The most cuddly basal T. rex ever, with feathers!
We all know that humans could not possibly change the climate, that this was in fact decreed by Republican Yaweh—except possibly when we're cooling it, as that gets a special-pleading magic pass. We'd better hope that's true, because a new study tells us just what separated the last ice-age from the ensuing warm period that changed the face of earth and contours of every coastline, and it wasn't much:
The team behind the study says its work further strengthens ideas about global warming. "At the end of the last ice age, CO2 rose from about 180 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere to about 260; and today we're at 392," explained lead author Dr Jeremy Shakun. "So, in the last 100 years we've gone up about 100 ppm - about the same as at the end of the last ice age, which I think puts it into perspective because it's not a small amount. Rising CO2 at the end of the ice age had a huge effect on global climate."
- As the pic from the Smithsonian above shows, a single new feathery find in China may rewrite textbooks and FX specials on large dinosaurs including T. rex. Everything Dinosaur has lots more:
This new discovery, reported in the academic journal “Nature”, suggests what a number of palaeontologists have thought for sometime, that even the biggest Theropods could have been feathered.
- Grats to Sen. Barbara Mikulski (D-Sane w/Ovaries): On Thursday, April 5, it was announced that one of the world's largest astronomy archives and an exploding star in space have been named in her honor.
- How did cute cuddly bunnies evolve, and what exactly does the Easter Bunny do the rest of the year anyway?
- Remember the mystery of the honey-bee over the last few years, where beekeepers reported their hive populations suddenly crashing? A culprit may have been found:
Bees that are exposed to non-lethal doses of Neonicotinoid pesticides forage abnormally, have "olfactory memory" problems, are easily disoriented and become poor learners. Essentially, a dose of this sort of pesticide may make it impossible for a bee to return to the nest.