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Earliest Mammals May Have Been Egg-Layers After All

Charles Choi
LiveScience
Thu, 16 Aug 2012 13:01 UTC
Dino Fossil
© Graciela PineiroThis composite photo shows an isolated mesosaur embryo with an adult mesosaur to show the size relation.
Despite evidence that the earliest examples of creatures such as mammals and reptiles gave birth to live young, they actually may have laid eggs, a scientist argues.

"These eggs are probably out there, but nobody has looked hard enough for them or they have not been recognized," says University of Bonn, Germany, paleobiologist P. Martin Sander, who details his analysis in the Aug. 17 issue of the journal Science.

Both mammals and reptiles envelop their developing embryos in protective layers, something that ultimately helped their ancestors conquer the land and that still helps their offspring survive.

Mammals often keep these membrane-bundled offspring within them, giving birth to live young, while reptiles generally lay their membrane-swaddled progeny in eggs.

The fact that mammals and reptiles wrap their embryos within these defenses makes them known as amniotes, which first evolved about 310 million years ago.

The fossil record of amniotic eggs and embryos is paltry, leaving scientists little knowledge about when, how and why they evolved.
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Arrow Up

CERN Scientists Create the Highest Temperature Mass Humanity Has Ever Seen

Fox Van Allen
Yahoo! News - Y!Tech
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
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Couldn't they have waited until the wintertime when we could actually use the heat?
CERN, the European physics lab responsible for discovering the Higgs boson just last month, has scored another major achievement in the realm of physics. No, scientists there haven't discovered any freaky new particles - they're just doing some pretty cool things with existing particles. Or should we say hot things: CERN scientists have created a "quark-gluon plasma" that clocks in at a balmy 5.5 trillion degrees.

Researchers believe that the mass of sub-atomic particles they created approximates the state of the universe immediately after the Big Bang. The ingredients for the mix were quite simple: two lead atoms, smashed.

When you're dealing with temperatures as high as these, collecting a precise measurement can be difficult. Scientists are only now working on the calculations to determine the exact quantity of heat present, but they're confident that the result will be greater than the previous high temperature of 4 trillion degrees.

Source: Tecca
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Arrow Down

A View of Mars: The Incredible 360-Degree Panorama from Curiosity

Dante D'Orazio
The Verge
Mon, 13 Aug 2012 02:38 UTC
Curiosity has been reliably beaming back photos from the Martian surface ever since it completed its dramatic landing a week ago, and now we have the best view yet of where the rover sits. Photographer Andrew Bodrov has stitched together images from NASA to create a Google Street View-esque version of the Red Planet. You can't virtually drive along the surface, of course, but there's no need to: you'll be completely awed by the vision the interactive picture provides. The solitude, beauty, and technological achievement represented by the shot is unavoidable as you peer up at the sun and down at the mountains in the distance. Words can't do it justice: just open it in full screen and get lost in it all.



Update: According to TPM, Bodrov said that he "used Adobe Photoshop to retouch the images and to add the Sun in the Martian sky, the size and appearance of which he approximated using an image captured in 2005 by the older NASA Mars rover Spirit." Despite the changes, the founder of 360 Cities maintains that "It is totally accurate - it is a wider-angle version of the existing photos put together."

Source: CNET and Andrew Bodrov (360 Cities)
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Info

Researchers Take A New Look At How Evolution Has Shaped Modern Europeans

April Flowers
RedOrbit
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:54 UTC
Neolithic Ancient Monuments
© Gail Johnson/ShutterstockNeolithic Ancient Monuments of Angelsey North Wales.
New analytical techniques are changing long-held, simplistic views about the evolutionary history of humans in Europe. The study, reported in the journal Trends in Genetics, found that many cultural, climatic, and demographic events have shaped genetic variation among modern-day European populations and that the variety of those mechanisms is more diverse than previously thought.

Recent advances in paleogenetics, or the study of the past through the examination of preserved genetic material from ancient organisms, are providing never-before-seen glimpses into the complex evolution of humans in Europe. These new technologies are helping researchers recreate events that led to the creation of what is now known as modern man.

Around 27,000 to 16,000 years ago, following the period when ice sheets were at their maximum extension across the Earth, hunter-gatherer populations re-colonized most parts of Europe. The first farming populations appeared on the continent around 8,000 years ago during the so-called Neolithic transition.

The Neolithic transition, sometimes called the Agricultural Revolution, was the world's first historically verifiable revolution in agriculture. The wide-scale transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent agricultural settlements helped to support an increasingly large population. Plant and animal domestication evolved independently in six separate locations worldwide between 8,000 - 5,000 B.C.
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Airplane

Unmanned military hypersonic aircraft X-51A Waverider crashes into Pacific


Anchorage Daily News
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:41 UTC
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© US Air Force / APIn this July 17, 2009 photo provided by the U.S. Air Force, an X-51A WaveRider hypersonic flight test vehicle is uploaded to an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52 for fit testing at Edwards Air Force Base.
An unmanned experimental aircraft failed during an attempt to fly at six times the speed of sound in the latest setback for hypersonic flight. The X-51A Waverider was designed to reach Mach 6, or 3,600 mph, after being dropped by a B-52 bomber off the Southern California coast on Tuesday. Engineers hoped it would sustain its top speed for five minutes, twice as long as an X-51A has gone before.

But the Air Force said Wednesday that a faulty control fin prevented it from starting its exotic scramjet engine and it was lost."It is unfortunate that a problem with this subsystem caused a termination before we could light the scramjet engine," Charlie Brink of the Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, said in a statement.

The Waverider successfully detached from the B-52 and fired the rocket booster as planned. Then its scramjet engine was supposed to take over as it attempted to climb to Mach 6. But that never happened. Fifteen seconds after separating from the rocket booster, the Waverider lost control, preventing a test of the scramjet engine.
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Blackbox

New deadly, highly contagious Ebola family virus found in snakes

Jonathan Ball
BBC News
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 10:09 UTC
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There was a good correlation between the arenaviruses and the presence of disease
The cause of a fatal illness that affects captive snakes has been identified, a study has shown. The condition - called Inclusion Body Disease (IBD) - affects constrictor snakes including boas and pythons. There is no treatment and symptoms include "stargazing" - a fixed upward stare - as well as breathing problems and general muscular paralysis.

It was long suspected that the disease was caused by a virus, but until recently its identity remained elusive. The research is published in the open-access journal mBio.

In this breakthrough study, researchers from the University of California San Francisco analysed samples obtained from snakes diagnosed with IBD, using sensitive DNA sequencing techniques.
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Better Earth

1.5 million years of climate history revealed after scientists solve mystery of the deep


Terra Daily
Wed, 15 Aug 2012 08:43 UTC
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1.5 million years of climate history revealed after scientists solve mystery of the deep

The study successfully reconstructed temperature from the deep sea to reveal how global ice volume has varied over the glacial-interglacial cycles of the past 1.5 million years of Tabular icebergs. The production of tabular icebergs is a major mechanism of mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet. Icebergs are calved during both rapid ice-shelf collapse and as part of the normal transfer of mass through the ice sheet to the surrounding ocean.

Scientists have announced a major breakthrough in understanding the Earth's climate machine by reconstructing highly accurate records of changes in ice volume and deep-ocean temperatures over the last 1.5 million years. The study, which is reported in the journal Science, offers new insights into a decades-long debate about how the shifts in the Earth's orbit relative to the sun have taken the Earth into and out of an ice-age climate.

Being able to reconstruct ancient climate change is a critical part of understanding why the climate behaves the way it does. It also helps us to predict how the planet might respond to man-made changes, such as the injection of large quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, in the future.

Comment: Fire and Ice: The Day After Tomorrow

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Study proves that 1 extinction leads to another


University of Exeter
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 06:11 UTC
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© Dirk SandersA parasitic wasp attacks an aphid in the first study to prove the theory that the extinction of one predator can lead to the extinction of another.
When a carnivore becomes extinct, other predatory species could soon follow, according to new research. Scientists have previously put forward this theory, but a University of Exeter team has now carried out the first experiment to prove it.

Published today (15 August 2012) in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the study shows how the demise of one carnivore species can indirectly cause another to become extinct. The University of Exeter team believes any extinction can create a ripple effect across a food web, with far-reaching consequences for many other animals.

The research adds weight to growing evidence that a 'single species' approach to conservation, for example in fisheries management, is misguided. Instead the focus needs to be holistic, encompassing species across an entire ecosystem.

The researchers bred two species of parasitic wasps, along with the two types of aphids on which each wasp exclusively feeds. They set up tanks with different combinations of the species and observed them for eight weeks. In tanks that did not include the first species of wasp, the second went extinct within a few generations. In tanks in which they co-existed, both wasp species thrived.
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Malaysian Government Promises Law Review after 'internet blackout' Protest


Yahoo News
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 00:00 UTC
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Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak, seen here in April, must call elections by next year against a formidable opposition that gets most of its message out via the Internet due to a government .
Malaysia's prime minister said he would review a legal amendment that critics claim threatens free expression online after they staged a one-day "Internet blackout" on Tuesday.

Prime Minister Najib Razak, facing mounting pressure ahead of looming elections, said on Twitter that he had asked the cabinet to discuss the controversial new section of the Evidence Act.

"Whatever we do we must put people first," he tweeted late Tuesday.

NGOs, bloggers and opposition politicians staged the protest earlier in the day by replacing their homepages with black screens featuring messages attacking the amendment, which went into effect in April despite widespread opposition.

Critics say under the amendment any web host, provider of a wifi network, or ordinary user of a computer or mobile device can be found liable for any defamatory or harmful content sent via its systems.
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Satellite

New Satellites Will Tighten Knowledge of Earth's Radiation Belts

Jason Major
Universe Today
Tue, 14 Aug 2012 10:57 UTC

Surrounding our planet like vast invisible donuts (the ones with the hole, not the jelly-filled kind) are the Van Allen radiation belts, regions where various charged subatomic particles get trapped by Earth's magnetic fields, forming rings of plasma. We know that the particles that make up this plasma can have nasty effects on spacecraft electronics as well as human physiology, but there's a lot that isn't known about the belts. Two new satellites, scheduled to launch on August 23, will help change that.
"Particles from the radiation belts can penetrate into spacecraft and disrupt electronics, short circuits or upset memory on computers. The particles are also dangerous to astronauts traveling through the region. We need models to help predict hazardous events in the belts and right now we are aren't very good at that. RBSP will help solve that problem."

- David Sibeck, RBSP project scientist, Goddard Space Flight Center
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