News Articles

Massive predators like Albertosaurus and Tyrannosaurus rex may have been at the top of the food chain, but they were not the only meat-eating dinosaurs to roam North America, according to Canadian researchers who have discovered the smallest dinosaur species on the continent to date. Their work is also helping re-draw the picture of North America's ecosystem at the height of the dinosaur age 75 million years ago.

Czar Nicholas II, eldest son of Tsar Alexander III, succeeded hs father in 1894 and, while he wasn't the most incompetent leader in the history of Russia, much less all of Europe, he was without question a disaster, losing a war to Japan and ordering the army to shoot at citizens who protested the poor conditions they lived under.  It's no surprise anyone wanted him gone.    A crazy shrew of a wife under the spell of Rasputin didn't help his decision-making prowess. 

That guy who gets in the elevator reeking of Drakkar Noir is nothing new - the Ancient Egyptians cherished their fragrant scents, too.   In a new part of its permanent exhibition, Bonn University's Egyptian Museum has on display a particularly well preserved example of that.Screening this 3,500-year-old flacon with a computer tomograph, scientists at the university detected the desiccated residues of a fluid, which they now want to submit to further analysis. They might even succeed in reconstructing this scent.

In the early parts of the decade, German and British intelligence said that Iraq had acquired weapons of mass destruction and were on their way to nuclear capability.    The American CIA agreed.    Saddam Hussein, in maybe the stupidest bluff of this century (there's still a long way to go), refused to let UN inspectors investigate thoroughly, perhaps thinking if the world believed he had nuclear capability, they would lift sanctions.    His mistakes cost him a wealthy dictatorship (though gold painted fixtures remain a puzzle to anyone who visits his many palaces) and, eventually, his life.

Sharks are among the most popular animals featured in television and cinema. And today among sharks, the undisputed king is the great white, a giant predator that can exceed 20 feet in length. Despite the popularity of great whites, relatively little is known about their biology, and even less is known about their evolutionary origins. A new 4-million-year-old fossil from Peru described in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology provides important evidence suggesting the shark’s origins may be more humble than previously believed.

If the Higgs boson, whatever that will turn out to be, is hiding, wherever it may be found continues to shrink. The latest analysis of data from the CDF and DZero collider experiments at Fermilab has now excluded a significant fraction of the allowed Higgs mass range established by earlier measurements. Those experiments predict that the Higgs particle should have a mass between 114 and 185 GeV/c2. Now the CDF and DZero results carve out a section in the middle of this range and establish that it cannot have a mass in between 160 and 170 GeV/c2.

It seems obvious; even in a noble profession like education, if you pay people more who are better at it, better people are incentivized to do it. Obviously a number of people do it despite the money, just like science and academia, and the overall quality of education has improved a lot this decade but America has a way to go if we are going to keep at the forefront of science and technology in the face of huge populations in China and India.
But there has been resistance to that from educational lobbyists and a hardline union that only votes Democrat, which has unfortunately made education a political football.

Nyiragongo, an active African volcano, possesses lava unlike any other in the world, which may point toward its source being a new mantle plume says a University of Rochester geochemist. The lava composition indicates that a mantle plume—an upwelling of intense heat from near the core of the Earth—may be bubbling to life beneath the soil of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The findings are presented in the current issue of the journal Chemical Geology.

Women with certain gene variations appear to be protected against cervical cancer, according to a study led by scientists at Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University and reported in Clinical Cancer Research. Knowing whether or not women have these genetic variants could help physicians to better tailor treatment strategies.
Virtually all cases of cervical cancer are caused by persistent infections from several of the human papillomaviruses (HPV) — a family of viruses that also cause common skin warts and genital warts. HPV is the most commonly sexually transmitted infection in young adults, yet only a small subset of these infections lead to cervical cancer.

Want to start an argument among shark paleontologists?   Ask whether Carcharodon carcharias, the great white shark, evolved from the line that produced Carcharodon megalodon, the largest carnivorous fish known, or from the broad-toothed mako shark.The mako camp contends megalodon, which grew to a length of 60 feet, should have its genus name switched to Carcharocles to reflect its different ancestry.  A study in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology says the mako proponents are right and concludes megalodon and modern white sharks are much more distantly related than paleontologists initially believed.

A new dating method found that "Peking Man" is around 200,000 years older than previously thought.  So how did he adapt to the cold of even a mild glacial period?The Zhoukoudian, China, site of the remains of Homo erectus, commonly known as "Peking Man", was found to be 680,000-780,000 years old. Earlier estimates put the age at 230,000-500,000 years old.Homo erectus is considered to be the ancestor species to humans and the first species that left Africa and moved into Asia. The "Peking Man" site, discovered in the late 1920s, was among the first found for Homo erectus and shaped the thoughts on the age and behavior of the species.

Researchers have found evidence suggesting that stars rich in carbon complex molecules may form at the center of our Milky Way galaxy - and it helps solve a mystery.   Namely, why have telescopes never detected carbon-rich stars at the center of our galaxy even though they have found these stars in other places?This discovery is also significant because it adds to our knowledge of how stars form heavy elements like oxygen, carbon and iron and and then blow them out across the universe, making it possible for life to develop.