Science News
Fossil reveals terror bird’s power
Beak strong enough for ancient South American predator to hatchet its prey
by Ashley Yeager
With a swift hatchet of its beak, the terror bird Llallawavis scagliai could have whomped its prey, a new fossil find confirms.
Terror birds were one of South America’s top predators from about 50 million to roughly 1.8 million years ago. Researchers from Argentina have discovered a nearly compete skeleton of a new species of terror bird in a cliff face close to Chapadmalal. The researchers call the bird Llallawavis scagliai —Scaglia’s magnificent bird — in honor of naturalist Galileo Juan Scaglia, the grandfather of one of the researchers. They describe the fossil in the March Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Included in the skeleton is a tiny bone that strengthened the connection between the bird’s beak and skull. It is the first time scientists have found this bone in a terror bird fossil, providing direct evidence that the birds’ beaks would have been sturdy enough to be used as a hatchet while hunting.
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Tyrannosaurs fought and ate each other
by Helen Thompson
The Cretaceous period was a tyrannosaur-eat-tyrannosaur world. Bite marks from before and after death scar the skull of an ancient tyrannosaur called Daspletosaurus, researchers report April 9 in PeerJ.
Paleontologists identified a fossilized skull and jaw as that of a teenage Daspletosaurus, a cousin to Tyrannosaurus rex. Some pre- and postmortem marks on the bones correspond to bite marks — big enough to come from the teeth of a Daspletosaurus or another tyrannosaur. The marks could be evidence of both combat and cannibalism, the scientists conclude.
It’s not unheard of for tyrannosaurs to fight or eat each other, but understanding the prevalence of such behavior lends insight into the extinct reptiles’ ecology.
Based on regions of healed bone around bite marks found on the Daspletosaurus fossils above, researchers concluded that some of the injuries must have occurred before death and may have been the result of fighting between tyrannosaurs. Scale bar is 10 centimeters.
Though the bones of a recently studied Daspletosaurus show evidence of bite marks, a scenario like that depicted above probably wasn’t behind this dinosaur whodunit. Instead, the arrangement of the bones points to drowning, disease or injury.
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Technology News
Unlock the secret Spock emoji in iOS 8.3
Apple has added support for a Vulcan salute emoji on iPhones and iPads, but you won't find it on the emoji keyboard.
by Dan Graziano
In a move Spock would deem most logical, Apple has added support for a Vulcan salute emoji in iOS 8.3 and OS X 10.10.3. While the symbol isn't in the emoji section of the iOS keyboard, it's not hard to manually add it to your device. You must first update your iPhone or iPad to iOS version 8.3. This can be done be going to Settings, clicking on General and selecting Software Update. You can then add the Vulcan salute emoji to your device by following these steps:
- Copy the emoji from this tweet on your iPhone or iPad. This can be done with a long press on the icon and selecting Copy.
- Head over to the Settings menu on your device.
- Click General, followed by Keyboards, and select Shortcuts.
- Tap the + icon.
- Double tap on the Phrase section and paste the Vulcan emoji you copied earlier.
- Enter a shortcut you would like to use (such as "llap" for live long and prosper).
- Tap Save.
You should now be able to use the Vulcan salute emoji on your iPhone or iPad. Head over to messages, type the shortcut you set (in my case that's "llap") and the emoji should appear. The icon will only be visible, however, to iOS users who have updated to version 8.3.
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Ex Machina Has a Serious Fembot Problem
Angela Watercutter
The Turing test detects if a machine can truly think like a human. The Bechdel Test detects gender bias in fiction. If you were to mash the two together to create a particularly messy Venn diagram, the overlap shall henceforth be known as the Ex Machina Zone.
In writer/director Alex Garland’s thought-provoking new film—out Friday—we meet Ava (Alicia Vikander), an artificially-intelligent robot. Ava’s creator, genius tech billionaire Nathan (Oscar Isaac), has asked his employee Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to determine whether Ava’s thinking is indistinguishable from a human’s. Until she meets Caleb, Ava has only ever met her maker and one other woman. (Hence the failing of the Bechdel Test, which stipulates that a movie must feature two female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.) Her existence, and her ability to learn how to interact, is a fascinating study of what makes us human.
It’s also a compelling, if problematic, look at the interactions between men and women—or at least that’s what I thought.
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Environmental News
Dispersant used to clean deepwater horizon spill more toxic to corals than the oil
Temple University
The dispersant used to remediate the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is more toxic to cold-water corals than the spilled oil, according to a study conducted at Temple University. The study comes on the eve of the spill's fifth anniversary, April 20th.
In this collaborative study between researchers from Temple and the Pennsylvania State University, the researchers exposed three cold-water coral species from the Gulf to various concentrations of the dispersant and oil from the Deepwater Horizon well. They found that the dispersant is toxic to the corals at lower concentrations than the oil.
The researchers' findings, "Response of deep-water corals to oil and chemical dispersant exposure," were published online in the journal Deep-Sea Research II.
Approximately five million barrels of crude oil escaped from the well drilled by the Deepwater Horizon oil rig in 2010, and nearly seven million liters of dispersants -- chemical emulsifiers used to break down the oil -- were used to clean it up. Normally applied to the water's surface, the spill marked the first time that dispersants were applied at depth during an oil spill.
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Acidic Oceans Implicated in Earth's Worst Mass Extinction
Huge amounts of CO2 spewed from colossal volcanic eruptions in Siberia may have turned the world's oceans dangerously acidic 252 million years ago, helping to drive a global environmental calamity
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON, April 9 (Reuters) - It is one of science's enduring mysteries: what caused the worst mass extinction in Earth's history. And, no, it is not the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Scientists said on Thursday that huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed from colossal volcanic eruptions in Siberia may have turned the world's oceans dangerously acidic 252 million years ago, helping to drive a global environmental calamity that killed most land and sea creatures.
The researchers studied rocks in the United Arab Emirates that were on the seafloor at the time and contained a detailed record of the changing ocean conditions at the end of the Permian Period.
"This is one of the few cases where we have been able to show that an ocean acidification event happened in deep time," said University of Edinburgh geoscientist Rachel Wood, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Science.
"This is significant because we believe our modern oceans are becoming similarly acidic," Wood added. "These findings may help us understand the threat posed to marine life by modern-day ocean acidification."
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Medical News
Did natural selection make the Dutch the tallest people on the planet?
By Martin Enserink
AMSTERDAM—Insecure about your height? You may want to avoid this tiny country by the North Sea, whose population has gained an impressive 20 centimeters in the past 150 years and is now officially the tallest on the planet. Scientists chalk up most of that increase to rising wealth, a rich diet, and good health care, but a new study suggests something else is going on as well: The Dutch growth spurt may be an example of human evolution in action.
The study, published online today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, shows that tall Dutch men on average have more children than their shorter counterparts, and that more of their children survive. That suggests genes that help make people tall are becoming more frequent among the Dutch, says behavioral biologist and lead author Gert Stulp of the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine.
"This study drives home the message that the human population is still subject to natural selection," says Stephen Stearns, an evolutionary biologist at Yale University who wasn't involved in the study. "It strikes at the core of our understanding of human nature, and how malleable it is." It also confirms what Stearns knows from personal experience about the population in the northern Netherlands, where the study took place: "Boy, they are tall."
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Shorter height is directly associated with increased risk of coronary heart disease
University of Leicester
The shorter you are- the more your risk of coronary heart disease.
That's the key finding of a new study led by the University of Leicester which discovered that every 2.5 inches change in your height affected your risk of coronary heart disease by 13.5%. For example, compared to a 5ft 6inch tall person, a 5 foot tall person on average has a 32% higher risk of coronary heart disease because of their relatively shorter stature.
The research, led by Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, British Heart Foundation Professor of Cardiology at the University of Leicester, is published online in the New England Journal of Medicine. The research was supported by the British Heart Foundation, The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and others.
Professor Samani said: "For more than 60 years it has been known that there is an inverse relationship between height and risk of coronary heart disease.
"It is not clear whether this relationship is due to confounding factors such as poor socioeconomic environment, or nutrition, during childhood that on the one hand determine achieved height and on the other the risk of coronary heart disease, or whether it represents a primary relationship between shorter height and more coronary heart disease.
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Space News
Violent formation of the moon: New view
University of Maryland
Within the first 150 million years after our solar system formed, a giant body roughly the size of Mars struck and merged with Earth, blasting a huge cloud of rock and debris into space. This cloud would eventually coalesce and form the moon.
For almost 30 years, planetary scientists have been quite happy with this explanation--with one major exception. Although this scenario makes sense when you look at the size of the moon and the physics of its orbit around Earth, things start to break down a little when you compare their isotopic compositions--the geological equivalent of a DNA "fingerprint." Specifically, Earth and the moon are too much alike.
The expectation has long been that the moon should carry the isotopic "fingerprint" of the foreign body, which scientists have named Theia. Because Theia came from elsewhere in the solar system, it probably had a much different isotopic fingerprint than early Earth.
Now, a team of scientists at the University of Maryland has generated a new isotopic fingerprint of the moon that could provide the missing piece of the puzzle. By zeroing in on an isotope of Tungsten present in both the moon and Earth, the UMD team is the first to reconcile the accepted model of the moon's formation with the unexpectedly similar isotopic fingerprints of both bodies. The results suggest that the impact of Theia into early Earth was so violent, the resulting debris cloud mixed thoroughly before settling down and forming the moon. The findings appear in the April 8, 2015 advance online edition of the journal Nature.
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Ice on Mars: Mars has belts of glaciers consisting of frozen water
University of Copenhagen - Niels Bohr Institute
Mars has distinct polar ice caps, but Mars also has belts of glaciers at its central latitudes in both the southern and northern hemispheres. A thick layer of dust covers the glaciers, so they appear as surface of the ground, but radar measurements show that underneath the dust there are glaciers composed of frozen water. New studies have now calculated the size of the glaciers and thus the amount of water in the glaciers. It is the equivalent of all of Mars being covered by more than one meter of ice. The results are published in the scientific journal, Geophysical Research Letters.
Several satellites orbit Mars and on satellite images, researchers have been able to observe the shape of glaciers just below the surface. For a long time scientists did not know if the ice was made of frozen water (H2O) or of carbon dioxide (CO2) or whether it was mud.
Using radar measurements from the NASA satellite, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, researchers have been able to determine that is water ice. But how thick was the ice and do they resemble glaciers on Earth?
A group of researchers at the Niels Bohr Institute have now calculated this using radar observations combined with ice flow modelling.
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Odd News
Solving the Four Corners Mystery: Probes Map Methane 'Hot Spot'
by Stephanie Pappas
A methane "hot spot" over the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest is undergoing serious scrutiny as scientists work to figure out why levels of the gas in the area are so high.
The mysterious methane was first detected from space, via a European Space Agency satellite that can measure this potent greenhouse gas. Researchers reported the discovery in October in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, but couldn't explain where the extra methane was coming from. The "hot spot" persisted from 2003 until at least 2009. And the amount of methane was significant, the researchers reported — equal to nearly 10 percent of all U.S. methane emissions from natural gas.
Now, a team of researchers is tackling the mystery of the extra methane. The scientists will fly two Twin Otter aircraft over the Four Corners area, where the borders of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Arizona meet. These planes will carry two instruments: the Next-Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRISng), which can detect and map methane in great detail, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; and the Hyperspectral Thermal Emission Spectrometer (HyTES).
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