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.
A computer programme which could help identify and even translate messages from aliens in outer space has been developed by a British scientist.
Even if there are extra terrestrials are one day discovered, scientists fear their alien tongue may make it impossible to understand them.
But John Elliott of Leeds Metropolitan University believes he has come up with software which at least will decipher the structure of their language – and be the first step in understanding what they are saying.
Dr Elliott’s programme would compare an alien language to a database of 60 different languages in the world to search see if it has a similar structure.
He believes that even an alien language far removed from any on Earth is likely to have recognisable patterns that could help reveal how intelligent the life forms are.
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.
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)
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.
The Mars Lander’s mission on the fourth planet from the Sun is a dream come true for many scientists who have been trying for decades to prove that there is indeed water on Mars, and that where there’s water, there could be life.
NASA’s Phoenix lander recently discovered chunks of bright materials near the surface of the planet, which at a first glance appeared to be ice. Mission investigators were convinced: could it be anything else?
At the time, the answer would have been yes, as some feared those could have been in fact salt deposits. However, their complete disappearance in just days after they had been uncovered made it clear: it was water ice, as scientists confirmed last week.
“The nice thing is we finally filled in a bit of a blank spot in the dinosaur map,” said Anne Schulp, a palaeontologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, who worked on the study.
“Until 10 years not even bones were known from the Arabian peninsula and at last we have some dinosaur tracks.”
After traveling 422 million miles since its launching last Aug. 4, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming for a touchdown on Sunday in the unexplored northern regions of Mars. But first, it must survive what its developers call the final “seven minutes of terror” to reach the surface.
Scientists believe they have cracked a long-standing mystery of evolution – how the turtle got its shell.
A computer programme which could help identify and even translate messages from aliens in outer space has been developed by a British scientist.
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.
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.
