Well yes, in the sense that a descendant of a species is that species, birds are dinosaurs (not the other way around though). But that wouldn't be nearly as much fun to make into a deadly amusement park attraction. If I was to create a flock of condors on this island, you wouldn't have anything to say!
Hit one with a sword about 6 or 7 times, and then see just how "Not quite so ferocious" they are.
Sometimes, (via Twilight Princess), strike a chicken ten times, and you inhabit its body for ten seconds. Too bad there aren't any locations accessible only by the cuccoo.
Synthetic telepathy
Posted by David Pescovitz, October 14, 2008 10:30 AM | permalink
Researcher are developing technology to translate thought into messages that can be wirelessly delivered. Funded by the US military ('natch), the aim is "synthetic telepathy," using EEG signals monitored non-invasively to communicate by brainpower alone. Apparently, this research goes back to the 1960s when a scientist used EEG to communicate in Morse code. Now though, the scientist are using brain scans to better understand how to detect and identify the brain signals. From MSNBC:
The Army grant to researchers at University of California, Irvine, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Maryland has two objectives. The first is to compose a message using, as (UC Irvine professor Mike) D'Zmura puts it, "that little voice in your head."
The second part is to send that message to a particular individual or object (like a radio), also just with the power of thought. Once the message reaches the recipient, it could be read as text or as a voice mail...
Mapping the brain's response to most of the English language is a large task, and D'Zmura says that it will be 15-20 years before thought-based communication is reality.
It was the mother of all snakes, a nightmarish behemoth as long as a school bus and as heavy as a Volkswagen Beetle that ruled the ancient Amazonian rain forest for 2 million years before slithering into nonexistence.
Now this monster, which weighed in at 2,500 pounds, has resurfaced in fossils taken from an open-pit coal mine in Colombia, a startling example of growth gone wild.
Modern boas and anacondas, which average less than 20 feet in length and reach a maximum of 30 feet, have been known to swallow Chihuahuas, cats and other small pets, but this prehistoric monster snacked on giant turtles and primitive crocodiles.
"This is amazing. It challenges everything we know about how big a snake can be," said herpetologist Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was not involved in the research.
The snake's estimated length, 43 feet, "is the same as the largest Tyrannosaurus rex that we know of, although it only weighs one-sixth as much," he said.
The find not only sheds new light on snake evolution; it also provides telling insights on climate. The snake flourished about 58 million to 60 million years ago. Because Titanoboa cerrejonensis, as it has been named, was coldblooded, the tropical climate had to be 6 to 8 degrees warmer than it is today for a snake that large to survive, said evolutionary biologist Jason Head of the University of Toronto at Mississauga, lead author of a paper on the fossils appearing today in the journal Nature.
The remains of several specimens of the snake are from a cache of fossils excavated from El Cerrejon coal mine in northern Colombia. Paleontologists are excited about the find because there are few fossils of tropical vertebrates from the period after the demise of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
Most rock outcroppings that might contain fossils have been hidden by the region's dense foliage, said paleontologist Jonathan Bloch of the University of Florida, who identified the snake.
"The entire 10-million-year period following the extinction of the dinosaurs is a blank slate," he said.
Bloch and his students identified hundreds of specimens that had been dug from the mine, including "the largest freshwater turtle ever known" and "beautifully preserved skeletons" of an extinct species of crocodile "known to have been in South America, but never seen [there] before."
They also found fossils of a variety of fish, related to bonefish and tarpon, that would have lived in brackish seawater. "That indicates it was a big, riverine system close to the ocean," Bloch said.
They also found 28 snakes in the 42-to-45-foot range.
Titanoboa probably was the largest nonmarine creature on Earth during that period, Head said.
The turtles and crocodiles that the team excavated were probably the giant snake's primary diet, Head said.
Snakes are generally able to swallow prey that weighs about the same as they do, Conrad said. Titanoboa "could eat a large cow or a bison" -- if any had been around.
Instead, it probably had to settle for other reptiles, sliding into the water and gulping them down in ferocious strikes.
Because snakes and other reptiles are coldblooded -- technically, poikilothermic -- they rely on heat in the environment. Generally, the farther from the equator that a reptile lives, the smaller it has to be.
Extrapolating from the energy requirements of modern snakes, the team estimated that Titanoboa required an average temperature of 86 to 93 degrees Fahrenheit, somewhat higher than the modern average of about 83 degrees in coastal Colombia.
This sheds some light on current theories about what happens at the equator during periodic bouts of natural global warming. One school of thought holds that temperatures at the equator are buffered, staying relatively constant while more northern and southern latitudes heat up.
"These findings support the idea that with a warmer world, the equator was also warmer," Bloch said.
Researchers now believe that the climate got even hotter after the time of the Titanoboa, perhaps hastening the snake's demise.
"Big animals went extinct because it simply got too hot," Conrad said. "This helps us to understand that the effects of global warming aren't just rising sea levels."
I should probably mention that I'll sometimes try to combine a few of these SCIENCE! stories together for maximum, well, SCIENCE! Combine prehistoric giant snake with successful cloning of extinct species, and you have the best damn Anaconda 3 we could possibly make.
The LHC suffered a malfunction just nine days after it was switched on
The Large Hadron Collider could be switched back on in September - a year after it shut down due to a malfunction and several months later than expected.
Scientists had said they expected the £3.6bn ($5.4bn) machine to be repaired by November, but then pushed the date back to June, before the latest delay.
The LHC was built to smash protons together at huge speeds, recreating conditions moments after the Big Bang.
The fault occurred just nine days after it was turned on last September.
The European Organization for Nuclear Research (Cern) said: "The new schedule foresees first beams in the LHC at the end of September this year, with collisions following in late October."
Repairs
An investigation into the LHC's problems concluded the initial malfunction was caused by a faulty electrical connection between two of the accelerator's magnets.
Cern said that as a result, 53 magnet units would have to be removed from the LHC's tunnel to be cleaned or repaired.
Cern had also said new protection systems would be added as part of £14m repairs.
It blamed the shutdown on the failure of a single, badly soldered electrical connection in one of its super-cooled magnet sections.
One extra day of existence... hmm. Maybe I'd read through Gaiman's Sandman again, just to feel that literary thrill run down my spine. Oh and I'd make sure Megan was around.
An online poll conducted in the '90s set Vitaly Komar, Alex Melamid and David Soldier on a quest to create the most annoying song ever. After gathering data about people's least favorite music and lyrical subjects, they did the unthinkable: they combined them into a single monstrosity, specifically engineered to sound unpleasant to the maximum percentage of listeners. The song is not new, but it resurfaced on Dial "M" for Musicology.
Amazingly, this "most unwanted music" contains little dissonance -- that would have been too easy. For the most part, they seem to have tried to assemble these elements in a listenable way.
Komar & Melamid and David Soldier's list of undesirable elements included holiday music, bagpipes, pipe organ, a children's chorus and the concept of children in general (really?), Wal-Mart, cowboys, political jingoism, George Stephanopoulos, Coca Cola, bossanova synths, banjo ferocity, harp glissandos, oompah-ing tubas and much, much more. It's actually a fascinating listen, worthwhile for the opera rapping alone. (We didn't think that was possible either.)
Comments
Sometimes, (via Twilight Princess), strike a chicken ten times, and you inhabit its body for ten seconds. Too bad there aren't any locations accessible only by the cuccoo.
Anyway, SCIENCE news continues!
sooner or later we'll all have brain computers.
I should probably mention that I'll sometimes try to combine a few of these SCIENCE! stories together for maximum, well, SCIENCE! Combine prehistoric giant snake with successful cloning of extinct species, and you have the best damn Anaconda 3 we could possibly make.
Ah, the black-hole maker has been delayed? We can all live another day.
Also, chocolate. Lots of chocolate.
How much of it can YOU stand?
Also, yeah, I've heard the annoying song before. It's pretty amusing. I heard they tried to do a 'most pleasant' song and it failed miserably.