Amazing Transportation Inventions: Shweeb Monorail

Photograph courtesy Shweeb Monorail Technology

In the late 1800s, a short-lived experimental transportation system in southern New Jersey took contraptions that looked like upside-down bicycles and mounted them on 1.8 miles (2.9 kilometers) of rail for a smoother, faster ride than one could expect on bicycles of the day. More recently, the idea of a pedal-powered monorail has been revived and updated at a Rotorua, New Zealand, amusement park by a company named Shweeb.

Google invested $1 million in September 2010 to support further development of the system for an urban environment. Similar to the bicycle railways of centuries past, the Shweeb system is meant to reduce rolling resistance, "by running hard wheels on hard rail," according to the Shweeb website. But the Shweeb concept goes way beyond that. The design also seeks to cut wind resistance by positioning pedaling passengers in bullet-shaped hanging "pods" with their feet forward, as on a recumbent bicycle. The pods hang from 8-inch-wide (20-centimeter-wide) rails constructed 19 feet (5.8 meters) above street-level pedestrians and traffic.

Worried about passing? No need, says the Shweeb team--tailgating can actually help both riders travel faster. That's because a solo pod would have a high-pressure zone, or headwind in front, and a low-pressure zone, or vacuum behind. But when one pod sidles up behind another, it eliminates the vacuum for the lead pod and the headwind for the trailing pod. In short, resistance is cut by half. The company's website promises, "Just as tandem bicycles always travel faster than two single bicycles, two Shweebs travelling in a train always travel faster than either of them could travelling solo." Don't just take it from Shweeb, though. Consider the NASCAR technique known as "two-car bump drafting," in which racers link front and rear bumpers to effectively drive as one car with two engines.

According to Peter Cossey, managing director of Shweeb Holdings, the company is hard at work on the Google-backed R&D project and hopes "to have something out" in late 2012, although with ambition to build an accessible, green, cost-competitive, and fun transit solution, he wrote in an email, there remains "a lot on the to-do list."


Read More

PALEONTOLOGIST: Edwin H. Colbert

Edwin H. Colbert had already made his mark as a working paleontologist (discovering the early dinosaurs Coelophysis and Staurikosaurus, among others) when he made his most influential discovery: a skeleton of the mammal-like reptile Lystrosaurus in Antarctica, which proved that Africa and the southern continent used to be joined in one gigantic land mass. Since then, the theory of continental drift during the Mesozoic Era has done much to advance our understanding of dinosaur evolution.

In 1969, just before retiring from the American Museum of Natural History in New York, Dr. Colbert traveled to Antarctica as part of a field expedition sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

While there, he was part of a team that discovered and identified a 220-million-year-old fossil of a Lystrosaurus, an early relative of mammals. Similar fossils had previously been found in South Africa. Since Lystrosaurus was not a swimmer, the discovery lent evidence to the theory that the present-day continents must have once been part of a large land mass or supercontinent that slowly separated over millions of years.

The continental drift theory, originally proposed in 1912 by Alfred Wegener, a German meteorologist, had long been debated by scientists, but the discovery was a crucial piece of evidence. Dr. Laurence M. Gould, the scientific leader of Adm. Richard E. Byrd's first expedition to Antarctica, in 1928, described the discovery in an article in The New York Times as ''one of the truly great fossil finds of all time.''  

Reader's Review: Suspense/Thriller Junky? This is a MUST READ

"I am a non-fiction reader, I have been for 20 years. With that said, I am a dinosaur addict so I am on full board with any movie or book that weaves the dinosaur theme in. Fossil River is a fiction read that caught my attention from the first page until the last, however it is laced with factual information throughout which as a non-fiction reader, I gravitate towards. I was on a long flight and I figured I would just start with the first couple of pages, I was hooked and read the entire book in one sitting. I can't wait for the movie, this is a story whose time has come and a must read for anyone who enjoys being hooked at the beginning through the end. A suspense/thriller that is riveting. At one point I noticed my eyes had dried out and then I realized I hadn't blinked for 10 pages. Step aside Jurassic Park, your rival has just entered the ring."

~  Lauren E Miller,  Author/Speaker/Stress Relief Expert

Jock's Bone Fish

Fly fishing at the Ocean Reef Club in Kay Largo Florida, I landed this beautiful Bone Fish in a fly rod. Love that sport! 

Nature Yields New Ideas for Energy and Efficiency: Whale Bumps for Power

Photograph by Jason Edwards, National Geographic

The bumps on a humpback whale's flipper, seen here in a mating ritual, are on the "wrong" side. Physicists are familiar with bumps on the trailing edges of wings or fins, but here they are found on the leading edge.

That led Dr. Frank E. Fish,  a biologist at West Chester University of Pennsylvania,  to try to design a fan blade that moved air as efficiently as a whale's flippers move the animal through water. The result was WhalePower, a Toronto-based company that designs blades for fans, turbines, and more, inspired by a whale's bumps.

On a whale, the bumps help it move effortlessly through the water at much steeper angles than it would otherwise. A Harvard study found that the angle of attack (the angle between the flipper and the direction of water flow) of a humpback whale flipper can be up to 40 percent steeper than a smooth flipper, giving the whale more control.

 Read More

Dinosaur Tracking

 Watch a video illustration of what scientists can learn from footprints

Where Dinosaurs Roamed

Footprints at one of the nation's oldest—and most fought over—fossil beds offer new clues to how the behemoths lived

By Genevieve Rajewski

Brontosaurus skeleton sketch (Historical Art Collection, National Museum of Natural History, SI)

Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were the two most prominent dinosaur specialists of the 1800s—and bitter enemies. They burned through money, funding expeditions to Western badlands, hiring bone collectors away from each other and bidding against one another for fossils in a battle of one-upmanship. They spied on each other's digs, had their minions smash fossils so the other couldn't collect them, and attacked each other in academic journals and across the pages of the New York Herald—making accusations of theft and plagiarism that tarnished them both. Yet between them they named more than 1,500 new species of fossil animals. They made Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops household names and sparked a dinomania that thrives today.

One of Marsh and Cope's skirmishes involved fossil beds in Morrison, Colorado, discovered in 1877 by Arthur Lakes, a teacher and geologist-for-hire. Lakes wrote in his journal that he had discovered bones "so monstrous...so utterly beyond anything I had ever read or conceived possible." He wrote to Marsh, at Yale, to offer his finds and services, but his letters met with vague replies and then silence. Lakes then sent some sample bones to Cope, the editor of American Naturalist. When Marsh got word that his rival was interested, he promptly hired Lakes. Under Marsh's control, the Morrison quarries yielded the world's first fossils of Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus, the long-necked plant eater more popularly known as Brontosaurus.

Lakes spent four field seasons chiseling the most easily reached bones out of the fossil beds. Before he left the area, he allegedly blew up one of the most productive sites—"Quarry 10"—to prevent Cope from digging there.

For 123 years, the site was lost, but in 2002 researchers from the Morrison Natural History Museum used Lakes' field notes, paintings and sketches to find the quarry, expose its original floor and support beams and begin digging once more.

 "The first things that we found were charcoal fragments: we were digging right below the campfire that Arthur Lakes had built," says Matthew Mossbrucker, director of the museum.

They quickly discovered that at least one misdeed attributed to the feud between Marsh and Cope was probably exaggerated. "It looks like [Lakes] just shoveled some dirt in there," says Mossbrucker. "I think he told people that he had dynamited it closed because he didn't want the competition up at the quarry—playing mind games with Cope's gang."

The reopened quarry is awash in overlooked fossils as well as relics that earlier paleontologists failed to recognize: dinosaur footprints that provide startling new clues about how the creatures lived.

Read More

Nature Yields New Ideas for Energy and Efficiency: Artificial Photosynthesis

A New Leaf In Energy Storage

Photograph courtesy Dominick Reuter, MIT

Plants are so fantastic at converting energy into a storable form (by photosynthesizing water with sunlight into sugars) that scientists are striving to figure out a way that humans can mimic this basic process.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientist Daniel Nocera's artificial leaf device, seen above with some real leaves, is a step closer to making artificial photosynthesis possible.

Made of a silicon solar cell with catalytic materials bonded to each side, the cell, when placed in water, splits water into oxygen and hydrogen for later use in fuel cells. Unlike previous artificial leaves, Nocera's works in ordinary water and requires no wires or equipment. It is lightweight and portable.

If researchers could develop a simple system to collect and store the gases, each of us could have "personal energy" at our fingertips: The hydrogen and oxygen can be fed into a fuel cell that combines them once again into water while delivering an electric current.


Read More

Amazing Places on Earth: The Great Blue Hole

From the air, the Great Blue Hole of Belize resembles an otherworldly maw, intent on drinking down the surrounding Lighthouse Reef Atoll. In reality, the 1,000-foot (305-meter) wide hole is simply a sinkhole in the ocean. Geologists believe that an underlying cave system collapsed under increased pressure some 10,000 years ago due to rising sea levels.

The dark hole descends 412 feet (126 meters), terminating in lightless depths where a lack of oxygen prevents most forms of life from thriving. Divers rarely plunge these depths, however, as most are content to explore the stalactite-rich caverns accessible from depths of some 130 feet (40 meters) below the surface.

Read More

The "Fighting Dinosaurs"

The "Fighting Dinosaurs" specimen, found in 1971, preserves a Velociraptor mongoliensis and Protoceratops andrewsi in combat and provides direct evidence of predatory behavior. When originally reported, it was hypothesized that the two animals drowned.

However, as the animals were preserved in ancient sand dune deposits, it is now thought that the animals were buried in sand, either from a collapsing dune or in a sandstorm. Burial must have been extremely fast, judging from the lifelike poses in which the animals were preserved. Parts of the Protoceratops are missing, which has been seen as evidence of scavenging by other animals.

Comparisons between the scleral rings of Velociraptor, Protoceratops, and modern birds and reptiles indicates that Velociraptor may have been nocturnal, while Protoceratops may have been cathemeral, active throughout the day during short intervals, suggesting that the fight may have occurred at twilight or during low-light conditions.

Flaming Cliffs

A region of the Gobi Desert in the Ömnögovi Province of Mongolia, in which important fossil finds have been made. 

It was given this name by American paleontologist Roy Chapman Andrews, who visited in the 1920s. The area is most famous for yielding the first discovery of dinosaur eggs. Other finds in the area include specimens of Velociraptor, and eutherian mammals.

The red or orange color of the sandstone cliffs (especially at a sunset), hence the nickname.

Not all parts of the world had substantially different climates 85 million years ago than they do today, but Mongolia's Gobi Desert seems to have been as hot, dry and brutal as it's always been. We know this from the fact that so many of the dinosaur fossils unearthed at the Flaming Cliffs formation appear to have been buried in sudden sandstorms, and that very few large dinosaurs (which would have needed equally large amounts of vegetation to survive) lived here.
 
This site is also close to the region where researchers unearthed the tangled remains of a Protoceratops and a Velociraptor, which appear to have been locked in a death struggle at the time of their sudden demise.When dinosaurs died at Flaming Cliffs, they died quickly: burial by fierce sandstorms is the only way to account for the discovery of this dinosaur pair (as well as numerous, articulated Protoceratops skeletons found standing in the upright position).

PALEONTOLOGIST: Roy Chapman Andrews

Although he had a long, active career in paleontology--he was director of the prestigious American Museum of Natural History from 1935 to 1942--Roy Chapman Andrews is best known for his fossil-hunting excursions to Mongolia in the early 1920's. At this time, Mongolia was a truly exotic destination, not yet dominated by China and rife with political instability. For his expeditions, Andrews used both automobiles and camels, and he had a number of narrow escapes that added to his reputation as a dashing adventurer (he was later said to have been the inspiration for Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones).

Andrews discovered numerous dinosaur fossils at the formation known as Flaming Cliffs, including specimens of Oviraptor and Velociraptor, but today he's most famous for unearthing the first indisputable evidence of dinosaur eggs (before then, scientists were unsure if dinosaurs laid eggs or gave birth to live young). Even still, he made a huge (if understandable) mistake: Andrews believed he had found an Oviraptor that had stolen the eggs of Protoceratops, but in fact this supposed "egg thief" turned out to be hatching its own young!

Amazing Transportation Inventions: Gossamer Albatross

Photograph from Corbis

Who needs jet fuel when you have a pair of powerful legs? That's the maxim demonstrated by a long line of engineers and athletic pilots who have pushed the limits of human-powered transportation by land, air, and sea. Pictured here is the Gossamer Albatross, which in 1979 became the first human-powered aircraft to cross the English Channel.

Sponsored by DuPont, inventor Paul MacCready built the lightweight craft from carbon fiber tubing, balsa wood, clear Mylar, and Kevlar, with the addition of some wire and foam. He engineered a series of human- and solar-powered aircraft between 1959 and 1980, and in 1971 he founded AeroVironment-a company today known for its unmanned aircraft systems and charging equipment for electric cars.

The 22.5-mile (36.2 kilometer) Albatross flight lasted just under three hours--about an hour longer than anticipated. And Bryan Allen, the long-distance cyclist who powered the 70-pound Albatross through that grueling journey over water despite leg cramps and dehydration, later told AeroVironment, "There were so many unknowns on that flight that I could not be certain we'd make it, but I was certain I'd use every resource in trying."

Read More 

More on Barum Brown

Brown in 1914 doing field work in Montana

Brown lived at the tail end of an unprecedented age of scientific discovery, and surely he was one of its more colorful practitioners. He was affectionately known as Mr. Bones by his admirers. At dig sites in Canada Barnum was frequently photographed wearing a large fur coat—as in the photo above. Later during World War I and II, he worked as an "intelligence asset." During his many trips abroad he wasn't above picking up spare cash acting as a corporate spy for oil companies.