Wow

This blog has been rather neglected.

I am hoping about the middle of next month, I can get past what has been eating my brain, time and life to post once more. I may get something out tomorrow though.

The Computer Game (and Interface) I Want

Yeah, stick late at the dayjob...waiting for my turn again.

Blood Vessels in Dinosaur Bones Suggest Endothermy

(caption:The y-axis is an index of the amount of blood flow through the foramen in relation to the body size of mammals (red), reptiles (blue) and dinosaurs (orange-red).)

New research from the University of Adelaide has added to the debate about whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish or warm-blooded and active.

Professor Roger Seymour from the University's School of Earth & Environmental Sciences has applied the latest theories of human and animal anatomy and physiology to provide insight into the lives of dinosaurs. The results will be published this month in Proceedings B, the Proceedings of the Royal Society B (Biological Sciences), and can now be found online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2011.0968

Human thigh bones have tiny holes – known as the 'nutrient foramen' – on the shaft that supply blood to living bone cells inside. New research has shown that the size of those holes is related to the maximum rate that a person can be active during aerobic exercise. Professor Seymour has used this principle to evaluate the activity levels of dinosaurs.

"Far from being lifeless, bone cells have a relatively high metabolic rate and they therefore require a large blood supply to deliver oxygen. On the inside of the bone, the blood supply comes usually from a single artery and vein that pass through a hole on the shaft – the nutrient foramen," he says.

Professor Seymour wondered whether the size of the nutrient foramen might indicate how much blood was necessary to keep the bones in good repair. For example, highly active animals might cause more bone 'microfractures', requiring more frequent repairs by the bone cells and therefore a greater blood supply.

"My aim was to see whether we could use fossil bones of dinosaurs to indicate the level of bone metabolic rate and possibly extend it to the whole body's metabolic rate," he says. "One of the big controversies among paleobiologists is whether dinosaurs were cold-blooded and sluggish or warm-blooded and active. Could the size of the foramen be a possible gauge for dinosaur metabolic rate?"

Comparisons were made with the sizes of the holes in living mammals and reptiles, and their metabolic rates. Measuring mammals ranging from mice to elephants, and reptiles from lizards to crocodiles, one of Professor Seymour's Honours students, Sarah Smith, combed the collections of Australian museums, photographing and measuring hundreds of tiny holes in thigh bones.

"The results were unequivocal. The sizes of the holes were related closely to the maximum metabolic rates during peak movement in mammals and reptiles," Professor Seymour says. "The holes found in mammals were about 10 times larger than those in reptiles."

These holes were compared to those of fossil dinosaurs. Dr Don Henderson, Curator of Dinosaurs from the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta, Canada, and Daniela Schwarz-Wings from the Museum für Naturkunde and Humboldt University Berlin, Germany, measured the holes in 10 species of dinosaur from five different groups, including bipedal and quadrupedal carnivores and herbivores, weighing 50kg to 20,000kg.

"On a relative comparison to eliminate the differences in body size, all of the dinosaurs had holes in their thigh bones larger than those of mammals," Professor Seymour says.

"The dinosaurs appeared to be even more active than the mammals. We certainly didn't expect to see that. These results provide additional weight to theories that dinosaurs were warm-blooded and highly active creatures, rather than cold-blooded and sluggish."

I don't have time to read the paper, but did they do modern birds?

Some original content coming soon, promise.

We both lovez and hatez the Beast Heads!

Wife Picture

Antarctica's Glacier Expansion Rate

A painstaking examination of the first direct and detailed climate record from the continental shelves surrounding Antarctica reveals that the last remnant of Antarctic vegetation existed in a tundra landscape on the continent's northern peninsula about 12 million years ago. The research, which was led by researchers at Rice University and Louisiana State University, appears online this week and will be featured on the cover of the July 12 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The new study contains the most detailed reconstruction to date of the climatic history of the Antarctic Peninsula, which has warmed significantly in recent decades. The rapid decline of glaciers along the peninsula has led to widespread speculation about how the rest of the continent's ice sheets will react to rising global temperatures.

"The best way to predict future changes in the behavior of Antarctic ice sheets and their influence on climate is to understand their past," said Rice University marine geologist John Anderson, the study's lead author. The study paints the most detailed picture to date of how the Antarctic Peninsula first succumbed to ice during a prolonged period of global cooling.

In the warmest period in Earth's past 55 million years, Antarctica was ice-free and forested. The continent's vast ice sheets, which today contain more than two-thirds of Earth's freshwater, began forming about 38 million years ago. The Antarctic Peninsula, which juts farther north than the rest of the continent, was the last part of Antarctica to succumb to ice. It's also the part that has experienced the most dramatic warming in recent decades; its mean annual temperatures rose as much as six times faster than mean annual temperatures worldwide.

"There's a longstanding debate about how rapidly glaciation progressed in Antarctica," said Sophie Warny, a Louisiana State University geologist who specializes in palynology (the study of fossilized pollen and spores) and led the palynological reconstruction. "We found that the fossil record was unambiguous; glacial expansion in the Antarctic Peninsula was a long, gradual process that was influenced by atmospheric, tectonic and oceanographic changes."

Warny, her students and colleague Rosemary Askin were able to ascertain the exact species of plants that existed on the peninsula over the past 36 million years after a painstaking, three-year examination of thousands of individual grains of pollen that were preserved in muddy sediments beneath the sea floor just off the coast.

"The pollen record in the sedimentary layers was beautiful, both in its richness and depth," Warny said. "It allowed us to construct a detailed picture of the rapid decline of the forests during the late Eocene -- about 35 million years ago -- and the widespread glaciation that took place in the middle Miocene -- about 13 million years ago."

Paper here.

Solar Sand Sintering

Markus Kayser - Solar Sinter Project from Markus Kayser on Vimeo.

Dude! Little White Hunter

Or is this the ultimate in the therapsid v. archosaur wars?

He's closing in on two years old.

A Cretaceous Gomphodont?

This is not a new paper, but rather me digging through old papers looking for info for both the XenoPermian and the therocephalian post. Theoretically, there might have been dicynodonts and gomphodonts in the Australian Cretaceous. Ponder that!

AN ENIGMATIC (SYNAPSID?) TOOTH FROM THE EARLY CRETACEOUS OF NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA

1. WILLIAM A. CLEMENS (a)

2. GREGORY P. WILSON (a)

3. RALPH E. MOLNAR (b)

a. Museum of Paleontology and Department of Integrative Biology, University of California Berkeley, California 94720-4785, bclemens@uclink4.berkeley.edu

b. Queensland Museum, P.O. Box 3300, South Brisbane QLD 4101, Australia, and Museum of Northern Arizona, Flagstaff, Arizona 86011

Abstract:

Largely fragmentary fossils from sites in New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland, Australia document terrestrial and marine vertebrate faunas of Aptian–Albian age. The natural cast of a large tooth from the Griman Creek Formation, Lightning Ridge, New South Wales, records the presence of a hitherto unknown member of the fauna. Although reference to one of the groups of crocodyliforms that evolved complex, mammal-like postcanine teeth cannot be excluded, the fossil more likely represents a species of synapsid. In some respects it is similar to lower postcanines of traversodontids. Greater morphological similarities to upper molars of dryolestids make reference of this tooth to this group more likely. Current Mesozoic Laurasian and Gondwanan fossil records include mammals with cheek teeth of similar large size.

Link to paper in title.

Why Animals Don't Have IR Vision

On rare occasion, the light-sensing photoreceptor cells in the eye misfire and signal to the brain as if they have captured photons, when in reality they haven't. For years this phenomenon remained a mystery. Reporting in the June 10 issue of Science, neuroscientists at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have discovered that a light-capturing pigment molecule in photoreceptors can be triggered by heat, as well, giving rise to these false alarms.

"A photon, the unit of light, is just energy, which, when captured by the pigment rhodopsin, most of the time causes the molecule to change shape, then triggering the cell to send an electrical signal to the brain to inform about light absorption," explains King-Wai Yau, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins and member of its Center for Sensory Biology. "If rhodopsin can be triggered by light energy," says Yau, "it may also be occasionally triggered by other types of energy, such as heat, producing false alarms. These fake signals compromise our ability to see objects on a moonless night. So we tried to figure it out; namely, how the pigment is tripped by accident."

"Thermal energy is everywhere, as long as the temperature is above absolute zero," says neuroscience research associate Dong-Gen Luo, Ph.D. "The question is: How much heat energy would it take to trigger rhodopsin and enable it to fire off a signal, even without capturing light?" says Johns Hopkins Biochemistry, Cellular and Molecular Biology graduate student Wendy Yue.

For 30 years, the assumption was that heat could trigger a pigment molecule to send a false signal, but through a mechanism different from that of light, says Yau, because it seemed, based on theoretical calculations: that very little thermal energy was required compared to light energy.

But the theory, according to Yau, was based mainly on the pigment rhodopsin. However, rhodopsin is mainly responsible for seeing in dim light and is not the only pigment in the eye; other pigments are present in red-, green- and blue-sensitive cone photoreceptors that are used for color and bright-light vision. Although researchers are able to measure the false events of rhodopsin from a single rhodopsin-containing cell, a long-standing challenge has been to take measurements of the other pigments. "The electrical signal from a single cone pigment molecule is so small in a cone cell that it is simply not measurable," says Luo. "So we had to figure out a new way to measure these false signals from cone pigments."

By engineering a rod cell to make human red cone pigment, which is usually only found in cone cells, Yau's team was able to measure the electrical output from an individual cell and calculate this pigment's false signals by taking advantage of the large and detectable signals sent out from the cell.

As for blue cone pigment, "Nature did the experiment for us," says Yau. "In many amphibians, one type of rod cells called green rods naturally express a blue cone pigment, as do blue cones." So to determine whether heat can cause pigment cells to misfire, the team, working in the dark, first cooled the cells, and then slowly returned the cells to room temperature, measuring the electrical activity of the cells as they warmed up. They found that red-sensing pigment triggers false alarms most frequently, rhodopsin (bluish-green-sensing pigment) triggers falsely less frequently, and blue-sensing pigment does so even less.

"This validates the 60-year-old Barlow's hypothesis that suggested the longer wavelength the pigment senses—meaning the closer to the red end of the spectrum—the noisier it is," says Yau. And this finding led the team to develop and test a new theory: that heat can trigger pigments to misfire, by the same mechanism as light.

Pivotal to this theory is that visual pigment molecules are large, complex molecules containing many chemical bonds. And since each chemical bond has the potential to contain some small amount of thermal energy, the total amount of energy a pigment molecule could contain can, in theory, be enough to trigger the false alarm.

"For a long time, people assumed that light and heat had to trigger via different mechanisms, but now we think that both types of energy, in fact, trigger identical changes in the pigment molecules," says Yau. Moreover, since longer wavelength pigments have higher rates of false alarms, Yau says this may explain why animals never evolved to have infrared-sensing pigments.

"Apart from putting to rest a long-standing debate, it's a wake-up call for researchers to realize that biomolecules in general have more potential thermal energy than previously thought," says Luo.

Link in title.

The Geography of the XenoPermian

The XenoPermian Period is a fictitious, alternate geological period that takes place because we hand wave away the Permian Extinction. The assumed point of departure is that the Permian Extinction never takes place. The reason for this is that the Siberian Traps are defused and their eruptions happen over a much longer period of time. This has knock-on effects. One of them being that the world's geography is different...

No, I am not the artist. Scott is.

Just wait until the unveiling of Raven's Walrodont. Wow. Along with the suminid...they're stunning.

Comments?

PAK-FA Flight Video

Glaciations Influences Biodiversity More Than Climate

The study, published yesterday in the journal Ecology Letters, analyzed the species richness and the structure of their communities throughout the different regions of the European territory from the Ural Mountains to the Iberian Peninsula. The selection of this family of insects was motivated by their high dispersal ability and because their food sources (mainly cattle and sheep dung) are present throughout the continent.

Research by the Spanish National Research Council reveals that the large impacts occurred during the last ice age maintain their effects on the current distribution of dung beetles of the scarab family. The presence of these beetles in Europe seems to be more influenced by the climate of that glaciation than by the present one.

Scarabs are insects of tropical origin that cannot survive below 0 ° C mean annual temperature, "so it could be expected that their presence gradually decreases as temperatures drop down northwards " says the researcher from the National Museum of Natural Sciences, CSIC, Joaquín Hortal. However, the analysis of the relationship between the magnitude of climate change since the last glaciation and the distribution of scarabs evidences that these insects are not evenly distributed according to this gradient, but rather show two different patterns, one in the north and one in the south. Horton said: "The border defining the two areas is almost similar to the limit of 0 °C of mean annual temperature at the time of the last ice age." (See Figure 1)

Although scarab species richness is actually lower in the north that in the south, another two characteristics can be explained under the hypothesis of the influence of the last ice age.

The first one is based on the species present throughout Europe. Data show that all scarab species living in the northern territory above the border defined by the 0 ° C limit in the last glaciations are also present in the south, and there is no species exclusive to the northernmost area. According to Hortal, "this is an effect of the difficulty of adapting to cold climate that still exists, as the north does not hold unique species adapted to the cold."

This feature is consistent with the second observation, based on the age of the species present in each area. The study results show that the species that have been able to re-colonize the north are also those that have evolved most recently." Although the adaptation to cold climates started before the last glaciation, these species belong to the newer phylogenetic branches of the Scarabaeidae," says the researcher from CSIC.

Must. Read. Paper.

And have no time.

JH-7B? A New Stealth Fighter-Bomber?

Dewline also noticed it.

Carbon Biomass Maps of Tropical Forests

Japanese Are Planning an Ikaros Follow-on

Japanese researchers are working on a solar-sail spacecraft with 10 times the surface area of the Ikaros testbed launched toward Venus last year, after achieving all of their technical objectives with the testbed.

This spacecraft will launch on a five-year mission instead of the six-month span allotted to Ikaros. Lofted as a piggyback payload with the Venus Climate Orbiter Akasuki on May 21, 2010, Ikaros passed Venus on Dec. 8.

Researchers hoped to demonstrate automatic sail deployment, power generation with thin-film solar cells on the sail surface, verification that the pressure of photons from the Sun caused the sail to accelerate, and guidance and navigation with the sail. The sail met its intended acceleration of 100 meters per second and veered off the ballistic trajectory it would have followed without the Sun’s pressure, says Yuichi Tsuda, an assistant professor in the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) Space Exploration Center, in an English-language report on the experiment’s outcome.

The deployment and power generation were demonstrated early on. To control the 14 x 14-meter (46 x 46-ft.) spin-stabilized sail, the Ikaros team used a non-toxic “gas-liquid equilibrium thruster” for attitude control, and an attitude-detection system that combined a Sun sensor and Doppler measurements from the low-gain antenna.

To tilt the spin axis of the spacecraft, the team powered a liquid-crystal variable-reflectivity element mounted as a thin polyimide film around the edges of the sail off and on to throw the spinning sail off balance and tilt it as it spun. As it happened, the spacecraft required almost no fuel to keep its sail facing the Sun, even though it turned a full 180 deg. over the six months, according to Tsuda.

*sighs* This is actually a pretty important piece of tech going forward.

Another XenoPermian Teaser

Raven is making progress, too. I can't wait to show the whole piece. She's doing an astounding job.

These are Walrodonts.

Wooly-Columbian Mammoth Hybrid Found?

Mammoths were a diverse genus that roamed across Eurasia and North America during the Pleistocene era. In continental North America, at least two highly divergent species have long been recognized – woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) and Columbian mammoths (M. columbi). But new genetic evidence published in BioMed Central's open access journal Genome Biology suggests that these species may have been closely related enough to mate when they had the chance.

Remains of woolly mammoths have been found across the glacial tundra-steppe of Eurasia and northern North America, while the much physically larger Columbian mammoths inhabited the savannah environments of temperate southern and central North America. The differences between the species have long been considered as unique adaptations to the environments where they evolved. But by piecing together trace fragments of DNA from an 11 thousand year-old Columbian mammoth from Fairview, Utah, a team of Canadian, American and French researchers found that surprisingly the mitochondrial genome from this mammoth was nearly indiscernible from that of its northern woolly counterparts.

But the group does not suspect that this requires a re-write of North American mammoth evolution. "We think this individual may have been a woolly-Columbian hybrid," says Jacob Enk of the McMaster Ancient DNA Centre, the group that led the research. "Living African elephant species interbreed where their ranges adjoin, with males of the bigger species out-competing the smaller for mates. This results in mitochondrial genomes from the smaller species showing up in populations of the larger. Since woolly and Columbian ranges periodically overlapped in time and space, it's likely that they engaged in similar behaviour and left a similar genetic signal." The team goes on to suggest that interbreeding may explain some mammoth fossils that have intermediate physical characteristics, between woollies and Columbians, sometimes assigned to the species M. jeffersonii.

They do not rule out other explanations however, and note that the only way to know for sure whether their mammoth was a hybrid is to sequence nuclear DNA from it and other mammoths. For poorly-preserved remains like those of southern-ranging Columbians, this will be a challenge. But they expect that by exploiting new cutting-edge sequencing technologies, the nuclear genomes of these amazing animals are within reach.

...

Quantum Data Deletion May Have Cooling Effect?

Recent research by a team of physicists reveals a surprise at this fundamental level. ETH-Professor Renato Renner, and Vlatko Vedral of the Centre for Quantum Technologies at the National University of Singapore and the University of Oxford, UK, and their colleagues describe in the scientific journal Nature how the deletion of data, under certain conditions, can create a cooling effect instead of generating heat. The cooling effect appears when the strange quantum phenomenon of entanglement is invoked. Ultimately, it may be possible to harness this effect to cool supercomputers that have their performance held back by heat generation. «Achieving the control at the quantum level that would be required to implement this in supercomputers is a huge technological challenge, but it may not be impossible. We have seen enormous progress is quantum technologies over the past 20 years,» says Vedral. With the technology in quantum physics labs today, it should be possible to do a proof of principle experiment on a few bits of data.

hmmm. This almost sounds like a real world version of a Reynolds cryocomp.

A Crazy Dangerous Precedent: Seismologists Tried for Manslaughter In Italy

Earthquake prediction can be a grave, and faulty science, and in the case of Italian seismologists who are being tried for the manslaughter of the people who died in the 2009 L'Aquila quake, it can have legal consequences.

The group of seven, including six seismologists and a government official, reportedly didn't alert the public ahead of time of the risk of the L'Aquila earthquake, which occurred on April 6 of that year, killing around 300 people, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

But most scientists would agree it's not their fault they couldn't predict the wrath of Mother Nature.

"We're not able to predict earthquakes very well at all," John Vidale, a Washington State seismologist and professor at the University of Washington, told LiveScience.

W

T

F?!

Strongly suggest if they get convicted that Italy's seismologists ought to...leave.

Younger Dryas Impactor Hypothesis Crashes and Burns

It seemed like such an elegant answer to an age-old mystery: the disappearance of what are arguably North America’s first people. A speeding comet nearly 13,000 years ago was the culprit, the theory goes, spraying ice and rocks across the continent, killing the Clovis people and the mammoths they fed on, and plunging the region into a deep chill. The idea so captivated the public that three movies describing the catastrophe were produced.

But now, four years after the purportedly supportive evidence was reported, a host of scientific authorities systematically have made the case that the comet theory is “bogus.” Researchers from multiple scientific fields are calling the theory one of the most misguided ideas in the history of modern archaeology, which begs for an independent review so an accurate record is reflected in the literature.

“It is an impossible scenario,” says Mark Boslough, a physicist at Sandia Laboratory in Albuquerque, N.M., where he taps the world’s fastest computers for nuclear bomb experiments to study such impacts. His computations show the debris from such a comet couldn’t cover the proposed impact field. In March, a “requiem” for the theory even was published by a group that included leading specialists from archaeology to botany.

Yet, the scientists who described the alleged impact in a hallowed U.S. scientific journal refuse to consider the critics’ evidence — insisting they are correct, even though no one can replicate their work: the hallmark of credibility in the scientific world.

[...]

A new look at the comet claim suggests all of these phenomena may be in play, apparently creating a peculiar bond of desperation as the theory came under increasing attack. Indeed, the team’s established scientists are so wedded to the theory they have opted to ignore the fact their colleague “Allen West” isn’t exactly who he says he is.

West is Allen Whitt — who, in 2002, was fined by California and convicted for masquerading as a state-licensed geologist when he charged small-town officials fat fees for water studies. After completing probation in 2003 in San Bernardino County, he began work on the comet theory, legally adopting his new name in 2006 as he promoted it in a popular book. Only when questioned by this reporter last year did his co-authors learn his original identity and legal history. Since then, they have not disclosed it to the scientific community.

West’s history — and new concerns about study results he was integrally involved in — raise intriguing questions about the veracity of the comet claim. His background is likely to create more doubts about the theory. And the controversy — because it involves the politically sensitive issue of a climate shift — is potentially more broadly damaging, authorities suggest.

[...]

West has no formal appointment at an academic institution. He has said he obtained a doctorate from a Bible college, but he won’t describe it further. Firestone said West has told him he has no scientific doctorate but is self-taught. West’s Arizona attorney refers to him in writing as: “A retired geophysicist who has had a long and distinguished career.”

In the early 1990s, a new-age business West was involved in Sedona, Ariz., failed, and his well-drilling company went bankrupt. Then he ran afoul of California law in small Mojave Desert towns in a scheme with two other men, with court records saying they collected fees up to $39,500 for questionable groundwater reports.

He originally was charged with two felonies for falsely representing himself as a state-licensed geologist but agreed to a no contest plea to a single misdemeanor of false advertising as part of plea bargain in which state records say he was fined $4,500. Two other men in the scam also were sanctioned.

Acknowledging he made a mistake, West has sought to downplay the 9-year-old conviction. And last September, after his impact theory colleagues learned of it, he went back to court in Victorville, Calif., convincing a judge to void the old plea.

After earlier denying any impropriety with his Younger Dryas work, West declined a recent interview request. Last month, he wrote a letter charging it was “highly prejudicial and distorted” to bring up his legal past in the context of his current studies. He is a member of “a group of two dozen dedicated scientists performing cutting-edge, although controversial, research,” he wrote.

...

ouch.

Homo confisio strikes again? Or ought that be Homo audacia?