Solution

Jumbo Shrimps: Why Mega-Mammals Still Looked Puny Next to the Biggest Dinosaurs

January 26, 2011 - By Brian Switek Email Author - Wired

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/01/jumbo-shrimps-why-mega-mammals-still-looked-puny-next-to-the-biggest-dinosaurs/

Imagine a rhinoceros. For the sake of argument, let’s say it’s a white rhinoceros. Don’t worry if you can’t envision every little anatomical flourish in your mind. We’re going to modify this beast a bit.

First thing’s first – lose the horn. We have no use for it. Next, lengthen the neck a bit. Not too much – we’re not turning this rhino into a giraffe – but enough so that the neck is slightly more than half the length of its back. Now for the legs. Stretch them out so that the rhino’s belly is a little higher off the ground. Scale the thing up until it stands about 18 feet at the shoulder and weighs about 17 tons, and you’re done.



What you have just made is a dead ringer for Paraceratherium, the largest land mammal of all time. This immense rhino – part of an entirely-extinct group of hornless rhinos called hyracodonts – lived in Asia between 37 and 23 million years ago, but even this giant would have been dwarfed by the dragons of earlier epochs. Futalognkosaurus, a sauropod dinosaur that was apparently elsewhere when the good names were being given out, stretched over 100 feet long from its tiny head to the tip of its tail, and it probably weighed in excess of 75 tons. The largest dinosaurs may have been even bigger still. Estimates based on the long-lost bones of the sauropod Amphicoelias reconstruct this dinosaur as being over 131 feet long and weighing in at over 122 tons. Compared to these giants, Paraceratherium seems rather puny.

Thankfully for the pride of Paraceratherium, a wide gulf in time separated it from the Mesozoic titans. The giant rhino arrived on the scene about 28 million years after the last of the non-avian dinosaurs became extinct, but its ancestors and evolutionary cousins lived alongside dinosaurs for 135 million years. During the long tenure of the dinosaurs, mammals did not get very large at all. The three-foot long Repenomamus – a 130 million year old mammal that ate baby dinosaurs – was as big as they came in those days. The ecological dominance of the dinosaurs kept mammals small, but, once the dinosaurs disappeared, what prevented them from attaining enormous size? Why have there never been elephants as big as Apatosaurus or rhinos equal in stature to Brachiosaurus? Continued at story link above.....

Squirrel works its way through backyard obstacle course for food

Friday, Jan 28, 2011 - Mark Frauenfelder - boingboing

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/28/squirrel-works-its-w.html

Difficult science

Good morning Doc Holliday,

Isotopes, what a difficult subject to start the day. One would need to know about radionuclides and such things as their three types (primordial, secondary, cosmogenic) but that is a little deep this early in the day.

Granted, it is not as difficult to understand, or attempt, as creating life from non-living chemicals as 1OFHIS referred to in post #msg-59265740

Let's just keep it easy with a simple math project, counting tree rings (dendrochronology) sounds like fun .

We will start with the cross section of a tree. It looks like this:



Starting in the center with the premise that one ring = one year of tree growth, we start to count outward 1,2,3.... etc. We get to a count of 5,000 rings and decide to take a breather but we have not made it even half way into the history of the tree so we continue to count 5,001,5,002, 5,003 .... Now we are at a count of 7,500 only to find we are short of the 70% level so we proceed 7,501, 7,502, 7,503 .... At last we are at a count of 10,000 and are only 90% complete.

Suddenly I don't like this math project. This can't be correct. Must have miscounted somewhere. Let's try again 1,2,3 .....

Will we ever glimpse the universe's first stars?

27 January 2011 - by Rachel Courtland - NewScientist - Space

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20038-will-we-ever-glimpse-the-universes-first-stars.html




The most distant galaxy yet found (inset) lies at a "redshift" of about 10. That is so far away that it took more than 13 billion years for the galaxy's light to reach Earth. We are seeing the galaxy as it was just 480 million years after the big bang (Image: NASA/ESA/G Illingworth/UCSC/R Bouwens/Leiden U/HUDF09 team)

The race to see the universe's most distant objects continues. Astronomers reported today the discovery of the farthest galaxy seen to date. Its light, which was captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, was emitted when the universe was less than 500 million years old, making it the oldest galaxy yet observed.

If history is any guide, the galaxy, dubbed UDFj-39546284, is unlikely to hold that title for long. So how far back in time can ultimately we go? New Scientist takes a look at the prospects for seeing the very first galaxies and stars.

What is the oldest light that reaches Earth?

The very oldest light we can see comes from the cosmic microwave background, a haze of radiation that was emitted when the universe was less than 400,000 years old. After this light was released, the universe entered the cosmic dark ages. It likely took at least 50 million years before the first stars lit up the night sky, and the first galaxies probably formed roughly 200 million years later.

Why are astronomers interested in these ancient objects?

Studying the first stars and galaxies could help shed light on an era called 'reionisationMovie Camera', which occurred within the first billion years after the big bang. During that time, neutral hydrogen atoms in the space between stars were broken into protons and electrons, making the universe transparent to ultraviolet light.

Radiation from the first stars and galaxies, and possibly dark matter, is thought to have caused the reionisation, but exactly how the process occurred is still unclear.

Studying early galaxies could also reveal how the colossal black holes inside galaxies, which may have grown up faster than the galaxies themselves, reached maturity.

Can we see the first stars and galaxies with current telescopes?

A deep image of a small patch of the night sky, made with the Hubble Space Telescope, was needed to find the new galaxy. But current telescopes are unlikely to probe much farther. That's because the light from ancient stars and galaxies is stretched to longer, and redder, wavelengths by the expansion of space.

To properly see these objects, astronomers need a sensitive telescope that can detect light farther into the infrared part of the spectrum. The best bet for seeing stars and galaxies much beyond the current record-holder is NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which could launch as early as 2015.

Could JWST see the very first stars?

It depends on how big the first stars, dubbed Population III stars, became and how late they formed. The first stars coalesced from a pure mix of hydrogen, helium, and lithium forged in the big bang, but it is not clear how massive they were. Interactions with dark matter may have allowed these first stars to grow into bloated behemoths dubbed dark stars.

"One thing that really hasn't converged yet is the typical mass of these Population III stars," says Erik Zackrisson of Stockholm University in Sweden. "We don't know whether it's 10 or 100 times the mass of the sun. If the universe can form dark stars, it could be 1000 solar masses."

Since the mass of the star has a strong influence on its brightness and its longevity, "it is an important factor in trying to figure out whether [the first stars] will be observable or not", he says.

Individual Population III stars are likely to be too dim for even JWST to detect, Zackrisson says. He says a better bet would be to look for galaxies that are mostly made of Population III stars or to look for the bright flashes created when those stars explode.

Will JWST see the first galaxies?

Maybe. "JWST has been marketed as the 'first light' machine, but if you look at the predictions in the literature, they are pretty bleak," Zackrisson says. "The earliest galaxies may be too distant and dim to see with JWST."

Galaxies that formed hundreds of millions of years after the first ones, in parts of the universe where the density of matter is relatively low, may offer the best chance of spotting stars like those that formed soon after the big bang. That is because in low-density regions, primordial gas clouds would take longer to collapse into stars, so they could be forming their first stars hundreds of millions of years after the first Population III stars were born.

Zackrisson reckons that clusters of galaxies relatively close to Earth could aid in the search for these late-blooming galaxies, since the clusters' gravity could bend and magnify the distant galaxies' light.

The old guy in the boat

They must be related as some of the stories in that book state we are all related to that old fellow and his seven passengers and our patriarchal genes can be traced only back to him. Let me run down the hall and check for validity with the genetics department.

.....

What rude people in that department!

They would only give me a two word answer.

Noah way!

Exploded into the multiverse

Side note: my brain hurts

The multiverse (or meta-universe, metaverse) is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes (including the historical universe we consistently experience) that together comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, and energy as well as the physical laws and constants that describe them. The term was coined in 1895 by the American philosopher and psychologist William James.[1] The various universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes.

The structure of the multiverse, the nature of each universe within it and the relationship between the various constituent universes, depend on the specific multiverse hypothesis considered. Multiverses have been hypothesized in cosmology, physics, astronomy, religion, philosophy, transpersonal psychology and fiction, particularly in science fiction and fantasy. In these contexts, parallel universes are also called "alternative universes", "quantum universes", "interpenetrating dimensions", "parallel dimensions", "parallel worlds", "alternative realities", and "alternative timelines", among others.

Continued .....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse

The universe versus the observable universe

Had to dig a bit to find the following:

In Big Bang cosmology, the observable universe consists of the galaxies and other matter that we can in principle observe from Earth in the present day, because light (or other signals) from those objects has had time to reach us since the beginning of the cosmological expansion. Assuming the universe is isotropic, the distance to the edge of the observable universe is roughly the same in every direction—that is, the observable universe is a spherical volume (a ball) centered on the observer, regardless of the shape of the universe as a whole. The actual shape of the universe may or may not be spherical. However, the portion of it that we (humans, from the perspective of planet Earth) are able to observe is determined by whether or not the light and other signals originating from distant objects has had time to arrive at our point of observation (planet Earth). Therefore, the observable universe appears from our perspective to be spherical. Every location in the universe has its own observable universe which may or may not overlap with the one centered around the Earth.

.....


Some parts of the universe may simply be too far away for the light emitted from there at any moment since the Big Bang to have had enough time to reach Earth at present, so these portions of the universe would currently lie outside the observable universe. In the future the light from distant galaxies will have had more time to travel, so some regions not currently observable will become observable in the future. However, due to Hubble's law regions sufficiently distant from us are expanding away from us much faster than the speed of light (special relativity prevents nearby objects in the same local region from moving faster than the speed of light with respect to each other, but there is no such constraint for distant objects when the space between them is expanding; see uses of the proper distance for a discussion), and the expansion rate appears to be accelerating due to dark energy. Assuming dark energy remains constant (an unchanging cosmological constant), so that the expansion rate of the universe continues to accelerate, there is a "future visibility limit" beyond which objects will never enter our observable universe at any time in the infinite future, because light emitted by objects outside that limit can never reach points that are expanding away from us at less than the speed of light (a subtlety here is that because the Hubble parameter is decreasing with time, there can be cases where a galaxy that is receding from us just a bit faster than light does manage to emit a signal which reaches us eventually. This future visibility limit is calculated to be at a comoving distance of 19 billion parsecs (62 billion light years), which implies the number of galaxies that we can ever theoretically observe in the infinite future (leaving aside the issue that some may be impossible to observe in practice due to redshift, as discussed in the following paragraph) is only larger than the number currently observable by a factor of 2.36.

Continued at the link ......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observable_universe

Blueshift, Redshift, and the fire truck

Perhaps as an example we can use a fire truck traveling towards you and continuing past your vantage point. One is able to hear the siren and see the lights coming toward you (blueshift short waves as it gets closer). After the vehicle has passed one can still see the lights and hear the siren as it goes off in the distance (redshift long waves) .

A similar situation happens when one sees a flash of lightning during a storm. We observe the flash rather quickly as the light is traveling at 186,000 miles per second but the sound is only traveling at a rate of .21 miles per second. The quick rule for calculating the distance of the lightning is counting the seconds that have passed between seeing the flash and hearing the boom and applying the rate of 5 seconds = 1 mile.

At the bottom of the graphic in my original post there is a timeline in years and also a redshift factor number indicating the measurement is for waves from things traveling away from us. As the waves travel they stretch. The longer they have traveled the more they have been stretched. Using mathematical formulas, one can determine the distance by calculating the amount of stretch the wave contains.

How Far Into the Past Can Our Telescopes See?

Jan 26, 2011 - By Jesus Diaz - Gizmodo

http://gizmodo.com/5744321/how-far-into-the-past-can-our-telescopes-see

Every time we point a telescope at the sky we're looking into the past. This chart shows how far we can go. Right now, Hubble's Ultra Deep Field IR can see as far as 480 million years after the Big Bang.

The James Webb Space Telescope will allow us to see 200 million years after the Big Bang. In a cosmic scale, that's almost like looking at the beginning of all this starstuff we call the Universe. I wonder if we will ever be able to get to the point of watching the Big Bang itself. If that can be watched, anyway.

When Earth Was a Snowball: Global Glaciers May Have Sparked Evolutionary Burst

New evidence links melting glaciers with the evolution of life

January 25, 2011 - By Carrie Arnold - Scientific American

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-earth-was-a-snowball

It took a mere 85 million years—the geologic blink of an eye—for animals to evolve and radiate out over much of the world’s land and oceans. Although fossil records and molecular biology have provided much information on the spread of animal life, scientists have not been able to figure out exactly what sparked this massive diversification. New research shows that nutrient-rich runoff from massive melting glaciers may have provided the extra energy needed to fuel this dramatic evolution.

In the 1990s several scientists found evidence that much of Earth’s surface was covered with glaciers 635 million to 750 million years ago. They called their hypothesis “Snowball Earth.” Since then, many other studies have confirmed that it once may have been possible to ski from pole to pole. As the glaciers advanced, they scraped off the top layer of rock and soil on land and then released minerals and nutrients into the ocean as they retreated.

The moment of glacial runoff coincided with the rapid evolution of animal life. Biogeochemists Timothy W. Lyons and Noah J. Planavsky of the University of California, Riverside, knew as much, but what they could not understand was whether the runoff contained enough nutrients to spur animal evolution and whether the appearance of animals in the fossil record at this time was merely a coincidence. If they could measure phosphorus, a key nutrient in biological systems known to support the growth of microbes and algae, Lyons and Planavsky could surmise the total nutrient concentration. The problem was finding a way to measure the phosphate concentrations of oceans nearly one billion years old.

Lyons and his colleagues realized they could use iron-rich deposits from ancient, low-oxygen oceans high in dissolved iron to estimate how much phosphorus was in the water. “These iron-rich deposits scavenge phosphates in a very predictable and well-understood way,” says Lyons, who published his and Planavsky’s research recently in Nature. (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) This discovery enabled the researchers to calculate marine phosphate concentration based on the phosphates in the iron-rich deposits. As the team expected, phosphate levels spiked in seven different samples around the world as the glaciers melted.

“A big pulse of phosphate would have supported a lot of life in the ocean,” Lyons says. This phosphate buffet would have encouraged the abundance of oxygen-producing algae and other organisms and increased oxygen levels spurring the explosion of animal evolution.

“This study links Earth’s geochemical systems with the evolution of life,” says Gabriel Filippelli of Indiana and Purdue Universities, who was not involved with the study. It also shows how one big chill might have changed life on Earth forever.

Black Holes

Setting the record straight

Hello 1OFHIS,

From your post: "Correct me if I am off base, but you seem to think that Christians are pretty ignorant, lack critical thinking skills, reject science and believe in myths due to some sort of need to prop up their weak minds. If I am characterizing your feelings towards Christians and the Christian faith incorrectly, I apologize and please set the record straight."

Remove the words christian/christians and insert "a few people" and you are close, with two exceptions, young earth creationists and those who insist on a literal interpretation of the bible. Science has long since put the final nails into that coffin.

Apparently you have taken the time to evaluate your position, reviewed many sources of data, and arrived at your own conclusion rather than just counting on the placebo effect of religion.

The discussion on this board is interesting and, as you know, there are differing groups of people who study the bible and/or various religions. A recent Pew poll revealed that atheists were more well versed in the bible than those claiming to be religious. It may come as a surprise to many that Dave Silverman, who is the current president of the American Atheists Organization, has given his children bibles to study and recommends all parents do the same.

Two quotes from Carl Sagan to ponder:

“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true."

The shrinking brain

Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave drawings translated

Found: A Funny-Looking Dinosaur With Just One Puny Finger

1-24-2011 - Discover Blogs - 80 beats

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2011/01/24/found-a-funny-looking-dinosaur-with-just-one-puny-finger

Meet Linhenykus monodactylus, the dinosaur that gave the world the finger. This parrot-sized theropod isn’t being surly. It just doesn’t have a choice: it’s the first single-digit dinosaur ever discovered.



In this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Xu Xing and colleagues document their find, which turned up in a fossil-rich part of northern China. Linhenykus is probably about 80 million years old.

Linhenykus monodactylus is a member of the theropod dinosaurs, the group of two-legged carnivores that includes Tyrannosaurus rex and Velociraptor. Most theropods had three fingers on each hand. But Linhenykus belongs to a family known as the alvarezsauroids: small, long-legged dinosaurs that had one big finger alongside two barely functional nub fingers. [National Geographic]

For humans, losing fingers is a serious hindrance. For theropods, though, fingers weren’t particularly useful. So as theropods spread around the world over the years, they began to lose them.

The earliest carnivorous dinosaurs had five fingers, although only four were actually functional. Many later meat-eaters had only three, and evolution left the mighty Tyrannosaurus rex with only two. Now researchers have unearthed the first known dinosaur with only one finger. [ScienceNOW]

If this little nub had any purpose, Xu speculates, it was likely for scratching up termite mounds to expose and eat the termites. But given the adaptations for the consumption of termites that nature has come up with, Linhenykus‘ one little finger seems a little sad.

The Humble Origins of 11 Chain Restaurants

They’re seemingly everywhere, yet they all started somewhere. Here are the stories of the humble beginnings of 11 chain restaurants.

January 24, 2011 - by Scott Allen - mental_floss

http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/80440

1. Applebee’s

The world’s largest casual dining chain celebrated 30 years of eatin’ good in the neighborhood in 2010. The original Applebee’s, which was named T.J. Applebee’s Rx for Edibles & Elixirs, opened in Atlanta in 1980. The founders of the original restaurant, including Bill and T.J. Palmer, wanted to name the restaurant Appleby’s, but that spelling had already been registered. Cinnamon’s and Peppers, two other names considered, were taken as well. The Palmers settled on T.J. Applebee’s, which was just different enough from their first choice. “Menu items ranging from munchies to steak and quail are served at round, high-topped tables on platforms,” read one newspaper review from 1981. A second location was opened in Atlanta before T.J. Palmer’s ownership group sold the restaurant concept in 1983. The name was changed to Applebee’s Neighborhood Bar & Grill in 1986 and became the first casual dining chain to hit 1,000 locations in 1998.

2. Bob’s Big Boy

In 1936, Robert Wian sold his Desoto roadster for $350 to purchase a hamburger stand he named Bob’s Pantry on Colorado Blvd. in Glendale, California. The double-decker burger Wian created for a hungry group of musicians that wandered into the restaurant late one night and asked for something different was an instant sensation. Wian, who named his creation the Big Boy after a chubby kid in overalls who frequented Bob’s Pantry, opened a second location in Los Angeles in 1939. In 1969, one year after McDonald’s introduced its Big Mac, Wian sold his chain of 600 Big Boy restaurants to the Marriott Corporation for $7 million. The oldest standing Bob’s Big Boy is in Toluca Lake, Calif.

3. Bob Evans

Bob Evans began producing sausage on his farm in 1948 for a 12-stool diner he owned in southeastern Ohio. His patrons raved about the sausage, prompting Evans to enter the sausage-making business on a larger scale. Bob Evans Farms was launched in 1953, and when the number of visitors to his farm began to increase, Evans saw an opportunity. Evans opened a small restaurant called the Sausage Shop in front of his brick farmhouse in Rio Grande, Ohio, in 1962. The Sausage Shop is considered the first of Bob Evans’ now-famous chain restaurants. Today, Evans’ farmhouse, known as the Homestead, is on the National Register of Historic Places.

4. California Pizza Kitchen

In 1985, federal prosecutors Rick Rosenfield and Larry Flax opened the first California Pizza Kitchen in Beverly Hills. Rosenfield and Flax, who were inspired by Wolfgang Puck’s popular Spago restaurant in West Hollywood and hired Puck’s original pizza chef at CPK, read Ray Kroc’s autobiography prior to starting their business. Today, the chain has grown to more than 250 restaurants
.
5. Cheesecake Factory

In 1972, Oscar and Evelyn Overton moved from Detroit to a suburb of Los Angeles to launch a wholesale bakery specializing in cheesecakes. Six years later, the Overton’s son, David, opened a salad and sandwich shop in Beverly Hills that featured 10 flavors of his mom’s cheesecake. One of the main purposes of the shop was to get local restaurateurs to carry the Overton’s cheesecake in their own establishments, but it turned into a booming business of its own. Overton opened a second restaurant in Marina Del Rey in 1983. The rest was history.

6. Cracker Barrel

In 1969, Dan Evins, who worked in his family’s gasoline business, opened the first Cracker Barrel Old Country Store off Highway 109 in Lebanon, Tennessee. By 1977, 13 additional Cracker Barrel stores had opened. The goal of the original Cracker Barrel was to provide a place for motorists to fill their tanks and their stomachs, and the inspiration for the concept came from the general stores that Evins frequented as a child. According to the Cracker Barrel website, goods such as crackers were shipped to these stores in barrels, and when the barrels were empty, the base was often used for a checkerboard. The gift shop remains a staple of Cracker Barrels today.

7. Denny’s

Harold Butler founded Denny’s in Lakewood, Calif., in 1953 as Danny’s Donuts. First-year earnings totaled $120,000. Butler opened 20 additional shops and expanded the menu to include sandwiches and other entrees over the next six years before renaming his restaurants Denny’s. Butler began franchising Denny’s in 1963 and introduced its signature Grand Slam breakfast in Atlanta in 1977. In 2000, Denny’s opened a restaurant in Rhode Island, which was the only state without one.

8. IHOP

The first IHOP was opened by brothers Al and Jerry Lapin on July 7, 1958, in Toluca Lake, California. Part of the reason the Lapins chose Toluca Lake was to capitalize on the overflow crowd from Bob’s Big Boy. Al Lapin had operated a series of coffee carts in Los Angeles when fast-food chains started to take off and saw the potential for a fast-food restaurant that specialized in breakfast. Today, IHOP boasts more than 1,500 restaurants in all 50 states. IHOP purchased Applebee’s in 2007.

9. Red Lobster

Bill Darden opened the first Red Lobster in Lakeland, Fla., in 1968. The restaurant, which offered seafood at reasonable prices, was popular from the start and Darden soon opened four additional locations throughout Florida. In 1970, General Mills purchased Darden’s chain. The original restaurant was closed in 1997 after Darden determined that Lakeland would be better served by only one location.

10. TGI Friday’s

Alan Stillman opened the first T.G.I. Friday’s at First Avenue and 63rd St. in New York City in 1965—partially as a means of meeting airline stewardesses. “The other thing is that my timing was exquisite, because I opened T.G.I. Friday’s the exact year the pill was invented,” Stillman told the New City Reader last year. “I happened to hit the sexual revolution on the head, and the result was that, without really intending it, I became the founder of the first singles bar.” The first Friday’s featured Tiffany lamps, sawdust on the floor, and distinctive red and white striped awnings. First year revenues at the original Friday’s were $1 million. A second location opened in Memphis in 1970, and within 10 years, eight other T.G.I. Friday’s had opened. Stillman eventually sold Friday’s and launched Smith and Wollensky Steakhouse in 1977.

11. Waffle House

The original Waffle House opened on Labor Day 1955 on East College Avenue in Decatur, Georgia. In 2008, the 13-stool diner that launched more than 1,500 Waffle Houses reopened as a Waffle House museum, with vintage equipment and memorabilia displays of old uniforms and place settings. “That was the year McDonald’s and all the hamburger chains started doing takeout,” Waffle House co-founder Joe Rogers told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2008 of his idea to open a restaurant with his neighbor, Tom Forkner. “We wanted to do sit-down, and we knew you couldn’t take out a waffle or it’d become flimsy.

Builders stumble across ice age 'graveyard' filled with fossilised remains of dozens of huge animals

24th January 2011 - By Daily Mail Reporter (More photos at the story link)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1350085/Builders-stumble-ice-age-graveyard-filled-huge-fossils.html



Building contractors have unearthed an ice age graveyard containing the fossilised remains of dozens of giant animals that died up to 150,000 years ago.

Mammoths, mastodons and a giant ground sloth were all discovered at the bottom of a drained reservoir near the Aspen ski resort in Colorado's Rocky Mountains.

The remains are thought to be one of the largest collections of animals from the last ice age to be found in one place, reported the Daily Telegraph.

They were found in sediment in October by contractors preparing to build a new dam at the reservoir near Snowmass Village, which is located on a plateau some 8,870ft above sea level.

Palaeontologists have since found more than 600 bones from 25 different animals from seven different species beneath the reservoir's bed.

Heavy snow has forced them to call off their search until the spring, but they fully expect to find more fossils when they return.

Their haul so far still makes for impressive reading - ten American mastodons; four Columbian mammoths; four ice age bison; a Jefferson's ground sloth, an ice age deer and a tiger salamander have all been identified.

Lead scientist Dr Kirk Johnson, from the Denver Museum of Nature and Science, told the Telegraph: 'It is an amazing site and is very unusual.

'It is a true treasure trove of ice age fossils.

'Many fossils are pristine as they have been very well preserved. Some of the bones we recovered are still white while we are finding leaves that are still green and tree branches with the bark still on.'

The researchers believe the discovery will enhance our understanding of the prehistoric environment.

As these fossils were found beneath a lake, small invertebrates including fossilised insects and plant matter have been preserved.

Scientists believe that so many remains were found there because animals had gravitated towards the lake to drink water.

Other ice age fossil sites have tended to be on the sites of former tar pits, where trapped animals died.

Dr Johnson said: 'Mammoths and mastodons are hardly ever found together on a single site as they lived in very different environments, so here we must have seen a change in the ecosystem around the lake.

'We are seeing two distinct ice age environments - the first was when the lake was fairly deep and had a lot of open water... but then later it seems to have become a marsh and it is in the sediment from this period that we are finding the mammoths.

'It shows this was far from being a frozen ice covered wasteland.'

Did coal fires contribute to biggest extinction ever?

23 January 2011 - by Bob Holmes - NewScientist - Environment

Ash from burning coalfields, sparked by massive volcanic eruptions, may have added to the volley of crises that led to the biggest extinction event in Earth's history.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20016-did-coal-fires-contribute-to-biggest-extinction-ever.html

Many factors combined to cause the mass extinction at the end of the Permian period 251 million years ago, during which about 96 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of those on land went extinct. Several researchers have speculated that volcanism might have set off extensive coal fires that contributed to the extinction, but no clear evidence had been found – until now.

In Permian sediments from the Sverdrup basin in the Canadian Arctic, a team led by Stephen Grasby at the Geological Survey of Canada in Calgary found tiny spherical particles that are evidence of open coal combustion – very different from the ash that comes from burning vegetation.

"It's the first literal smoking gun to show that coal combustion was occurring," says Grasby.

Fire starters

He speculates that major volcanic eruptions some 1000 kilometres east of the Sverdrup basin – in what is now Siberia – may have ignited overlying coal deposits and released huge quantities of ash into the atmosphere.

Modern-day coal-fired power plants scrub this so-called "fly ash" from their emissions because it contains a lot of toxic metals such as chromium. When Grasby looked more closely at his sediments dating to the very end of the Permian, he found that they, too, contained high levels of chromium. This suggests that fly ash may have poisoned ancient oceans and lakes and contributed to the extinction.

Further studies of other end-Permian sediments around the world should show how widely the fly ash spread as the coalfields burned, and therefore how important it is likely to have been in causing the global extinction, says Andrew Knoll, a palaeobiologist at Harvard University.

If it turns out to be one of the main drivers of the extinction, he notes, it would probably have killed off species relatively indiscriminately. Another factor must explain why some groups – such as corals – suffered massive extinctions, while others – such as sea anemones – did not, he says.

Journal reference: Nature Geoscience, DOI: 10.1038/ngeo1069

Critical Thinking

Critical thinking, in its broadest sense has been described as "purposeful reflective judgment concerning what to believe or what to do."

Critical thinking clarifies goals, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, accomplishes actions, and assesses conclusions.

"Critical" as used in the expression "critical thinking" connotes the importance or centrality of the thinking to an issue, question or problem of concern. "Critical" in this context does not mean "disapproval" or "negative." There are many positive and useful uses of critical thinking, for example formulating a workable solution to a complex personal problem, deliberating as a group about what course of action to take, or analyzing the assumptions and the quality of the methods used in scientifically arriving at a reasonable level of confidence about a given hypothesis. Using strong critical thinking we might evaluate an argument, for example, as worthy of acceptance because it is valid and based on true premises. Upon reflection, a speaker may be evaluated as a credible source of knowledge on a given topic.

Critical thinking can occur whenever one judges, decides, or solves a problem; in general, whenever one must figure out what to believe or what to do, and do so in a reasonable and reflective way.

The list of core critical thinking skills includes observation, interpretation, analysis, inference, evaluation, explanation and meta-cognition.

There is a reasonable level of consensus among experts that an individual or group engaged in strong critical thinking gives due consideration to:

* Evidence through observation
* Context of judgment
* Relevant criteria for making the judgment well
* Applicable methods or techniques for forming the judgment
* Applicable theoretical constructs for understanding the problem and the question at hand

In addition to possessing strong critical thinking skills, one must be disposed to engage problems and decisions using those skills. Critical thinking employs not only logic but broad intellectual criteria such as clarity, credibility, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, significance and fairness.

Willingness to criticize oneself

Critical thinking is about being both willing and able to evaluate one's thinking. Thinking might be criticized because one does not have all the relevant information – indeed, important information may remain undiscovered, or the information may not even be knowable – or because one makes unjustified inferences, uses inappropriate concepts, or fails to notice important implications. One's thinking may be unclear, inaccurate, imprecise, irrelevant, narrow, shallow, illogical, or trivial, due to ignorance or misapplication of the appropriate learned skills of thinking.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking

Throwing logic, mathematics, and science out the window

Good morning tenac. You raise some interesting points.

"Why am i suppose to "THINK" for a minute that these so called smart...educated...experts...really know anything about anything? Why should i listen to anyones thoughts about anything when it completely contradicts Gods word?"

Part of the problem within our education system, in my opinion, is that critical thinking skills are not taught. These are skills that teach one not what to think but how to think in order to evaluate information, ideas, and situations and come their own conclusions.

Critical thinking is not easy but anyone can use the method. The difficult part is in wiping the slate clean to get a fresh start by eliminating bias and pre-conceived information, gathering information, and applying logic to the information to draw a conclusion. Whenever new information is presented it should be processed again within the critical thinking process.

Not saying that you are wrong in your conclusions. Sounds like you have come a long way from from a rather rough start in life.

The Incredible Shape-Shifting Owl

January 20, 2011 - by Mangesh and Jason - mental_floss Watercooler Ammo

While many creatures rely on camouflage as their best defense, the Southern White-Faced Scops Owl isn't one to blend in. Instead, this incredible creature changes its form completely! The transformations are astounding, and if you like animals, you've got to see this Japanese video.

http://blogs.discovery.com/animal_oddities/2010/05/transformer-owl.html

The 30,000 Year Old Cave That Descends Into Hell

Jan 20, 2011 - By Jesus Diaz - Gizmodo

Note: There is a 2:12 minute video at the article link below. The movie - Cave of Forgotten Dreams - (spring 2011).

http://gizmodo.com/5738795/the-30000+year+old-cave-that-descends-into-hell

There's a cave in France where no humans have been in 26,000 years. The walls are full of fantastic, perfectly-preserved paintings of animals, ending in a chamber full of monsters 1312-feet underground, where CO2 and radon gas concentrations provoke hallucinations.

It's called the the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, a really weird and mysterious place. The walls contain hundreds of animals—like the typical Paleolithic horses and bisons—but some of them are not supposed to be there, like lions, panthers, rhinos and hyenas.
A few are not even supposed to exist, like weird butterflyish animals or chimerical figures half bison half woman. These may be linked to the hallucinations. The trip is such that some archeologists think that it had a ritual nature, with people transcending into a new state as they descended into the final room.

In fact, the paintings themselves are of such sophistication—some even have three-dimensional relief—that is hard to believe they were made back then. However, radiocarbon dating shows that these paintings are indeed prehistoric: A group was made around 27,000-26,000 years ago and the other at 32,000-30,000 years ago.

The cave first discovered in 1994 by three French speleologists: Eliette Brunel-Deschamps, Christian Hillaire, and Jean-Marie Chauvet. And now you can visit it too. Not in person, but in the next best thing: The great German film director Werner Herzog has made a 3D film of it, which is the only 3D film I want to watch this year (actually, amazing documentaries are probably the only movie genre that is perfect for 3D, like this or the Hubble 3D movie).

.....
Chauvet Cave



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave

Yellowstone Has Bulged as Magma Pocket Swells

Some places saw the ground rise by ten inches, experts report.

January 19, 2011 - Brian Handwerk - for National Geographic News

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/01/110119-yellowstone-park-supervolcano-eruption-magma-science/



Yellowstone National Park's supervolcano just took a deep "breath," causing miles of ground to rise dramatically, scientists report.

The simmering volcano has produced major eruptions—each a thousand times more powerful than Mount St. Helens's 1980 eruption—three times in the past 2.1 million years. Yellowstone's caldera, which covers a 25- by 37-mile (40- by 60-kilometer) swath of Wyoming, is an ancient crater formed after the last big blast, some 640,000 years ago.

(See "When Yellowstone Explodes" in National Geographic magazine.)

Since then, about 30 smaller eruptions—including one as recent as 70,000 years ago—have filled the caldera with lava and ash, producing the relatively flat landscape we see today.

But beginning in 2004, scientists saw the ground above the caldera rise upward at rates as high as 2.8 inches (7 centimeters) a year. (Related: "Yellowstone Is Rising on Swollen 'Supervolcano.'")

The rate slowed between 2007 and 2010 to a centimeter a year or less. Still, since the start of the swelling, ground levels over the volcano have been raised by as much as 10 inches (25 centimeters) in places.

"It's an extraordinary uplift, because it covers such a large area and the rates are so high," said the University of Utah's Bob Smith, a longtime expert in Yellowstone's volcanism.

Scientists think a swelling magma reservoir four to six miles (seven to ten kilometers) below the surface is driving the uplift. Fortunately, the surge doesn't seem to herald an imminent catastrophe, Smith said. (Related: "Under Yellowstone, Magma Pocket 20 Percent Larger Than Thought.")

"At the beginning we were concerned it could be leading up to an eruption," said Smith, who co-authored a paper on the surge published in the December 3, 2010, edition of Geophysical Research Letters.

"But once we saw [the magma] was at a depth of ten kilometers, we weren't so concerned. If it had been at depths of two or three kilometers [one or two miles], we'd have been a lot more concerned."

Studies of the surge, he added, may offer valuable clues about what's going on in the volcano's subterranean plumbing, which may eventually help scientists predict when Yellowstone's next volcanic "burp" will break out.

Yellowstone Takes Regular Breaths

Smith and colleagues at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Yellowstone Volcano Observatory have been mapping the caldera's rise and fall using tools such as global positioning systems (GPS) and interferometric synthetic aperture radar (InSAR), which gives ground-deformation measurements.

Ground deformation can suggest that magma is moving toward the surface before an eruption: The flanks of Mount St. Helens, for example, swelled dramatically in the months before its 1980 explosion. (See pictures of Mount St. Helens before and after the blast.)

But there are also many examples, including the Yellowstone supervolcano, where it appears the ground has risen and fallen for thousands of years without an eruption.

According to current theory, Yellowstone's magma reservoir is fed by a plume of hot rock surging upward from Earth's mantle. (Related: "New Magma Layer Found Deep in Earth's Mantle?")

When the amount of magma flowing into the chamber increases, the reservoir swells like a lung and the surface above expands upward. Models suggest that during the recent uplift, the reservoir was filling with 0.02 cubic miles (0.1 cubic kilometer) of magma a year.

When the rate of increase slows, the theory goes, the magma likely moves off horizontally to solidify and cool, allowing the surface to settle back down.

Based on geologic evidence, Yellowstone has probably seen a continuous cycle of inflation and deflation over the past 15,000 years, and the cycle will likely continue, Smith said.

Surveys show, for example, that the caldera rose some 7 inches (18 centimeters) between 1976 and 1984 before dropping back about 5.5 inches (14 centimeters) over the next decade.

"These calderas tend to go up and down, up and down," he said. "But every once in a while they burp, creating hydrothermal explosions, earthquakes, or—ultimately—they can produce volcanic eruptions."

Yellowstone Surge Also Linked to Geysers, Quakes?

Predicting when an eruption might occur is extremely difficult, in part because the fine details of what's going on under Yellowstone are still undetermined. What's more, continuous records of Yellowstone's activity have been made only since the 1970s—a tiny slice of geologic time—making it hard to draw conclusions.

"Clearly some deep source of magma feeds Yellowstone, and since Yellowstone has erupted in the recent geological past, we know that there is magma at shallower depths too," said Dan Dzurisin, a Yellowstone expert with the USGS Cascades Volcano Observatory in Washington State.

"There has to be magma in the crust, or we wouldn't have all the hydrothermal activity that we have," Dzurisin added. "There is so much heat coming out of Yellowstone right now that if it wasn't being reheated by magma, the whole system would have gone stone cold since the time of the last eruption 70,000 years ago."

The large hydrothermal system just below Yellowstone's surface, which produces many of the park's top tourist attractions, may also play a role in ground swelling, Dzurisin said, though no one is sure to what extent.

"Could it be that some uplift is caused not by new magma coming in but by the hydrothermal system sealing itself up and pressurizing?" he asked. "And then it subsides when it springs a leak and depressurizes? These details are difficult."

And it's not a matter of simply watching the ground rise and fall. Different areas may move in different directions and be interconnected in unknown ways, reflecting the as yet unmapped network of volcanic and hydrothermal plumbing.

The roughly 3,000 earthquakes in Yellowstone each year may offer even more clues about the relationship between ground uplift and the magma chamber.

For example, between December 26, 2008, and January 8, 2009, some 900 earthquakes occurred in the area around Yellowstone Lake.

This earthquake "swarm" may have helped to release pressure on the magma reservoir by allowing fluids to escape, and this may have slowed the rate of uplift, the University of Utah's Smith said. (Related: "Mysterious 'Swarm' of Quakes Strikes Oregon Waters.")

"Big quakes [can have] a relationship to uplift and deformations caused by the intrusion of magma," he said. "How those intrusions stress the adjacent faults, or how the faults might transmit stress to the magma system, is a really important new area of study."

Overall, USGS's Dzurisin added, "the story of Yellowstone deformation has gotten more complex as we've had better and better technologies to study it."

Other ways of knowing

Jan 19, 2011 - Ken Perrot - Open Parachute - The mind doesn't work if it's closed

There’s been a lot of rubbish written about “other ways of knowing”. So it’s quite refreshing to read Richard Carrier’s classification of methods of knowing. This is from his book Sense and Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism. Well worthy reading by the way.

He starts by pointing out that no method of obtaining knowledge can produce absolute certainty. We can always be wrong, make mistakes. But we can list possible methods in order of reliability:

“What is rational is to assign degrees of conviction to degrees of certainty established by a tried-and-tested method. What is rational is reasonable certainty, not absolute certainty.”

“The methods of logic and mathematics are well-developed and provide the greatest certainty we have yet been able to find regarding anything, other than a present, uninterpreted experience. The next greatest certainty has been found in the application of scientific methods to empirical problems. In third place is our own daily experience, when interpreted with a logical or scientific mindset. Fourth is the application of critical-historical methods to claims about past events. Fifth is the application of the criteria of trust to the claims of experts. Sixth is the untested but logical application of inferential generalizations from incomplete facts—that is, plausible deductions. Such is the scale of methods that we have historically been able to discover and confirm as effective.”

“Experience shows that our degree of certainty will generally be weaker with regard to facts at each stage down this six-rung ladder, though within each category lies its own continuum of certainty and uncertainty, and the ladder itself is a continuum of precision and access to information: the more data we have to ground our conclusions, the farther up the ladder we find ourselves. Thus, mathematics is just perfected science; science, perfected experience; experience, perfected history; and history, perfected attention to experts; while plausible inference is what we are left with when we have none of those things.”

“Lacking any of the above approaches to the truth, we are faced with untrustworthy hearsay and pure speculation, where only the feeblest of certainty can ever be justified, if at all.”

Carrier writes that accurate methods of knowing have the properties of predictive success and convergent accumulation of consistent results. However, these should be evaluated intelligently. Even the best method may produce faulty knowledge if used incorrectly.

So how do the different methods rate?:

1: Logic and mathematics

Produces the broadest, most complete and most consistent results. The methods are relatively simple and they involve few, precisely defined, predictions which are easily validated (as Carrier says – “in the laboratory of the mind”).

Logical claims are about the meaning of concepts, not details, and this limits the applicability of the method. It is also easily (and often) manipulated. For example logical arguments are presented as arbitrary lists (proving only that the “logician” can count) or based on shonky premises – chosen to produce the desired answer. This often happens with people arguing for strong ideological prejudices.

I think this can be countered using careful validation by other logicians or mathematicians. Many of the conclusions can also be validated (or proved wrong) by application of empirically based methods of knowing.

2: Scientific method

This is actually a whole complex of empirical methods, and also includes logic and mathematics. I think it is important to see that the method cannot be reduced to a simple algorithm. In reality science can be quite messy and influenced by subjective desires. But it also includes processes to reduce the influence of subjectivism and test resulting conclusions.

The method is not as certain as the logical-mathematical method. It is also a complicated, expensive, difficult and often lengthy process. Requiring special care and extensive evaluation. “But,” Carrier points out, “when these standards are met, well and properly, our conclusions will be the most certain we can achieve about facts outside the human mind, correcting even our own errors in direct experience.”

We need to appreciate, though, scientific knowledge is relative, always open to change and improvement as we acquire more empirical and logical information. And often science needs to talk in terms of probabilities rather than absolutes. On the other hand we are often able to quantify the probabilities involved.

3: Experience

Ultimately all out knowledge comes from our personal life experiences. And we know that knowledge is largely correct because very different people agree on these conclusions.

But simple unexamined isolated experiences are not as trustworthy as many, well analysed and verified experiences. So we must accept that our knowledge based on personal experience is wrong if this is shown by science, logic or mathematics. The lesson here is that it is always best to examine out own experiences with logical reason and scientific honesty.

Richard Carrier points to the clear advantage of a personal philosophy of scientific naturalism. “For us, if we want greater certainty rather than less, the method of personal experience ought to be the simple practice of living a life of reason, applying scientific and logical principles whenever and wherever possible. This will ensure your life experience produces more reliable knowledge, and is more flexible (by being more open-minded and skeptical), and thus less challenged by the findings of science and logic.”

4: History

Because our evidence here is indirect, historical knowledge is less reliable than logic, scientific and personal experience. And methods available to verify or confirm this knowledge are also indirect and less secure.

However, critical historical analysis can avoid or limit some of these problems. It’s also important to realise that some of the criticisms of “historical science” are mistaken in that that knowledge can often be derived from several different lines of empirical evidence, often derived from current measurements, which converge on a conclusion.

5: Expert testimony

This is important because most people rely on this sort of knowledge for often very important decisions.

Expert testimony is essentially derivative of the other methods. For example scientific experts may derive their authority from actual involvement in the scientific, logical and mathematical methods.

Experts will clearly provide more reliable and trustworthy knowledge that non-experts. This places importance on criteria for determining the reliability of experts. Its worth “testing” them for reliability.

For example:

* Are their qualifications relevant to the questions at hand;
* Is their testimony confirmed by other reliable experts
* Is their evidence that the experts adhere to reliable methods of gaining their knowledge
* Do the experts make an effort to avoid or correct for their personal biases.

Clearly experts can be wrong and ideally their advice should be checked by other more reliable methods where possible. Their expertise counts for nothing if their advice conflicts with knowledge obtained logically, mathematically and scientifically.

These are important qualifications for the person in the street who often relies on expert testimony for input to their own important decisions. Just consider, for example, the political importance of expert testimony when considering climate change and political decisions arising from it. Unfortunately, many people “choose” their expert using confirmation bias rather than objective assessment. The advice from Richard Carrier on the personal advantage of scientific naturalism (see 3: Experience above) is relevant here.

A claimed area of expertise may be inappropriate to the question at hand. For example, militant theists will often argue that comments, articles and books written by scientists, philosophers and others questioning existence of gods are irrelevant becuase these people are not theologians. As Richard Carrier points out “a theologian may be an expert on theology, but that only means he has a genuine experts in concepts of theology, not that he is an expert on factual questions like whether a god exists or whether Catholicism is the One true religion. No one can be an expert on these questions becuase no one has any real evidence for them, at least evidence properly produced by one or more of the superior methods above. A theologian can hardly claim any more experience with an actual god than we can.”

And we need to recognise that in some areas “like theology we find very little agreement among qualified experts, and a vast influence of ideological bias that is rarely placed under any objective control.”

6: Plausible inference

It is reasonable to trust plausible inference and inferential generalisations if well argued. But we shouldn’t give these more credence than the more reliable methods of knowing.

I believe this method has an important role in science and should not be rejected just because the evidence is incomplete or missing. Speculation and wild ideas are an important source of creativity and of hypotheses for testing.

In fact some ideas or hypotheses based on plausible inference may have useful explanatory power and be useful where validation is not yet possible. Consider “String Theory” and the “Multiverse” ideas.

However, we should expect that a proportion of ideas based on plausible inference will fail when tested scientifically. This is a salutary lesson all good scientists learn early in their career.

7: Pure faith

These are beliefs based solely on tradition, hearsay, mere speculation, desires and wishes. Beliefs in ungrounded assertions.

We know from experience that such beliefs usually turn out to be false. Just consider all those legends, traditional myths and superstitions which have been shown wrong throughout history. Yet the method of pure faith transmits beliefs without any regard to their truth. Faith conveys false beliefs just as well as it does true ones.

So the probability of faith-based beliefs being reliable must be low. Carrier writes: “blind faith is inherently self-defeating. The number of false beliefs always vastly outnumbers the true. It follows that any arbitrary method of selection will be maximally successful at selecting false beliefs.”

Some sense at last!

http://sciblogs.co.nz/open-parachute/2011/01/19/“other-ways-of-knowing”-–-some-sense-at-last

Canadian paleontologists reveal earthly origins of mysterious Tibetan footprints

January 18, 2011 - By Randy Boswell, Postmedia News

http://www.allvoices.com/s/event-7926909/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jYW5hZGEuY29tL0NhbmFkaWFuK3BhbGVvbnRvbG9naXN0cytyZXZlYWwrZWFydGhseStvcmlnaW5zK215c3RlcmlvdXMrVGliZXRhbitmb290cHJpbnRzLzQxMjc4NzUvc3RvcnkuaHRtbA==



When giant, human-shaped footprints were found stamped in rock at a construction site in Tibet in 1999, local residents celebrated what they believed to be the discovery of ancient traces left by the legendary figure King Gesar, the hero of an epic poem at the heart of Tibetan history. But two leading Canadian paleontologists have published a study revealing the more earthly origins of the metre-long prints — an enormous dinosaur that made tracks along a Tibetan mudflat about 150 million years ago.

The finding, due to appear in the next issue of the Geological Bulletin of China, represents the first documented dinosaur trackway in Tibet. But it isn't likely to deter locals from leaving respectful offerings to King Gesar at the site of the fossilized footfalls, says the University of Alberta scientist who led the study.

Lida Xing, who co-authored the footprint study with his U of A colleague and famed fossil hunter Philip Currie, said the research site in Tibet was frequently shrouded with gifts left by local residents as a tribute to the mythic king.

"Some Tibetans believed the footprints were left by warrior King Gesar," Xing told Postmedia News. "Lots of khatas — a traditional ceremonial scarf used in Tibet and Mongolia — were hung all over the footprint site."

Xing said the Gesar epic is captured in "folk tales, legends, folk songs and proverbs," from the mountainous, semi-autonomous region of China.

"It has been passed down orally and musically from one generation to the next," he said. "Even today, the epic is still widespread among the Tibetan people, especially among farmers and herdsmen."

But the two Canadian researchers, along with paleontologist Jerald Harris of Utah's Dixie State College, compared the markings at the Tibetan site to other dinosaur trackways from around the world, including Canada.

They concluded that the footprints, up to 112 centimetres (44") in length, were created by a Jurassic-era sauropod such as Apatosaurus — a 23-metre (75 FOOT), 23-tonne monster of the Jurassic era.

The way tracks were laid down by such creatures, said Xing, they "look like human footprints, which is the source of the locals' imagination."

In the Geological Bulletin study, the researchers note that some Tibetans believe the trackways represent markings left by a "deity of the mountains" who ran away from the area after being alarmed by the 1999 construction activity.


"These footprints, which were made by sauropod dinosaurs, have now become a tourist attraction."

Bearly There



This tiny polar bear cub will eventually grow up to be 770 to 1,500 pounds—half that, if it's female. The wonders of nature!

Sun Jan 16, 2011 - Jezebel - http://jezebel.com/5734325/bearly-there

Holy Cow! (AKA The Red Heifer)

Had never heard of Perry Stone. Glad to see he is also interested in paleontology.

Bishop Dr. Perry F. Stone (born June 28, 1958) is an American televangelist, preacher, inspriational speaker and author, and lead pastor of International Ministry Center and director of Voice of Evangelism Ministries.

Television and Literary works

During his thirty-plus years of full time ministry, Stone has authored over forty books and booklets, including The Meal That Heals, and Breaking The Jewish Code; produced over one-hundred videos and DVD’s; as well as produced hundreds of audio teaching albums series. Over the last two decades, Stone has also found time to write for and publish his ministry's magazine, The Voice of Evangelism. In September 2000, Stone launched Manna-Fest with Perry Stone, an internationally-syndicated weekly television program which can be seen via cable TV, internet podcasts, and satellite systems worldwide.

Bible Prophecies

Stone is also known as one of America’s foremost experts on Biblical Prophecy. Perry is often featured as a keynote speaker at internationally recognized Prophecy Conferences. Rapture Rosh Hashanah. He has also been interviewed by nationally recognized Christian television programs, such as TBN's Praise The Lord, and The 700 Club, and often enters millions of homes on major Christian networks such as Trinity Broadcasting Network, Daystar and INSP. Stone’s world travels and his personal contacts with numerous government and military personalities has given him "direct links" to “insider information” as it relates to the fulfillment of Bible prophecy.

Search for the Red Heifer

Through numerous contacts in Israel, Stone was one of the first American ministers to confirm and publicize the search for the ashes of the Red Heifer. A decade before most Americans had ever heard of the Bible Code, Stone had not only heard of it, but had begun informing churches about this now famous phenomena.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Stone

.....

The Red Heifer (translated to English as: Red Cow) in Judaism, is a sacrificial cow whose ashes are used for the ritual purification of people who come into contact with a corpse.

Hebrew Bible

According to Numbers 19:2: "Speak unto the children of Israel, that they bring thee a red heifer without spot, wherein is no blemish, and upon which never came yoke"—in other words, the animal must not have hairs of any other color, it must be in perfect health, and it must never have been used to perform work. The heifer is then slain (Numbers 19:3) and burned outside of the camp (Numbers 19:3–6). Cedar wood, hyssop, and scarlet are added to the fire, and the remaining ashes are placed in a vessel containing pure water (Numbers 19:9).

In order to purify a person who has become ritually contaminated by contact with a corpse, water from the vessel is sprinkled on him, using a bunch of hyssop, on the third and seventh day of the decontamination process (Numbers 19:18–19). The kohen who have performed the ritual then become impure themselves. The kohen who performs the ritual must then bathe himself and his clothes in water. He shall be deemed impure until evening.

Book of Daniel

In the Book of Daniel is a reference to a Red Heifer.In Daniel 12:10, God tells Daniel that in the last days, "many shall be purified and made white"; a reference to the purification ritual of the Red Heifer, "Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow" (Isa 1:18, Num 19:6). The analogy appears to relate to a partner of the returning End Time messiah.

Christian tradition

The non-canonical Epistle of Barnabas (8:1) explicitly equates the Red Heifer with Jesus. In the New Testament, the phrases "without the gate" (Hebrews 13:12) and "without the camp" (Numbers 19:3, Hebrews 13:13) have been taken to be not only an identification of Jesus with the Red Heifer, but an indication as to the location of the crucifixion. This is the thesis of Ernest L. Martin in his 1984 book Secrets of Golgotha.

Christians

Some Christians believe that the Second Coming of Jesus Christ cannot occur until the Third Temple is constructed in Jerusalem, which requires the appearance of a red heifer born in Israel. Clyde Lott, a cattle breeder in O'Neill, Nebraska, United States, is attempting to systematically breed red heifers and export them to Israel to establish a breeding line of red heifers in Israel in the hope that this will bring about the construction of the Third Temple and ultimately the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Heifer

34,000-Year-Old Organisms Found Buried Alive!

13 January 2011 - By Andrea Mustain, OurAmazingPlanet Staff Writer - Live Science

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/ancient-bacteria-organisms-found-buried-alive-110112.html

It's a tale that has all the trappings of a cult 1960s sci-fi movie: Scientists bring back ancient salt crystals, dug up from deep below Death Valley for climate research. The sparkling crystals are carefully packed away until, years later, a young, unknown researcher takes a second look at the 34,000-year-old crystals and discovers, trapped inside, something strange. Something ... alive.

Thankfully this story doesn't end with the destruction of the human race, but with a satisfied scientist finishing his Ph.D.

"It was actually a very big surprise to me," said Brian Schubert, who discovered ancient bacteria living within tiny, fluid-filled chambers inside the salt crystals.

Salt crystals grow very quickly, imprisoning whatever happens to be floating — or living — nearby inside tiny bubbles just a few microns across, akin to naturally made, miniature snow-globes.

"It's permanently sealed inside the salt, like little time capsules," said Tim Lowenstein, a professor in the geology department at Binghamton University and Schubert's advisor at the time.

Lowenstein said new research indicates this process occurs in modern saline lakes, further backing up Schubert’s astounding discovery, which was first revealed about a year ago. The new findings, along with details of Schubert’s work, are published in the January 2011 edition of GSA Today, the publication of the Geological Society of America.

Schubert, now an assistant researcher at the University of Hawaii, said the bacteria — a salt-loving sort still found on Earth today — were shrunken and small, and suspended in a kind of hibernation state.

"They're alive, but they're not using any energy to swim around, they're not reproducing," Schubert told OurAmazingPlanet. "They're not doing anything at all except maintaining themselves."

The key to the microbes' millennia-long survival may be their fellow captives — algae, of a group called Dunaliella.

"The most exciting part to me was when we were able to identify the Dunaliella cells in there," Schubert said, "because there were hints that could be a food source."

With the discovery of a potential energy source trapped alongside the bacteria, it has begun to emerge that, like an outlandish Dr. Seuss invention (hello, Who-ville), these tiny chambers could house entire, microscopic ecosystems.

Other elderly bacteria?

Schubert and Lowenstein are not the first to uncover organisms that are astonishingly long-lived. About a decade ago, there were claims of discoveries of 250-million-year-old bacteria. The results weren't reproduced, and remain controversial.

Schubert, however, was able to reproduce his results. Not only did he grow the same organisms again in his own lab, he sent crystals to another lab, which then got the same results.

"So this wasn’t something that was just a contaminant from our lab," Schubert said.

Survival strategy

The next step for researchers is to figure out how the microbes, suspended in a starvation-survival mode for so many thousands of years, managed to stay viable.

"We're not sure what's going on," Lowenstein said. "They need to be able to repair DNA, because DNA degrades with time."

Schubert said the microbes took about two-and-a-half months to "wake up" out of their survival state before they started to reproduce, behavior that has been previously documented in bacteria, and a strategy that certainly makes sense.

"It's 34,000 years old and it has a kid," Schubert said. And ironically, once that happens, the new bacteria are, of course, entirely modern.

Of the 900 crystal samples Schubert tested, only five produced living bacteria. However, Schubert said, microbes are picky. Most organisms can't be cultured in the lab, so there could be many living microbes that just didn't like their new home enough to reproduce.

Still, wasn't it exciting to discover what could be one of the oldest living organisms on the planet?

"It worked out very well," Schubert said.

Pyramid Texts - Book of the Dead

From your post: "I saw the dead, the great and the small, standing before the throne, and books were opened; and another book was opened, which is the book of life; and the dead were judged from the things which were written in the books, according to their deeds."
Revelation 20:12

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The Pyramid Texts are a collection of ancient Egyptian religious texts from the time of the Old Kingdom. The pyramid texts are the oldest known religious texts in the world. Written in Old Egyptian, the pyramid texts were carved on the walls and sarcophagi of the pyramids at Saqqara during the 5th and 6th Dynasties of the Old Kingdom. The oldest of the texts date to between 2400-2300 BC. Unlike the Coffin Texts and Book of the Dead into which parts of the pyramid texts later evolved, the pyramid texts were reserved only for the pharaoh and were not illustrated. Following the earlier Palermo Stone, the pyramid texts mark the next-oldest known mention of Osiris, who would become the most important deity associated with afterlife in the Ancient Egyptian religion.

The spells, or "utterances", of the pyramid texts are primarily concerned with protecting the pharaoh's remains, reanimating his body after death, and helping him ascend to the heavens, which are the emphasis of the afterlife during the Old Kingdom. The spells delineate all of the ways the pharaoh could travel, including the use of ramps, stairs, ladders, and most importantly flying. The spells could also be used to call the gods to help, even threatening them if they did not comply. Continued .....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyramid_Texts

The Book of the Dead is the modern name of an ancient Egyptian funerary text, used from the beginning of the New Kingdom (around 1550 BC) to around 50 BC. The original Egyptian name for the text, transliterated rw nw prt m hrw is translated as "Book of Coming Forth by Day", and the text consists of a number of magic spells intended to assist a dead person journey through the Duat, or underworld, and into the afterlife. The Book of the Dead was part of a tradition of funerary texts which includes the earlier Pyramid Texts and Coffin Texts. Some of the spells included were drawn from these older works and date to the 3rd millenium BC. Other spells were composed later in Egyptian history, dating to the Third Intermediate Period (11th to 7th centuries BC). Continued .....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_dead



This detail scene, from the Papyrus of Hunefer (ca. 1375 B.C.), shows the scribe Hunefer's heart being weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth, by the jackal-headed Anubis. The Ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. If his heart is lighter than the feather, Hunefer is allowed to pass into the afterlife. If not, he is eaten by the waiting chimeric devouring creature Ammut composed of the deadly crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus. Vignettes such as these were a common illustration in Egyptian books of the dead.

Magic bandsaw action

Jan 11, 2011 - Cory Doctorow - boingboing

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/11/magic-bandsaw-action.html

Wood Working in Action's YouTube demo of mad bandsaw skillz is a fantabulous blend of deft conjuror's handwork and breathtaking near-amputations. Be sure to watch for the thrilling finale!

An ancient hill where you can touch thousands of dinosaur footprints

http://io9.com/5730242/an-ancient-hill-where-you-can-touch-thousands-of-dinosaur-footprints

1-11-2011 - io9



In Sucre, Bolivia, a limestone wall rises at an angle above the ground, its surface criss-crossed with thousands of dinosaur tracks. It's the biggest collection of dinosaur footprints in the world. How did these 68 million-year-old prints wind up here?

Photo by Leslie Middlemass

The truly strange thing is that the wall wasn't discovered until the mid-1990s, when workers from a nearby cement factory saw it. According to Atlas Obscura:

It's unclear how the wall went undiscovered for so long, as it is filled with more than 5,000 tracks made during the second half of the Cretaceous period about 68 million years ago. There are so many tracks, actually - and they're placed in such strange patterns - that scientists refer to the area as a dinosaur dance floor.

So far, six different types of dinosaur prints have been identified. One special track that measures 347 meters is the longest dinosaur trackway ever discovered and was made by a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex nicknamed "Johnny Walker" by some of the local researchers.

Eight other limestone walls with dinosaurs tracks have been found in the region. Millions of years ago, when dinosaurs walked the earth, this area was part of a huge shallow lake. The tectonic plate shifts during the Tertiary period that formed the great Andes Mountains also pushed some of these limestone walls out from the bed of the lake. The rock cliff measures about 325 feet tall and juts into the sky at a 70 degree angle.

Oxygen-Free Early Oceans Likely Delayed Rise of Life on Planet

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110110151016.htm

ScienceDaily (Jan. 10, 2011) — Geologists at the University of California, Riverside have found chemical evidence in 2.6-billion-year-old rocks that indicates that Earth's ancient oceans were oxygen-free and, surprisingly, contained abundant hydrogen sulfide in some areas.

"We are the first to show that ample hydrogen sulfide in the ocean was possible this early in Earth's history," said Timothy Lyons, a professor of biogeochemistry and the senior investigator in the study, which appears in the February issue of Geology. "This surprising finding adds to growing evidence showing that ancient ocean chemistry was far more complex than previously imagined and likely influenced life's evolution on Earth in unexpected ways -- such as, by delaying the appearance and proliferation of some key groups of organisms."

Ordinarily, hydrogen sulfide in the ocean is tied to the presence of oxygen in the atmosphere. Even small amounts of oxygen favor continental weathering of rocks, resulting in sulfate, which in turn gets transported to the ocean by rivers. Bacteria then convert this sulfate into hydrogen sulfide.

How then did the ancient oceans contain hydrogen sulfide in the near absence of oxygen, as the 2.6-million-year-old rocks indicate? The UC Riverside-led team explains that sulfate delivery in an oxygen-free environment can also occur in sufficient amounts via volcanic sources, with bacteria processing the sulfate into hydrogen sulfide.

Specifically, Lyons and colleagues examined rocks rich in pyrite -- an iron sulfide mineral commonly known as fool's gold -- that date back to the Archean eon of geologic history (3.9 to 2.5 billion years ago) and typify very low-oxygen environments. Found in Western Australia, these rocks have preserved chemical signatures that constitute some of the best records of the very early evolutionary history of life on the planet.

The rocks formed 200 million years before oxygen amounts spiked during the so-called "Great Oxidation Event" -- an event 2.4 billion years ago that helped set the stage for life's proliferation on Earth.

"Our previous work showed evidence for hydrogen sulfide in the ocean more than 100 million years before the first appreciable accumulation of oxygen in the atmosphere at the Great Oxidation Event," Lyons said. "The data pointing to this 2.5 billion-year-old hydrogen sulfide are fingerprints of incipient atmospheric oxygenation. Now, in contrast, our evidence for abundant 2.6 billion-year-old hydrogen sulfide in the ocean -- that is, another 100 million years earlier -- shows that oxygen wasn't a prerequisite. The important implication is that hydrogen sulfide was potentially common for a billion or more years before the Great Oxidation Event, and that kind of ocean chemistry has key implications for the evolution of early life."

Clint Scott, the first author of the research paper and a former graduate student in Lyons's lab, said the team was also surprised to find that the Archean rocks recorded no enrichments of the trace element molybdenum, a key micronutrient for life that serves as a proxy for oceanic and atmospheric oxygen amounts.

The absence of molybdenum, Scott explained, indicates the absence of oxidative weathering of the continental rocks at this time (continents are the primary source of molybdenum in the oceans). Moreover, the development of early life, such as cyanobacteria, is determined by the amount of molybdenum in the ocean; without this life-affirming micronutrient, cyanobacteria could not become abundant enough to produce large quantities of oxygen.

"Molybdenum is enriched in our previously studied 2.5 billion-year-old Archean rocks, which ties to the earliest hints of atmospheric oxygenation as a harbinger of the Great Oxidation Event," Scott said. "The scarcity of molybdenum in rocks deposited 100 million years earlier, however, reflects its scarcity also in the overlying water column. Such metal deficiencies suggest that cyanobacteria were probably struggling to produce oxygen when these rocks formed.

"Our research has important implications for the evolutionary history of life on Earth," Scott added, "because biological evolution both initiated and responded to changes in ocean chemistry. We are trying to piece together the cause-and-effect relationships that resulted, billions of years later, in the evolution of animals and, ultimately, humans. This is really the story of how we got here."

The first animals do not appear in the fossil record until around 600 million years ago -- almost two billion years after the rocks studied by Scott and his team formed. The steady build-up of oxygen, which began towards the end of the Archean, played a key role in the evolution of new life forms.

"Future research needs to focus on whether sulfidic and oxygen-free conditions were prevalent throughout the Archean, as our model predicts," Scott said.

Lyons and Scott were accompanied on this project by Christopher Reinhard from UCR; Andrey Bekker from the University of Manitoba, Canada; Bernhard Schnetger from Oldenburg University, Germany; Bryan Krapež from the Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia; and Douglas Rumble III from the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC. Currently, Scott is a postdoctoral researcher at McGill University, Canada.

Funding for this work came from the National Science Foundation, the NASA Exobiology Program, the NASA Astrobiology Institute, and through a Canadian National Sciences and Engineering Research Council Discovery Grant.

Astronomers shed light on the dark ages of the Universe

07 Jan 2011 - By Richard Alleyne, Science Correspondent - The Telegraph

Astronomers have discovered the "missing link" in the evolution of the universe following the Big Bang, it has been claimed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8246888/Astronomers-shed-light-on-the-dark-ages-of-the-Universe.html



For years scientists have known nothing about the "dark ages" of space – a period between the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago and the creation of the first stars.

But Cambridge University researchers have now captured light emitted from a massive black hole to peer into this unknown portion of the history of the universe.

They discovered remnants of the first stars and evidence of the aftermath of an exploding star, which was 25 times larger than the sun.

Prof Max Pettini, of Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy, believes the discovery of these gases could help reveal the origins of the universe.

He said: "We have effectively been able to peer into the Dark Ages using the light emitted from a quasar.

"The light provides a backdrop against which any gas cloud in its path can be measured.

"We discovered tiny amounts of elements present in the cloud in proportions that are very different from their relative proportions in normal stars today.

"Most significantly, the ratio of carbon to iron is 35 times greater than measured in the sun.

"The composition enables us to infer that the gas was released by a star 25 times more massive than the sun and originally consisting of only hydrogen and helium.

"In effect, this is a fossil record that provides us with a missing link back to the early universe."

Cambridge's Institute of Astronomy teamed up with researchers at California Institute of Technology to carry out the groundbreaking research.

They used light emitted from a massive black hole, called a quasar, to 'light up' gases released by the young stars.

These early stars are believed to hold the key to how the universe evolved from being filled with hydrogen and helium to one rich in heavier elements such as oxygen, carbon and iron.

Lasting half a billion years after the Big Bang, this period is inaccessible to telescopes because the clouds of gas that filled the universe then were not transparent.

But astronomers in California and Cambridge successfully located a rare cloud released from a star using the world's largest telescopes in Hawaii and Chile.

The results provide experimental observations of a time that has so far been possible to model only with computer simulations.

The universe is no fluke, Pope Benedict XVI says

Jan 7, 2011 - By John Matson - Scientific American

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=the-universe-is-no-fluke-pope-bened-2011-01-07

Why are we here? Many cosmologists think that everything—not just life on Earth but the planets, the stars, the entire observable universe—is a roll of the dice writ large. Other universes within a grander multiverse have entirely different properties, not to mention completely different laws of physics, based on different rolls of those cosmic dice.

Pope Benedict XVI might beg to differ. The birth of our universe was not in any way random, he said December 6 during a sermon to thousands at the Vatican, according to Reuters. Benedict's speech was given on the day that the Epiphany—the coming of the Magi—is observed in the Western church.

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," the Pope said, according to the wire service. Reuters reports that the Pope's sermon held that "God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the big bang" but does not quote Benedict explicitly mentioning the big bang theory. "Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God," Benedict said.

Maybe now cosmologists will stop contemplating the cosmos through the lens of their own theories—worrying about how the universe began, whether our universe is but one of many within a multiverse, and whether time and space may have existed in some kind of pre–big bang cosmic past life. Then again, probably not.

....

Current poll at msnbc about the statement made by the pope with 68,855 votes cast:

The pope says God was behind the Big Bang, which scientists believe created the universe. What do you think?



http://msnbc.newsvine.com/_question/2011/01/06/5777073-the-pope-says-god-was-behind-the-big-bang-which-scientists-believe-created-the-universe-what-do-you-think

Scientists probe the idea of chronesthesia

Fri Jan 7, 2011 - io9

Chronesthesia is known as 'mental time travel,' and it allows us to think about the past or the future. Although vital to everyday life, it's seldom been studied. What parts of the brain light up when you get nostalgic?

http://io9.com/5726732/scientists-probe-the-idea-of-chronesthesia

Many people are familiar with the term synesthesia, when the brain takes physical sensual reality and swaps it out for a different sensation — for example, seeing sounds as colors. Chronesthesia is its more common, but lesser known temporal equivalent. Instead of being stuck in time, the way we are physically, we can remember the past or plan for the future. It's not seen as a big deal, but it is taking the mind away from real stimulus and letting it see something else.

For a time, researchers thought of this as just any other part of a world building. Humans have the capacity for building mental pictures of scenes that don't exist in reality. We can plot, scheme, dream, and use our imaginations. Whether we were doing it while thinking of the past, the present, or the future was all the same. Or so people thought.

In fact, we use an entirely different part of the brain when we're thinking about a different time. People were asked to think about taking the same walk in the past, the present, or the future. They were asked to think about taking the walk in their real life, and in an imagined past, present or future. Using an MRI, researchers saw that a different section of the brain lights up when people think about the past or future than when they think about the present. People aren't just building a picture and thinking, "Oh, this happened five years ago." They're relegating times other than the present to different portions of the mind.

God was behind Big Bang, universe no accident: Pope

Thu Jan 6, 2011 - Philip Pullella - Reuters

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) - God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said on Thursday.

http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE7052OC20110106

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

"Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God," he said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St Peter's Basilica on the feast day.

While the pope has spoken before about evolution, he has rarely delved back in time to discuss specific concepts such as the Big Bang, which scientists believe led to the formation of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.

Researchers at CERN, the nuclear research center in Geneva, have been smashing protons together at near the speed of light to simulate conditions that they believe brought into existence the primordial universe from which stars, planets and life on earth -- and perhaps elsewhere -- eventually emerged.

Some atheists say science can prove that God does not exist, but Benedict said that some scientific theories were "mind limiting" because "they only arrive at a certain point ... and do not manage to explain the ultimate sense of reality ..."

He said scientific theories on the origin and development of the universe and humans, while not in conflict with faith, left many questions unanswered.

"In the beauty of the world, in its mystery, in its greatness and in its rationality ... we can only let ourselves be guided toward God, creator of heaven and earth," he said.

Benedict and his predecessor John Paul have been trying to shed the Church's image of being anti-science, a label that stuck when it condemned Galileo for teaching that the earth revolves around the sun, challenging the words of the Bible.

Galileo was rehabilitated and the Church now also accepts evolution as a scientific theory and sees no reason why God could not have used a natural evolutionary process in the forming of the human species.

The Catholic Church no longer teaches creationism -- the belief that God created the world in six days as described in the Bible -- and says that the account in the book of Genesis is an allegory for the way God created the world.

But it objects to using evolution to back an atheist philosophy that denies God's existence or any divine role in creation. It also objects to using Genesis as a scientific text.

Mysteries of Lake Vostok on brink of discovery

05 January 2011 - Olivier Dessibourg - New Scientist - Environment

For 14 million years, Antarctica's vast Lake Vostok has remained tantalisingly sealed off from the rest of the world, hidden under 4 kilometres (2.5 miles) of ice. What unique forms of life might have evolved in the hidden depths?

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19918-mysteries-of-lake-vostok-on-brink-of-discovery.html

After years of speculation we are about to find out, as a Russian drill nears the lake. The Antarctic Treaty Secretariat, the body set up to preserve the continent, has approved the comprehensive environmental evaluation carried out to ensure the reservoir is not polluted. Researchers from Russia's Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI) in St Petersburg expect to reach the water in late January.

The AARI's Valery Lukin says they have devised a clever method for sampling the lake without contaminating it. "Once the lake is reached, the water pressure will push the working body and the drilling fluid upwards in the borehole, and then freeze again," Lukin says. The following season, the team will go back to bore in that frozen water, take the sample out and analyse its contents.

"The Russians really did a good job in giving answers to all the fears raised that their actions would contaminate this unexplored environment," says Manfred Reinke, head of the ATS.
Unknown life?

Covering an area of 16 square kilometres, and reaching down 1050 metres, Lake Vostok is isolated from the other 150 subglacial lakes found in Antarctica. Anything living in the lake is either very old, or – potentially – an unknown form of life.

The Russian science team based at Vostok station have been ready to drill into ice above the lake since 1998. But the ATS wouldn't give the go-ahead until it was satisfied that a thorough environmental assessment had been conducted to avoid any pollution of the pristine reservoir.

"The bottom of the new borehole lies at 3650 metres, more or less 100 metres above the lake," says Lukin. "Beginning late December, we will first use a mechanical drill and the usual kerosene-freon to reach 3725 metres. Then, a newly developed thermal drill head, using a clean silicon-oil fluid and equipped with a camera, will go through the last 20 to 30 metres of ice."

Yves Frenot of the French Polar Institute Paul Emile Victor in Brest, France, doubts the Russians will penetrate the lake during this Antarctic summer. "In respect to the Antarctic Treaty, they should wait 60 days after having submitted their CEE, which would bring them almost to the end of the Antarctic season."

Lukin admits time is short but says that since the exact location of the ice-water boundary is not known, "the breakthrough could well happen in a few weeks."

Tainted wafers, not the wine!

Christmas Communion at a NY Church May Have Infected Hundreds with Hepatitis A

Long Island Parishioners Are Urged to Get Hepatitis A Vaccinations

Jan. 4, 2011 - EMILY FRIEDMAN - ABC News - Health

Catholics who receive communion at Sunday mass believe the sacred wafer they swallow contains the body of Christ. New York health officials have warned the parishioners of a Long Island church that the wafers they received on Christmas Day may have also contained hepatitis A.

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/catholics-received-holy-communion-christmas-risk-hepatitis/story?id=12537329&page=1

The Nassau County Department of Health in New York is warning parishioners who attended Christmas Mass at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park to seek treatment, worried that the hundreds who took communion could fall ill.

Those who attended the 10:30 a.m. and noon Masses are most likely to be at risk, according to the health department.

While no individuals who attended the Masses have reported illness, MaryEllen Laurain, a spokesperson for the county's department of health, said vaccines will be offered as a "preventative measure."

Hepatitis A, a liver disease, is contracted by putting something in your mouth that has been contaminated with fecal matter from an infected person. It is frequently spread when an infected person fails to wash his or his hands after using the toilet.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, consuming food that has been handled by an infected individual is one of the most common ways of contracting the disease.

The potential outbreak at Lady of Lourdes Church may have been caused by a church leader who was infected by the disease and then handled the wafers distributed to churchgoers.

Sean Dolan, the spokesman for the diocese that oversees the church, did not immediately return messages left by ABCNews.com.

In an interview with Newsday, Dolan said, "It was probably a full church" of the services, but did not estimate how many of the church's 7,500 parishioners may have been in attendance at the two services.

"We don't want to jump to conclusions," Dolan told the paper. "Obviously, it's very concerning when there's potential exposure to any sort of virus."

On the diocese's website a message read, "We pray that no one comes down with this virus."

Because the disease is highly contagious at it's peak -- usually 10 days before the patient notices symptoms and seeks medical attention -- doctors and hospitals must report any patient who is diagnosed with the infection. The health department must then notify anyone who may have been in contact with the individual.

Signs of infection include severe diarrhea, nausea, fatigue and sometimes jaundice, a yellowing of the eyes and skin. There is no antibiotic treatment, and those who get it must let it run its course, which usually takes about a month.

As of 2006, children have been routinely vaccinated against the different strains of hepatitis, but adults have not necessarily received the precautionary vaccine. Those who have been vaccinated do not need to take further action.

A few years ago, the high-profile New York City club "Socialista" made headlines when a bartender was hospitalized for hepatitis A was discovered to have served several A-list celebrities, prompting a warning by the New York City Department of Health.

Celebrities were partying at the club Feb. 7, one of the nights the New York City Department of Health said the infected bartender was on duty. Ashton Kutcher's birthday party was that night, which brought Demi Moore, Madonna, Salma Hayek, Gwyneth Paltrow, Ivanka Trump and Bruce Willis to the club.

Anywhere between 700 and 800 people visited the bar over the three nights the employee was on duty, according to the city health department.

Similar to the case in Long Island, New York City officials urged those who have not been vaccinated against the disease to get the injection just in case they had been exposed to it.

Those who attended the masses in Long Island are being asked to call the Nassau County Department of Health at 516-227-9496.

Danger when using a "common cup" for the Eucharist

The Eucharist, also called Holy Communion, Sacrament of the Altar, the Blessed Sacrament, or The Lord's Supper, and other names, is a Christian sacrament or ordinance, generally considered to be a re-enactment of the Last Supper, the final meal that Jesus Christ shared with his disciples before his arrest and crucifixion, during which he gave them bread, saying, "This is my body", and wine, saying, "This is my blood".

There are different interpretations of the significance of the Eucharist, but "there is more of a consensus among Christians about the meaning of the Eucharist than would appear from the confessional debates over the sacramental presence, the effects of the Eucharist, and the proper auspices under which it may be celebrated."

The phrase "the Eucharist" may refer not only to the rite but also to the consecrated bread (leavened or unleavened) and wine or, (in some Protestant denominations), unfermented grape juice or (in Mormonism) water, used in the rite, and, in this sense, communicants may speak of "receiving the Eucharist", as well as "celebrating the Eucharist".

Continued....... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist

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Hepatitis A warning issued after Christmas communion on Long Island

January 3, 2011 - By Nina Golgowski, CNN

New York (CNN) -- Hundreds of people might have been exposed to hepatitis A while receiving communion on Christmas Day, Long Island officials said Monday.

http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/01/03/new.york.hepatitis.a/index.html

The Nassau County Department of Health is offering vaccines to those who attended two services at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Massapequa Park in Long Island, New York, according to Nassau County Department of Health spokeswoman Mary Ellen Laurain.

Individuals might be at risk if they received communion during the 10:30 am and noon Masses, according to a statement from the county health department.

"We know that there's a potential that (exposure) could have happened," she said. "We think the risk is relatively low."

At least one member of the clergy involved in the communion process was infected with the disease, Laurain said.

There have been no additional reports of illness.

Some 1,300 people were in attendance between the two church services, she added.

Symptoms of the disease include the onset of fever, fatigue, poor appetite, nausea, stomach pain, dark-colored urine and jaundice, according the statement. The disease is rarely fatal and most people recover within a few weeks without complications, it said.

Individuals exposed to the disease should receive vaccination within two weeks of exposure, the statement said.