Tuesday, February 26, 2013
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
and never agree to transcribe 20 hours of meetings from an Australian business meeting.
That's what I've been doing for the last 4 days...utter nightmare. Could NOT understand their accents. Making it worse were the bad audio levels and the fact that a lot of the people preesnt insisted on talking over each other from all around the room except in front of the microphone... I will never transcribe ANYTHING every again.
Anyway, so sorry to be MIA from my blogs.
Sunday, February 17, 2013
Dinosaur show fuels learning, imagination
From SFO Star Advertiser: Dinosaur show fuels learning, imagination
SAN FRANCISCO » About dinosaurs, the old masters, they were never wrong, to paraphrase W.H. Auden if he were writing a poem about the endless fascination kids have with prehistoric beasts. That fascination is part of the reason "Dinosaur Train" is popular among the youngest members of the PBS audience and why the show's fans will enjoy the new special "Dinosaur Train: Submarine Adventure," airing Tuesday.
| ‘DINOSAUR TRAIN: SUBMARINE ADVENTURE’
The PBS special airs at 9 p.m. Tuesday. Repeats 1 p.m. Wednesday and 5 p.m. Thursday.
|
"Dinosaur Train," which premiered in 2009, "stars" Buddy, a curious young Tyrannosaurus Rex whose egg somehow winds up in a nest of Pteranodons (technically flying reptiles — not dinosaurs).
Buddy and his scaly buddies ride the Dinosaur Train around the prehistoric jungles, volcanoes and other settings, learning about species. At the end of each show, a live-action segment with paleontologist Scott D. Sampson helps young viewers learn about the species they have just met with big, unpronounceable names.
"Submarine Adventure" follows the format of the show, but the submarine, of course, gives the dinosaurs a chance to learn about undersea life, including Otto the Ophtalmosaurus — whose speaking voice is disconcertingly reminiscent of Arnold Schwarzenegger's — Shoshana Shonisaurus and Maisie Mosasaurus. By tapping into childhood fascination with dinosaurs, the series and the special teach kids not only about various prehistoric species, but, in a more subtle way, about the diversity of life in the world. Buddy is a welcome member of a blended family.
Friday, February 8, 2013
Fresh Clues In Dinosaur Whodunit Point To Asteroid
From NPR: Fresh Clues In Dinosaur Whodunit Point To Asteroid
Some 66 million years ago, about 75 percent of species on Earth disappeared. It wasn't just dinosaurs but most large mammals, fish, birds and plankton. Scientists have known this for a long time just from looking at the fossil record. If you dig deep enough, you find lots of dinosaur bones. And then a few layers up, they're gone.
But scientists couldn't figure out exactly what had caused this phenomenon. Of course, there were lots of theories.
"Some of them are pretty wacky," says J. David Archibald, an evolutionary biologist at San Diego State University who wrote the book Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era. "The really weird ones, of course, are that space hunters came and killed them all off, they died of constipation, mammals ate their eggs."
Then, in 1980, a new theory surfaced.
"It's the one that everybody hears about all the time because it's most dramatic," Archibald says.
Near what is now the town of Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula, an asteroid more than 5 miles across slammed into the Earth. It caused tsunamis and earthquakes, and threw up a cloud of dust that smothered the world.
It sounds like a movie premise, but the Chicxulub impact left behind evidence. It threw up small blobs of black glass that were later found in Haiti. It dusted the world with iridium, an element that is rare on Earth but common in meterorites. It left a barely detectable imprint on the Yucatan Peninsula. Many scientists came to believe that the Chicxulub asteroid alone killed off the dinosaurs — and the public ate it up.
"We have this thing for big glitz and dramatic things," Archibald says. "Instantaneous is better."
But Princeton professor Gerta Keller wasn't convinced. She has her own theories about the mass extinction.
"Vulcanism has played a major role," Keller says.
In the hundreds of thousands of years before the Chicxulub impact, volcanoes in a region of India known as the Deccan Traps erupted repeatedly. They spewed sulfur and carbon dioxide, poisoning the atmosphere and destabilizing ecosystems. Keller says the dinosaurs were already on death's door by the time the asteroid hit.
And there is confusion about when that actually happened.
"If [the impact] is the cause, it had to be precisely at the time of the mass extinction," Keller says. "It can't be before and it can't be afterwards."
Keller's data suggest that the impact happened about 100,000 years before the mass extinction. Previous studies, on the other hand, put it 180,000 years after the dinosaurs died off.
Enter Paul Renne, a geologist from the University of California, Berkeley. To pin down the date, he headed out to the badlands of northeastern Montana.
"It's a region that has yielded a huge number of dinosaur fossils over the years," Renne says. "It's very famous for that."
Renne collected samples of ash that were deposited at the time of the mass extinction just above that treasure trove of fossils. He also obtained some of the glass blobs left by the Chicxulub impact. Measuring the rate of decay of radioactive potassium from these two samples, Renne was able to estimate the age of the impact and the age of the extinction.
"And lo and behold they are exactly the same," Renne says. "The impact clearly occurred right at the extinction level."
His results are published in the journal Science. They reinforce an idea that many scientists have held for years: The Chicxulub asteroid was the straw that broke the dinosaurs' back.
Gerta Keller thinks Renne's method was admirably precise, but she doesn't agree with some of his conclusions. She says his data are contradicted by other samples from Texas where a similar age date shows the Chicxulub impact predates the KT boundary — the point in time between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods when the dinosaurs are believed to have gone extinct.
Still, there is one thing that Keller and Renne agree on: The asteroid isn't the whole story.
"There were significant extinctions and ecological perturbations going on a million or 2 million years before the impact, so we think that something else was already happening," Renne says. "What caused those things? There is an outstanding candidate — the early eruptions of the Deccan Traps."
The next step will be to find the age of these eruptions.
"We need to be able to place that set of eruptions into a time framework," Renne says.
Then they can better piece together what happened to the dinosaurs — and the rest of the species that went extinct. Renne and Keller will join Archibald and dozens of their colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London at the end of March to talk over their ideas.
"I'm looking forward to rather spirited discussions," Keller says.
Some 66 million years ago, about 75 percent of species on Earth disappeared. It wasn't just dinosaurs but most large mammals, fish, birds and plankton. Scientists have known this for a long time just from looking at the fossil record. If you dig deep enough, you find lots of dinosaur bones. And then a few layers up, they're gone.
But scientists couldn't figure out exactly what had caused this phenomenon. Of course, there were lots of theories.
"Some of them are pretty wacky," says J. David Archibald, an evolutionary biologist at San Diego State University who wrote the book Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era. "The really weird ones, of course, are that space hunters came and killed them all off, they died of constipation, mammals ate their eggs."
Then, in 1980, a new theory surfaced.
"It's the one that everybody hears about all the time because it's most dramatic," Archibald says.
Near what is now the town of Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula, an asteroid more than 5 miles across slammed into the Earth. It caused tsunamis and earthquakes, and threw up a cloud of dust that smothered the world.
It sounds like a movie premise, but the Chicxulub impact left behind evidence. It threw up small blobs of black glass that were later found in Haiti. It dusted the world with iridium, an element that is rare on Earth but common in meterorites. It left a barely detectable imprint on the Yucatan Peninsula. Many scientists came to believe that the Chicxulub asteroid alone killed off the dinosaurs — and the public ate it up.
"We have this thing for big glitz and dramatic things," Archibald says. "Instantaneous is better."
But Princeton professor Gerta Keller wasn't convinced. She has her own theories about the mass extinction.
"Vulcanism has played a major role," Keller says.
In the hundreds of thousands of years before the Chicxulub impact, volcanoes in a region of India known as the Deccan Traps erupted repeatedly. They spewed sulfur and carbon dioxide, poisoning the atmosphere and destabilizing ecosystems. Keller says the dinosaurs were already on death's door by the time the asteroid hit.
And there is confusion about when that actually happened.
"If [the impact] is the cause, it had to be precisely at the time of the mass extinction," Keller says. "It can't be before and it can't be afterwards."
Enter Paul Renne, a geologist from the University of California, Berkeley. To pin down the date, he headed out to the badlands of northeastern Montana.
"It's a region that has yielded a huge number of dinosaur fossils over the years," Renne says. "It's very famous for that."
Renne collected samples of ash that were deposited at the time of the mass extinction just above that treasure trove of fossils. He also obtained some of the glass blobs left by the Chicxulub impact. Measuring the rate of decay of radioactive potassium from these two samples, Renne was able to estimate the age of the impact and the age of the extinction.
"And lo and behold they are exactly the same," Renne says. "The impact clearly occurred right at the extinction level."
His results are published in the journal Science. They reinforce an idea that many scientists have held for years: The Chicxulub asteroid was the straw that broke the dinosaurs' back.
Gerta Keller thinks Renne's method was admirably precise, but she doesn't agree with some of his conclusions. She says his data are contradicted by other samples from Texas where a similar age date shows the Chicxulub impact predates the KT boundary — the point in time between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods when the dinosaurs are believed to have gone extinct.
Still, there is one thing that Keller and Renne agree on: The asteroid isn't the whole story.
"There were significant extinctions and ecological perturbations going on a million or 2 million years before the impact, so we think that something else was already happening," Renne says. "What caused those things? There is an outstanding candidate — the early eruptions of the Deccan Traps."
The next step will be to find the age of these eruptions.
"We need to be able to place that set of eruptions into a time framework," Renne says.
Then they can better piece together what happened to the dinosaurs — and the rest of the species that went extinct. Renne and Keller will join Archibald and dozens of their colleagues at the Natural History Museum in London at the end of March to talk over their ideas.
"I'm looking forward to rather spirited discussions," Keller says.
Wednesday, February 6, 2013
Fossil of new flying reptile from dinosaur age discovered
From NBC News: Fossil of new flying reptile from dinosaur age discovered
Pterosaurs lived among the dinosaurs and became extinct about the same time, but they were not dinosaurs. They are sometimes wrongly called pterodactyls, which actually just describes the first genus of pterosaur discovered by scientists in the 18th century. Small pterosaurs developed during the Triassic Period, about 230 to 200 million years ago. Later, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, more advanced forms of the flying reptiles, like azhdarchids, started evolving.
"These were long-necked, long-beaked pterosaurs whose wings were strongly adapted for a soaring lifestyle," researcher Darren Naish, a paleontologist from the U.K.'s University of Southampton, said in a statement. "Several features of their wing and hind limb bones show that they could fold their wings up and walk on all fours when needed."
The wingspan of Eurazhdarchoindicates it would have been "large, but not gigantic" compared to some of its cousins, Naish said. (The researchers pointed to the example of the giant azhdarchid, Hatzegopteryx thambema, whose bones found in the Romanian town of Hateg show that its wings would have stretched out 36 feet, or 11 meters, during flight.) The discovery brings new evidence to the debate about how azhdarchids lived, the scientists say.
"It has been suggested that they grabbed prey from the water while in flight, that they patrolled wetlands and hunted in a heron or stork-like fashion, or that they were like gigantic sandpipers, hunting by pushing their long bills into mud," Gareth Dyke, a paleontologist from the National Oceanography Center Southampton, said in a statement.
The newly found fossil was uncovered alongside dinosaurs and other terrestrial animals, suggesting that azhdarchids stalked small animal prey in woodlands, plains and scrublands rather than in coastal habitats.
"Eurazhdarcho supports this view of azhdarchids, since these fossils come from an inland, continental environment where there were forests and plains as well as large, meandering rivers and swampy regions," Dyke said.
The findings were detailed online Jan. 30 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Scientists say they've discovered the fossilized bones of a new
type of pterosaur, a flying dinosaur-age reptile, which lived about 68
million years ago and had a wingspan of nearly 10 feet (3-meters).
The skeletal bits of the midsized pterosaur were found in Sebes-Glod
in Romania's Transylvanian Basin, famous for its rich array of Late
Cretaceous fossils, including crocodylomorphs (ancient relatives of
crocodiles), mammals, turtles and dinosaurs like the dwarf sauropod Magyarosaurus dacus and the dromaeosaurBalaur. Scientists dubbed the new reptile Eurazhdarcho langendorfensis and say it belonged to a group of pterosaurs called the azhdarchids.Pterosaurs lived among the dinosaurs and became extinct about the same time, but they were not dinosaurs. They are sometimes wrongly called pterodactyls, which actually just describes the first genus of pterosaur discovered by scientists in the 18th century. Small pterosaurs developed during the Triassic Period, about 230 to 200 million years ago. Later, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, more advanced forms of the flying reptiles, like azhdarchids, started evolving.
"These were long-necked, long-beaked pterosaurs whose wings were strongly adapted for a soaring lifestyle," researcher Darren Naish, a paleontologist from the U.K.'s University of Southampton, said in a statement. "Several features of their wing and hind limb bones show that they could fold their wings up and walk on all fours when needed."
The wingspan of Eurazhdarchoindicates it would have been "large, but not gigantic" compared to some of its cousins, Naish said. (The researchers pointed to the example of the giant azhdarchid, Hatzegopteryx thambema, whose bones found in the Romanian town of Hateg show that its wings would have stretched out 36 feet, or 11 meters, during flight.) The discovery brings new evidence to the debate about how azhdarchids lived, the scientists say.
"It has been suggested that they grabbed prey from the water while in flight, that they patrolled wetlands and hunted in a heron or stork-like fashion, or that they were like gigantic sandpipers, hunting by pushing their long bills into mud," Gareth Dyke, a paleontologist from the National Oceanography Center Southampton, said in a statement.
The newly found fossil was uncovered alongside dinosaurs and other terrestrial animals, suggesting that azhdarchids stalked small animal prey in woodlands, plains and scrublands rather than in coastal habitats.
"Eurazhdarcho supports this view of azhdarchids, since these fossils come from an inland, continental environment where there were forests and plains as well as large, meandering rivers and swampy regions," Dyke said.
The findings were detailed online Jan. 30 in the journal PLOS ONE.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)