Dinos Evolved by Fattening Up
Think of a dinosaur and what may come to mind is a large, lumbering animal with four legs, a long neck, a tiny head and tail.
Now a new species helps to explain how this iconic dino body shape evolved.
The new dinosaur, Aardonyx celestae, belongs to the Sauropodomorpha, a group that includes the ancestors of sauropods — gigantic, four-legged herbivores — but not the sauropods themselves. The largest animals that ever walked the earth were sauropodomorphs.
The recently documented sauropodomorph, described in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, lived around 200 to 183 million years ago in South Africa and was nearly 30 feet in length.
Discovery News (thanks, Fosca)
Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody – Computer Remix
OK, I’m a geek, can’t help it, just love this!
LHC First Particle Beams Collision Doesn’t Obliterate World, Universe
Hey, we are alive! In the end we didn’t need any escape pods: The Large Hadron Collider has smashed two particle beams together for the first time. However, the unknown is still ahead of us, as they ramp things up:
Next on the schedule is an intense commissioning phase aimed at increasing the beam intensity and accelerating the beams. All being well, by Christmas, the LHC should reach 1.2 TeV per beam, and have provided good quantities of collision data for the experiments’ calibrations.
New Human Species: Hobbits
Professor Mike Morwood created an international storm with his discovery of Homo floresiensis — dubbed the Hobbit because of its small size and big feet — on Flores, an Indonesian island, in 2003. The archaeologist said the Hobbits, who were only about one metre tall and weighed just 30kg, existed on the remote island until about 12,000 years ago.
Homo floresiensis is a genuine ancient human species and not a descendant of healthy humans dwarfed by disease found researchers from Stony Brook University Medical Center in New York. Using statistical analysis on skeletal remains of a well-preserved female specimen, the researchers determined the “hobbit” to be a distinct species and not a genetically flawed version of modern humans.
Daily Galaxy (thanks Jay, Kim, John etc)
NASA Scientist Converts iPhone into Chemical Sniffer
Cell phones have increasingly become mobile labs and tech tools for researchers, and now NASA has gotten in on the act. A postage-stamp-sized chemical sensor allows iPhones to sniff out low airborne concentrations of chemicals such as ammonia, chlorine gas and methane.
A puff from a “sample jet” helps sense any airborne chemicals. That information gets processed by a silicon chip consisting of 16 nanosensors, and then passes on to another phone or computer through any Wi-Fi or telecom network.
PopSci (thanks, ReliegiousMarie)
Are there asexuals among us?
Jesse Bering over at Scientific American writes. “Gay people are often asked by the curious: When did you first realize you were gay?” In my case, I remember undressing my Superman doll–and being terribly disappointed at the result–as well as being motivated to befriend the more attractive boys in third grade. But hormonally speaking, it wasn’t until I was about fourteen that I first looked in the mirror and thought to myself, ah, that’s what I am all right, it all makes perfect sense now.
It wasn’t much of a mystery. After all, lust isn’t exactly a subtle thing. Back then I derived as much pleasure from making out with my “girlfriend” as I might have from scraping the plaque from my dog’s teeth. In contrast, barely touching legs with a boy I had a crush on sparked an electric, ineffable ecstasy. In the locker room after high school gym class, I forced myself to picture naked girls in my head (particularly my girlfriend) as a sort of cognitive cold shower, a pre-emptive strike against an otherwise embarrassing physical response. I could go on but you get the idea: whether or not we like, hide or accept what we are, our true identities–gay, straight, bisexual–consciously dawn on each of us at some point in adolescence. We all have a natural “orientation” towards sexual contact with others, and for the most part we’re just hopeless pawns, impotent onlookers, to our body’s desires.”
Full story over at Scientific American
The Symphony os Science
I just got a good telling off from “Spike”. He wanted to know how we missed this one. Well, we can only apologise. The Symphony of Science is a geeks dream – and being a Carl Sagan fan it at least raises a lasting smirk in my inner nerd.
Carl Sagan (on drums), Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawkins laying it down in the style of T-Pain. I think my favourite lyric is “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe”. There’s a couple of them, both available for download. If only hip hop / R&B was like this.
Business man visits every country on earth in record time
He began his epic journey to 194 countries with a visit to Holland in July 2002 and finished his mission in Kosovo in May of this year – six years, ten months and seven days later – with plenty of drama along the way.
Mr Samaddar, an Indian national who now lives in Dubai, said of his trip to Afghanistan: ‘The hotel where I stayed in Kabul was blown apart an hour after I left my room.
‘I have travelled through regions with bullets flying thick and fast all around. It’s a miracle I didn’t get killed.
‘In East Timor, I stayed without food for three days and had to pay a local lad a few hundred dollars for some bananas.’In Nauru, my flight was cancelled eight times and I had to overstay for one-and-a-half months.’
2012 both sides of the argument in clear graphic form
We like to report on conspiracy theories in all their glorious forms. Quite often you only get one, well formed side of the argument – whether right or wrong there’s always 2 sides (sometimes more) and usually one side is better funded, more backed up, easier to grasp than the other. But let’s not bury our heads in the sand and see all sides. I love a “fake moon landing” documentary as much as the next, but I can watch it safe in the knowledge it really happened because I used to work in a special effects department and I know fake TV when I see it. Some of them are even quite convincing at times.
So that people can be informed about what the others side says this process is necessary. At this point we get the few angry ranters who criticise us for even reporting such a story and think that this represents OUR beliefs or that were “helping the opposition” or tell us our blog has “dramatically gone down hill” for even mentioning it.
However on this occasion we have BOTH sides of the argument in lovely clear detail from the wonderful lot at informationisbeautiful.net. Admittedly this is a “debunking the 2012 theory” graphic and I’m sure that some 2012 end-of-worlders will have a pop. But I appeal to you to make your own lovely graphic like the one below and we’ll show that too (unless it’s rubbish then we’ll ignore you and call you crazy). And the 2012 movie with John Cusack doesn’t count because it’s very very silly.
I wish there were more “both sides” things like this.
Click here to see the full size image via informationisbeautiful.net
