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Author Topic: Some cool news and Phenomena  (Read 2985 times)

Offline BFM_Octane

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Some cool news and Phenomena
« on: August 01, 2007, 01:36:00 PM »
Got this all from another frequently visited forum of mine. Only i cannot post this website. No way lol...

Picked out the best ones

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Earth's Worst Extinction a Prolonged Event
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The rise of mollusks across the globe was a harbinger of doom roughly 250 million years ago, ushering in the most devastating mass extinction in Earth's history, research now reveals.

This clammy conclusion suggests the disaster was long in coming, as opposed to the result of a more catastrophic extraterrestrial cause such as an asteroid impact, scientists added.

The largest die-off in Earth's history was not the cataclysm that ended the Age of the Dinosaurs some 65 million years ago. Instead, it was the so-called end-Permian mass extinction, which eliminated as much as 95 percent of the planet's species before even the earliest dinosaurs strode the planet.

One supposed consequence of this mass extinction was the dominance of oysters, snails and other mollusks all over the world. Now scientists studying mollusks fossils find they started rising to prominence some 8 million years before the end-Permian.

"Our results aren't really consistent with a more catastrophic extraterrestrial cause, such as an asteroid impact—although they don't directly contradict the impact theory either," said researcher Matthew Clapham at Queen's University in Kingston, Canada.

Instead, these findings support theories suggesting the end-Permian was triggered by ocean changes long in the making, "the climax of a prolonged environmental crisis," Clapham said.

The whole Permian period, stretching from about 300 million to 250 million years ago, saw gradual warming. This would have slowed down circulation in the ocean, eventually leading to very low levels of oxygen in the water. Massive volcanism near the end of the Permian might have wreaked even further havoc on the environment.

"Mollusks are better adapted to such stressful and changing environments, and so could have thrived," Clapham told LiveScience. "The abundance of mollusks we see are symptoms of the conditions that ultimately caused the extinction."

The research involved gleaning more than 33,000 Permian fossils from blocks of limestone that researchers gathered from China, Greece, Thailand, Nevada and Texas over the course of four years. These blocks were then dunked in vats of hydrochloric acid. Although the acid dissolved the limestone, over millions of years the building blocks of the fossil shells were replaced one by one with silica. This silica resisted the acid and helped the fossils survive.

"Most of the fossils were less than one centimeter in size, typically four to eight millimeters [roughly the size of an ant], so it was very delicate work to find them among all of the other detritus in the sample," Clapham recalled.

No source
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Beef a shocker for carbon emissions
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A KILOGRAM of beef causes more greenhouse gas and other pollution than driving for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home, a Japanese study has found.

New Scientist reports that a team led by Akifumi Ogino, of the National Institute of Livestock and Grassland Science in Tsukuba, calculated the environmental cost of raising cattle through conventional farming, slaughtering the animal and distributing the meat.

The team discovered that producing a kilo of beef causes the equivalent of 36.4kg in carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal greenhouse gas, the study found.

Most of these greenhouse gas emissions are methane, released from the cow's digestive system.

That 1kg of beef also requires energy equivalent to lighting a 100-watt bulb for nearly 20 days to produce and transport the animals' feed.

The calculations, which are based on standard industrial methods of meat production in Japan, did not include the impact of managing farm infrastructure and transporting the meat, so the total environmental load is higher than the study suggests.

The study appears in full in the specialist publication Animal Science Journal.

Source

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Man with a pancake brain
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A MAN with an unusually tiny brain managed to live an entirely normal life despite his condition, caused by a fluid buildup in his skull, French researchers have reported.

Scans of the 44-year-old man's brain showed that a huge fluid-filled chamber called a ventricle took up most of the room in his skull, leaving little more than a thin sheet of actual brain tissue.

"He was a married father of two children, and worked as a civil servant," Dr Lionel Feuillet and colleagues at the Universite de la Mediterranee in Marseille wrote in a letter to the Lancet medical journal.

The man went to a hospital after he had mild weakness in his left leg.

When Dr Feuillet's staff took his medical history, they learned he had had a shunt inserted into his head to drain away hydrocephalus - water on the brain - as an infant.

The shunt was removed when he was 14.

The researchers performed a computed tomography (CT) scan and another type of scan called magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).

They were astonished to see "massive enlargement" of the lateral ventricles - usually tiny chambers that hold the cerebrospinal fluid that cushions the brain.

Intelligence tests showed the man had an IQ of 75, below the average score of 100 but not considered mentally retarded or disabled, either.

"What I find amazing to this day is how the brain can deal with something which you think should not be compatible with life," commented Dr Max Muenke, a pediatric brain defect specialist at the National Human Genome Research Institute.

"If something happens very slowly over quite some time, maybe over decades, the different parts of the brain take up functions that would normally be done by the part that is pushed to the side," Dr Muenke said.

Source

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Pink Dolphin

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This extremely rare and beautiful “pink dolphin” was spotted and photographed by Capt. Erik Rue of Calcasieu Charter Service on June 24th, 2007 during a charter fishing trip on Calcasieu Lake south of Lake Charles, LA.



It appears to be an uncanny freak of nature, an albino dolphin, with reddish eyes and glossy pink skin. It is small in comparison to the others it is traveling with and appears to be a youngster traveling with mama. After spotting the beautiful mammal cruising with a pod of four other dolphins, Rue and his guests Randy and Peyton Smith and Greg and Sam Elias of Monroe, LA idled nearby while watching and photographing the unusual sight for more than an hour.

Our expectations are high that we will see this amazing mammal again as it was in an area frequented by the gentle mammals and one confirmed report has it being spotted at least a month earlier in a nearby location. If it does turn up again, it will be a welcome surprise to our guests.

Source

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WIlectricity?
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have announced they've made a 60-watt light bulb glow by sending it energy wirelessly, potentially previewing a future in which mobile phones and other gadgets get juice without having to be plugged in.

The breakthrough, disclosed in Science Express, an online publication of the journal Science, is being called "WiTricity" by the scientists.

The concept of sending power wirelessly is not new, but its wide-scale use has been dismissed as inefficient because electromagnetic energy generated by the charging device would radiate in all directions.

Last northern autumn, though, MIT physics professor Marin Soljacic explained how to do the power transfer with specially tuned waves. The key is to get the charging device and a gadget to resonate at the same frequency - allowing them to efficiently exchange energy.

It is similar to how opera singers can break a wine glass that happens to resonate at the same frequency as their voice. In fact, the concept is so basic in physics that inventor Nikola Tesla sought a century ago to build a huge tower on Long Island that would wirelessly beam power along with communications.

The new step described in Science was that the MIT team put the concept into action. The scientists lit a 60-watt bulb that was two metres away from the power-generating appliance.

"It was quite exciting," Soljacic said. The process is "very reproducible. We can just go to the lab and do it whenever we want."

The development raises the prospect that it might be possible to eliminate some of the clutter of cables in the electronic world. Is that necessarily a good thing? Soljacic acknowledged "that it's far from obvious how crucial people will find this."

But at least one benefit could be that if devices can get their power through the air, they might not need batteries and their attendant toxic chemicals.

Before that can happen, the technology has a long way to go.

The MIT system is about 40 per cent to 45 per cent efficient - meaning that most of the energy from the charging device does not make it to the light bulb.

Soljacic believes it needs to become twice as efficient to be on par with the old-fashioned way portable gadgets get their batteries charged.

Also, the copper coils that relay the power are almost 60cm wide for now - too big to be feasible for, say, laptops. And the two-metre range of this wireless handoff could be increased - presumably so that one charging device could automatically power all the gadgets in a room.

Soljacic believes all those improvements are within reach. The next step is to fire up more than just light bulbs, perhaps a Roomba robotic vacuum or a laptop.

The MIT team stresses that the "magnetic coupling" process involved in WiTricity is safe on humans and other living things.

And in the initial experiments on the light bulb, nothing bad happened to the mobile phones, electronic equipment and credit cards in the room - though more research on that is needed.

The harmlessness apparently extends both ways: The researchers noted that putting people and other things between the coils - even when they block the line of sight - generally has no effect on the power transfer.

Source

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Offline BFM_Hydra

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Re: Some cool news and Phenomena
« Reply #1 on: August 01, 2007, 08:24:26 PM »
Crazy stuff!


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Offline ((Kàkà§hì))

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Re: Some cool news and Phenomena
« Reply #2 on: August 03, 2007, 06:29:28 PM »
Hey... Keep 'em coming! I love interesting facts like those. I live close to where the albino dolphin was spotted and had heard of the sighting.

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Offline BFM_Octane

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Re: Some cool news and Phenomena
« Reply #3 on: August 04, 2007, 03:33:15 PM »
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Some cool hi-rez pics of bugs.
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Baby Monitor Pics up NASA mission.
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PALATINE, Ill. - A mother of two in this suburb of Chicago doesn't have to turn on the news for an update on NASA's space mission. She just flips on her baby monitor. Since Sunday, Natalie Meilinger's baby monitor has been picking up black-and-white video from inside the space shuttle Atlantis.

"Whoever has a baby monitor knows what you'll usually see," said the elementary school science teacher. "No one would ever expect this."

Live video of the mission is available on NASA's Web site, so it's possible the monitor is picking up a signal from somewhere.

"It's not coming straight from the shuttle," NASA spokeswoman Brandi Dean said. "People here think this is very interesting and you don't hear of it often — if at all."

Meilinger silenced disbelieving co-workers by bringing in a video of the monitor to show her class on Tuesday, her students' last day of school. At home, 3-month-old Jack and 2-year-old Rachel don't quite understand what their parents are watching.

"I've been addicted to it and keep waiting to see what's next," Meilinger said.

Source link broken.

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360 degree panoramic View of Mount Everest

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Physicists report an electrifying discovery!
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Canadian physicists have cracked a decades-old mystery surrounding metals that carry electricity without resistance, opening the door for everyday trains that levitate on magnetic fields, ultrapowerful quantum computers and big savings for utilities.

Details of the breakthrough in an arcane field called high-temperature superconducting are published today in the research journal, Nature.

Using uniquely pure crystals created at the University of British Columbia, researchers from the University of Sherbrooke detected an elusive signature of electrons within a high-temperature superconductor, a feat that has eluded scientists since the exotic materials were first discovered in 1986.

"This discovery has cleared the thick fog that physicists have been in for the past 20 years," said research team leader Louis Taillefer, a Sherbrooke professor previously at the University of Toronto.

Taillefer predicted the discovery would lead to room-temperature superconductors within 10 years, triggering a technological revolution similar to the invention of the transistor.

One of the most promising applications for such superconducting metals is in magnetic levitation trains, which can theoretically run at speeds of up to 500 km/h.

The force of powerful magnets suspends these trains in the air above a rail, eliminating friction from moving parts.

But the few experimental magnetic levitation (known as maglev) trains have been commercial failures because current electromagnets are too inefficient and bulky.

The use of superconducting metals for the magnets would slash both electricity costs and weight, making maglev trains practical, transportation experts say.

Other possible superconducting applications include shrinking MRI machines to the size of laptops, eliminating the 10 to 20 per cent electricity lost from resistance inside power stations and building quantum computers, machines so powerful they would make today's supercomputers resemble mere pocket calculators.

More here.

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Polar Depths yield hundreds of new species.

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Antarctic waters served as a cradle for marine life, researchers say

By Jeanna Bryner

Updated: 9:56 p.m. ET May 16, 2007
Carnivorous sponges, blind creepy-crawlies adorned with hairy antennae and ribbed worms are just some of the new characters found to inhabit the dark abysses of the Southern Ocean, an alien abode once thought devoid of such life.

Recent expeditions have uncloaked this polar region, finding nearly 600 species of organisms never described before and challenging some assumptions that deep-sea biodiversity is depressed. The findings also suggest that all of Earth's marine life originated in Antarctic waters.

Scientists had assumed that the deep sea of the South Pole would follow similar trends in biodiversity documented for the Arctic. "There are less species in the Arctic than around the equator," said one of the scientists behind the study, Brigitte Ebbe, a taxonomist at the German Center for Marine Biodiversity Research. "People assumed that it would be the same if you went from the equator south, but it didn't prove to be true at all."

The findings, reported this week in the journal Nature, provide a more accurate picture of creatures in the southern deep sea and shed light on the evolution of biodiversity in the deep ocean, including ancient colonization dating back 65 million years.

"The Antarctic deep sea is potentially the cradle of life of the global marine species," said lead author Angelika Brandt of the Zoological Institute and Zoological Museum at the University of Hamburg.

Deep dwellers
Between 2002 and 2005, an international team of scientists completed three research expeditions to the Weddell Sea aboard the German vessel Polarstern. Part of the Southern Ocean, the Weddell Sea is bounded by an Antarctic bulge called Coats Land and the Antarctic Peninsula.

Ernest Shackleton's Endurance was trapped and crushed by ice in this sea in 1915. (Shackleton and his entire crew survived. Shackleton died in 1922 of a heart attack on a different Antarctic expedition).

Part of the ANDEEP (Antarctic Benthic Deep-Sea Biodiversity) project, the team collected biological samples from regions between about 2,000 and 21,000 feet below the surface of the Weddell Sea and nearby areas.

In addition to cataloging biodiversity, the scientists aimed to determine how species intermingled within and between the deep and shallower waters and whether continental-shelf organisms colonized the deep ocean or vice versa.

The Weddell Sea is part of a vast ocean current and a critical source of deep water and possibly a mode of transport to the rest of the Southern Ocean. Some of the scientists' findings indicate species originating in a single water domain did migrate to the Southern Ocean, and some even trekked across the globe and now inhabit the Arctic waters. Many of the organisms have relatives in both the nearby shallower waters and even in other ocean basins.

Species finds included 674 species of isopods, a group of crustaceans, 80 percent of which were new to science. Some of the isopods and marine worms spotted on the continental shelf sported clues of their deep-water past. "On the shelf, the animals have eyes because they can see. There's light in the water. In the deep sea you don't really need them, so many animals get rid of their eyes," Ebbe told LiveScience.

"There were some [species] that are very closely related to eyeless isopods, and they are now living on the shelf. So that's an indication they have moved upward," Ebbe said.

Water travel
Many species living in the deep abyss of the Weddell Sea showed strong links with other oceans, particularly organisms like amoebae that can disperse their larvae over long distances. Poor dispersers — including some isopods, nematode worms and seed shrimps — stayed close to home in the Southern Ocean.

One particularly cosmopolitan group included the foraminifera, or tiny single-celled organisms covered with relatively decorative shells. Genetic analyses showed that three foraminifera species (Epistominella exigua, Cibicidoides wuellerstorfi and Oridorsalis umbonatus) found in both the Weddell Sea and the Arctic Ocean were nearly identical.

"They literally found some of [the foraminifera] from pole to pole, which is really amazing," Ebbe said.

Time to diversify
In terms of the soaring biodiversity, the scientists suggest organisms in the Antarctic have been around for a long time, giving them time to diversify.

"The Southern Ocean has been like it is pretty much for the last 40 million years, and it has been isolated," Ebbe said. "So the communities have had a long, long time to evolve. In the Arctic, it is much different."

In the geologic past Antarctica belonged to a giant land mass called Gondwana that straddled the equator. The land mass, which also included Africa, Australia, India and the tip of South America, started breaking apart more than 100 million years ago. About 60 million years ago, Antarctica had drifted close to the South Pole, and oceans rise to fill the gaps between Antarctica and Africa and India. By 40 million years ago, the continent had become completely encircled by oceans, now called the Southern Ocean.

"What was once thought to be a featureless abyss is in fact a dynamic, variable and biologically rich environment," said study team member Katrin Linse, a marine biologist with the British Antarctic Survey.

"Finding this extraordinary treasure trove of marine life is our first step to understanding the complex relationships between the deep ocean and distribution of marine life," she said.

© 2007 LiveScience.com. All rights reserved.

Source

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Quite a fast train...

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Highway shut for butterfly crossing.
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Taiwan is to close one lane of a major highway to protect more than a million butterflies, which cross the road on their seasonal migration.
The purple milkweed butterfly, which winters in the south of the island, passes over some 600m of motorway to reach its breeding ground in the north.

Many of the 11,500 butterflies that attempt the journey each hour do not reach safety, experts say.

Protective nets and ultra-violet lights will also be used to aid the insects.

Taiwanese officials conceded that the decision to close one lane of the road would cause some traffic congestion, but said it was a price worth paying.

"Human beings need to coexist with the other species, even if they are tiny butterflies," Lee Thay-ming, of the National Freeway Bureau, told the AFP news agency.

Under the bridge

Each year thousands of butterflies die when turbulence generated by fast-moving cars drags them into the traffic or under the wheels of oncoming vehicles.

Ecologists hope the triple-action effort of lane closure, protective nets and ultra-violet lighting will dramatically increase the milkweed's chances of reaching the breeding ground.

The protective nets are designed to force the butterflies to fly higher, reducing the chances of them getting caught in the traffic.

Ultra-violet lighting will be used below an elevated section of road to encourage the butterflies to head beneath.

The measures are estimated to have cost $30,000 (£15,200).

Source

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Offline BFM_Hydra

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Re: Some cool news and Phenomena
« Reply #4 on: August 05, 2007, 03:04:16 AM »
Wow at the butterflies one. What people will do for others. I congratulate them :)


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Offline BFM_Chaindog

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Re: Some cool news and Phenomena
« Reply #5 on: August 06, 2007, 11:31:51 AM »
 :yesyes:
"May you never cheat, lie, steal, or drink....if you must cheat, cheat death..if you must lie, lie in a loved ones arms...if you must steal, steal kisses...and if you must drink, drink with us yo!"




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