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Oldest Dinosaur 'Nursery' Discovered

Charles Choi
Live Science
Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:00 UTC
Dino Nursery
© Artwork by Julius Csotonyi
This artist's interpretation shows 190-million-year-old nests, eggs, hatchlings and adults of the prosauropod dinosaur Massospondylus in Golden Gate Highlands National Park, South Africa. While the mother dinos likely were 20 feet (6 meters) long, while their eggs were only 2.3 - 2.7 inches (6 to 7 cm) wide.
Tiny prints from baby dinosaurs dot the oldest dino nesting site found to date, a 190-million-year-old nursery in South Africa, researchers said.

The hatchery and the baby footprints uncovered there are significant clues about the evolution of complex family behaviors in early dinosaurs, providing the oldest-known evidence that dinosaur hatchlings remained at nests long enough to at least double in size.

The newly unearthed clutches of eggs, many with embryos inside, belonged to the plant-eating dinosaur Massospondylus, a prosauropod, or predecessor of the largest animals to ever walk the Earth, long-necked sauropods such as Brachiosaurus.
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Chalkboard

'Electric Earth' Could Explain Planet's Rotation

Kate McAlpine
Science
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 14:58 UTC
disk of iron monoxide
© Kenji Ohta
Under pressure. The disk of iron monoxide (FeO) inside the diamond anvil, connected to gold (Au) electrodes.
When it comes to Earth's rotation, you might think geophysicists have pretty much everything figured out. Not quite. In order to explain some variations in the way our planet spins, Earth's mantle - the layer of hot, softened rock that lies between the crust and core - must conduct electricity, an ability that the mantle as we know it shouldn't have. Now, a new study finds that iron monoxide, which makes up 9% of the mantle, actually does conduct electricity just like a metal, but only at temperatures and pressures found far beneath the surface.

Earth's spin isn't flawless. Geophysicists have discovered that the time it takes our planet to complete one rotation - the length of a day - fluctuates slightly over the course of months or years. They've also noticed extra swing in the predictable wobble of Earth's axis of rotation, like the swaying of a spinning top. The variations are probably caused by the solid iron inner core, liquid metal outer core, and rocky mantle rotating at slightly different rates. Friction helps bring them into line, and the magnetic field of the outer core can pull on the metal inner core. But to really fit the observations, the core should also exert its magnetic tug on the mantle, says Bruce Buffett, an earth scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the new study. This means that a layer of the mantle must be able to conduct electricity. But, he says, "the origin of the metallic layer remains an open question."
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Meteor

International Organization To Assess Earth Defense From Space Dangers

Jonathan Amos
BBC News
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 14:40 UTC
asteroid/Earth
© NASA/JPL/JHUAPL
NEOShield is a new international project that will assess the threat posed by Near Earth Objects (NEO) and look at the best possible solutions for dealing with a big asteroid or comet on a collision path with our planet.

The effort is being led from the German space agency's (DLR) Institute of Planetary Research in Berlin, and had its kick-off meeting this week.

It will draw on expertise from across Europe, Russia and the US.

It's a major EU-funded initiative that will pull together all the latest science, initiate a fair few laboratory experiments and new modelling work, and then try to come to some definitive positions.

Industrial partners, which include the German, British and French divisions of the big Astrium space company, will consider the engineering architecture required to deflect one of these bodies out of our path.

Should we kick it, try to tug it, or even blast it off its trajectory?
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Satellite

Russian Mars Probe Crash Sets Off Confusion, Conspiracy Theories

Denise Chow
Space.com
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 06:00 UTC
failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt
© Michael Carroll
This artist's concept shows fuel from Russia's failed Mars probe Phobos-Grunt burning from a ruptured fuel tank as the spacecraft re-enters the atmosphere.
When an ill-fated Russian Mars probe fell to Earth over the weekend, the spacecraft's untimely demise set off a flurry of conflicting media reports and conspiracy theories.

Russia's Phobos-Grunt space probe suffered a debilitating malfunction shortly after its November 2011 launch, which stranded it in low-Earth orbit for more than two months before it succumbed to gravitational forces and plummeted through the atmosphere on Jan. 15.

The $165 million spacecraft reportedly broke apart over the Pacific Ocean, but inconsistent reports soon surfaced, which sparked different theories about where the probe had landed, and what had caused it to malfunction in the first place.

The Russian Federal Space Agency is notorious for closely controlling any information released, but part of the issue is the tricky nature of calculating re-entry predictions for dead satellites and other pieces of orbital debris.
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Cards

What If There Were Another Advanced Species?

Natalie Wolchover
MSNBC
Sat, 21 Jan 2012 12:55 UTC
Apes planet
© 20th Century Fox
Still from Planet of the Apes, a 2001 film.
Would we break bread with our brainy cohabitants or be locked in battle?

What if Neanderthals, who bit the dust just 28,000 years ago, had instead wised up and were now living next door? Or what if, during all these millennia that humans have been evolving, some unrelated creature had evolved cognitive and technological prowess in keeping with our own? Another scenario: what if humans had split into two separate species - the original gangsters, and a successful evolutionary offshoot?

These are all perfectly reasonable histories of the world that would have resulted in two advanced species of Earthlings living side-by-side today. They're just not the histories that happen to have happened.

But what if they had? Would we break bread with our brainy cohabitants or be locked in a constant battle for supremacy?
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Nuke

In This Nuclear World, What Is the Meaning of "Safe"?

Barbara Rose Johnston
Truthout
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 18:55 UTC
empty streets of Minamisoma
© Ko Sasaki / The New York Times
The empty streets of Minamisoma, a city near the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. Thousands of Japanese are stranded near the stricken reactors and residents are criticizing the government’s lack of help.
In a nuclear crisis, life becomes a nightmare for those people trying to make sense of the uncertainties. Imaginably, the questions are endless.

Radiation is invisible, how do you know when you are in danger? How long will this danger persist? How can you reduce the hazard to yourself and family? What level of exposure is safe? How do you get access to vital information in time to prevent or minimize exposure? What are the potential risks of acute and chronic exposures? What are the related consequential damages of exposure? Whose information do you trust? How do you rebuild a healthy way of life in the aftermath of nuclear disaster?

And the list of unknowns goes on.

These questions are difficult to answer in the chaos and context of an ongoing disaster, and they become even more complicated by the fact that governments and the nuclear industry maintain tight control of information, operations, scientific research, and the biomedical lessons that shape public-health response.
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UFO 2

Mystery Surrounds Air Force's Secretive X-37B Space Plane Landing Plan

Mike Wall
Space.com
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 18:07 UTC
X-37B
© USAF/Vandenberg Air Force Base
An Air Force photographer snapped this profile view of the X-37B shortly after its landing on Dec. 3, 2010, which marked the end of the secret vehicle's maiden space mission.
The United States Air Force's secretive X-37B space plane has been circling Earth for more than 10 months, and there's no telling when it might come down.

As of Friday (Jan. 20), the mysterious robotic X-37B spacecraft has been aloft for 321 days, significantly outlasting its stated mission design lifetime of 270 days. But it may stay up for even longer yet, experts say, particularly if the military views this space mission - the second ever for the hush-hush vehicle - as something of an endurance test.

"Because it is an experimental vehicle, they kind of want to see what its limits are," said Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force.

A long mystery mission

The Air Force launched the X-37B in March 2011, sending the reusable space plane design on its second space mission. The X-37B now zipping around our planet is known as Orbital Test Vehicle-2, or OTV-2.
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Beaker

New Scientists May Unleash Censored Weaponized Bird Flu Data

Anthony Gucciardi
Activist Post
Fri, 20 Jan 2012 17:56 UTC
gas mask graphic
© n/a
The United States government recently blocked virologist Ron Fouchier from releasing the blueprints to develop heavily weaponized H5N1 bird flu virus thanks to pressure stemming from the alternative media, but now a new group of scientific labs have begun to recreate the findings and may release them to the public.

The experiments involve mutating the virus a total of 5 times, making the strain highly contagious between ferrets - the very animal model used to study human flu infection.

Bioterrorism experts state that a public release of the data could result in a widespread pandemic of weaponized H5N1 that could endanger millions of lives.

This is highlighted by the severe mortality rate of the disease, which has killed more than 1 in every 2 people that it infected. Paul Keim, chair of the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, explained how volatile of a weapon the mutated bird flu could become:
'This is such a dangerous biological weapon, it would not be controllable. Whoever used it would doubtlessly decimate their own people as well,' Keim said.
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Display

The Brave New World After SOPA: A Censored Internet

Jesse Emspak
Security News Daily
Wed, 18 Jan 2012 01:14 UTC
sopablackout
© SecurityNewsDaily
Wondering what happened to Wikipedia yesterday (Jan. 18)? Perhaps you heard it was a protest against legislation with the vague name SOPA and arguments about a lot of other acronyms like ISP and DNS. You could read all day about the technical and legislative intricacies. But here is the dystopian scenario that SOPA's opponents fear:

You're talking with friends about Avatar and whether it was Zoe Saldana's first lead role. To find out, you do a Web search for her name and get a set of links - none of them to Wikipedia. In fact, the only sites you see are from the movie studio.
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2 + 2 = 4

Math formula may explain why serial killers kill


msnbc
Thu, 19 Jan 2012 18:19 UTC
Serial killer Hannibal Lecter
© Phil Bray / Getty Images
Anthony Hopkins stars as a serial killer, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures' (and Universal Pictures in association with Dino De Laurentiis) thriller Hannibal.

Researchers have discovered that the seemingly erratic behavior of the "Rostov Ripper," a prolific serial killer active in the 1980s, conformed to the same mathematical pattern obeyed by earthquakes, avalanches, stock market crashes and many other sporadic events. The finding suggests an explanation for why serial killers kill.

Mikhail Simkin and Vwani Roychowdhury, electrical engineers at the University of California, Los Angeles, modeled the behavior of Andrei Chikatilo, a gruesome murderer who took the lives of 53 people in Rostov, Russia between 1978 and 1990. Though Chikatilo sometimes went nearly three years without committing murder, on other occasions, he went just three days. The researchers found that the seemingly random spacing of his murders followed a mathematical distribution known as a power law.

Comment:
According to Pustilnik, neuroscience research demonstrating that a psychopath is merely a victim of his own faulty biology cannot be used in court as an argument for his innocence. It is admissible, however, as evidence that a jury should be lenient during sentencing.
Ummm... hello!? Shouldn't this mean that psychopaths should be put away for LIFE instead of getting off for being conscienceless killers who "just can't help it"?? What kind of insane logic is this? Oh, yeah, right. We live in a world ruled by psychopaths so of course they should do what they like and get away with it!

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