Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Fossils of Snake Eating Dino Eggs Found in India

Michael Casey
The Associated Press
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 10:21 UTC
Image
© AP Photo/Monica WilsonField assistant Shiva Rathore carries two recently excavated sauropod eggs back to a truck in at Gujarat, central India.
The fossilized remains of a 67 million-year-old snake found coiled around a dinosaur egg offer rare insight into the ancient reptile's dining habits and evolution, scientists said Tuesday.

The findings, which appeared in Tuesday's issue of the PLoS Biology journal, provide the first evidence that the 11.5-foot- (3.5-meter-) long snake fed on eggs and hatchlings of saurapod dinosaurs, meaning it was one of the few predators to prey on the long-necked herbivores.

They also suggest that, as early as 100 million years ago, snakes were developing mobile jaws similar to those of today's large-mouthed snakes, including vipers and boas.

"This is an early, well preserved snake, and it is doing something. We are capturing it's behavior," said University of Michigan paleontologist Jeff Wilson, who is credited with recognizing the snake bones amid the crushed dinosaur eggs and bones of hatchlings.
Read More...
Magnify

Ancient DNA Suggests Polar Bears Evolved Recently

Sid Perkins
Science News
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 15:00 UTC
Image
© Tom Brakefield/Getty ImagesGenetic analyses of a fossil unearthed on an island far north of Norway’s mainland suggest that the polar bear, Ursus maritimus, evolved a mere 150,000 years ago.
Rare fossil shows creatures are most closely related to modern-day brown bears in Alaska

The polar bear probably evolved no more than 150,000 years ago and is most closely related to brown bears that now live in southeastern Alaska, new genetic analyses of a rare fossil suggest.

Ursus maritimus, the polar bear, is a specialized predator that - ignoring the bears that forage for garbage in towns and villages along the Arctic coast - hunts solely on sea ice.

Several previous studies agreed that polar bears are closely related to brown bears but provided widely divergent answers about when polar bears first evolved, with estimates ranging between 70,000 and 1 million years ago, says Charlotte Lindqvist, an evolutionary biologist at the University at Buffalo in New York. Now, genetic analyses of material from a fossil first described two years ago narrow the window when the huge white bears first appeared, Lindqvist and her colleagues report in a paper to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Read More...
Laptop

Baby DVDs fail to boost word power: 'Baby Einstein' show could do more harm than good

Fiona Macrae
The Daily Mail
Tue, 02 Mar 2010 01:22 UTC
baby einstein
© AlamyWarning: Parents who show their babies educational DVDs may actually be harming their word skills.
Parents who buy educational DVDs to give their toddlers a head start may be doing more harm than good.

A study of almost 100 boys and girls aged between one and two found that regularly watching a DVD from the Baby Einstein range did nothing to boost their vocabulary.

In fact, the younger the children were when they began to watch the programmes, the worse their word power.

Researchers tested the children over six weeks. Half were given a Baby Wordsworth DVD, which their parents were told to play 15 times over six weeks.

The 35-minute disc, costing around £18, is part of the Baby Einstein range - popular with parents keen to boost toddlers' IQs before starting school.

It uses puppets and people to introduce 30 words for rooms and household appliances, including 'fridge' and 'phone'.

The remaining children's parents were told to 'go about life as normal'.

Not surprisingly, older children picked up more new words than younger ones, the
California University team found. However, those who watched the DVD did no better than the others, and in fact appeared to learn little or nothing, their parents told Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, an American journal.
Read More...
Pharoah

Statue head of King Tut's grandfather found in Luxor


france24.com
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:16 UTC
Image
© Egypt's Antiquities DepartmentA picture released by Egypt's Antiquities Department on February 28, 2010 shows a 3,000 year-old red granite head of King Amenhotep III. Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed a colossal statue head of the pharaoh whom DNA tests revealed last week was King Tutankhamun's grandfather, the government has said.
Egyptian archaeologists have unearthed a colossal statue head of the pharaoh whom DNA tests revealed last week was King Tutankhamun's grandfather, the government said on Sunday.

The red granite head of King Amenhotep III, part of a larger 3,000 year-old statue, was discovered at the site of the pharaoh's funerary temple in Luxor, Egypt's culture ministry said in a statement.

"The newly discovered head is intact and measures 2.5 metres (8.2 foot) high," antiquities chief Zahi Hawass was quoted as saying.
Read More...
Info

Syria's Stonehenge: Neolithic stone circles, alignments and possible tombs discovered


The Independent
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 22:00 UTC
Image
© Dr. Robert MasonOne of the corbelled stone structures found in the Syrian desert. Archaeologists suspect that its an ancient stone tomb. In the front of it are the remains of a stone circle.
For Dr. Robert Mason, an archaeologist with the Royal Ontario Museum, it all began with a walk last summer. Mason conducts work at the Deir Mar Musa al-Habashi monastery, out in the Syrian Desert. Finds from the monastery, which is still in use today by monks, date mainly to the medieval period and include some beautiful frescoes.

Dr. Mason explains that he "went for a walk" into the eastern perimeter of the site - an area that hasn't been explored by archaeologists. What he discovered is an ancient landscape of stone circles, stone alignments and what appear to be corbelled roof tombs. From stone tools found at the site, it's likely that the features date to some point in the Middle East's Neolithic Period - a broad stretch of time between roughly 8500 BC - 4300 BC.

It is thought that in Western Europe megalithic construction involving the use of stone only dates back as far as ca. 4500 BC. This means that the Syrian site could well be older than anything seen in Europe.
Read More...
Fish

Scientists rethink old whale tales

Kelly Shiers
The Chronicle Herald
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 13:33 UTC
Image
© unknown
A 500-year-old right whale bone discovered deep in the frigid waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence is shedding new light on the demise of one of the world's most endangered marine mammals.

With fewer than 400 North Atlantic right whales alive today, experts have long believed that the species first ran into serious trouble with the arrival of Basque whalers from Europe in the 16th and 17th centuries. They harpooned them by the thousands off the coast of Labrador, mainly for their oil.

But research on ancient whale bones, including one found near a sunken 16th century Basque galleon, is rewriting the animals' history, suggesting there may not have been as many right whales as previously estimated, even before commercial whalers took their devastating toll.

As a result, researchers are left with a puzzle, trying to figure out what - if anything - caused the initial right whale population crash.
Read More...
Info

The Aging Brain Is Less Quick, But More Shrewd

Michelle Trudeau
National Public Radio
Mon, 01 Mar 2010 02:46 UTC
Old Man
© iStockphotoLifelong learning and brain stimulation can help increase memory and decision-making ability, according to neuroscientists.
For baby-boomers, there is both good news and bad news about the cognitive health of the aging brain.

Brain researcher Gary Small from UCLA conveys the bad news first: "Reaction time is slower," he says. "It takes us longer to learn new information. Sometimes it takes us longer to retrieve information, so we have that tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon - where you almost have that word or that thought. That's typical of the middle-age brain."

As we age, our ability to multi-task diminishes. "We're quick, but we're sloppy when we're in middle-age. We make more errors when we're in middle age," says Small.
Read More...
Bulb

Large Hadron Collider restarts


RIA Novosti
Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:04 UTC
The world's most powerful atom smasher has been restarted, the Symmetry magazine reported Sunday.

The first protons were injected into the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on Saturday following a pre-New Year technical shutdown and traveled in both directions successfully.

"The circulating beams marked the end of a ten week particle-free hiatus for the world's largest particle accelerator, during which LHC scientists and engineers have prepared the machine for its biggest challenge yet, particle collisions at an energy of seven trillion electron volts (TeV). The beams also mark the beginning of the LHC's first long run, expected to last until at least mid-year 2011," Symmetry said.
Read More...
Meteor

Small Asteroids, Bread Flour, and a Dutch Physicist's 150-year Old Theory

Jean Tate
Universe Today
Sat, 27 Feb 2010 15:17 UTC
Image
© JAXAItokawa, a dusty asteroid
No, it's not the Universe Puzzle No. 3; rather, it's an intriguing result from recent work into the strange shapes and composition of small asteroids.

Images sent back from space missions suggest that smaller asteroids are not pristine chunks of rock, but are instead covered in rubble that ranges in size from meter-sized boulders to flour-like dust. Indeed some asteroids appear to be up to 50% empty space, suggesting that they could be collections of rubble with no solid core.

But how do these asteroids form and evolve? And if we ever have to deflect one, to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs, how to do so without breaking it up, and making the danger far greater?

Johannes Diderik van der Waals (1837-1923), with a little help from Daniel Scheeres, Michael Swift, and colleagues, to the rescue.
Read More...
Blackbox

Scientists Unravel Mysteries of Intelligence

Amanda Gardner
HealthDay News
Fri, 26 Feb 2010 12:55 UTC
It's not a particular brain region that makes someone smart or not smart.

Nor is it the strength and speed of the connections throughout the brain or such features as total brain volume.

Instead, new research shows, it's the connections between very specific areas of the brain that determine intelligence and often, by extension, how well someone does in life.

"General intelligence actually relies on a specific network inside the brain, and this is the connections between the gray matter, or cell bodies, and the white matter, or connecting fibers between neurons," said Jan Glascher, lead author of a paper appearing in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "General intelligence relies on the connection between the frontal and the parietal [situated behind the frontal] parts of the brain."

The results weren't entirely unexpected, said Keith Young, vice chairman of research in psychiatry and behavioral science at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Temple, but "it is confirmation of the idea that good communication between various parts of brain are very important for this generalized intelligence."

General intelligence is an abstract notion developed in 1904 that has always been somewhat controversial.
Read More...