Feathery Ostrich Mimics Enfluffle the Dinosaur Family Tree

Not only was Ornithomimus feathered, but the dinosaur’s fluffy coat changed as it aged. Lovely art by Julius Csotonyi.

Since the discovery of the fluffy Sinosauropteryx in 1996, paleontologists have discovered direct evidence of fuzz, feather-like bristles and complex plumage on over two dozen dinosaur genera. University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky adds another enfluffled species to the dinosaurian ranks. Even better, the specimens raise hopes that many more dinosaurs might be preserved with their feathery coats intact.

Zelenitsky’s downy dinosaurs are not newly discovered species. Ornithomimus edmontonicus was initially described by famed bone hunter C.H. Sternberg in 1933, and it is one of the characteristic Late Cretaceous species found in Alberta, Canada’s fossil-rich Horseshoe Canyon Formation. In Sternberg’s time, these dinosaurs were thought to be scaly, but recent finds of so many feathery dinosaurs has raised the likeliehood that the “ostrich mimic” dinosaur was at least coated in some sort of dinofuzz.

... A trio of Ornithomimus skeletons have finally confirmed what paleontologists expected. Zelenitsky enthusiastically explained the details to me by phone earlier this week. In 1995, when Zelenitsky was a graduate student, paleontologists uncovered an articulated Ornithomimus with weird marks on its forearms. No one knew what they were. But in 2008 and 2009 a juvenile and an adult Ornithomimus turned up with preserved tufts of filamentous feathers. “When we found these specimens,” Zelenitsky said, “we made the link to the 1995 dinosaur.” All those strange marks on the arms of the previously discovered Ornithomimus, Zelenitsky and colleagues argue, are traces of longer, shafted feathers.

Even though paleontologists expected feathery Ornithomimus, the discovery was still a surprise. “I was in disbelief,” Zelenitsky said. “They’re the first feathered dinosaurs from the Americas, and the first ornithomimosaurs with feathers, as well. It was shocking to say the least.”

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Inside China's Energy Machine

Photograph by Toby Smith, Reportage by Getty Images

China's energy use, production, and ambitions are best captured by superlatives: The country is the world's largest energy consumer, and leading source of greenhouse gas emissions.

To power its tremendous economic growth, China has called on every fuel, every technology. It is the largest producer of coal and its greatest consumer, and yet China has more nuclear reactors under construction than any other nation. Its growing appetite for oil has kept gasoline prices high around the globe. And yet China's commitment to wind and solar power is so outsized that its young industries are now among the largest in the world.

But what does China's rapidly growing and changing energy landscape really look like?

Photographer Toby Smith of London spent two years working to gain access to China's new world of energy, in an effort to capture images rarely seen in the West. He sought to document not only the sources of the pollution that darkens the skies of Beijing and other cities, but the efforts to forge a cleaner energy future.

This blast furnace within a Baogang Group steel plant in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, is emblematic of China's emissions problems as the world leader in steelmaking, one of the most energy-intensive industries. In the past decade, China's steel industry has grown at the breakneck pace of 17 percent per year. Yet efficiency has improved since the 1990s, thanks in part to adoption of waste-heat recovery technology and a process known as top-pressure recovery for blast furnaces, which involves recycling fuel to produce electricity.

China's Prime Minister Wen Jiabao pledged to use an "iron hand" to push efficiency improvements further, not least of all by forcing the closure of many small, inefficient steel mills. The country's latest five-year plan, for 2011-2015, estimates the Chinese steel industry will see annual growth slow to 5 to 6 percent.

—Josie Garthwaite



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Thomas Henry Huxley and the Dinobirds

Evolution never got much time in my elementary school science classes. When the topic came up, inevitably near the end of the term, the standard, pre-packaged historical overview came along with it. Charles Darwin was the first person to come up with the idea of evolution, and, despite the ravings of religious leaders offended at our relationship to monkeys, the idea that natural selection adapted life into “endless forms most beautiful” quickly became established among the scientists of the day.

Like many textbook stories, the story of evolutionary discovery my classmates and I were presented with was clean, neat and hopelessly flawed. Darwin was not the first naturalist to propose that evolution was a reality; many of his colleagues thought that natural selection was too weak of a force to affect evolution, and for several decades following the 1859 publication of On the Origin of Species, many naturalists preferred alternative evolutionary mechanisms such as large-scale mutations and internal forces driving organisms onward and upward. Darwin was not even the first naturalist to come up with the idea of natural selection. Many naturalists had previously considered it and thought that it could at best preserve life as is and at worst destroy species. (As for Alfred Russel Wallace and the role he played in the development of evolutionary ideas, my classmates and I didn’t have a clue that he existed.)

The significance of Darwin’s work was in his demonstration of how natural selection could modify life and create a branching pattern of diversity over vast expanses of time. He had worked long and hard to collect all the necessary data to support his case. There was no “Newton’s Apple” type moment—another favorite science myth—in which a Galapagos finch perched on Darwin’s shoulder and whispered the secrets of evolution to the previously clueless naturalist. In Darwin’s time evolution was a frequently discussed issue, and the debate over what natural laws drove the change in species continued long after 1859.

Almost every major figure of the emerging field of evolutionary science has been miscast at one time or another. Richard Owen, one of the first evolutionists, has been traditionally portrayed as a brooding creationist for his opposition to natural selection. St. George Jackson Mivart met a similar fate despite the seriousness with which Darwin took his objections. Charles Lyell, on the other hand, became the white knight of geology who did away with the religiously fundamentalist views of catastrophic change popularized by Georges Cuvier (yet another myth). In order to preserve any semblance of the intellectual March of Progress each character must take up their proper place in the historical drama; they must fall along a simple chain of succession from ignorance to understanding. But among the most pernicious myths are those which seek to honor past scholars for the wrong reasons.

In 1996 a single photograph caused quite a stir at the annual Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in New York City. The picture depicted a small dinosaur in the classic death pose—head thrown back and stiff tail levered straight up—but it was covered in a fuzzy coat of rudimentary feathers. Eventually named Sinosauropteryx, this creature was the first feathered dinosaur to be found since the first specimens of Archaeopteryx were chiseled out of German limestone quarries in the late 19th century. It was a stunning confirmation of what many paleontologists had come to suspect on the basis of anatomy alone—that birds had evolved from dinosaurs, and many characteristic avian traits appeared among dinosaurs first. John Ostrom, Bob Bakker and other paleontologists were not the first to support this idea. The hypothesis had once been among the most prominent explanations for the origin and birds, and many authorities credited the Victorian naturalist Thomas Henry Huxley as being the first to propose it.

Huxley is often included among Darwin’s supporting cast. He was a prominent public voice for evolutionary science while Darwin mostly kept track of the discussions and debates about evolution through correspondence. In fact, Huxley was among the first scientists to propose graded lines of descent for birds, whales and horses, but his determination of these evolutionary transitions required a circuitous process of discovery and realization. Huxley’s ideas about bird origins, especially, were not a perfect anticipation of our current knowledge, but a set of nuanced hypotheses which relied on Huxley’s idiosyncratic conception of evolution.
 
(More…)

Reposted from Smithsonian Magazine

Energy Trends: India will edge China as "engine" of energy demand.

 

Photograph by Zheyang Soohoo, Reuters/Corbis

The swirl of headlights and taillights marks the traffic flow at a busy Petrol China gasoline station. Two-thirds of future growth in energy demand will come from Asia, led by both China and India.


Meanwhile, the world's thirst for oil is not slacking. Under the energy and climate policies that nations currently have in place, the IEA expects demand for oil to increase 27 percent between 2012 and 2035, to 111 million barrels a day. Fully two-thirds of that growth will come from Asia, with China in the lead.

China will remain Asia's biggest market, but "the volumetric growth in Indian demand (between 2020 and 2035) is larger than that of China," the IEA said. "India will be the engine of global demand growth," said the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol.

Demand will also accelerate greatly in the Middle East, which will account for 10 percent of growth in energy demand through 2035. By 2035, Middle Eastern countries will be gobbling down nearly 10 million barrels of oil a day, or about the same amount that China is consuming today.

Demand in developed countries like the United States and much of Europe will actually decrease between now and 2035, largely because of improved energy efficiencies, particularly tougher automotive fuel standards.

"Fossil Free" Fossil Fuels May Lie Deep Inside Earth

by Brian Handwerk 

Reserves of oil and gas, like the puddle of Venezuelan crude seen above, are made from the remains of plants and animals buried just a few miles below Earth's surface.

By mimicking the extreme conditions found much deeper, inside Earth's mantle, scientists have created the chains of carbon and hydrogen that make up so-called fossil fuels—without the fossils, a July 2009 study says.

The standard recipe for oil and natural gas is simple: Take animal or plant remains, bury them under layers of Earth's crust, turn up the pressure and temperature, and set a very, very long timer.

But a new study suggests that Earth could be cooking up the same finished products using a few substitutions.

By mimicking the extreme conditions found deep inside Earth, scientists have created the chains of carbon and hydrogen that make up so-called fossil fuels—without the fossils.

The feat may be a boost to an unorthodox theory that Earth could hold significant amounts of abiotic, or life-free, fuels far below conventional oil reserves.

Experts caution, however, that even if such reserves exist, exploiting them commercially could pose a challenge.

Diamonds and Lasers

Most of today's oil comes from deposits found a mere three to five miles (five to eight kilometers) below Earth's surface.

But Vladimir Kutcherov and colleagues wanted to know if fossil fuels could form where no organic matter exists: the upper mantle, 40 to 95 miles (65 to 150 kilometers) underground.

For their raw material, the team started with methane—a component of natural gas—that had been previously produced in the lab from only water and minerals.

The scientists crushed the "artificial" methane between two diamonds and heated it with a laser to re-create conditions thought to exist in Earth's mantle—although with a much shorter "cooking time" than what would be needed in nature.

The lab technique created pressures more than 20,000 times those found at sea level and temperatures topping 2,240 degrees F (1,227 degrees C).

Under these conditions, the methane reacted to produce a blend of ethane, propane, butane, molecular hydrogen, and graphite. "This is not just an artificial hydrocarbon mixture," said Kutcherov, of Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology.

"This mixture is very similar to the composition of natural gas."

Lab-made ethane subjected to the same temperatures and pressures produced methane, the team reports this week in the online version of the journal Nature Geoscience.

The reversibility suggests a hydrocarbon production cycle could be at work deep inside Earth's mantle, Kutcherov said.

New Energy Source?

The study addresses the controversial view, first proposed by Soviet geologists in the 1950s, that deep Earth holds reserves of oil made from just minerals and water.

Some scientists have even suggested that material from these deeper reservoirs occasionally migrates to the surface and may help to replenish known oil fields.

Henry Scott, of Indiana University South Bend, was part of a 2004 team that made inorganic methane from marble under simulated "deep Earth" conditions.

Production of heavier hydrocarbons from methane is a "big step forward," said Scott, who was not part of the new study.

The work makes it seem increasingly likely that some abotic hydrocarbons can form in the deep Earth.

However, he cautioned, there is little to suggest that commercially important amounts of oil, gas, and other hydrocarbons have fossil-free origins.

"There is simply an overwhelming body of evidence suggesting [commercial deposits] form from the decay of once-living things," he said.


Reposted from National Geographics News

Microraptor's Plumage Could Offer Insight into Early Evolution of Feathers

 A team of American and Chinese researchers has revealed the color and detailed feather pattern of Microraptor, a pigeon-sized, four-winged dinosaur that lived about 130 million years ago. The non-avian dinosaur's fossilized plumage, which had hues of black and blue like a crow, is the earliest record of iridescent feather color. The findings, which suggest the importance of display in the early evolution of feathers, will be published in the March 9 edition of the journal Science.

"This study gives us an unprecedented glimpse at what this animal looked like when it was alive," said Mark Norell, one of the paper's authors and chair of the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology. "There's been a lot of speculation about how the feathers of Microraptor were oriented and whether they formed airfoils for flight or whether they had to do with sexual display. So while we've nailed down what color this animal was, even more importantly, we've determined that Microraptor, like many modern birds, most likely used its ornate feathering to give visual social signals."

Although its anatomy is very similar to birds, Mircroraptor is considered a non-avian dinosaur and is placed in the group of dinosaurs called dromaeosaurs that includes Velociraptor. The fossilized specimen used in this study comes from rocks in Northeastern China that are about 130 million years old.

A reconstruction of Microraptor
based on digital overlays of nine
fossilized specimens (AMNH/M. Ellison) 

A close-up view of the well-preserved
feather imprints on the Microraptor fossil
(AMNH/M. Ellison)

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Microraptor Was a Glossy Dinosaur

Microraptor was an exquisitely feathered dinosaur. The small, sickle-clawed predator, which lived about 120 million years ago, was covered in well-developed plumage, including long feathers on its arms and legs. But we now know that Microraptor was not only beautiful in an anatomical structure sense. A detailed new study has painted this dinosaur in a glossy black sheen.  Microraptor feathers were iridescent blue-black

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Energy Trends: Fossil fuels will still dominate the scene

 
IEA expects renewable energy generation to double by 2035 under existing policies. But solar, wind, and hydropower are not on track to catch up with oil or coal, and world primary energy demand is on track to increase 43 percent.

Today's share of fossil fuels in the world energy mix—82 percent—is the same as it was 25 years ago. And by 2035, the IEA forecasts that fossil fuels will barely give up ground, providing 75 percent of global energy. 

Governments around the world subsidized consumption of fossil fuel to the tune of $544 billion last year—more than five times greater than supports for renewable energy, which totaled $101 billion in 2012. IEA expects subsidies for renewables to more than double to $220 billion by 2035, but they will still be overshadowed by government supports for fossil fuels without reform.

Unsurprisingly, given the expected energy mix, carbon dioxide emissions from energy are expected to continue their upward movement, jumping 20 percent by 2035. This leaves the world on a trajectory consistent with a long-term average temperature increase of 3.6°C (6.5°F), far above the internationally agreed 2°C (3.6°F) target. 

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Plundering Science, Bone by Bone

By ALANNA MITCHELL

The fossil of a Tarbosaurus bataar, top, was finally returned to Mongolia after it was poached and sold for $1 million. The Nemegt Basin, a fertile site, is particularly vulnerable.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

It is the dinosaur version of grave robbing: fossil poachers plundering a paleontological dig, frequently smashing ancient skulls and stealing valuable teeth, claws and feet.

Often, all that remain are shards of fossilized bone and a wrecked, irreplaceable scientific record. And in cases where poachers excavate an entire skeleton and spirit it away to illicit entrepreneurs or collectors, it is as if the bones, buried for millions of years, were being dug up only to be hidden away again in private collections.

“This is huge,” said Catherine A. Forster, a paleontologist at George Washington University who is president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. “It isn’t just one or two specimens. A fair proportion of very good fossils just disappear from knowledge, and few are ever seen again.”

And while some scientists hoped that a high-profile legal case in New York last year over the $1 million sale of a rare Mongolian dinosaur would curb the illegal digging, that does not appear to have happened. Mark A. Norell, chairman of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said a visit to the Gobi Desert over the summer made clear that poaching continues “in a big way.”

Philip J. Currie, a paleontologist at the University of Alberta, says he has determined that 98 skeletons of the dinosaur, Tarbosaurus bataar (sometimes called Tyrannosaurus bataar), were destroyed or removed by poachers in Mongolia. Fewer than a dozen are in scientific hands, he says. And he has counted many other plundered fossil skeletons from the Gobi, including 86 ostrichlike dinosaurs. (It has been illegal to remove fossils from Mongolia since the 1920s.)

Although the age of the dinosaurs lasted about 165 million years, their skeletons are relatively uncommon: only about 3,000 are known to exist. About 1,300 dinosaur species have been identified, Dr. Norell said — more than half from a single skeleton and perhaps a third from a single bone.

Paleontologists say they are not taking aim at professional fossil finders, who work within the law and dig carefully. They are calling for the patchwork of laws on dinosaur stealing and smuggling to be enforced and tightened around the world, and they are pleading with private collectors to demand proof of a fossil’s origins before they buy — just as they would question the pedigree of a painting or an antique.

Otherwise, the scientists say, valuable entries in the earth’s book of life will be lost forever, including information about exactly where the fossils were found, what geological formation the creatures were in, how they were lying in the ground, how they were discovered and precisely when they lived, not to mention what surrounded them at death.

“I’m saying, ‘Ask for provenance,’ ” Dr. Norell said. “It worked in the art world, but it hasn’t hit the fossil world.”

The Association of Applied Paleontological Sciences, a professional group representing private commercial fossil collectors and dealers, is also encouraging its members to educate themselves and the public on the legality of the specimens.

The modern-day fossil rush began in earnest after the Field Museum in Chicago paid $8.36 million in 1997 for Sue, the most complete T. Rex skeleton ever found, said Kenshu Shimada, a professor at DePaul University in Chicago who is chairman of government affairs at the paleontology society. Shortly after, the phenomenon of online buying and selling through sites like eBay took off, opening up global markets for fossils.

Dr. Shimada said the society became so concerned about the extent of the illegal dinosaur trade that it made a survey of “paleo hot spots,” gathering information from 20 countries about where fossils are, what laws govern them and how the laws are enforced.

Dr. Currie said the Nemegt Basin, in the Gobi Desert, is a particular concern. It is one of the two best dinosaur sites on the planet, he said, with a diverse range of fossils and thousands of footprints. The 70-million-year-old T. Bataar, for example, was an Asian relative of the Tyrannosaurus rex, and was one of the last dinosaurs to evolve, one of the most sophisticated and one of the most dangerous — yet much of its life cycle remains unknown.

“One of the most spectacular sites for understanding dinosaurs in the world is now being destroyed by poachers,” Dr. Currie said.

The dream, he said, is to explore the basin as an ancient ecosystem, learning how dinosaurs interacted with one another and their environment. Many puzzles remain. For example, scientists would expect to find far more plant-eating dinosaurs than meat eaters in one layer of the basin, yet the remains of carnivores predominate. Why?

While the Mongolian government’s successful lawsuit over the T. Bataar skeleton did not end poaching, it has had other effects. The sale was voided, and the smuggler, Eric Prokopi, a fossil dealer from Gainesville, Fla., pleaded guilty in a criminal proceeding and awaits sentencing. The skeleton was returned to Mongolia in May.

As a result, the country has set up its first dinosaur museum, in the capital, Ulan Bator, with the repatriated skeleton as the starring attraction, said Minjin Bolortsetseg, director of the Institute for the Study of Mongolian Dinosaurs. Twenty-two more Mongolian fossils are due to be repatriated soon.

But Dr. Bolortsetseg said that until the Mongolian government protects fossil sites, involves local governments in policing them and educates the public about the historical value of the fossils, the looting is unlikely to stop. 

Reposted from The New York Times

Energy Trends: U.S. energy boom is unique, has risks.

Thanks to "fracking," the United States is reaching the top spot among world oil producers sooner than expected, and is "well on its way to realizing the American dream" of energy independence, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said.

"But this does not mean that the world is on the cusp of a new era of oil abundance," the IEA warned in its closely watched annual World Energy Outlook. Instead, the agency predicted that no other country will replicate the United States' success with hydraulic fracturing and other unconventional technologies that have led to the North American boom in oil and natural gas production.


IEA notes that there is a steep decline rate for shale oil and natural gas wells tapped by hydraulic fracturing, the unconventional technology that has been key to U.S. success. Maintaining high output will require continuous investment in drilling new wells to compensate for declines at existing ones, the agency said.

IEA notes that many nations hope to replicate U.S. success in fracking, and areas of Argentina, Russia, China, and the Middle East seem  promising. But "good geology alone is not sufficient to replicate the U.S. experience," the agency said. Outside of the United States, there's neither the legal environment nor the oil services industry capacity to make shale oil and gas development worth the cost. More than 6,000 wells were drilled for unconventional oil in the United States and Canada in 2012, and only 100 outside of North America.

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More on the Ornithomimus

Ornithomimus on display at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Ornithomimus was a swift bipedal theropod which fossil evidence indicates was covered in feathers, equipped with a small toothless beaked head that may indicate an omnivorous diet.

Like other ornithomimids, species of Ornithomimus are characterized by feet with three weight-bearing toes, long slender arms, and long necks with birdlike, elongated, toothless, beaked skulls. They were bipedal and superficially resembled ostriches. 

Ornithomimus edmontonicus in "death pose", Royal Tyrrell Museum.

Reposted from Wikipedia 

 

The Bat-Winged Dinosaur That Never Was

Pennycuick’s hypothetical Archaeopteryx ancestor, with membranes between the fingers and no feathers. From Pennycuick, 1986.

The prediction of fluffy Ornithomimus came from the spread of feathers on the coelurosaur family tree. The Coelurosauria is a major dinosaur group that encompasses tyrannosaurs, compsognathids, ornithomimosaurs, alvarezsaurs, oviraptorosaurs, deinonychosaurs and birds. To date, evidence of feathers has been found in every coelurosaur lineage except one–the ornithomimosaurs. The spread of feathers hinted that some sort of plumage was present in the common ancestor of all coelurosaurs and therefore should have been inherited by the ornithomimosaurs, but, until now, no one had found direct evidence.

A trio of Ornithomimus skeletons have finally confirmed what paleontologists expected. Paleontologists Zelenitsky enthusiastically explains ... In 1995, when Zelenitsky was a graduate student, paleontologists uncovered an articulated Ornithomimus with weird marks on its forearms. No one knew what they were. But in 2008 and 2009 a juvenile and an adult Ornithomimus turned up with preserved tufts of filamentous feathers. “When we found these specimens,” Zelenitsky said, “we made the link to the 1995 dinosaur.” All those strange marks on the arms of the previously discovered Ornithomimus, Zelenitsky and colleagues argue, are traces of longer, shafted feathers.

But there’s more to the find than simply adding another species of fluffy dinosaurs to the list. The fact that the adult and juvenile animals had different kinds of plumage adds new evidence that coelurosaurs changed their fluffy coats as they aged. “The one juvenile was completely covered in filamentous type feathers,” Zelenitsky said. What the adults looked like comes from the two other specimens. One adult skeleton, lacking forearms, preserves fuzzy feathers, and “the second adult had markings on the forearm.” Together, the specimens indicate that adult Ornithomimus were mostly covered in fuzz but developed more complex arm feathers by adulthood.

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Solar Prospecting

Solar power is measured by insolation. The insolation rating of a particular area is the amount of solar radiation to hit the ground in a specific time period. This is usually figured in terms of kilowatt-hours per square meter per day (kWh/m2/day). A high insolation rating is a good indicator of a town"s potential for supplementing traditional power plants with solar energy.




Reposted from Curiosity.com

Can renewable forms of energy replace fossil fuels?

Well, remember, efficiency comes first. So we quit the waste. As soon as you quit the waste, then your energy demand drops in the rich countries and flatlines in the developing countries. That's a manageable problem. If you have dropping energy demand, you can make carbon drop even faster by a steady substitution of renewable fuels.

If you have flat energy demand, which they would in China, for example, then you can start chewing away at that with new renewables. But you've bought yourself the time to introduce those renewable on a mass scale. It's no longer a panic situation.

Reposted from Curiosity.com

 

New Dinosaur a Prehistoric Turkey?

An artist's impression of the newly-discovered dinosaur, called Hagryphus.
Photo: Michael Skrepnick

Fossils from a new species of birdlike dinosaur resembling a 2.1 metre brightly coloured turkey and which could run at up to 40 kph have been found in southern Utah.

Fossils of the meat-eater's hand-like claw and foot found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument near the Arizona border in Utah, give paleontologists reason to believe some dinosaurs known as raptors roamed from Canada to northern New Mexico about 75 million years ago.

The dinosaur had a strong toothless beak, powerful arms and formidable claws that made it capable of eating animals and plants. Large feathers grew on its hind end, giving it a resemblance to a turkey, Zanno said today.

Scientists are not sure what purpose the feathers served, but it was not for flying. "It's quite different from modern birds," she said.

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As Jet Fuel Prices Soar, a Green Option Nears the Runway

Aviation is making an important step in breaking free of its petroleum dependence through biofuel.

In March 2011, a U.S. Air Force F-22 Raptor powered by a 50-50 blend of renewable and petroleum jet fuel flew at supersonic speed from Edwards Air Force Base in California. The important test helped prove the fuel's viability.

Photograph courtesy Kevin North, US Air Force

The ethanol that is typically used in cars—fuel alcohol refined from grain or sugar cane—would not work in aviation, at least with today's jet engines, because its energy density (the power it packs per gallon or liter) is too low. But numerous start-up companies around the world have been working with a very different fuel derived from oils that have been extracted from plants, animal fat, or grease. The oils are treated with hydrogen to produce HRJ, synthetic kerosene that is chemically the same as jet fuel. Only carbon dating would reveal that it is not made from fossil fuel.


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Palentologist: Annie M. Alexander

Annie Alexander (1867 – 1950)  Annie M. Alexander was born in Hawaii into a wealthy family of sugarcane growers and refiners, was educated in California and Europe, and spent much of her life adventuring across the globe. After sitting in on some lectures given by Berkeley paleontologist John Merriam, Alexander became acutely interested in the subject and funded several fossil hunting expeditions across the United States, on the condition that she could join the parties.

Alexander’s importance as a patron of the sciences could hardly be over-exaggerated.  She endowed what would ultimately become the University of California Museum of Paleontology, as well as the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology both located on the Berkeley campus of the University of California and both which remain important research institutions. In addition to her philanthropic work, Alexander was a talented naturalist and collected numerous fossil, zoological and botanical specimens for the museums that she founded. Some 17 species or subspecies, extinct and extant, bear her name including three marine reptiles Thalattosaurus alexandrae , (see below) Hydrotherosaurus alexadrae and Shastasaurus alexandrae (though the later is now considered to be a junior synonym of S. pacificus).



Thalattosaurus alexandrae







Thalattosaurs (meaning "ocean lizards") are a group of prehistoric marine reptiles which lived during the mid-late Triassic Period. Some species of thalattosaur grew to over 4 metres (13 feet) in length, including a long, flattened tail used in underwater propulsion. While they bore a superficial resemblance to lizards.

More on Why do two dragons sleep soundly?

 
The little crow-sized troodontid dinosaur, Mei long (meaning “soundly sleeping dragon”) was more aptly named than Xu and Norell (2004) originally realized. Now, Chunling Gao and colleages (2012) have reported their discovery of a second fully articulated specimen preserved in the posture characteristically adopted by many modern birds while they sleep: neck curved around sideways, head tucked in behind a wing, legs folded under body and (something of which modern birds are incapable, with their truncated pygostyle) long tail wrapped around the body. The only significant difference in posture between the two animals is that the new one’s (DNHM D2154) neck is bent in the opposite direction to that in the first specimen (IVPP V12733). Xu and Norell (2004) had suggested that as in modern birds, this compact body configuration minimizes the ratio of surface area to volume, thereby enhancing body heat retention, which is a significant challenge to such small homeothermic (warm blooded) animals.

Despite the fact that these fossils were found in the volcaniclastic (volcanic ash deposit) sediments of the Yixian formation, which facilitate extremely fine preservation, fossilization is a very spotty process (only two such beautiful Mei specimens are known so far). So it seems statistically unlikely that both specimens (and a partial Sinornithoides) would be found in this sleeping posture unless death and the posture were somehow related. But how?

Gao et al. (2012) point out that not all the victims of Pompei (who were similarly covered by ash as Mei) display the hyperflexion (clenching) of muscles that results from death by high temperature ash falls and fire. Therefore, (assuming that theropods such as Mei display similar neuromuscular responses to heat as do mammals) it isn’t unreasonable to surmise that the specimens of Mei died by asphyxiation from toxic volcanic gases while sleeping instead of being roasted. In this scenario, the volcanic eruptions that killed and buried the animals may have occurred during the sleeping period, and therefore represents a kind of snapshot of ‘normal’ life in this prehistoric ecosystem.

Alternatively, Gao et al. (2012) have suggested that perhaps the preserved brooding posture of Mei represents either (1) sheltering behaviour within a burrow (which may have constrained the position of the body and prevented the kind of opisthotonic neck-twisted-up-over-back posture that characterizes many dinosaur skeletons and which has been proposed to results from either a neurolomuscular response to toxins or agony, or postmortem contraction of neck ligaments), or (2) a defensive postural response to volcanic events such as ash fall. In this last case, the volcanic event may have directly influenced the preserved postures of some of the fossils that are found in its resulting sediments. In the sketch above, I have chosen to illustrate Mei curled up under a relatively cooler ash fall, and the hapless creature has been asphyxiated, either in its sleep or in a defensive posture.

The multiplicity of possible explanations for the brooding posture of Mei and the likelihood of the fossilization process to influence the behaviour of the animals that it preserves underscores the daunting and complex task facing paleontologists who strive to piece together the puzzle of prehistoric ecosystems from relatively few pieces left to them sometimes by catastrophic events.

Reposted from Evolutionary Routes

Flying Wind Turbines Reach for High-Altitude Power: Circling to Get Ahead

Photograph courtesy Doug Selsam

The KiteGen power kite is designed to fly in figure-eight patterns, according to illustrations on the company website.

Another pioneering system that has garnered some attention has been under development since 2005 by Kanata, Canada-based Magenn Power. Its 100-kW device, the Magenn Air Rotor System (MARS), is a helium-filled mini blimp designed to float up to 1,000 feet (305 meters).  (A land-based wind turbine of that capacity would be considered among the largest of small wind turbines.)

Wind makes the blimp's cylindrical core rotate around a horizontal axis, which generates electricity. The juice is then sent down the tether, according to the company.

Magenn claims the helium keeps the device especially stable in high-altitude winds, and says it has met U.S. Federal Aviation Administration guidelines for safety. Company marketing materials promote the product as ideal for remote applications like oil rigs and wilderness cabins, although it has not been released yet.

Some are skeptical of the company's claims. Alternative wind turbine designer Doug Selsam says the MARS system "takes the least efficient turbine type known and makes it more expensive and less efficient, by taking it into the air, with the balloon vastly increasing swept area without increasing power."

Magenn did not respond to a request for comment left on the company's Canadian headquarters answering system. The U.S. phone number listed on the company's website is disconnected.

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How Did Dinosaurs Sleep?

A second specimen of the troodontid Mei, preserved in a bird-like sleeping position. From Gao et al., 2012.

Bone by bone and study by study, paleontologists are learning more than ever before about dinosaurs. But there are still many aspects about prehistoric biology that we know little about. In fact, some of the simplest facets of dinosaur lives remain elusive.

For one thing, we don’t know much at all about how dinosaurs slept. Did Apatosaurus doze standing up or kneel down to rest? Did tyrannosaurs use their tiny, muscular arms to push themselves off the ground after a nap? And, given the discovery of so many enfluffled dinosaurs, did fuzzy dinosaurs ever cuddle up together to stay warm on chilly Mesozoic nights?

Since we can’t observe living non-avian dinosaurs directly, some of these questions have to remain in the realm of speculation. But a handful of fossils have shown us that at least some dinosaurs curled up just like birds. In 2004, Xing Xu and Mark Norell described the tiny, early Cretaceous dinosaur Mei long–a feathery troodontid dinosaur with big eyes and a little switchblade claw on each foot. What made Mei special, though, was the way the dinosaur was preserved.

Many articulated dinosaur skeletons are found in the classic dinosaur death pose, with their tails tilted up and their necks thrown over their backs. The nearly-complete skeleton of Mei was different. The foot-long dinosaur rested its head over its folded arms, and its tail wrapped around the dinosaur’s torso. Mei died sleeping in a roosting position similar to that of modern birds. The dinosaur’s name, which means “sleeping dragon,” is a tribute to the behavior.

Now another Mei specimen has confirmed that the first find was not a fluke. Last week, paleontologist Chunling Gao, of the Dalian Natural History Museum in China, and colleagues described a second, slightly smaller Mei that was preserved in a nearly identical sleeping position. Much like the first, this Mei probably died in a prehistoric ashfall that both killed and preserved the dinosaur in delicate detail without jarring the snoozing troodontid out of position. Some feathery, non-avian dinosaurs not only looked like birds, but they slept like them, too.

The two Mei specimens aren’t the only dinosaurs found in such positions. Gao and colleagues also point out that a specimen of another troodontid found in the Cretaceous rock of Mongolia, Sinornithoides youngi, was found in the same sort of sleeping position. And while not mentioned by the authors of the new study, the sleeping positions of Mei and Sinornithoides remind me of the early Jurassic dinosaur Segisaurus. Described in 1936, the partial skeleton of Segisaurus was found with its legs tucked beneath its body and arms apparently in a resting position. Perhaps this dinosaur, too, died while dozing, and records an even older record of how dinosaurs rested. Such glimpses are rare, but they help fill in some of the most elusive moments in Mesozoic history.

Reposted from Smithsonian Magazine 

 

Book Hostage Promotes Fossil River

Book Promotion: Fossil River by Jock Miller

Posted on November 12, 2013 by bookhostage
 

Today’s book promotion comes from Jock Miller and his book called Fossil River. If you like science fiction, take a look below. You might just find another book for your “to read” pile!

Book: Fossil River
Author: Jock Miller
Genre: Science Fiction
Publisher: Story Merchant Books
Format: Paperback and eBook
Released: May 21, 2012
Summary:


From the publisher of Careers & The disABLEd Magazine, Jock Miller, comes an action-packed thriller set in the wilderness of Northern Alaska, Fossil River. The main characters– a wounded warrior Marine from the wars of Afghanistan and Iraq, and a the brilliant curator of NY’s Museum of Natural History, along with her teenage son and his girlfriend–pitted against a colony of living fossils, which happen to be the most vicious predators that ever walked the earth.

Will the nation be plunged into darkness because the United States cannot get access to the largest fossil fuel deposit in the world in time to prevent the lights and mobility fuel from being extinguished, plunging the nation into utter financial ruin and darkness? Will they survive?

 Fossil fuel has an ageless affinity with dinosaurs. To create oil, dinosaurs died.

The world’s largest fossil fuel deposit is discovered in a remote mountain range within Alaska’s Noatak National Preserve.

Preventing access to it is a colony of living dinosaurs–protecting its territory to the death as the nation’s lights are about to extinguish. Will the nation go dark or will the US Military succeed in gaining access in time to save the nation from utter disaster.




Jock Miller received a BS degree in Zoology from Ohio Wesleyan University. Focus of study: paleontology, ornithology, and comparative anatomy. He attended Harvard Business School to participate in a case study publishing management program sponsored by the American Business Press.

Before starting his own publishing company, Miller served as Director of Marketing and Sales Service for Billboard Publications, Inc, then Director of Circulation for the twelve magazine publishing company. Miller has appeared on cable TV talk shows, been interviewed on numerous radio talk shows and interviewed live on the Today Show by Barbara Walters. He has been a guest lecturer at C.W. Post College, and C.W. Post Brentwood Campus, lecturing on industry’s responsibility to society and its community.

Miller is Director Emeritus of The First National Bank of Long Island where he served on the Board for twenty-three years. He is currently serving on the Board of Directors of the Middleby Company as Chairman of the Compensation Committee. He is past President of the Boards of The Cold Spring Harbor Whaling Museum and The Huntington Arts Council, and served on the Cold Spring Harbor Fish Hatchery Board of Directors. He has served as an Elder and Deacon of the First Presbyterian Church of Huntington.

Miller has received the Pericles Award for his work promoting people with disAbilites, Wounded Warriors, Minorities and Women into the workforce through his company, EOP, Inc. (www.Eop.com). He is also the recipient of the Valley Forge Honor Certificate recognizing his contribution to a free society.

His hobbies are fly fishing, writing novels, playing the bag pipes and the piano. Miller is an amateur radio operator, K2MUS.
~
I want to thank Jock Miler for allowing me to promote his book on my blog. I hope this post has inspired you to go out and read Fossil River!

Reposted from Book Hostage

Sweden plans to be world's first oil-free economy

Evergreen... Sweden will develop biofuels from its forests. 

Photograph: Mattias Klum/Getty Images

Sweden is to take the biggest energy step of any advanced western economy by trying to wean itself off oil completely within 15 years - without building a new generation of nuclear power stations.

The attempt by the country of 9 million people to become the world's first practically oil-free economy is being planned by a committee of industrialists, academics, farmers, car makers, civil servants and others, who will report to parliament in several months.

The intention, the Swedish government said yesterday, is to replace all fossil fuels with renewables before climate change destroys economies and growing oil scarcity leads to huge new price rises.

"Our dependency on oil should be broken by 2020," said Mona Sahlin, minister of sustainable development. "There shall always be better alternatives to oil, which means no house should need oil for heating, and no driver should need to turn solely to gasoline."

According to the energy committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, there is growing concern that global oil supplies are peaking and will shortly dwindle, and that a global economic recession could result from high oil prices.

Ms Sahlin has described oil dependency as one of the greatest problems facing the world. "A Sweden free of fossil fuels would give us enormous advantages, not least by reducing the impact from fluctuations in oil prices," she said. "The price of oil has tripled since 1996."

A government official said: "We want to be both mentally and technically prepared for a world without oil. The plan is a response to global climate change, rising petroleum prices and warnings by some experts that the world may soon be running out of oil."

Sweden, which was badly hit by the oil price rises in the 1970s, now gets almost all its electricity from nuclear and hydroelectric power, and relies on fossil fuels mainly for transport. Almost all its heating has been converted in the past decade to schemes which distribute steam or hot water generated by geothermal energy or waste heat. A 1980 referendum decided that nuclear power should be phased out, but this has still not been finalised.

The decision to abandon oil puts Sweden at the top of the world green league table. Iceland hopes by 2050 to power all its cars and boats with hydrogen made from electricity drawn from renewable resources, and Brazil intends to power 80% of its transport fleet with ethanol derived mainly from sugar cane within five years.

Last week George Bush surprised analysts by saying that the US was addicted to oil and should greatly reduce imports from the Middle East. The US now plans a large increase in nuclear power.

The British government, which is committed to generating 10% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2012, last month launched an energy review which has a specific remit to consider a large increase in nuclear power. But a report by accountants Ernst & Young yesterday said that the UK was falling behind in its attempt to meet its renewables target.

"The UK has Europe's best wind, wave and tidal resources yet it continues to miss out on its economic potential," said Jonathan Johns, head of renewable energy at Ernst & Young.

Energy ministry officials in Sweden said they expected the oil committee to recommend further development of biofuels derived from its massive forests, and by expanding other renewable energies such as wind and wave power.

Sweden has a head start over most countries. In 2003, 26% of all the energy consumed came from renewable sources - the EU average is 6%. Only 32% of the energy came from oil - down from 77% in 1970.

The Swedish government is working with carmakers Saab and Volvo to develop cars and lorries that burn ethanol and other biofuels. Last year the Swedish energy agency said it planned to get the public sector to move out of oil. Its health and library services are being given grants to convert from oil use and homeowners are being encouraged with green taxes. The paper and pulp industries use bark to produce energy, and sawmills burn wood chips and sawdust to generate power.

Reposted from The Guardian

Feathery Ostrich Mimics Enfluffle the Dinosaur Family Tree

Not only was Ornithomimus feathered, but the dinosaur’s fluffy coat changed as it aged. Lovely art by Julius Csotonyi.

University of Calgary paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky adds another enfluffled species to the dinosaurian ranks. Even better, the specimens raise hopes that many more dinosaurs might be preserved with their feathery coats intact.

Zelenitsky’s downy dinosaurs are not newly discovered species. Ornithomimus edmontonicus was initially described by famed bone hunter C.H. Sternberg in 1933, and it is one of the characteristic Late Cretaceous species found in Alberta, Canada’s fossil-rich Horseshoe Canyon Formation. In Sternberg’s time, these dinosaurs were thought to be scaly, but recent finds of so many feathery dinosaurs has raised the likeliehood that the “ostrich mimic” dinosaur was at least coated in some sort of dinofuzz.


Read more

Harbin Smog Crisis Highlights China’s Coal Problem

Christina Nunez

A traffic policeman signals to drivers Monday in Harbin, China, where smog grew so thick that roads had to be closed. Winter heating systems fired by coal are being blamed, in part, for the crisis.

Photograph by China Daily, Reuters

Choked with smog that shut down roads, schools, and its main airport, the city of Harbin (map) this week offered a striking reminder that China has a long way to go in addressing the hazards caused by its dependence on coal.

Visibility in the northeastern city of more than 10 million people reportedly was reduced in places to less than 65 feet (20 meters) as coal-fired heating systems ramped up for the winter months. Officials also pointed to farmers burning crop stubble and low winds as additional causes for the pollution crisis.

Harbin, also known as the Ice City, hosts an ice and snow festival every year that features displays of elaborate ice sculptures. But the city's frigid temperatures, which can reach -40ºF (-40º C) in winter, mean that residences usually need heating for six months of the year. As part of a national effort to reduce energy intensity, Harbin in 2010 spent $1.1 million to retrofit 21 million square feet (2 million square meters) of residential buildings—adding five new layers of wall insulation, as well as better windows and roofing. (See related story: "In China's Icy North, Outfitting Buildings to Save Energy.")

But building retrofits can go only so far in a country where coal fuels 70 percent of the energy consumption. China, the world's largest consumer of coal, is also the world's leader in carbon emissions. (See related interactive map: "Four Ways to Look at Global Carbon Footprints.") Those emissions have stark consequences for the country's residents, a fact highlighted in two recent studies that measured the health impacts of fossil fuel emissions.

Deadly Pollution Problems

The level of fine particulate matter, or PM2.5, in Harbin's air this week reportedly reached 1,000 micrograms per cubic meter, exceeding the World Health Organization's daily target level by a factor of 40. While Harbin's predicament is alarming, it is not isolated; many cities in Northern China, including the capital Beijing and neighboring Tianjin, rank among the most polluted in the world. In January, Beijing made headlines when its air quality got so bad that it went beyond the very top of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality Index.

Research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) in July found that air pollution has caused the loss of more than 2.5 billion years of life expectancy in China. Because of a government policy that provided free coal for home and office heating to residents of the north from 1950 to 1980, life expectancy there was 5.5 years shorter than in southern China in the 1990s. That disparity persists today, researchers say, almost entirely because of heart and lung disease related to air pollution from the burning of coal. (See related story: "Coal Burning Shortens Lives in China, New Study Shows.")

Bill Chameides of Duke University's Nicholas School for the Environment led two air quality studies in China's Yangtze Delta between 1995 and 2004. "Hearing about Harbin's smog problems, I couldn't help but think back [to those studies]," Chameides said via e-mail Tuesday. "It was really bad then. Everywhere I went in China the sky was covered with a smoggy, foggy gray blanket. A cab driver told me, tongue in cheek, that while dogs howl once a month at night at the moon, in China they howl once a month during the day-because that's how often the sun comes out."

A separate study released last month found that if the world took action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, more than 500,000 lives could be saved globally each year. The air and health quality benefits for East Asia alone would add up to between 10 and 70 times the cost of reducing emissions by 2030, researchers said. (See related story: "Climate Change Action Could Save 500,000 Lives Annually, Study Says.")

Growth, at a Cost

The challenge to improve heating infrastructure and improve efficiency for millions of square feet within existing buildings is made even more formidable by the fact that China is currently adding some 22 billion new square feet (2 billion square meters) of construction per year. At the same time, living standards are increasing, creating demand for ever more power; and coal remains subsidized, meaning that consumers don't see the fuel's true cost in their heating prices. (See related quiz: "What You Don't Know About Home Heating.")

China did earlier this year announce a ban on new coal plants in three industrial regions near Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, citing air quality problems. (See related blog post by Chameides: "China Puts Kibosh on New Coal Plants (in Three Regions).")

The government has also approved at least nine large-scale projects that would turn coal into synthetic natural gas (SNG), a strategy that may help ease China's air pollution woes but create more environmental problems than it solves. "In terms of mitigating smog in eastern China, replacing coal with SNG indeed can help quite a bit," said Chi-Jen Yang, a researcher at Duke, in an e-mail Tuesday. Yang co-authored a recent paper on the topic in Nature Climate Change, noting that SNG produces greenhouse gas emissions seven times that of conventional natural gas while requiring vast amounts of water.

"I understand that to the Chinese government, smog is probably more urgent than global warming, which explains their policy [favoring SNG]," Yang said. "I am just warning that their near-sighted policy will lock them into a long-term unsustainable path of development."

Yang's warning underscores a larger truth echoed by Chameides: Though China's energy decisions are being felt most keenly right now by those in Harbin and cities like it, the longer-term effects reverberate far beyond its borders. "When you think about how important China's economy is to the U.S. consumer, indeed to the whole world," said Chameides, "China's pollution is a threat to us all."

—Additional reporting by Marianne Lavelle and Te-Ping Chen

Reposted from National Geographics

Spinach power has just gotten a big boost.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers at Vanderbilt University have developed a way to combine the photosynthetic protein that converts light into electrochemical energy in spinach with silicon, the material used in solar cells, in a fashion that produces substantially more electrical current than has been reported by previous "biohybrid" solar cells.

How did feathered dinosaurs take to the air?

Archaeopteryx had a wing that was different from that of modern birds, and, as seen here, might have been a glider more than a powered flyer. Art by Carl Buell, courtesy of Nicholas Longrich.

Paleontologists have been investigating and debating this essential aspect of avian evolution for over a century. Indeed, there have been almost as many ideas as they have been experts, envisioning scenarios of dinosaurs gliding through trees, theropods trapping insects with their feathery wings and even aquatic Iguanodon flapping primitive flippers as flight precursors (I didn’t say that all the ideas were good ones). The biomechanical abilities of bird ancestors and their natural history has always been at the center of the debate, and a new Current Biology paper adds more fuel to the long-running discussion.

At present, hypotheses for the origin of avian flight typically fall into one of two categories. Either bird ancestors accrued the adaptations necessary for flight on the ground and, through evolutionary happenstance, were eventually able to take off, or small tree-dwelling dinosaurs used their feathery coats to glide between trees and, eventually, flapped their way into a flying lifestyle. There are variations on both themes, but feathers and the characteristic avian flight stroke are at the core of any such scenario. In the case of the new paper, Yale University paleontologist Nicholas Longrich and colleagues draw from the plumage of early bird Archaeopteryx and the troodontid Anchiornis to examine how feathers changed as dinosaurs started to fly.

In modern flying birds, Longrich and coauthors point out, the wing arrangement typically consists of “long, asymmetrical flight feathers overlain by short covert feathers.” This pattern creates a stable airfoil but also lets the flight feathers separate a little during the upstroke of a wing beat, therefore reducing drag. When the paleontologists examined the fossilized wings of Archaeopteryx and Anchiornis, they found different feather arrangements that would have constrained the flight abilities of the Jurassic dinosaurs.

Both prehistoric creatures had long covert feathers layered on top of the flight feathers. Anchiornis, in particular, appeared to have an archaic wing form characterized by layers of short, symmetrical flight feathers and similarly shaped coverts. Archaeopteryx showed more specialization between the flight feathers and the coverts but still did not have a wing just like that of a modern bird. As a result, Longrich and collaborators hypothesize, both arrangements would have stabilized the wing at the cost of increased drag at low speeds, making it especially difficult for Anchiornis and Archaeopteryx to take off. As an alternative, the researchers suggest that these dinosaurs might have been parachuters who jumped into the air from trees, which might hint that “powered flight was preceded by arboreal parachuting and gliding.”

The trick is determining whether Anchiornis and Archaeopteryx actually represent the form of bird ancestors, or whether the dinosaurs, like Microraptor, were independent experiments in flight evolution. At the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conference in Raleigh, North Carolina last month, flight expert Michael Habib quipped that all that was needed to make dromaeosaurs aerially competent was the addition of feathers. If Habib is right, and I think he is, then there could have been multiple evolutionary experiments in flying, gliding, wing-assisted-incline-running and other such activities. There’s no reason to think that flight evolved only once in a neat, clean march of ever-increasing aerodynamic perfection. Evolution is messy, and who knows how many ultimately failed variations there were among flight-capable dinosaurs?

The three-step Anchiornis-Archaeopteryx-modern bird scenario of wing evolution fits our expectations of what a stepwise evolutionary pattern would look like, but, as the authors of the new paper point out, shifting evolutionary trees currently confound our ability to know what represents the ancestral bird condition and what characterized a more distant branch of the feathered dinosaur family tree. We need more feathery fossils to further investigate and test this hypothesis, as well as additional biomechanical and paleoecological information to determine whether such dinosaurs really took off from trees. We must take great care in distinguishing between what an organism could do and what it actually did, and with so much up in the air, the debate on the origin of flight will undoubtedly continue for decades to come.

Read more

 

Flying Wind Turbines Reach for High-Altitude Power: KitGen Airfoil

A Game of Tetherball
 

Photograph courtesy KiteGen

The KiteGen airfoil prototype dangles above its housing, with its high-tension wires reeled in. The start-up company is based in Chieri, Italy, near Torino.

KiteGen builds on some earlier prototypes and theoretical ideas. In the 1980s, Bryan Roberts, an engineering professor at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia, tested a small prototype of a helicopter-like airborne turbine that he hoped would eventually fly to 15,000 feet (4,600 meters), where it would float on the strong winds and send energy down a very long tether. Roberts' idea lives on in his Oroville, California-based spin-off company Sky WindPower, which claims to be working on a Flying Generator.

Since the 1970s, airborne wind designers have toyed with a concept called the Laddermill, which is made up of a loop or loops of kites deployed at high altitude. By varying the "attack angles" of the kites, operators can theoretically get them to dive or soar, or fly in endless circles, all to transmit energy to the ground.

Dutch astronaut and physicist Wubbo Ockels published a 4-kW version of a Laddermill in 2007. In this proposal, a loop of kites would be lofted at a height of 0.62 mile (one kilometer). As the kites climbed, they would unspool a tether around a drum, which would drive a generator. When the line ran out, they would be angled to dive, and the slack line would be recovered-and then the kites would be sent back up for another cycle. According to the published proceeding in European Power and Energy Systems, Ockels' team successfully tested a 2-kW (a typical U.S. household routinely draws about 2 kW, not counting air-conditioning).

In a somewhat similar concept, the Italian start-up Twind Technology is working on a device made of two tethered balloons, each with an inflatable sail. The sails are alternately filled and stowed, to make the pair swing back and forth. The resultant motion of their tether can be used to saw wood or drive an engine, according to the company.

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Utah paleontologists probing for signs of dinosaurs’ rise

Chinle Formation proves to be rich in clues about the environment where dinosaurs first evolved. 

A fossil of a fish found by paleontologist Randy Irmis in southeast Utah. Friday, October 4, 2013

For paleontologists Randall Irmis and Andrew Milner, the tiny stuff matters, especially when you’re exploring the dawn of big reptiles. Microscopic fossilized pollen, two-inch fishes, even the color of the rock that bones are embedded in say a lot about the landscapes dinosaurs roamed, the climate, what they ate and what their prey ate. 

And, more important, such details can help explain how they evolved during the late Triassic more than 200 million years ago to dominate the Earth’s land forms for millions of years.

Among the best places to look for clues is Utah’s Chinle Formation, the dark red and orange conglomerates deposited when the Colorado Plateau was a swampy tropical place.

While exploring federal lands in southeast Utah, Irmis and his team of students and volunteers discovered the remains of small fish and a phytosaur. These finds could lead to troves of ancient bones when they return next year with an excavation permit from the Bureau of Land Management. 

"It’s not just a few scales and bones, but the whole skeleton of many different fish," said Irmis, a curator at the Natural History Museum of Utah. He blogs about his excavations in The New York Times. 

The BLM has asked the news media to not disclose the exact location to deter vandalism or theft of the publicly owned resource. 

The phytosaur was a crocodilelike reptile that prowled freshwater environments for prey that included early dinosaurs. The dominant predator, phytosaurs died off like so many other species at the end of the Triassic. 

Phytosaur species have a long snout like modern crocodiles, but the nostrils are close to the eyes rather than protruding from the end of the snout. This is evidence that the crocodile did not descend from the phytosaur and the two creatures developed long snouts independently in a process known as "convergent evolution," according to Milner, a paleontologist with St. George’s Dinosaur Discovery Site at Johnson Farm. 

He and his colleagues have found numerous phytosaurs, as well as early crocodiles that look nothing like their modern descendants. "When phytosaurs went extinct, it opened up a niche for crocs to evolve," Milner said. The disappearance of the phytosaur also made room for other reptiles.

By Brian Maffly | Reposted from The Salt Lake Tribune