Protein extracted from 68 million-year-old T. rex bones has shed new light on the evolutionary link between dinosaurs and birds.
Researchers compared organic molecules preserved in the T. rex fossils with those of living animals, and found they were similar to chicken protein.
The discovery of protein in dinosaur bones is a surprise - organic material was not thought to survive this long.
A US team of researchers have published the finding in Science journal.
The team says their technique could help reveal evolutionary relationships between other living and extinct organisms.
The finding is consistent with the idea that birds can trace a direct evolutionary line to dinosaurs.
The proteins are original organic material from the dinosaur's soft tissue, and not contamination, the scientists argue.
According to theories of fossilisation, original organic material is not thought to survive as long as this; finding them in a fossil this old is a genuine surprise. They are by far the oldest such molecules extracted from fossils.
"It has always been assumed that preservation of [dinosaur bones] does not extend to the cellular and molecular level," said co-author Mary Schweitzer, from North Carolina State University in Raleigh, US.
"The pathways of cellular decay are well known for modern organisms. And extrapolations predict that all organics are going to be gone completely in 100,000 years, maximum."
Brooks Hanson, an editor at Science journal said: "The goal of obtaining sequences either from proteins or DNA for extinct [organisms] has been a long-standing goal to test evolutionary links and processes, or even functional information."
The work builds on an earlier discovery of soft tissue - including blood vessels - by Dr Schweitzer's team in the same, incredibly well-preserved Tyrannosaurus rex fossils.
The dinosaur remains - which include a skull, both thigh bones and both tibiae (shin bones) - were unearthed from rocks in the Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana, US.
The fossils were buried under at least 1,000 cubic metres of loose sandstone, interspersed with muds, which are thought to represent ancient stream channel sediments.
The bones were buried under 1,000 cubic metres of rock in Montana
The proteins found in the T. rex bones belong to the elastic connective fibres - known as collagen - that support other tissues in the body.
Collagen makes up most of the organic material in bone, which consists of both minerals and protein. It is the same substance injected into the lips, and other areas of the body, in cosmetic surgery procedures.
When minerals are removed from human bone, a collagen matrix is left behind. The US scientists performed the same operation on the T.rex fossil, and found what appeared to be residual traces of collagen.
The findings of protein in the bones were confirmed by mass spectrometry, a sensitive technique that identifies chemicals by their atomic mass.
It was able to show the T.rex material contained sequences of amino acids - protein building blocks - typical of collagen.
When the scientists compared the protein sequence pattern to those of living animals in a database, it was found to be structurally similar to chicken collagen, and there were also similarities with frog and newt protein.
Dr Schweitzer said the similarity to chickens was exactly what one would expect given the relationship between modern birds and dinosaurs."
Dr Jack Horner, a co-author from the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Montana, explained that extraordinarily well-preserved fossils such as the ones in question were probably not unique.
"To get specimens like that involves excavating enormous amounts of material, covered with tens of feet of rock," Dr Horner said.
"The T.rex was under a thousand cubic yards of rock and therefore in a position not to have been invaded by bacteria or groundwater," he said.
"I think we're learning an important lesson here - that if we do get specimens like this, we spend a lot of time getting as deep into the sediment as we can in places where there has been very little atmospheric or water contamination."
Dinosaurs, excluding bird lineages, disappeared from the face of the planet 65 million years ago. The reptiles are thought to have been killed off by an asteroid impact which struck off the present-day Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A giant hole in the Universe is devoid of galaxies, stars and even lacks dark matter, astronomers said on Thursday.
The team at the University of Minnesota said the void is nearly a billion light-years across and they have no idea why it is there.
"Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected to find one this size," said astronomy professor Lawrence Rudnick.
Writing in the Astrophysical Journal, Rudnick and colleagues Shea Brown and Liliya Williams said they were examining a cold spot using the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite, and found the giant hole.
"We already knew there was something different about this spot in the sky," Rudnick said. The region stood out as being colder in a survey of the Cosmic Microwave Background -- the faint radio buzz left over from the Big Bang that gave birth to the Universe.
"What we've found is not normal, based on either observational studies or on computer simulations of the large-scale evolution of the Universe," Williams said in a statement.
The astronomers said the region even appeared to lack dark matter, which cannot be seen directly but is usually detected by measuring gravitational forces.
The void is in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus, southwest of Orion.
Huh... that's interesting. Perhaps a black hole has a reach of about a billion light years? I would think it would be less, but I'm no astronomer. Maybe it was just an incredibly large black hole that ran out of stuff to consume.
OR
An even cooler possibility is that a long long time ago a MASSIVE space battle occurred there, and it was so large and so intense, with laser beams flying everywhere and ships defying the laws of nature by exploding in space, that THEY DESTROYED ALL THE STUFF IN THAT PART OF THE UNIVERSE.
I'm pretty sure they mean a vast empty expanse and not a black hole. Black holes aren't a billion light-years across, and can be detected via x-rays and other unique physical properties.
An even cooler possibility is that a long long time ago a MASSIVE space battle occurred there, and it was so large and so intense, with laser beams flying everywhere and ships defying the laws of nature by exploding in space, that THEY DESTROYED ALL THE STUFF IN THAT PART OF THE UNIVERSE.
This guy created a radio-frequency generator that has the power to burn salt water. They're gonna try to make a clean fuel out of it... it's not like it's in limited supply or anything.
I've been seeing this pop up all over the place lately. It won't work. All he invented was a way of doing electrolysis from a distance. You'll still need more energy to run the RF generator than you'd get from burning the hydrogen.
Just tink about it for a minute: The RF generator separates water into hydrogen and oxygen, then you burn the hydrogen, causing it to re-combine with the oxygen and become water again, leaving you with the same stuff as you had when you started, but somehow giving you a net increase in energy? Sorry, but thermodynamics just doesn't work that way.
This could still have some interesting applications, but allowing us to use salt water as fuel isn't one of them.
The 118-year-old cylinder that is the international prototype for the metric mass, kept tightly under lock and key outside Paris, is mysteriously losing weight — if ever so slightly. Physicist Richard Davis of the International Bureau of Weights and Measures in Sevres, southwest of Paris, says the reference kilo appears to have lost 50 micrograms compared with the average of dozens of copies.
"The mystery is that they were all made of the same material, and many were made at the same time and kept under the same conditions, and yet the masses among them are slowly drifting apart," he said. "We don't really have a good hypothesis for it."
The kilogram's uncertainty could affect even countries that don't use the metric system — it is the ultimate weight standard for the U.S. customary system, where it equals 2.2 pounds. For scientists, the inconstant metric constant is a nuisance, threatening calculation of things like electricity generation.
"They depend on a mass measurement and it's inconvenient for them to have a definition of the kilogram which is based on some artifact," said Davis, who is American.
But don't expect the slimmed-down kilo to have any effect, other than possibly envy, on wary waistline-watchers: 50 micrograms is roughly equivalent to the weight of a fingerprint.
"For the lay person, it won't mean anything," said Davis. "The kilogram will stay the kilogram, and the weights you have in a weight set will all still be correct."
Of all the world's kilograms, only the one in Sevres really counts. It is kept in a triple-locked safe at a chateau and rarely sees the light of day — mostly for comparison with other cylinders shipped in periodically from around the world.
"It's not clear whether the original has become lighter, or the national prototypes have become heavier," said Michael Borys, a senior researcher with Germany's national measures institute in Braunschweig. "But by definition, only the original represents exactly a kilogram."
The kilogram's fluctuation shows how technological progress is leaving science's most basic measurements in its dust. The cylinder was high-tech for its day in 1889 when cast from a platinum and iridium alloy, measuring 1.54 inches in diameter and height.
At a November meeting of scientists in Paris, an advisory panel on measurements will present possible steps toward basing the kilogram and other measures — like Kelvin for temperature, and the mole for amount — on more precise calculations. Ultimately, policy makers from around the world would have to agree to any change.
Many measurements have undergone makeovers over the years. The meter was once defined as roughly the distance between scratches on a bar, a far cry from today's high-tech standard involving the distance that light travels in a vacuum.
One of the leading alternatives for a 21st-century kilogram is a sphere made out of a Silicon-28 isotope crystal, which would involve a single type of atom and have a fixed mass.
"We could obviously use a better definition," Davis said.
Does the kilo-cylinder really matter as long as people continue to use the metric system, I mean measuring is just applying numbers to physical objects anyway, it doesn't really matter what numbers you use as long as most people use the same numbers.
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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.03/bemore.html?pg=1&topic=bemore&topic_set=
or 1 iron maiden album
OR
An even cooler possibility is that a long long time ago a MASSIVE space battle occurred there, and it was so large and so intense, with laser beams flying everywhere and ships defying the laws of nature by exploding in space, that THEY DESTROYED ALL THE STUFF IN THAT PART OF THE UNIVERSE.
That's got to be it.
Your theory is pure win!
That theory is what happened in the latest Doctor Who.
No, just The Doctor.
You're gonna believe a team from the U of M?
This guy created a radio-frequency generator that has the power to burn salt water. They're gonna try to make a clean fuel out of it... it's not like it's in limited supply or anything.
Just tink about it for a minute: The RF generator separates water into hydrogen and oxygen, then you burn the hydrogen, causing it to re-combine with the oxygen and become water again, leaving you with the same stuff as you had when you started, but somehow giving you a net increase in energy? Sorry, but thermodynamics just doesn't work that way.
This could still have some interesting applications, but allowing us to use salt water as fuel isn't one of them.
Someone's stealing our mass!
The First!
The Second! And First!
Don't know why there's two- then again, I never read the first first one.