Ediacaran Fossil Trails Identified

Trails found in rocks dating back 565 million years are thought to be the earliest evidence of animal locomotion ever found.

The newly-discovered fossils, from rocks in Newfoundland in Canada, were analysed by an international team led by Oxford University scientists. They identified over 70 fossilised trails indicating that some ancient creatures moved, in a similar way to modern sea anemones, across the seafloors of the Ediacaran Period.

The team publish a report of their research in the February edition of the journal Geology.

'The markings we've found clearly indicate that these organisms could exert some sort of muscular control during locomotion,' said Alex Liu of Oxford University's Department of Earth Sciences, an author of the paper. 'This is exciting because it is the first evidence that creatures from this early period of Earth's history had muscles to allow them to move around -- enabling them to hunt for food or escape adverse local conditions and, importantly, indicating that they were probably animals.'

Scientists compared the trails to those left by the modern sea anemone Urticina, and found many similarities suggesting that the animals that made them were anemone-like -- perhaps using a muscular disc-shaped 'foot' to get around as anemones do today.

Evidence for animal movement from before the Cambrian Period (542-488 million years ago) is very rare, which has led many palaeontologists to suggest that earlier organisms were stationary and perhaps resembled modern fungi rather than animals.

Discovering evidence for animal movement in the Ediacaran Period (630-542 million years ago), nearly 30 million years before the Cambrian, is especially significant as it sheds light on the world before the so-called 'Cambrian explosion' in which a vast array of animal life rapidly appears in the fossil record -- an event whose apparent suddenness greatly troubled Charles Darwin when he was gathering evidence for his theory of evolution.

WOW! No time to comment though.

Iran Claims to Launch Live Cargo into Space

Iran said Wednesday it had launched a rocket carrying a rodent, two turtles and some worms into orbit, claiming it as a successful advance in a space program that has raised international concerns.

The official Islamic Republic News Agency said the "home-built" Kavoshgar-3, or Explorer-3 rocket was launched at a ceremony to commemorate this month's anniversary of the 1979 Islamic Revolution that overthrew Iran's monarchy.

Iran, which is trying to contain a political crisis after violent protests erupted following the disputed re-election of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is expected to mount a series of high profile events to mark the anniversary.

State-run Press TV quoted Iranian Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi declaring the launch a success and describing Iran's space program as "peaceful."

[...]

IRNA said the rocket launched Wednesday was "designed to send consecutive aerial images to ground and measure environmental information."

Press TV quoted Iranian space officials saying live video transmission and telemetry allowed the rat or mouse -- named Helmz-1 -- turtles and worms to be monitored during their space voyage.

The Fars news agency said later Wednesday that the animals had returned to Earth and were being studied by scientists.

In August 2008, a claim by Iran that it had successfully launched a vehicle capable of carrying a satellite into orbit were dismissed by the Pentagon, which said the rocket had been too unstable to leave the Earth's atmosphere.

So did they? Or didn't they?

It'd be funny if the Iranians between the Japanese, Europeans, and Indians to having an astronaut.

Chinese (and AvLeak) Views of the Russian PAK-FA

Bill Sweetman of AvLeak says:

First of all, for anyone contemplating the use of the word "Raptorski": don't. While this is an airplane that could have been the answer to the Advanced Tactical Fighter requirement, way back when, it's not an F-22 in many important ways.

Xiong in China Military Review states:

[...] the Russian T-50 could hardly compete with the U.S. F-22 "Raptor" [...] T-50's shape and F-22 is indeed a resemblance, but the current evaluation of an advanced fighter aircraft whether or not mainly depends on how its information technology equipment. [...] the Russian fighter in the information and data chain is not like the United States. He said, F-22 main features is the powerful information technology.

(note, translations can be rough...)

Gist of it is that no one in the defense circles is terribly impressed with the T-50/PAK-FA. It's not what was advertised. *bites tongue*

Trees Are Growing Faster

Speed is not a word typically associated with trees; they can take centuries to grow. However, a new study to be published the week of Feb. 1 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has found evidence that forests in the Eastern United States are growing faster than they have in the past 225 years. The study offers a rare look at how an ecosystem is responding to climate change.

For more than 20 years forest ecologist Geoffrey Parker has tracked the growth of 55 stands of mixed hardwood forest plots in Maryland. The plots range in size, and some are as large as 2 acres. Parker's research is based at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center, 26 miles east of the nation's capital.

Parker's tree censuses have revealed that the forest is packing on weight at a much faster rate than expected. He and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute postdoctoral fellow Sean McMahon discovered that, on average, the forest is growing an additional 2 tons per acre annually. That is the equivalent of a tree with a diameter of 2 feet sprouting up over a year.

Forests and their soils store the majority of the Earth's terrestrial carbon stock. Small changes in their growth rate can have significant ramifications in weather patterns, nutrient cycles, climate change and biodiversity. Exactly how these systems will be affected remains to be studied.

Parker and McMahon's paper focuses on the drivers of the accelerated tree growth. The chief culprit appears to be climate change, more specifically, the rising levels of atmospheric CO2, higher temperatures and longer growing seasons.

Assessing how a forest is changing is no easy task. Forest ecologists know that the trees they study will most likely outlive them. One way they compensate for this is by creating a "chronosequence"—a series of forests plots of the same type that are at different developmental stages. At SERC, Parker meticulously tracks the growth of trees in stands that range from 5 to 225 years old. This allowed Parker and McMahon to verify that there was accelerated growth in forest stands young and old. More than 90% of the stands grew two to four times faster than predicted from the baseline chronosequence.

By grouping the forest stands by age, McMahon and Parker were also able to determine that the faster growth is a recent phenomenon. If the forest stands had been growing this quickly their entire lives, they would be much larger than they are.

[...]

During the past 22 years CO2 levels at SERC have risen 12%, the mean temperature has increased by nearly three-tenths of a degree and the growing season has lengthened by 7.8 days. The trees now have more CO2 and an extra week to put on weight. Parker and McMahon suggest that a combination of these three factors has caused the forest's accelerated biomass gain.

No time to comment!

Experimental Evolutionary Ecology: Evolution Impacts Ecologies

(artificial stream from the experiment)

Biologists have known for long that ecology, the interaction between organisms and their environment, plays a significant role in forming new species and in modifying living ones. The traditional view is that ecology shapes evolution. The environment defines a template and the process of evolution by natural selection shapes organisms to fit that template.

Some specialized theory, a few laboratory experiments and studies of natural populations suggest, however, that evolutionary processes reciprocate by influencing ecology in turn.

Now a team of biologists presents evidence that ecology and evolution are indeed reciprocally interacting processes, presenting a fundamental shift in our understanding of the relationship between evolution and ecology.

"Ecology for the most part ignores evolution because organisms are treated as constants," said David Reznick, an evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Riverside, who led the study. "This does not mean that ecologists don't believe in evolution. It means the general assumption is that ecological interactions happen on such a short time scale in comparison to evolution that evolution can be ignored—similar to the way physicists can often safely ignore relativity in the majority of their experiments.

[...]

In the new experiments, the researchers collected guppies from the two different types of communities, and quantified their impact on the stream ecosystem by placing them in replicate, artificial streams built alongside a natural stream. The researchers chose this location for the artificial streams so that they could divert water from a spring that normally flowed into the stream in such a way that it first flowed through the artificial streams, emptying later into the natural stream.

Next, they seeded the artificial streams with organisms such as insect larvae from the natural stream so that all artificial streams had similar ecosystems at the start of the experiment.

They found that guppies from the two types of fish communities had substantially different impacts after only four weeks on the structure and function of their ecosystems.

"Guppies from the more diverse fish communities ate more insect larvae while the low-predation guppies – guppies from the simple fish communities – ate more algae," said Ronald Bassar, a graduate student in Reznick's lab and the first author of the research paper. "These differences in diet resulted in the artificial streams with guppies from the diverse communities having substantially more algae and fewer invertebrates than streams stocked with guppies from the simple communities.

"There were corresponding differences in how and at what rate nutrients, like nitrogen or phosphorus, were recycled. The streams with high-predation guppies – guppies from the more diverse fish communities – had less plant production and oxygen consumption, a slower breakdown of leaves that had fallen into the water and a slower accumulation of detritus, the breakdown product of leaves."

The researchers found, too, that their findings from their experiments in the artificial streams mirrored their observations in guppies across natural stream communities in Trinidad.

"By doing our experiments in the artificial streams we are able to pin down guppies as a likely cause of what we see in the natural streams," Bassar said. "The experiments show that local adaptation causes the evolution of differences in diet, which, in turn, causes differences in ecosystem structure. Our next step is to characterize how this changed ecosystem, in turn, shapes how the guppies adapt to it."

I suspected as much, but...anyways. no more time to comment.

NASA Budget: A Bright Spot

Restarts Plutonium-238 production w/ DOE to support future missions

AWESOME!

(especially with the Russians backing out of the deal...)

Polish Neandertals Found

A team of Polish scientists said Monday they have discovered three Neanderthal teeth in a cave, a find they hope may shed light on how similar to modern humans our ancestors were.

Neanderthal artifacts have been unearthed in Poland before. But the teeth are the first bodily Neanderthal remains found in the country, according to Mikolaj Urbanowski, an archaeologist with Szczecin University and the project's lead researcher.

Urbanowski said the teeth were unearthed in the Stajna Cave, north of the Carpathian Mountains, along with flint tools and the bones of the woolly mammoth and the woolly rhinoceros, both extinct Ice Age species.

The researchers also found a hammer made of reindeer antler and bones of cave bears bearing cut marks, indicating they were eaten by the Neanderthals, Urbanowski said.

"The cave bears were big, dangerous animals and this supports the view the Neanderthals were really efficient hunters," he said.

The findings were reported by the German science journal Naturwissenschaften in an online article dated Jan. 28.

Mmmm. How to get a Neandertal cookbook for cavebear? mmmm.

Uranocentrodon & Lystrosaurus: Wow!

That is seriously kewl. Go look at Dmitry Bogdanov's gallery for more.

It's Official: Return to the Moon Tossed

President Barack Obama's proposed budget gives NASA a $6 billion 5-year boost but aborts early attempts to return to the moon and turns over space transportation to commercial companies.

The space agency's budget would grow to $19 billion in 2011 under the proposed budget released on Monday, with an emphasis on science and less spent on space exploration.

It "adds $6 billion to NASA's budget over five years and draws upon American ingenuity to enable us to embark on an ambitious 21st Century program of human space exploration," the budget proposal reads.

But the plan ends the Constellation program "which was planning to use an approach similar to the Apollo program to return astronauts back to the Moon 50 years after that program's triumphs."

The budget notes that an independent panel found the moon program was years behind schedule.

"Instead, we are launching a bold new effort that invests in American ingenuity for developing more capable and innovative technologies for future space exploration," it reads.

The new budget, which is subject to change by Congress, also extends operations at the International Space Station past its planned retirement date of 2016, suggesting such potential additions as inflatable space habitats.

I'm saddened, but, honestly, this was expected. Space goals never survive past administrations it seems. I have to wonder what the follow-on to the Orion capsule is going to be. A Dragon derived one? There are some bits of hope in here. One being that the budget is growing.

However, I believe, strongly, that NASA needs to have some of its missions trimmed. The earth observing mission ought to be handed over to NOAA. I have to wonder if we ought not to scrap NASA as is and reform the thing. Spin NACA back out. The aeronautics and astronautics has been a troubled marriage at best. Then make a department of space or some such.

Looks like it'll be a while before we get any more additions to the A's on the map. Damnit. I was promised moon colonies when I was a kid! We may just do it with or without, Mr President. Hopefully, we'll be announcing something big this week or next for Team Phoenicia. We'll see. The investing class is a fickle bunch.

What Was the Rationale Behind the Chinese ABM Test?

On January 11, a large missile streaked upward from a test site in China. The missile rocketed beyond the atmosphere and struck another similar missile launched from a separate site. Later that day, the official Xinhua news agency announced a ‘test on ground-based midcourse missile interception technology.’

‘The test has achieved the expected objective,’ Xinhua proclaimed. ‘The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country.’

It was a seemingly impressive accomplishment--and apparently a big surprise to Western governments. To date, just one nation has managed to fire one missile to intercept another outside Earth's atmosphere: the United States. And that was after some 20 years of concerted technology development. Today the United States spends around $10 billion a year developing and buying missile-defense equipment, yet has hit another missile in exo-atmospheric tests on just a handful of occasions. The Chinese test seemed to represent a huge step towards eliminating the US lead.

It's unclear, however, how realistic the Chinese test was and how advanced the Chinese missile-defense technology truly is. It's equally unclear what exactly the Chinese missile interceptor is for.

These uncertainties are not unusual. The whole field of missiles and missile defense is notorious for its political theater. Nations will fund, buy or just plan for ballistic missiles and ballistic-missile defenses--however technically troubled or operationally impractical--solely for posturing. ‘These things tend to be tools of international politics,’ says Phil Coyle, an expert in missiles and missile defenses.

By firing just a handful of ballistic missiles, Iraq was nearly able to draw Israel into the 1991 Gulf War, which could have shattered the Western-Arab alliance arrayed against Iraq. North Korea, Iran and China all field ballistic missiles to back up their rhetoric towards South Korea, Israel and Taiwan, respectively. By the same token, systems that promise to render impotent these politically-empowering ballistic missiles carry much of the same weight in the halls of diplomacy and at the bargaining table.

For that reason, missile defenses are also big business. The US arms industry earns billions of dollars a year exporting various command systems, radars, launchers and interceptors associated with missile defense. In one of the biggest recent deals, last autumn Turkey announced plans to spend $8 billion on US-made PAC-3 missile interceptors.

States ringing heavily missile-armed nations are the best customers. The United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia all have bought PAC-3 interceptors, owing to Iran's growing missile force. South Korea bought PAC-3s and sea-based SM-2s, and Japan bought PAC-3s and seaborne SM-3s, both to contend with North Korea. Taiwan is buying PAC-3s to defend against China.

Was the Chinese test for real? Is the system meant to boost Beijing's position as it jockeys for influence over Taiwan? Was the point to send a signal to some other strategic rival--the United States perhaps, or India? Is the interceptor meant for export as part of a burgeoning commercial arms catalogue?

‘The bottom line is that people don't know for sure what's motivating this,’ says Michael Swaine, an analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. And considering how the Americans have been working on their own missile defenses, good answers regarding the Chinese system could be years in coming. Just one thing is certain: whatever their operational reality, whatever the rationale behind their development, missile defenses represent an important and growing concern for the whole world and in particular, Asia.

The article goes on. I have my opinions (they want the capability as much as some of us do), but they are not the mainstream. Main, also, because I think the capability is worth having.

Sukhoi T-50/PAK-FA Flight Video

NIF's AWAY! A Step to the Fusion Drive

Using the most powerful laser system ever built, scientists have brought us one step closer to nuclear fusion power, a new study says.

The same process that powers our sun and other stars, nuclear fusion has the potential to be an efficient, carbon-free energy source—with none of the radioactive waste associated with the nuclear fission method used in current nuclear plants.

Thanks to the new achievement, a prototype nuclear fusion power plant could be operating within a decade, speculated study leader Siegfried Glenzer, a physicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California.

Glenzer and colleagues used the world's largest laser array—the Livermore lab's National Ignition Facility—to heat a BB-size fuel pellet to millions of degrees Fahrenheit.

"These lasers are pulsed, and for a very short amount of time"—one ten-billionth of a second—"the power they produce is more than all the power generated by the entire electrical grid of the United States" at any given moment, Glenzer said.

The test confirmed that a technique called inertial fusion ignition could be used to trigger nuclear fusion—the merging of the nuclei of two atoms of, say, hydrogen—which can result in a tremendous amount of excess energy. Nuclear fission, by contrast, involves the splitting of atoms.

The laser demonstration means scientists are now much closer to triggering nuclear fusion in a controlled setting—something that's never been done before and which is necessary if fusion is to be harnessed for energy.

Wow. This is really kewl and damned depressing at the same time. A bit of background is available here.

depressing first. The NIF has waaaaaaaaaaaaaaay over budget. It's waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay behind schedule. In fact, if not for Shrub, I suspect it would have been canceled even with its supposed place in our testing regime. I know a nontrivial number of physicists, including those in the fusion program, that are annoyed with this: it sucks down money, they feel, is better spent elsewhere.

The damned kewl part is that we'er a step closer to inertial confinement fusion. While probably not the best way to produce power unlike the MHD fusion. However, it is INFINITELY closer to what we need for fusion drives in space. Now, assembling this is space is going to be a stone cold...monster...but once you have, you can get some impressive results for propulsion.

Potential irony here: we could get fusion drives long, long before we get fusion reactors.

Oh, note, maybe there's a reason to get that lunar He3 after all, James.

Russian "5th Gen" Fighter/PAK-FA Flies

The great big militaria news is...the T-50/PAK-FA has flown. First off, let me state congratulations to the Russian engineers and techs that got this off the grown. Not so easy to do, especially working where and what you have. Let's see how easy it is to transition into production.

Some very good posts on the subject are here, here, and here. A video in that last one.

That said, let me make a few observations.

Let me state that unless this is a first iteration of multiple prototypes, do NOT expect this to be as stealthy as the F-22 or probably even the F-35. The reason being that if you noticed that the contours are not quite right for it. If there are multiple iterations of prototypes (for the air frame) then this could end up very stealthy.

Shaping is not the only issue here. Composites are also important, but it is really, truly important that they get their material science right. On the one hand, composites have come down in price and pretty easy to work with as we are about to with Team Phoenicia (c'mon tax return!). On the other hand, composite MatSci is not a field that the Russians are noted for...at all.

Furthermore, those nozzles. Dude. IR signature from hell.

Equally important for a 5th generation fighter is the sensor suite and integration. The Soviets, for their time, were pretty good with sensors. Not the best, but enough to cause heart burn and nervousness. A lot of tech has changed since the USSR went poofta.

The side view of the T-50 reminds me of the YF-23 for some reason.

Those renderings from some time back, well, looks like they were damned near spot on. At least for one of the designs. Interesting that.

Homo floresiensis Brain Size Revisited (in terms of primate evolution)

Reconstructing the ups and downs of primate brain evolution: implications for adaptive hypotheses and Homo floresiensis

Stephen H Montgomery, Isabella Capellini, Robert A Barton, and Nicholas I Mundy

BMC Biology 2010, 8:9doi:10.1186/1741-7007-8-9
Published: 27 January 2010

Abstract (provisional)

Background

Brain size is a key adaptive trait. It is often assumed that increasing brain size was a general evolutionary trend in primates, yet recent fossil discoveries have documented brain size decreases in some lineages, raising the question of how general a trend there was for brains to increase in mass over evolutionary time. We present the first systematic phylogenetic analysis designed to answer this question.
Results

We performed ancestral state reconstructions of three traits (absolute brain mass, absolute body mass, relative brain mass) using 37 extant and 23 extinct primate species and three approaches to ancestral state reconstruction: parsimony, maximum likelihood and Bayesian Markov-chain Monte Carlo. Both absolute and relative brain mass generally increased over evolutionary time, but body mass did not. Nevertheless both absolute and relative brain mass decreased along several branches. Applying these results to the contentious case of Homo floresiensis, we find a number of scenarios under which the proposed evolution of the Homo floresiensis brain appears to be plausible, dependent on body mass and phylogenetic position.
Conclusions

Our results confirm that brain expansion began early in primate evolution and show that increases occurred in all major clades. Only in terms of an increase in absolute mass does the human lineage appear particularly striking, with both the rate of proportional change in mass and relative brain size having episodes of greater expansion elsewhere on the primate phylogeny. However, decreases in brain mass also occurred along branches in all major clades, and we conclude that, while selection has acted to enlarge primate brains, in some lineages this trend has been reversed. Further analyses of the phylogenetic position of Homo floresiensis and better body mass estimates are required to confirm the plausibility of the evolution of its small brain mass. We find that for our dataset the Bayesian analysis for ancestral state reconstruction is least affected by inclusion of fossil data suggesting that this approach might be preferable for future studies on other taxa with a poor fossil record.

Paper is here (pdf warning).

The Trouble With Monotremes

There's a small war over the evolution of the Monotremes. It was suggested that the echidna recently branched off from the platypus family. Recently means, btw, around the Paleogene-Neogene boundary. The original paper that suggested it is here. This caused a response. There has now been a response to that response.

India Plans Manned Space Flight in 2016

India plans to launch its first manned space mission in 2016, moving to become the fourth nation to put a man in space.

Space scientists and senior officials of the state-run ISRO are preparing a pre-project report to build the infrastructure and facilities for the mission, estimated to cost a $2.76 billion.

ISRO chairman K. Radhakrishnan said the agency would develop the space module for the program within four years.

"We are planning a human space flight in 2016, with two astronauts who will spend seven days in the Earth's lower orbit," Radhakrishnan told reporters at ISRO headquarters in Bangalore.

The government had allocated $10 million for pre-project initiatives in 2007-08.

The sad part is that, if rumors are true, Obama is about to gut the American space program.

Dino Feather COLOR Found

The colour of some feathers on dinosaurs and early birds has been identified for the first time, reports a paper published in Nature this week.

The research found that the theropod dinosaur Sinosauropteryx had simple bristles – precursors of feathers – in alternate orange and white rings down its tail, and that the early bird Confuciusornis had patches of white, black and orange-brown colouring. Future work will allow precise mapping of colours and patterns across the whole bird.

Mike Benton, Professor of Palaeontology at the University of Bristol, said, "Our research provides extraordinary insights into the origin of feathers. In particular, it helps to resolve a long-standing debate about the original function of feathers – whether they were used for flight, insulation, or display. We now know that feathers came before wings, so feathers did not originate as flight structures.

"We therefore suggest that feathers first arose as agents for colour display and only later in their evolutionary history did they become useful for flight and insulation."

The team of palaeontologists from the University of Bristol, UK, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) in Beijing, University College Dublin and the Open University report two kinds of melanosomes found in the feathers of numerous birds and dinosaurs from the world-famous Jehol beds of NE China.

Melanosomes are colour-bearing organelles buried within the structure of feathers and hair in modern birds and mammals, giving black, grey, and rufous tones such as orange and brown. Because melanosomes are an integral part of the tough protein structure of the feather, they survive when a feather survives, even for hundreds of millions of years.

This is the first report of melanosomes found in the feathers of dinosaurs and early birds. It is also the first report of phaeomelanosomes in fossil feathers, the organelles that provide rufous and brown colours.

These discoveries confirm the substantial body of evidence that suggests birds evolved through a long line of theropod (flesh-eating) dinosaurs. It also demonstrates that the unique assemblage of characters that make a modern bird – feathers, wings, lightweight skeleton, enhanced metabolic system, enlarged brain and visual systems – evolved step-by-step over some 50 million years of dinosaur evolution, through the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.

"These discoveries open up a whole new area of research", said Benton, "allowing us to explore aspects of the life and behaviour of dinosaurs and early birds that lived over 100 million years ago.

"Furthermore, we now know that the simplest feathers in dinosaurs such as Sinosauropteryx were only present over limited parts of its body – for example, as a crest down the midline of the back and round the tail – and so they would have had only a limited function in thermoregulation.

"Feathers are key to the success of birds and we can now dissect their evolutionary history in detail and see how each feather type – and the fine detail of feather structure – was acquired through time. This will link with current work on how the genome controls feather development."

Wow.

Just fscking WOW.

ALso see Not Exactly Rocket Science's Post.

Take that BAND!

Nat Geo's Extraterrestrial

The computer lab makes me gag. So does their treatment of computer models. Precipitation in the models is being misrepresented as well. I'm tempted to tack on the bad science label here because of it.

It's also not as original as I had thought it was going to be. I realize that they only have a limited amount of time but the simplicity of the ecosystems is irritating as well. This was a problem on virtually any faux documentary about past or alien ecosystems, actually.

The State of Russian Science

Political turmoil, a brain drain of scientists and waning interest have transformed Russia from a nation that launched the first satellite into an increasingly minor player in the world of science, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Tuesday.

An analysis of research papers published by Russian scientists shows an almost across-the-board decrease, which reflects Russia's shrinking influence not only in science but in science-based industries such as nuclear power, the authors of the Thomson Reuters report said.

"Russia's research base has a problem, and it shows little sign of a solution," the report reads.

"Russia has been a leader in scientific research and intellectual thinking across Europe and the world for so long that it comes not only as a surprise but a shock to see that it has a small and dwindling share of world activity as well as real attrition of its core strengths."

[...]

Russian research accounts for about 2.6 percent of the world's papers published in journals indexed by Thomson Reuters over five years, the report found.

"For comparison, this is more than Brazil (102,000 papers, 2.1 percent of world) but less than India (144,000 papers, 2.9 percent) and far less than China (415,000 papers, 8.4 percent)."

The main focus was on physics and chemistry, with little research in agriculture or computer science.

[...]

Cuts in funding and an aging work force have not helped, the report said.

"By one 2007 account, a few of the best Russian research institutes have budgets for research amounting to 3-5 percent of comparably sized institutes in the United States," the report reads.

The average age for a member of the Russian Academy of Science is over 50, and the prestige of a field that gave birth to Sputnik as the ultimate expression of Cold War rivalry has plummeted. Just 1 percent of Russians polled in 2006 named science as a prestigious career.

Sad, isn't it?

To make things worse, this seems to be an xUSSR wide situation. In Ukraine, being a scientist was considered, frankly, pathetic. A business career or even a farmer was considered a preferable job. Scientists do not have any respect at all in my experience.

KT Extinction: Did Dr Xu Just Find the Burnt Corpses?

What killed the dinosaurs? Scientist Wang Haijun thinks the answer may be buried inside a 980-foot-long ravine in the Chinese countryside 415 miles southeast of Beijing where hundreds of the creatures may have huddled in the final moments before their extinction.

The fossils here -- more than 15,000 fractured, mangled and blackened bones from about 65 million years ago in the late Cretaceous period right before they went extinct -- support theories of a catastrophe. Global fires. Explosions. Climate change.

"This find is very important for understanding the very end of the age of dinosaurs," said James M. Clark, a paleontologist at George Washington University who has examined some of the fossils.

Sounds like they were killed in a blast to me, but those of you that know more of taphonomy will be possibly be able to correct the possible misconception.

One of the largest and most oft repeated complaints is "Where are the fossils?" (from the KT 'roid splat)

We may be looking at them there. In fact, if this is the result of the Chicxulub Impact, then...that might be the explanation as to why there are so few NorAm fossils in Montana at the time. Why? Think it through.

I'm eagerly waiting for the papers that are generated from the site...and the resulting verbal wars.