wired:

Visiting Mongolia during the Cretaceous might have revealed a variety of birdlike dinosaurs strutting their stuff and using a spectacular fan of tail feathers to woo potential mates.

The birdlike dinosaurs are oviraptors, so named because their discoverer suspected the first specimen had been fossilized in the act of stealing eggs from a Protoceratops nest. Feathered but flightless, oviraptors had strong, flexible tails tipped with a spray of multicolored feathers, a team of paleontologists reported Jan. 4 in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.

Studying oviraptor fossils, as well as present-day birds and reptiles, and digitally recreating an oviraptor tail helped the team conclude that, like peacocks and turkeys, oviraptors shook their tail feathers to attract mates.

“You have, I think, a tail that is specifically adapted to flaunt its feathers,” said Scott Persons, study author and doctoral student at the University of Alberta. “Swish it from side to side, show off the tail, strike a sinuous pose and hold it.”

historical-nonfiction:

Earth is the only planet not named after an ancient god.

mothernaturenetwork:

Dinosaurs born to be big

A skew toward giant sizes generally happened toward the end of major time periods, likely the result of long exposures to stable environments.

mothernaturenetwork:

Santa’s ‘flying’ reindeer story traced back to magic mushrooms

Shamans in the Siberian and Arctic regions used to give dried Amanita muscaria mushroom as gifts on the winter solstice.

Water on Mars and Earth Had Similar Origins

The Earth’s oceans and the water that once flowed on Mars likely came from a similar source: meteorites that landed on the planets when they were first forming, new research suggests.

Scientists analyzed the makeup of two rare Mars rocks that crashed into Earth as meteorites, and found that Martian water probably came from planetary building blocks similar to those that formed Earth. The two planets likely formed in parallel ways, but then took divergent evolutionary paths.

This finding goes against the common idea that the water in terrestrial planets like Earth and Mars came from comets. Instead, scientists think it originated in chondritic meteorites, which contain small, granular minerals that become integrated into the planets they land on.

‘These meteorites contain trapped basaltic liquids, not unlike the basalts that erupt on Hawaii,” John Jones, an experimental petrologist at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, said in a statement. “They are pristine samples that have sampled various Martian volatile element environments.”

Jones was a co-author on a paper detailing the findings published in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The research was led by Tomohiro Usui, a former postdoctoral researcher at NASA’s Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston.

The two Martian meteorites studied represent two very different sources of ancient water from the Red Planet, the researchers found.

One space rock came from a middle layer of Mars called the mantle, with traces of water from the deep interior of the planet and about the same amount of a special type of hydrogen found on Earth. The other meteorite is enriched with material from the shallow Martian crust and atmosphere.

The meteorite from the mantle suggests Mars’ interior is dry. Meanwhile, the enriched meteorite has 10 times more water, indicating the surface of Mars might have been very wet at one time.

“There are competing theories that account for the diverse compositions of Martian meteorites,” Usui said. “Until this study there was no direct evidence that primitive Martian lavas contained material from the surface of Mars.”

discoverynews:

geneticist:

Opalized dinosaur tooth Fossils are normally formed when minerals fill the cellular spaces and crystallize. Opalized fossils, on the other hand, form when bits of silica gel settled into the cracks and fissures of the cellular spaces and form opal. (via)

what sweet tooth!

bandh:

This Week in Photography History: On October 24, 1946 the White Sands Rocket (V2 No. 13) was fired up into the atmosphere and shot the first photos of the Earth. The rocket reached a maximum altitude of 107.5 miles and then snapped the photos with a 35mm camera.

Photo via Air and Space Smithsonian

ikenbot:

Fact Check: What a 9,000-Year-Old Earth Really Looked Like

U.S. House Rep. Paul Broun, a Georgia Republican, doesn’t believe in evolution, the Big Bang theory, or the teachings of embryology. In fact, in a Sept. 27 talk at LibertyBaptist Church in Hartwell, Ga., the member of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, who is also a medical doctor, called those areas of science “lies straight from the pit of hell.”

Illustration: An artist’s conception of a rocky, Earth-like planet forming in a star system 424 light-years away. A belt of rocky material feeds the planet’s formation in this early stage. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ C. Lisse (Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory)

But Broun also advanced his own theory of life on Earth.

“You see, there are a lot of scientific data that I’ve found out as a scientist that actually show that this is really a young Earth,” he said. “I don’t believe that the Earth’s but about 9,000 years old. I believe it was created in six days as we know them. That’s what the Bible says.”

Broun’s creationist viewpoint stands in opposition to what scientific research reveals about the age of the planet. In fact, Earth formed 4.54 billion years ago — and humanity is rather lucky not to be seeing the planet on its 9,000th birthday. Earth was formed by the colliding and coming together of massive space objects called planetesimals, said Richard Carlson, a geochemist at the Carnegie Institution who has studied some of Earth’s oldest rocks. The force of the impacts would have melted rock, leaving Earth molten for hundreds of thousands of years, Carlson told LiveScience.

“Nine thousand years after the last giant impact — there likely were several big impacts during the growth of the planet — the surface of Earth, to a considerable depth, likely was molten rock,” he said.

Creationist beliefs

Broun is far from the only believer in a literal, or Biblical, creation. According to a Gallup poll conducted in June, 46 percent of Americans believe God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years, a creationist belief. Only 15 percent said they believed in evolution without God’s hand, while 32 percent said they believed in evolution guided by God.

That survey did not ask adults how old they believed Earth to be, but estimates based on literal interpretation of the Bible normally range from 6,000 to 8,000 years. (It’s not clear why Broun believes in a 9,000-year-old Earth.)

The most popular 6,000-year-old figure comes from James Ussher, a 16th-century Irish clergyman. Ussher, whose position as Archbishop of Armagh made him head of the church in Ireland, published two works in the 1650s using genealogies from the Bible to date the creation of the world to Oct. 23, 4004 B.C.

Other estimates differ based on the use of different Bible translations and whether biblical scholars take the Bible’s six-day creation period literally or assume the “days” to be longer periods of time.

What the science says

Scientists, on the other hand, have reached a surprisingly precise answer as to the age when Earth and the rest of the solar system began to solidify: between 4.567 and 4.568 billion years — the equivalent of knowing a person’s birthday within two days, Carlson said.

This age range is calculated using isotopes, or variants of chemical elements. For the purposes of dating the solar system, researchers use lead and uranium isotopes. They measure the ratios of different types of isotopes from Earth and from meteorites. Because these objects all formed from the same pool of cosmic dust and gas during the birth of the solar system, the measurements enable researchers to determine how long ago the objects separated from that common pool.

As it turns out, these numbers mesh quite nicely with the ages of the oldest rocks known on Earth, which would have formed after the planet stabilized and cooled. The best estimate for the age of the oldest rocks on Earth, found near Hudson Bay in Quebec, is 4.4 billion years, according to Carlson. (The date is somewhat controversial, with some scientists believing 3.8 billion years is a closer date for those rocks.) Meanwhile, the oldest mineral grains found on Earth, zircons from Western Australia, date back 4.36 billion years.

The cooling and solidifying of the planet likely happened quickly on a geologic time scale, on the order of hundreds of thousands to a million years, Carlson said. But Adam and Eve wouldn’t have found Earth hospitable for a very long time. Even at 2.5 billion years of age, the planet had a flip-flopping atmosphere that periodically looked like something you’d see on one of Saturn’s moons today.

The first evidence for life on Earth may be Australian stromatolites, fossilized bacterial mats that date back 3.5 billion years. More certain fossils peg life’s arrival to 2.7 billion years ago. Modern humans, by contrast, didn’t show up until 200,000 years ago.

Source

The glasses John Lennon wore when he was shot, 31 years ago, december 8th.

Above is a part of the picture Yoko Ono used for her album Season of Glass, released in 1981.

(Source: twolagersandlime)

ikenbot:

NASA’s Voyager 1 Spacecraft May Not Be Near Edge of Solar System after All [Updated]

Side Note: So a few days ago we had many news outlets and blogs writing about Voyager’s entry into interstellar space (a huge technological feat for mankind), but a new finding published in a September issue of Nature indicates that this is far from the truth.

No one knows the thickness of the heliosheath, so no one knows how soon Voyager 1 might reach its outer edge. By one previous estimate, the heliopause could be just ahead of humankind’s most well-traveled emissary, or it could lie as many as four billion kilometers beyond—about seven years’ travel time. The new findings seem to favor the latter possibility. Decker and his colleagues conclude from the plasma measurements “that Voyager 1 is not at present close to the heliopause, at least in the form that it has been envisioned up to now.”

In an email, Decker notes that the Nature paper was based on data collected before February 2012 and that newer observations further complicate the question of when Voyager 1 will leave the heliosphere and enter interstellar space.

“I should point out that data received from Voyager 1 within the past two months show very interesting variations in the numbers of charged particles that enter our heliosphere from the interstellar medium and in the number that leave our heliosphere and enter the interstellar medium,” Decker notes. “Whether these very new data are another feature of the broad transition region that Voyager 1 has been in for the past two years, or a new region or boundary of the heliosphere, remains to be seen.”

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ikenbot:

Hurricane Paths on Planet Earth

Should you be worried about hurricanes?

To find out, it is useful to know where hurricanes have gone in the past. The above Earth map shows the path of every hurricane reported since 1851, Although striking, a growing incompleteness exists in the data the further one looks back in time.

The above map graphically indicates that hurricanes — sometimes called cyclones or typhoons depending on where they form — usually occur over water, which makes sense since evaporating warm water gives them energy. The map also shows that hurricanes never cross — or even occur very near — the Earth’s equator, since the Coriolis effect goes to zero there, and hurricanes need the Coriolis force to circulate.

The Coriolis force also causes hurricane paths to arc away from the equator. Although incompleteness fogs long term trends and the prevalence of hurricanes remains a topic of research, evidence is accumulating that hurricanes are, on the average, more common and more powerful in the North Atlantic Ocean over the past 20 years.

ikenbot:

How to Build a Planet: Heavy Metals Are Key Ingredients

Image: An artist conception of a newly formed star surrounded by a swirling protoplanetary disk of dust and gas, where debris coalesces to create rocky ‘planetesimals’ that collide and grow to eventually form planets. A new study suggests small rocky planet may actually be widespread in our Milky Way galaxy. Credit: University of Copenhagen, Lars A. Buchhave

Planets may not be able to form without a heaping helping of heavy elements such as silicon, titanium and magnesium, a new study suggests.

Stars that host planets have higher concentrations of such “metals” — astronomer-speak for elements heavier than hydrogen and helium — compared to iron than do planetless stars, the study found.

“To form planets, one needs heavy elements,” said lead author Vardan Adibekyan, of the Centre for Astrophysics of the University of Porto in Portugal.

Connected at birth

Planets coalesce from the disk of dust and gas left over after the birth of their parent star. According to the leading theory of planet formation, the core accretion model, small particles clump together, growing larger and larger until they produce protoplanets.

Scientists have long suspected that stars with higher metallicities are more likely to have planets orbiting them. Iron has long been a primary indicator.

“Usually, in stellar physics, people use the iron content as a proxy of overall metallicity,”

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