Scientists believe they have cracked a long-standing mystery of evolution - how the turtle got its shell.
It follows the discovery in south west China last year of the oldest known turtle fossils, believed to date back 220 million years.
The three adult specimens were discovered remarkably intact and with characteristics never before seen in turtles - including teeth and an incomplete upper shell.
Scientists from Canada, China and the US said the half-shell provided new evidence of how it evolved, Nature magazine has reported.
Dr Xiao-chun Wu, a palaeontologist at the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa, said: ‘Since the 1800s, there have been many hypotheses about the origin of the turtle shell.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new type of dry glue designed to mimic gecko feet is 10 times stickier than the gravity-defying lizards, and three times stickier than other gecko-inspired glues, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
“It’s the stickiest dry glue yet,” said Liming Dai of the University of Dayton, who reported on the glue in the journal Science.
A 1-inch (2.5-cm) square of the adhesive can support the weight of a 220-pound (100-kg) man climbing up a vertical surface, but it can be easily lifted and reapplied, an ideal material for, say, a Spider-Man suit.
“That is not real. What we do is real,” said Zhong Lin Wang of Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, referring to the comic book superhero’s wall-climbing prowess.
Aside from helping people walk up walls, the glue could be used in electrical components without the need for soldering, Wang and Dai said in a telephone interview.
Discovering a planet around another star is no big deal these days — dozens of them have been reported in 2008 alone, and the total count now stands at more than 300.
Of course, the burgeoning exoplanet population hasn’t stopped astronomers from looking for more of them. Big gaps remain in the sampling statistics, because the most successful techniques (radial-velocity monitoring, microlensing events, and periodic transits) favor finding large bodies close to their parent stars. Far-out planets are rarely discovered this way because they have long orbital periods and even longer odds of crossing directly in front of their stars.
But it should be possible to spot alien worlds directly by imaging very young nearby stars. This game plan assumes that any outlying gas-giant planets are still glowing warmly from their recent formation, making them relatively easy pickings at infrared wavelengths. One of these came to light in 2004, though it orbits a feebly glowing brown dwarf rather than a proper star.
The Large Hadron Collider is the largest and most complex scientific instrument ever built and the highest energy particle accelerator in the world. The accelerator is located 100 m underground and runs through both French and Swiss territory. ( 27km circumference)
Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?
A NASA working group hosted a discussion this week to ask: Who owns the moon? The answer, of course, is no one. The Outer Space Treaty, the international law signed by more than 100 countries, states that the moon and other celestial bodies are the province of all mankind. No doubt that would irk all of the people throughout the ages, like monks from the Middle Ages, who have tried to claim the moon was theirs.
But ownership is different from property rights. People who rent apartments, for example, don’t own where they live, but they still hold rights. So with all of the upcoming missions to visit the moon and beyond, space industry thought leaders are seriously asking themselves how to deal with a potential land rush, cowboy-style.
Engineers John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University, Chicago have created an electronic eye-shaped camera that uses a new class of electronics technology that can conform to almost any shape of a human eye. The new retina-like camera sensor uses flexible photosensitive pixels.
“Using simple mechanics principles, the researchers have produced, for the first time, electronic devices on a hemispherical surface so that they can take images much like those captured by the human eye,” said Ken Chong, advisor in the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Directorate, who is one of the officers overseeing the researchers’ National Science Foundation grant, in a statement.
A scientist on board the Amundsen research icebreaker near the Beaufort Sea says the ice shelf that broke apart last week is another sign that the Arctic has reached a tipping point in climate change.
Two blocks that broke away from the Ward Hunt Ice Shelf near the northern coast of Ellesmere Island are simply the latest loss in the Arctic’s rapidly disappearing mass of thick, ancient ice, said Gary Stern, chief scientist on board the Amundsen Coast Guard vessel.
“When I hear what happened, I am not surprised,” Stern said by satellite telephone.
“The rate we are losing ice is phenomenal. This (climate change) is real,” he said. “I think a lot of people don’t understand how fast things are changing up here.”
Stern, a University of Manitoba professor, is leading a major research project – part of the International Polar Year – examining climate change and the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.
After spending winter months navigating freely through Arctic waters that were once impassable, he pointed to the lack of new ice freezing as another indication that warming is well underway.
WASHINGTON - The Pentagon will buy and operate one or two commercial imagery satellites and plans to design and build another with more sophisticated spying capabilities, according to government and private industry officials.
The satellites could spy on enemy troop movements, spot construction at suspected nuclear sites and alert commanders to militant training camps.
The Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collector satellite system, or BASIC, will cost between $2 billion and $4 billion. It would add to the secret constellation of satellites that now circle the Earth, producing still images that are pieced together into one large mosaic.
A single satellite can visit one spot on Earth once or twice every day. BASIC’s additional satellites will allow multiple passes over the same sites, alerting U.S. government users to potential trouble, humanitarian crises or natural disasters like floods.
Scientists believe they have cracked a long-standing mystery of evolution - how the turtle got its shell.
CHICAGO (Reuters) - A new type of dry glue designed to mimic gecko feet is 10 times stickier than the gravity-defying lizards, and three times stickier than other gecko-inspired glues, U.S. researchers said on Thursday.
Discovering a planet around another star is no big deal these days — dozens of them have been reported in 2008 alone, and the total count now stands at more than 300.
Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?
Scientists in the US say they are a step closer to developing materials that could render people invisible.
Engineers John Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Yonggang Huang of Northwestern University, Chicago have created an electronic eye-shaped camera that uses a new class of electronics technology that can conform to almost any shape of a human eye. The new retina-like camera sensor uses flexible photosensitive pixels.
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