Science & TechnologyS


Sherlock

Chinese 'Dinosaur City' Reshapes Understanding of Prehistoric Era

Tania Branigan
The Guardian, UK
Sat, 14 May 2011 20:08 UTC
Models of dinosaurs in Zhucheng
© Tania Branigan/GuardianModels of dinosaurs in Zhucheng, Shandong province which has become known as 'dinosaur city'.
Troves of early Cretaceous and Jurassic relics in country where palaeontology is just taking off has ignited evolutionary debate

It must have been an awe-inspiring sight: four metres tall and weighing 11 tonnes. Its sharp teeth delivered a bone-crushing bite. Yet even "the tyrant from Zhucheng" reached its inevitable, ignominious end. Over time, half its skull was torn from its skeleton and jumbled with the bones of less imposing creatures at this site in what is now China's eastern Shandong province.

Last month - tens of millions of years later - researchers resurrected Zhuchengtyrannus magnus. Impressive though the reconstruction was, it was just one of a succession of fossil discoveries that have put this "dinosaur city" on the map.

Zhucheng's early Cretaceous relics, Liaoning's feathered dinosaurs and Xinjiang's wealth of Jurassic material are among the Chinese treasure troves reshaping our understanding of ancient life on Earth, and the processes that have created the world around us. "Some of the new material from China is breathtaking," said Dr Paul Barrett, a palaeontologist at the Natural History Museum. "Firstly, the sheer number of new species is impressive. Secondly, some of the dinosaurs that have been discovered have had major impacts on evolutionary debates."
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Bizarro Earth

Cell Phones Caused Mysterious Worldwide Bee Deaths, Study Finds


Fox News
Fri, 13 May 2011 07:37 UTC
Bumble bee
© Reuters/Russell CheyneA bumble bee lands on a plant in Pitlochry in Scotland May 29, 2010.

Cellphone transmissions may be responsible for a mysterious, worldwide die off in bees that has mystified scientists.

Dr. Daniel Favre, a former biologist with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland, carefully placed a mobile phone underneath a beehive and then monitored the reaction of the workers.

According to a story in The Daily Mail, the bees were able to tell when the handsets were making and receiving calls. They responded by making the high pitched squeaks that usually signal the start of swarming.

"This study shows that the presence of an active mobile phone disturbs bees -- and has a dramatic effect," Favre told the Daily Mail.

Favre believes this to be evidence of something other scientists have suggested: Signals from mobile phones are contributing to the decline of honeybees. Favre thinks more research could help confirm the link between cell signals and "colony collapse disorder" -- the sudden disappearance of entire colonies over winter -- which has halved the bee population, according to some estimates.
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Wolf

Not Just a Cute Tail: Female Dogs Aren't Easily Fooled

Helen Fields
Science NOW
Tue, 26 Apr 2011 23:19 UTC
dog
© Unknown
The battle of the sexes has just heated up - in dogs. A new study finds that when a ball appears to magically change size in front of their eyes, female dogs notice but males don't. The researchers aren't sure what's behind the disparity, but experts say the finding supports the idea that - in some situations - male dogs trust their noses, whereas females trust their eyes.

The study, published online today in Biology Letters, didn't set out to find sex differences. Cognitive biologist Corsin Müller and his colleagues at the University of Vienna and its Clever Dog Lab wanted to find out how good dogs are at size constancy - the ability to recognize that an object shouldn't change size if it disappears for a moment. But they recruited 25 female and 25 male dogs for the study, just to be safe.
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Info

Evidence That Cosmic Rays Seed Clouds

Edwin Cartlidge
Physics World
Fri, 13 May 2011 14:13 UTC
Clouds and Sunlight
© Physics World
By firing a particle beam into a cloud chamber, physicists in Denmark and the UK have shown how cosmic rays could stimulate the formation of water droplets in the Earth's atmosphere. The researchers say this is the best experimental evidence yet that the Sun influences the climate by altering the intensity of the cosmic-ray flux reaching the Earth's surface.

The now conventional view on global warming, as stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is that most of the warming recorded in the past 50 years has been caused by emissions of manmade greenhouse gases. But some scientists argue that the Sun might have a significant influence on changes to the Earth's climate, pointing out that in centuries past there has been a close correlation between global temperatures and solar activity.

However, changes to the Sun's brightness are believed to have altered temperatures on Earth by no more than a few hundredths of a degree in the last 150 years. Researchers have therefore been investigating ways that the Sun could indirectly modify the Earth's climate, and one hypothesis, put forward by Henrik Svensmark of the National Space Institute in Copenhagen, posits a link between solar activity and cosmic-ray flux.
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Sun

Jupiter's Moon Io has a Sea of Magma Beneath its Surface


Popular Mechanics
Thu, 12 May 2011 14:00 UTC
With its famous volcanoes, Io produced about 30 times more heat than Earth per year, putting our planet to shame in the volcano game. While scientists had guessed that a vast ocean of magma lies beneath the surface of the fiery moon, they couldn't prove it - until now.

Image
© Xianzhe Jia -UMICH & Krishan Khurana -UCLAUnderneath a low-density crust of 30-50 km thickness exists a global magma layer (asthenosphere) with a thickness exceeding 50 km and a rock melt fraction of a few tens of percent.
Jupiter's moon Io is the only place in the solar system besides Earth with volcanoes that spew molten rock. In fact, it's the most volcanically active body in the solar system, producing 30 times more heat than Earth despite being 70 times less massive. But the source of all this volcanism was hidden from scientists, until now - a new study reveals the vast ocean of semimolten magma that lies beneath the moon's volcano-ridden surface.

Io's center is in constant flux: Jupiter's enormous gravity pulls on the moon's "slushie-like interior," UCLA geophysicist Krishan Khurana says, and all that friction produces an enormous amount of thermal energy, through what's called tidal heating. The heat melts rock to create magma, which spews out of the 400 or so volcanoes on Io's crust. Previously, however, scientists weren't sure exactly how that magma was distributed. Some thought it might have come from isolated underground pockets or wellsprings, as is the case on Earth, rather than a global layer of magma.
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Telescope

Haumea: Mysterious radioactive rugby-ball world

Lewis Page
The Register
Fri, 13 May 2011 11:41 UTC
Image
© UnknownRed-spotted radioactive rugby-ball: remarkable.
Boffins probe secrets of bizarro Kuiper belt denizen

The fifth "dwarf planet" of the solar system, Haumea, is shaped like a rugby ball 2,000km long and its icy surface is warmed by radioactive uranium and thorium ores in its interior.

The strange ellipsoid world is thought to have a day just four hours long, and is attended by a brace of moons as it circles the Sun far out in the distant Kuiper belt beyond the planet Neptune.

These new revelations on Haumea, which was only discovered in 2005, come to us courtesy of a team of international astronomers who have been probing the strange object using the aptly-big Very Large Telescope operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile.

According to the latest observations, the surface of Haumea and its moon Hi'aka are covered with crystalline water ice. Normally, considering the outrageously chilly temperatures which prevail out beyond Neptune, the ice would have become glass, without a crystalline structure: there must be some form of heating present.
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Sherlock

Caves and their dripstones tell us about the uplift of mountains

Michael Meyer
EurekAlert.org
Mon, 02 May 2011 04:53 UTC
Caves Quakes Mountains
© Michael MeyerIn a recent Geology paper, geologists from the universities of Innsbruck and Leeds report on ancient cave systems discovered near the summits of the Allgäu Mountains that preserved the oldest radiometrically dated dripstones currently known from the European Alps.
In one of his songs Bob Dylan asks "How many years can a mountain exist before it is washed to the sea?", and thus poses an intriguing geological question for which an accurate answer is not easily provided. Mountain ranges are in a constant interplay between climatically controlled weathering processes on the one hand and the tectonic forces that cause folding and thrusting and thus thickening of the Earth's crust on the other hand. While erosion eventually erases any geological obstacles, tectonic forces are responsible for piling- and lifting-up rocks and thus for forming spectacular mountain landscapes such as the European Alps. In reality, climate, weathering and mountain uplift interact in a complex manner and quantifying rates for erosion and uplift, especially for the last couple of millions of years, remains a challenging task.

In a recent Geology paper Michael Meyer (University of Innsbruck) et al. report on ancient cave systems discovered near the summits of the Allgäu Mountains (Austria) that preserved the oldest radiometrically dated dripstones currently known from the European Alps. "These cave deposits formed ca. 2 million years ago and their geochemical signature and biological inclusions are vastly different from other cave calcites in the Alps" says Meyer, who works at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
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Telescope

Thirty Supernovas per Second in the Observable Universe! Is the Red Giant Betelgeuse Next?


The Daily Galaxy
Thu, 12 May 2011 20:47 UTC
Supernova
© The Daily Galaxy
Betelgeuse, one of the brightest stars in the sky, could burst into its supernova phase and become as bright as a full moon -- and last for as long as a year. The massive star is visible in the winter sky over most of the world as a bright, reddish star, could explode as a supernova anytime within the next 100,000 years.

Most astronomers today believe that one of the plausible reasons we have yet to detect intelligent life in the universe is due to the deadly effects of local supernova explosions that wipe out all life in a given region of a galaxy.

While there is, on average, only one supernova per galaxy per century, there is something on the order of 100 billion galaxies in the observable Universe. Taking 10 billion years for the age of the Universe (it's actually 13.7 billion, but stars didn't form for the first few hundred million), Dr. Richard Mushotzky of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, derived a figure of 1 billion supernovae per year, or 30 supernovae per second in the observable Universe!

The red giant Betelgeuse, once so large it would reach out to Jupiter's orbit if placed in our own solar system, has shrunk by 15 percent over the past decade in a half, although it's just as bright as it's ever been.
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Info

Biologists Announce Discovery of an Entirely New Branch of Life

Clay Dillow
PopSci
Thu, 12 May 2011 16:50 UTC
Fungus
© Hans Hillewaert via WikimediaMmm, Fungus.
In further proof that we never know just how much we don't know, a paper published in Nature suggests that biologists in the UK have discovered an entirely new and unique branch in the tree of life. A group of mysterious microscopic organisms related to fungus are actually so different that they make up their own kind of fungal group. Another way to say that: there are so many of these distinctly different kinds of organisms living in so many diverse places, that the biodiversity among this new group might be as vast as the entire known fungal kingdom. In fact, they might not actually be fungi at all.

The scientists who have discovered this new clade--a clade is like a branch on the tree of life that consists of an organism and all of its descendants--have named it cryptomycota, which loosely means "hidden from the kingdom Fungi" so we're told. And indeed the cryptomycota have remained hidden from sight even though it turns out they are everywhere, living in many different environments, including freshwater lakes and sediments, as well as pond water.
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Eye 1

UK Police buy software to map suspects' digital movements

Ryan Gallagher and Rajeev Syal
The Guardian
Wed, 11 May 2011 16:21 UTC
Minority Report
© John Anderton/APPolice have bought software that maps suspects' movements in space and time, in a step towards the futuristic crime detecting imagined in Minority Report.
Geotime software, bought by the Met, collates data from social networking sites, satnavs, mobiles and financial transactions

Britain's largest police force is using software that can map nearly every move suspects and their associates make in the digital world, prompting an outcry from civil liberties groups.

The Metropolitan police has bought Geotime, a security programme used by the US military, which shows an individual's movements and communications with other people on a three-dimensional graphic. It can be used to collate information gathered from social networking sites, satellite navigation equipment, mobile phones, financial transactions and IP network logs.

Police have confirmed its purchase and declined to rule out its use in investigating public order disturbances.

Campaigners and lawyers have expressed concern at how the software could be used to monitor innocent parties such as protesters in breach of data protection legislation.
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