''Mummified'' Dinosaur Unveiled

The skin of a duck-billed dinosaur pokes out of the soil at Hell Creek Formation in North Dakota.

The 67-million-year old "dino mummy," nicknamed Dakota, was discovered in 1999 by then-teenage paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family's North Dakota property. (Read about another dinosaur mummy found in Montana.)

Much of Dakota's fossilized skin has maintained its texture, allowing scientists to map it in 3-D and get a better picture of how duck-billed dinosaurs may have appeared.

"There seems to be a variation in scale size that might possibly correlate as it does in modern reptiles in many cases with changes in color," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Britain's University of Manchester and a National Geographic Expeditions Council grantee.

"And there seems to be striping patterns associated with joint areas on the arm," he added.

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Dinos: Dinosaur Mummy Has Skin, Guts

http://news.discovery.com





The most intact dinosaur mummy was unveiled to the public in 2008. Discovery News' Kasey-Dee Gardner reports.

Dinos: Becoming a Dinosaur Mummy

http://news.discovery.com




Kasey-Dee Gardner uncovers the strange phenomenon of dinosaur mummification.

Are Flying Bikes the Solution to Road Traffic?

Engineers in the Czech Republic unveil prototype of an electric bicycle that can fly.




Engineers in the Czech Republic have successfully tested their flying bicycle project, F-bike. The bicycle was able to lift off, hover, steer and land during its five-minute flight.

F-bike is a joint effort among several tech companies, but is spearheaded by Technodat. When the project first started in the fall of 2011, it was conceived as a high-tech electric bicycle without any flying capability. But the "e-bike" idea was too mundane to be worthy of pursuit, according to F-bike's website.

Instead, they drew inspiration from the flying machines found in the novels of Jules Verne and Czech author Jaroslav Foglar. Unlike those fictional vehicles, however, F-bike flies not with wings but with six motorized propellers attached to the bike's frame: two propellers in the front, two in the back, and one on each side of the seat.

Technodat CEO Ales Kobylik sees several more unmanned tests in F-bike's future. Although they are planning on testing the bicycle with an actual human rider, no timetable has been set.

United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton

A dinosaur skeleton was auctioned by Heritage last year. According to documents in a federal court case quaintly titled United States of America v. One Tyrannosaurus Bataar Skeleton, the man who consigned the museum-quality skeleton to Heritage indicated on customs documents that the country of origin for the 8-foot-high, 24-foot-long fossil was Great Britain, when, according to paleontologists, T. bataar only lived in the Mongolian desert. 

The May 20, 2012 New York auction was interrupted by an announcement from a lawyer that his client, the president of Mongolia, had gotten a temporary restraining order from a Texas state court judge prohibiting the sale. Heritage went ahead with the auction but made the sale contingent on resolution of the court proceedings and has cooperated with the feds.
 
No money ever changed hands between Heritage and the victorious bidder–who was ready to spend $1.05 million to display the skeleton in the lobby of an office building that he owned, Rohan says. The consigner of the skeleton has pleaded guilty to helping to smuggle numerous dinosaur remains into the U.S. and is out on $100,000 bail, awaiting sentencing.

As for the T. bataar, he’s been repatriated to his homeland.  

See: “Stolen Dinosaur, Bought For $1 Million At New York Auction, Will Be Returned To Mongolia

Sea of miracles: Industrial uses for ocean biodiversity

The seafloor is our planet’s most biodiverse realm. It is in the sea that life on earth began over 3.5 billion years ago. It is in the sea where 34 of the 36 known phyla of animals remain to this day, 15 of which are exclusive to the world’s oceans. And it is in the sea where myriad opportunities await.

The commercial potential of marine biodiversity is changing as technology evolves and we seek new services from our oceans beyond the current focus on food and energy supply and tourism. One new frontier lies in the novel biological systems and chemical pathways developed by marine creatures to survive extreme physical environments and ruthless biological competition in the ocean.

“Biodiscovery” is the search for these attributes so they can be developed as new products, including pharmaceuticals, agrichemicals, tools for environmental remediation, or more efficient and less polluting industrial processes.

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Amazing Transportation Inventions : Leonardo da Vinci’s Helicopter

 Photograph by Valentina Petrova, AP

A scale model of Leonardo da Vinci's aerial screw, pictured here in an exhibit at the Sofia City Art Gallery in Bulgaria, gives visitors a glimpse of one of the inventors' most famous schemes for a flying machine. Sketched in 1493, the design called for a spiral-shaped, rotating surface made from iron wire and linen made "airtight with starch," and powered by a human passenger, according to the U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission report on early helicopter technology.

The screw, also known a the "air gyroscope," is credited as the first rotary-wing aircraft concept, but Leonardo's design would have been a flightless bird. According to the Centennial of Flight Commission, muscle power "would never have been sufficient to operate a helicopter successfully . . . there was no way to deal with the torque created by the propeller."


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10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction

Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear (1998)

 

This novel is a sort of sideways sequel to The Lost World, insofar as it takes place in an alternate universe in which the events of that book actually happened. This means capturing real life dinos and putting them in circuses totally destroys the careers of stop-motion animators like Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen. Sad! However, eventually the dinosaur circuses start to slow down, causing all sorts of children’s birthday parties to totally suck. (We might be kidding about that last part.)

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Amazing Transportation Inventions

Harry Potter "Knight Bus"

Photograph by Astrid Stawiarz, Getty Images

A stranded young wizard in the world of Harry Potter need only jab a wand in the air to summon the Knight Bus, a triple-decker that offers a topsy-turvy brand of public transportation on demand. Forget taxis. This machine can shrink to squeeze through tight spots, and passengers can buy hot chocolate or a toothbrush on board.

"I love Harry Potter's Knight Bus," said Rachel MacCleery, vice president of infrastructure for the Urban Land Institute. "[It's] so great that it's a bus--the workhorse of any transit system-and not a train," she wrote in an email.

Wands sadly remain the stuff of fiction, but the Knight Bus illustrates concepts at work in real-world transportation systems. Telematics, for example, have helped advance "demand responsive" and community-based flexible transport services to help fill the gap between buses and taxis, especially in rural areas. Routes can be optimized based on real-time demand and passengers can be assigned dynamically based on the location and status of vehicles in the fleet.

In cities around the world, minibuses and share taxis facilitate this kind of trip aggregation in more informal networks. Residents of New York City and other metro areas, meanwhile, have a growing number of apps to use for finding fellow travelers who will share a cab ride--thereby saving on fare and potentially preventing emissions that would otherwise result from two cars carrying solo passengers.

"Even with diesel buses, we're taking cars off the road," Virginia Miller, a spokesperson for the American Public Transportation Association said in a phone interview. But many buses now run on natural gas or use gas-electric hybrid systems. Percentage-wise, she added, "If the auto fleet here had as many hybrids as the transit system does, we'd be in a much better place."


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Forests Fuel Hydropower in Brazil

by Bill Chameides of Duke University

 

Map of Xingu River (pink) and the site of Brazil’s Belo Monte Dam (arrow). (Kmusser/Wikimedia Commons)

In the Amazon you don’t need to burn wood for a forest to contribute to energy production.

Once Upon a Time…

People thought the worth of a forest was determined by the value of its timber. We now know that leads to a gross undervaluation. Forests, like most ecosystems, provide a host of services whose value can far exceed the simple worth of the trees. Services like clean water and air, soil retention, stormwater control, habitat, and even increasing groundwater supply. Cut down a forest and you need to replace all the things the forest provides, and that can be quite expensive.

New York’s Water Story

A case in point – the riparian forests in upstate New York provide clean drinking water to the residents of the Big Apple. In the early 1990s the U.S. EPA mandated that the city build a filtration plant at a cost of ~$7 billion. But New York came up with a better plan at a savings of about $6 billion: rehabilitate the riparian forests in the Catskills where the water comes from and allow the trees, at a greatly reduced cost, to provide the needed filtration. The system works so well that New York City is one of the few major metropolitan areas in the U.S. that gets away with minimal filtering for its drinking water.

Is There an Energy Story?

Ok, forests providing clean water – that’s easy to understand. But what about energy? One way to generate energy from a forest is to cut it down and burn the wood – but that destroys most of the other services as well.

Is there a way to use forests to enhance energy production without burning them? Yes, say Claudia Stickler of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute and co-authors in a paper published May 13 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Interestingly like the New York story this one involves water as well.

Hydropower Reigns Supreme in Brazil

You’ve heard of king coal? Well, in Brazil, hydropower is king. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, a whopping 79 percent of Brazil’s electricity came from hydropower in 2010. (In the U.S. that drops to about 7 percent.)

But Brazil wants even more hydropower, which brings us to the next chapter in our story.

Way Down Upon the Xingu River

You can find the Xingu River on a map in the northeastern corner of Brazil. It runs south to north for about 1,200 miles and drains into the Amazon River. (See related pictures: “A River People Awaits an Amazon Dam.”)

Brazil has big plans for the Xingu River — more specifically, on the Xingu about 100 miles south of where it meets up with the Amazon. That is the construction site of the Belo Monte Dam, slated to be the third largest hydropower facility in the world behind China’s Three Gorges Dam and the Itaipu Dam operated jointly by Brazil and Paraguay. When completed, the Belo Monte Dam will have the capacity to produce up to 11 million kilowatts.

Environmentalists Cheer… and Hiss

If you’re a fan of the environment, all that hydropower can seem like a good thing – energy without burning fossil fuels and so no air pollution, no greenhouse gas emissions. Right? Not quite.

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Paleontologist: Edward Hitchcock

Hitchcock's assumption might seem quaint today, but it's important to remember the times in which he worked. He delivered his report several years before Richard Owen even named the Dinosauria, when the only known dinosaur fossils were fragmentary. The prevailing view of ancient reptiles was that they were like today's lizards, just many times the size. Only with later discoveries, such as the first relatively complete dinosaur skeleton of Hadrosaurus foulkii did paleontologists realize that some dinosaurs were bipedal. And when Hitchcock published another report in 1858, Ichnology of New England, he considered the possibility, based on occasional tail impressions, that the "giant birds" who made the tracks might have had some reptilian characteristics.

 

From Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos

 

In 1836, Edward Hitchcock delivered a report to the American Journal of Science about "remarkable footmarks in stone in the valley of Connecticut River, which have since awakened so much interest among intelligent men." Throughout his life he collected over 20,000 fossil footprints and established a footprint museum at Amherst College. To this day it remains the world's largest fossil footprint museum.

Hitchcock, professor of geology and theology, and president of Amherst College, devoted his life to reconciling scientific discoveries with the Bible. He believed the footprints had been made by giant birds, and he carried this belief to his grave. We now know the fossil footprints were made by bipedal dinosaurs.

From The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White

Even if he refused to accept a dinosaur as the track maker, Hitchcock did demonstrate some impressive logic. He undertook extensive comparisons between the fossil tracks and those of modern birds, and he identified several potential species among the track makers. He speculated (correctly) that many more fossil tracks might be found if quarries were to be opened. He also reasoned that tracks on inclined rocks were probably originally made of level ground, remarking, "There is no appearance as if the animal had scrambled upwards, or slid downwards, except in one or two tracks of great size, where the mud appears to have been rolled up a few inches before the feet."

10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction

The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1912)

Here, the classic notion that dinosaurs might still be among us is executed wonderfully by Sherlock Holmes scribe Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The Lost World primarily concerns a hidden plateau in Venezuela where prehistoric creatures somehow survived extinction. Serving as the inspiration for several subsequent dinos-in-the-present-day stories, this book interestingly only features four technical dinosaurs: Iguanodon, Stegosaurus, Allosaurus, and Megalosaurus. Any other creatures Professor Challenger and co. encounter are other types of prehistoric reptiles.



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South America’s First Dinosaur Tracks

One of the many dinosaur tracks figured in Edward Hitchcock's Ichnology of New England.

Way back in 1839, no one had any idea what dinosaur tracks looked like. In fact, the word “dinosaur” did not even exist yet—the term would be coined by the British anatomist Richard Owen in 1842. Little wonder, then, that tracks now readily recognizable as belonging to dinosaurs were once attributed to prodigious birds and other creatures.

Edward Hitchcock, a New England geologist and theologian, established the study of dinosaur tracks in North America thanks to the abundance of trace fossils found in the Connecticut Valley. People had known about these tracks for a long time—the Lenape Native American tribe even had legends about them—but it wasn’t until the mid-1830s that they came under the scrutiny of naturalists who wanted to know how they were made and what sort of animals they represented. But Hitchcock and other American naturalists were not the only ones interested in these fossil impressions.

In 1839, while Hitchcock was pondering his tracks from New England, the German geologist Carl Degenhardt discovered what appeared to be large bird footprints left in the red sandstone of a Colombian mountain range. No illustration of the tracks was ever published, but given that dinosaur tracks were often confused with the footprints of large birds, it seems probable that Degenhardt truly did find imprints left by dinosaurs. According to paleontologist and historian Eric Buffetaut, this was probably the first recorded dinosaur tracks found in South America.

Despite the importance of Degenhardt’s discovery, though, news of his find quickly sank from view. The reasons why, Buffetaut hypothesized, had to do with how the discovery was communicated. A description of the discovery had been included in a report of a geographical, rather than a geological, journal, and a later newspaper blurb about the find mistakenly placed the tracks in Mexico instead of Colombia. These quirks of publication kept Degenhardt’s discovery obscure—it took over a century and a half for news of the tracks he found to be rediscovered.

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Amazing Transportation Inventions

Lightweight "Dymaxion" Car

Photograph from Hedrich Blessing Collection, Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

A house, a map, a bathroom, and a car: Those are the widely varied applications that inventor Buckminster Fuller found for his Dymaxion (dynamic maximum tension) concept. Shown here is Fuller's first Dymaxion Car, which could carry up to 11 passengers, travel up to 120 miles per hour (about 145 kilometers per hour), and average 28 miles per gallon of gasoline (a little less than 12 kilometers per liter). For comparison, the most efficient minivans in the 2012 model year are rated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency at only 24 miles per gallon (just over 10 kilometers per liter).

The three-wheeled Dymaxion Car, pictured here at the 1933 Chicago World's Fair, had a steel frame and an ash wood body covered with aluminum. Painted canvas formed the roof. A Dymaxion driver ended up being killed in a crash during a demonstration of the teardrop-shaped vehicle--the apparent result of a rubber-necking driver pulling alongside and hitting the vehicle. The incident spooked potential investors, and the design never made it into large-scale production.

Still, shedding pounds has become a vital part of vehicle design in an era of automakers competing to build better, greener cars. "Light weight in vehicle design is extremely important for fuel economy and to make electric vehicles more viable," said Chris Gerdes, director of the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford University. In an email, he explained, "There is a concept known as 'mass decompounding,' meaning that as you make the car lighter, you can make the motor smaller which in turn allows you to carry fewer batteries, which reduces weight further."

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Energy in the Forces of Nature

Lightning: Brief Bolts of Energy

Photograph by Markus Mauthe, Iaif/Redux

Lightning bolts dance on the Colorado Plateau at Canyonlands National Park, Utah, in one of nature's most familiar energy displays.

Worldwide, lightning strikes the Earth an estimated 45 times a second.

The amount of energy released in one of those atmospheric electrical discharges can vary widely—from 100 megajoules to as high as 30,000 megajoules, says Don MacGorman, lightning expert with the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A typical range would be 1,000 to 5,000 megajoules, he says.

That would hardly be enough to transport anyone three decades across space-time, as the fictional Dr. Emmett Brown did when he harnessed a lightning bolt to fuel the time-traveling car he invented in the movie, Back to the Future. But it would be a blast sufficient to propel the average U.S. passenger car about 180 to 910  miles (290 to 1,450 kilometers), equivalent to the energy in about 8 to 38 gallons (30 to 144 liters) of gasoline.

The force that Dr. Brown called "1.21 jigawatts" was more like 280 to 1,390 kilowatt-hours, the amount used by the average U.S. household over about nine days at the low end to almost a month and a half at the high end.

The wide range of estimates for lightning's energy is due to its complexity. A flash develops initially in the cloud, then a channel begins approaching the ground in steps. Once it connects with the ground, a large current surge moves back up the channel in a process called a return stroke—responsible for most of the energy transferred to ground. What the eyes perceive as a single lightning flash is actually made up of several strokes of lightning, enough to last nearly a half second. If the gap between strokes is long enough, the lightning flash appears to flicker.

While brief, the voltage is intense enough to quickly heat the air to nearly 50,000°F (30,000°C). (In contrast, the surface of the sun is about 10,000°F, or 5,500°C.) The rapid expansion of the heated air generates a shock wave that is heard as thunder.

Although lightning strikes certainly can be deadly, their energy output pales when considered against forces of nature that have leveled cities and altered coastlines. Japan's 9.0-magnitude Tohoku earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011, was one of the more fearsome displays of nature's power, but scientists have also sought to measure the energy in volcanoes, wildfires, hurricanes, and the waves lapping against the shore.

Their calculations show that society's successes in developing geothermal, wind, and solar energy have captured but a minuscule fraction of nature's energy.


Read More —David Lagesse and Marianne Laelle

10 Essential Books Featuring Dinosaurs in Science Fiction: Jurassic Park By Michael Crichton (1990)

This book is about some folks who clone dinosaurs and then stick them on an island. As opposed to the film version, the character of Ian Malcolm dies in this book, only to be resurrected in the book version of The Lost World (no relation to the Conan Doyle novel, other than dinos.) This makes Crichton’s The Lost World more of a direct sequel to the film version of Jurassic Park than his own novel. (Read more on why the film version of the Lost World might be better than the book here.) However, Jurassic Park, the book AND film, both still rock.

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