✔How Captialism Saved the Honey Bee
One of the most interesting and upbeat articles I’ve read in YEARS!! A must read, especially in these times when so much seems to go so wrong so consistently.
✔Then there are the ever-present Luddites, whom we will always have among us. Genetically engineered crops send them into hysterics, but this?
✔This fascinating article is about what unborn babies hear in the womb:
Fetuses can distinguish between someone speaking to them in English and Japanese one month before they are born, researchers have found.
Fetuses can hear things in the womb, including speech - although it's muffled.
But they can still perceive the rhythm of a language, and the study suggests that fetuses discriminate between different types of language based on rhythmic patterns.
A recent research article suggests the T-Rex couldn't run very fast. From what I can tell from this selection on the T-Rex-speed articles available, they're talking about adults. But as some comments suggest here and there, youngermembers of the Tryannosauridae clans could run quite fast. Juveniles were probably pretty speedy, for example. And when all is said and done, Mama and Papa T-Rex could probably outrun the average human anyway, so sayonarato you should you find yourself amongst them. Actually, there's more and more evidence that they hunted in family packs. Although many paleontologists vociferously dispute this, it's where the trend in T-Rex thinking is going, but see:
Here's a list of related articles with a few pithy comments included:
Well, haven't they also "proven" that bumblebees can't fly?
And proven that mans destruction of the planet would make it uninhabitable by 2010 or so?
Also depends too much on assumptions used- if he lands on his toes (claws) in soft mud it will be very different from coming down on his heel in basalt. Are his knees and ankles locked, or do they flex to absorb the force of landing? Can they tell from the fossil how much of the bone is bone and how much is marrow, or do they just scale up from a lizard bone? (but then I didn't read the paper, these assumptions may be specified).
Yes. 17 mph corresponds to a 3.5 minute mile- in high school track a 5 minute mile is extremely good. Also corresponds to 24 ft/sec- with a 12 foot stride (my guess) that would be two steps per second- by no means plodding along!
There is a huge flaw in the premise of this article, and it's this: 17 Miles Per hour is still pretty fast. The average, healthy, human (Usain Bolt aside) can run 15MPH, and for only about twenty seconds. 17 MPH is like the speed of a weak moped. It basically means that if you were running for your life, as fast as you've ever run under any circumstance, T. Rex would still run you down quite quickly.
So this does not represent a really radical change from what people in general think they know about the king of the dinosaurs. Basically, it's somewhat slower than Spielberg represents it, but faster than YOU. So still pretty swift, for all practical purposes.
✔At least some are now saying the most ferocious land predator on record wasn't a super-sized crow:
T-Rex didn’t have feathers
✔Finally, two more interesting T-Rex-related articles. First, they got so big because they first got smart:
"The ancestors of T. rex would have looked a whole lot like Timurlengia, a horse-sized hunter with a big brain and keen hearing that would put us to shame," said Dr. Steve Brusatte, a co-author from the University of Edinburgh."Only after these ancestral tyrannosaurs evolved their clever brains and sharp senses did they grow into the colossal sizes of T. rex. Tyrannosaurs had to get smart before they got big."
A T-Rex’s face was something special, indeed!
He and his team found that the dinosaur family had no lips and had faces covered with small patches of armored skin and large, flat scales more similar to crocodiles than to lizards. Behind their eyes on each side of the head there was a large horn that may have been covered in keratin, the material that makes a person’s fingernails and a bird’s beak. The team also discovered that tyrannosaur snouts and jaws were most likely laced with nerves that made their skin supersensitive, comparable to a human’s fingertips. The extra sensitivity may have aided the tyrannosaurs in hunting and could have helped shape the family into efficient killing machines
Then there's some (beginnings of, possibly, maybe) science-fiction become science fact:
Not long ago, in the early 1990s, scientists only speculated that teleportation using quantum physics could be possible.
Now, researchers in China have taken the process a few steps further: they successfully teleported a photon from Earth to a satellite orbiting more than 500 km (311 mi) away.
The satellite, called Micius, is a highly sensitive photo receiver capable of detecting the quantum states of single photons fired from the ground. Micius was launched to allow scientists to test various technological building blocks for quantum feats including entanglement, cryptography, and teleportation.
This teleportation feat was announced as one of the first results of these experiments. Not only did the team teleport the first object ever from the ground to orbit, they also created the first satellite-to-ground quantum network, smashing the record for the longest distance for which entanglement has been measured.
✔Some have been getting nervous about the Yellowstone Super Volcano, but we're told to relax:
"The location and focal mechanism solution of this earthquake are consistent with right-lateral faulting in association with faults of the Lewis and Clark line, a prominent zone of strike-slip, dip slip and oblique slip faulting trending east-southeast from northern Idaho to east of Helena, Montana, southeast of this earthquake," said the USGS.
✔Seems likely that some form of the Wooly Mammoth will reappear (a Mammoth/Indian elephant cross), but oddly, they want to "test-tub" it and not give it a mother:
That's just a cruel idea from the beginning. Bring 'em back if you can but give them Indian Elephant mothers (they're more closely related to the Indian elephant than any other elephant, and the scientists will be using Indian elephant DNA anyway, so...).
The geology of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM) is dynamic, driven not by plate tectonics but by the movement of subsurface bodies of salt. Salt deposits, a remnant of an ocean that existed some 200 million years ago, behave in a certain way when overlain by heavy sediments. They compact, deform, squeeze into cracks, and balloon into overlying material.
Such salt tectonics continue to sculpt the geologic strata and seafloor in the GOM like few other places on Earth. Because of this salt tectonism and a steady supply of sediment delivered to the basin by rivers, the GOM’s seafloor is a terrain continually in flux. Bathymetry is ripe with active faults and escarpments, slump blocks and slides, canyons and channels, sediment waves, pockmarks and mud volcanoes, and other natural oil and gas seeps.
✔Old Stephen Hawkings got called out for hysterics, too:
As for all you Global Warming nerds (Al Gore says we've passed the point of no return in some ways; betcha didn't notice), there's been a lot of news.
original article below behind a WSJ payway:
Most experts believe that warming of less than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels will result in no net economic and ecological damage. Therefore, the new report is effectively saying (based on the middle of the range of the IPCC's emissions scenarios) that there is a better than 50-50 chance that by 2083, the benefits of climate change will still outweigh the harm.
Probably the biggest news is this report:
This is a research report exploring whether the various temperature adjustments and manipulations were overdone, careless, or intentionally faked. The authors and reviewers are pretty hefty scientists, so we'll see if this goes anywhere. An excerpt:
The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.
And a related story about a long-running, never-resolved lawsuit brought by Michael Mann of the Global Warming temperature "Hockey Stick" fame. After years and years of litigation, it's not going good for him:
Refusal to hand over the raw data will likely land Mann in a Contempt of Court finding. Should this happen then not only will Mann loss by default, but he could and likely would be held responsible for everyone's court costs. Being that this fight has gone on for six years, those costs could easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. These court costs would have to come out of Mann'sown pocket and insurance and the university would refuse to pay them because Mann brought this upon himself with the contempt charges. It could easily bankrupt Mann.
One no must ask the question of what is it about the raw data that is so startling that Nann would risk personal bankruptcy and public condemnation by refusing to release it. There is only one answer that I can see which is how the data and computer codes used to analyze it are fabricated. It has taken a long time, but we may finally be seeing an end to this charade into scientific malpractice.
Should it indeed turn out that Mann fabricated the whole "Hockey Stick" schtick, then good-night nurse for a big portion of AGW. What's interesting is that while there's a U.S. court case on this, there's also a Canadian one, and the judge there is the one who might well find Michael Mann in Contempt of Court. So, we'll see.
Finally, something for Mike Finn and me:
Police: Poconos woman kills boyfriend after spat with reptilian cult
TOBYHANNA, Pa. (AP) — A woman shot her boyfriend in the head after he asked her to kill him because he thought the leader of a cult they belonged to was a reptile posing as a human, police said.
Barbara Rogers fatally shot her boyfriend, Steven Mineo, in the forehead from point-blank range on Saturday in their apartment in Coolbaugh Township, about 100 miles north of Philadelphia, authorities said.
Rogers told officers Mineo, 32, was having “online issues” with a cult and asked her to kill him, said Lt. Steven Williams, of the Pocono Mountain Regional Police. She said her boyfriend believed the cult's leader to be a “reptilian” pretending to be a human, a police affidavit said.
Rogers, 42, told police that the group centers on “aliens and raptures.” Online postings associated with the cult detail a theory that a group of alien reptiles is subverting the human race through mind control.
Michael, what can I say? Every once in a while, the truth almost gets out, but we're able to suppress it. How much longer, I wonder? :D
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