors.

The Sun's core is about 6000 degrees C, but its outer layer, the Corona, which is filled with a strong magnetic field, is 200 to 300 times hotter.
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Star

Skeleton Of Sun's Atmosphere Reveals Its True Nature


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:04 UTC
The Sun's outer atmosphere or corona is incredibly complex, as shown in observations from space. It is also extremely hot, with a temperature of over a million degrees by comparison with that of the Sun's surface of only 6000 degrees.

corona
©NASA
Typical image of the solar corona clearly revealing the complex tangle of heated magnetic loops from TRACE.
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Telescope

Spring Is Aurora Season


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:56 UTC
What are the signs of spring? They are as familiar as a blooming daffodil, a songbird at dawn, a surprising shaft of warmth from the afternoon sun. And, oh yes, don't forget the aurora borealis. Spring is aurora season. For reasons not fully understood by scientists, the weeks around the vernal equinox are prone to Northern Lights. Canadians walking their dogs after dinner, Scandinavians popping out to the sauna, Alaskan Huskies on the Iditarod trail -- all they have to do is look up and behold, green curtains of light dancing across the night sky. Spring has arrived!

aurora
©Jan Curtis of the Geophysical Institute at the University of Alaska
This photograph of an aurora was taken in Alaska.
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Clock

'Quantum Logic Clock' Rivals Mercury Ion As World's Most Accurate Clock


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:44 UTC
An atomic clock that uses an aluminum atom to apply the logic of computers to the peculiarities of the quantum world now rivals the world's most accurate clock, based on a single mercury atom. Both clocks are at least 10 times more accurate than the current U.S. time standard.

quantum cloxk
©Greg Kuebler/JILA
NIST quantum logic clock
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Cow Skull

Fossilized Giant Rhino Bone Questions Isolation Of Anatolia, 25 Million Years Ago


sciencedaily.com
Mon, 10 Mar 2008 16:37 UTC
Contrary to generally accepted belief, Anatolia[1] was not geographically isolated 25 million years ago (during the Oligocene epoch): this has just been demonstrated by researchers from the Laboratoire des Mécanismes et Transferts en Géologie (LMTG) (CNRS/ University of Toulouse 3/IRD) and the Paléobiodiversité et paléoenvironnements laboratory (CNRS/Muséum national d'histoire naturelle/University of Paris 6).

rhino fossil
©Unknown
Fragment of a radius from the baluchithere Paraceratherium sp., discovered in 2002 and dating from the Oligocene epoch in Central Anatolia (Turkey, approx. 25 million years ago) and described in the article published in Zool. J. Linn. Soc. Left, front view of the specimen. Center, interpretative drawing of the same specimen. Right, comparison with the largest known specimen from a baluchithere (Oligocene epoch in Mongolia), modified from Granger & Gregory (1936). All views are at the same scale (bar = 10 cm).
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