Three new Australian dinosaurs: Top: Australovenator wintonensis; middle: Wintonotitan wattsi: bottom: Diamantinasaurus matildae
Courtesy T. Tischler, Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural HistoryThree new dinosaur species from the mid-Cretaceous period have been unearthed in Queensland, Australia. Australovenator wintonensis was a relatively small but deadly 1100 pound theropod that hunted its prey 98 million years ago. Remains of two new sauropods species were also found. Wintonotitan wattsi was a giraffe-like titanosaurus, while Diamantinasaurus matildae ( a stockier, more hippo-like plant-eater. Australia has given up very few dinosaur fossils because the continent has remained relatively flat and undisturbed by the tectonic forces that churn up fossil-containing layers on other continents. Paleontologists had to bulldoze off more than a yard of overburden to get to the fossil layer. Australovenator is nicknamed "Banjo" after poet A.B. "Banjo" Paterson who wrote Australia's unofficial anthem, "Waltzing Matilda" on a nearby sheep ranch in the late 19th century. The new research appears in the online journal PLoS ONE but you can also read more here.
Tags : Today the public had it's first crack to walk out on "The Ledge," the new glass balconies on the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower. Made entirely of glass, visitors walk out from the 103rd floor Skydeck on to the ledge and can see straight down 1,353 feet below. Here's a collection of photos from the Associated Press showing the new sensation in action. I freak out on the Guthrie Theater's "yellow box" glass floors that are like ten or 12 stories above ground, so I think I won't be going to "The Ledge" any time soon.
In this age of über-social networking via the internet and assorted technologies the folks at CollegeHumor.com have come up with a rather clever (and nicely-produced) spoof of the classic American musical "West Side Story". Inter-gang relations just ain't what they used to be.
Bleh.
Check out the video, y’all. It was taken in a sewer in North Carolina somewhere, and it appears to show the end of the world. (Yes, I believe the end of the world will involve gelatinous lumps pulsating in the dark.)
I noticed this on a couple sites yesterday, and the general consensus seemed to be that it was either the product of film students with too much time on their hands or part of some sort of viral marketing campaign. (What was being marketed? Possibly horror.)
But today, it looks like some folks who are more informed than your average comment board dude (whaaaat?) have chimed in, and it seems that the nightmare is all too real. According to Deepseanews (via Gizmodo—I couldn’t get the link to the original site to work) what we’re looking at “are clumps of annelid worms, almost certainly tubificids (Naididae, probably genus Tubifex).”
The Deapseanews expert elaborates:
“Normally these occur in soil and sediment, especially at the bottom and edges of polluted streams. In the photo they have apparently entered a pipeline somehow, and in the absence of soil they are coiling around each other. The contractions you see are the result of a single worm contracting and then stimulating all the others to do the same almost simultaneously, so it looks like a single big muscle contracting.”
So there you go. They’re alien worm-balls. (“Alien” here being used in the sense of “unfamiliar” or “strange,” rather than “from another planet.”)
The more you know, right? The more you know, the better you understand that you need to stay out of North Carolina sewers unless you’re carrying a flamethrower, or, like, a proton pack.
The Sony Whatnow? Yes, geezers, it was 30 years ago today that Sony introduced the portable, personal tape player. Greg Beato argues that this now-obsolete device paved the way for all future programmable, customizable technology, essentially changing forever the way we interact with media and culture. Not bad for a clunky hand-sized gadget. Meanwhile, a teenager in England put down his MP3 player for a week and went roughing it, using his Dad's old Walkman. Stories of walking ten miles to school, through the snow, uphill both ways, turn out to have been exaggerated, but only slightly.
NOVA - MUSICAL MINDS at 8PM ET/PT (please check local listings)
Can the power of music make the brain come alive? Throughout his career Dr. Oliver Sacks, neurologist and acclaimed author, whose book Awakenings was made into a Oscar-nominated feature film starring Robin Williams and Robert De Niro, has encountered myriad patients who are struggling to cope with debilitating medical conditions. While their ailments vary, many have one thing in common: an appreciation for the therapeutic effects of music. NOVA follows four individuals—two of whom are Sacks’s case studies—and even peers into Sacks’s own brain, to investigate music’s strange, surprising, and still unexplained power over the brain.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/musicminds/
NOVA scienceNOW hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson at 9PM ET/PT (please check local listings)
The fast-paced science magazine series NOVA scienceNOW returns on
June 30 on PBS with a new, 10-week season full of fresh new perspectives, fascinating
scientists, cutting-edge innovations, and provocative stories from the frontlines of science,
technology, and medicine. Hosted by renowned author and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse
Tyson, the series also introduces a brand-new correspondent this season, Ziya Tong (former
host and producer of Wired Science).
Once again robots do something I’ve been doing for years and everybody gets excited.
Robots are stealing our jobs: Even when our job is to eat bugs.
Courtesy manbartlettYeah, hooray, robots can walk. I’ve been walking for, like, most of my life. A robot can make sad faces. Whatever. That’s practically my specialty. A robot can simulate excruciating pain and horror. So? Nuts to “simulate”—I live it.
Great. It’s all great. Robots are programmed and built to do all sorts of inane stuff, and people love it. But I’ve been able to do this stuff forever, and nobody’s giving me high-fives and kisses. Cool, a robot can remember your name. I can usually so that. A robot can remember your credit card number. I can for sure do that. Give me a chance people, and you’ll see how much better than a robot I am.
But no. Robot development rumbles onward, and, once again, robots are taking a brave new step where I’ve stepped years ago: they fuel themselves by eating bugs.
Some artsy science people in London have designed self-sustaining robotic furniture. The robots digest organic matter (bugs) in “microbial fuel cells,” creating enough power to run a clock (I can do that) or light up lamp (I could probably do that), and eat more bugs (done). Microbial fuel cells, by the way, are sort of like batteries that run on decomposing matter. Chemicals in the fuel cell (I think) pretty much steal the electrons being produced by bacteria as they break down organic fuel. I can’t do this, but, then again, no one is asking me to. MFCs seem like pretty interesting technology, actually. More about them here, if you’re interested.
The designers have made working models of a fly-attracting lamp that works like a pitcher plant to capture its victims, a wall-mounted clock with a sticky conveyor belt, and a table that attracts mice onto its surface and into a trap door, where (I guess) they are digested to death. (I can’t help it… it’s like the Pit of Carkoon! Argh. I’m always going to be this way.)
It’s all pretty neat, although the small mammal attracting and digesting table might be a little much. That one seems like a case of somebody getting a little too arty or a little too sciencey for their own good. I mean, I could lure and eat a mouse, and hold your food for you, but would you want me to?
alien-y
Courtesy namillionairee
You know that movie Signs? Imagine how much cooler it would have been if, instead of a preachy horror (ish) movie about aliens, Mel Gibson found wallabies making the circles in his fields, just chilling out, playing some hacky sack, listening to Phish. Picture it with me now: maybe one of them has dreadlocks, they’re wearing a lot of tie-dye and hemp. Can anyone say Academy Award? Take that, M. Night. All right, I guess Mel would have to be growing opium poppies and living in Tasmania. But he is Australian, so there’s that. Call it creative license, or something.
“What is she rambling on about?” Yeah that’s right, I can hear your thoughts. Well, I’m getting there. Tasmania, home of Bugs Bunny’s nemesis (didn’t you know that Elmer Fudd was from Oceania? Man, I slay me), is also a huge producer of legal opium (used for painkillers like morphine). Australia produces about fifty percent of the world’s legally grown opium. Awesome.
Wallabies, which are like little kangaroos (that is the official scientific classification), have been wandering into fields of these poppies, ingesting a few, and making crop circles. In the words of Tasmania’s attorney general, Laura Giddings, these animals are “getting as high as a kite, and going around in circles. Then they crash.” Aw, sleepy little marsupials.
There are a few instances of other animals having a little “Dorothy Moment” in the poppy fields, like sheep, but wallabies are the most frequent offenders. Can you blame them? I mean, it’s Friday, they ain’t got no job …
Super Corn!: Resistant to bugs AND delicious!
Courtesy U.S. Department of Agriculture
While every other industry in the world seems to be tanking and going to visit their loyal bankruptcy lawyer, science and the genome project is on top!
The cost of sequencing has drastically decreased over the past few years and now smaller institutes can afford to contribute to the genome project. The Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council has recently opened a new research center in Norwich, England to aid farmers in the face of climate change.
Their main overarching goal is to help boost food production for future generations. They take seriously the threats of climate change on the global food sources. As such the institute is hoping to develop crops that are more resistant to harmful insects and can withstand severe drought. Outside of issues surrounding climate change there is great interest on the board to develop new strains of vegetables that will contain compounds that reduce the incidence of some cancers.
With more institutes like the one in Norwich and affordable genome sequencing we may well survive the terrors of climate change!
It's only a squirt gun: Wait—what am I saying, "only"?
Courtesy Wikimedia CommonsGone are the heady days of the devil-may-care Raindrop Kid, and the infamous Morning Dew Gang. (Not to be confused with the morning dugong, which I believe is just an early-rising manitee-like creature.)
Yessir, the iron fisted rule of the rain barons is over, and the good people of Colorado can now legally gather rainwater.
Colorado is thirsty country, and they’ve got some serious laws regarding water rights. The folks who own flowing and standing water have wanted to make sure that no one tapped into their supply—precipitation in this case—and so it has been illegal to, say, put a bucket under your gutters and water your garden with it.
A 2007 study, however, showed that something like 97 percent of falling water in the Denver area never made it anywhere near a stream (it all either evaporated, or was quickly absorbed my plants), and so whoever owned water rights to a stream didn’t have much to complain about.
Taking this into consideration alongside the growing population of the region, and shrinking water supplies, state government decided to allow people to gather and use the water falling on their homes—so long as they have a permit. So if you’re dead set on maintaining that outlaw freedom, I suppose you could always just use a rain barrel without a permit. Yee-haw.
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