15-Ton Particle Ring Travels To Chicago By Land And By Sea

It looks almost like the Millennium Falcon, creeping ever so slowing, taking up the entire roadway on New York's Long Island. A team of spotters walks alongside, calling out trees that need cutting and road signs that need to be taken down.

Its name is the Muon g-2 (pronounced g minus two) and it's a very powerful electromagnetic ring capable of carrying 5,200 amps of current, says Chris Polly, the lead scientist for the ring's experiments.

"It creates a very strong magnetic field that allows us to store a special particle called a muon," he says.

A muon is a sort of phantom particle that exists only for a very short time after a particle collision. The g-2 traps muons and then uses them to probe for evidence of other new particles no one has seen before. Back in 2001, scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island found hints of new particles, but to be sure, they need more muons. Fermi National Lab, located outside Chicago, has a big accelerator that can produce loads of them, but no ring. So, you just need to bring the ring to the accelerator.

npr

Climate change frames debate over the extinction of megafauna in Sahul (Pleistocene Australia-New Guinea)

• by Stephen Wroe, Judith H. Field, Michael Archer, Donald K. Grayson, Gilbert J. Price, Julien Louysd, J. Tyler Faith, Gregory E. Webb, Iain Davidson, and Scott D. Mooney

“Around 88 large vertebrate taxa disappeared from Sahul sometime during the Pleistocene, with the majority of losses (54 taxa) clearly taking place within the last 400,000 years. The largest was the 2.8-ton browsingDiprotodon optatum, whereas the ∼100- to 130-kg marsupial lion,Thylacoleo carnifex, the world’s most specialized mammalian carnivore, and Varanus priscus, the largest lizard known, were formidable predators. Explanations for these extinctions have centered on climatic change or human activities. Here, we review the evidence and arguments for both. Human involvement in the disappearance of some species remains possible but unproven. Mounting evidence points to the loss of most species before the peopling of Sahul (circa 50–45 ka) and a significant role for climate change in the disappearance of the continent’s megafauna.

Explaining Pleistocene faunal extinctions remains one of the most challenging problems in the prehistory of Sahul (1–3). The vast majority of extinctions across geological time are wholly attributable to climate-related factors (4), but claims that some, or even all, Pleistocene extinctions of large-gigantic vertebrates (Fig. 1) in Sahul were the consequence of human activity have generated particularly robust debate. Polarized views have emerged to account for the mode and timing of these events (2, 5–11). A paucity of empirical data; shortfalls in radiometric dating; and, until recently, a limited appreciation of the paleoenvironmental record (7, 12) have placed considerable constraints on the ability to resolve “who or what” was responsible for these extinctions. Given these limitations, assertions such as “… the question is no longer if, but rather how, humans induced this prehistoric extinction event” (ref. 13, p. 563) are premature” (read more/not open access).

(Source: PNAS, early addition 2013;  doi:10.1073/pnas.1302698110)

The Maned Wolf

Canis Jubatus (now Chrysocyon brachyurus) - The Maned Wolf

While it might have a mane of sorts, the maned wolf is not a wolf. In fact, it’s not even a fox, even though it might look like a fox on stilts. Speaking of stilts, these guys are the tallest living canid, measuring up to 42 inches (106 cm) at the shoulder! Historically, the maned wolf was placed in the genera Canis and Vulpes (the wolves and foxes, respectively), because of superficial morphological similarities.

However, on further anatomical examination, and later, DNA analysis, the maned wolf was found to be unique in the genus Chrysocyon. There are no known extant or extinct species that come close to the maned wolf, though part of that is almost certainly due to a lack of fossilized remains - there may have been other members of the genus in the Pleistocene and Holocene that have not been found yet.

Currently, one of the most accepted theories on why the maned wolf is so unique is that it just happened to be the sole surviving species of its genus, during the Pleistocene (or Quaternary) extinction. That extinction event snuffed out all the large canids of South America, along with almost 3/4 of all the large mammals living at that time. 

The diet of this species may lend a clue as to how it survived the mass extinction: it’s extremely omnivorous. While they search out and eat birds, small mammals, and reptiles, they also eat  berries, leaves, fruits, and tubers, and spread the seeds of many plants. Their diet also lends the maned wolf its nickname - the Skunk Wolf. They produce pyrazines and other musky plant derivatives that they spray about to mark territory. In fact, the smell of the maned wolf enclosure at the Rotterdam Zoo set off a search for marijuana, before they discovered the true source!

migration of humans

1677 rose-shaped map of bohemia

narwhal fest

Mudskippers

Mudskippers are completely amphibious fish that can use their pectoral fins to walk on land. Being amphibious, they are uniquely adapted to inter-tidal habitats, unlike most fish in such habitats which survive the retreat of the tide by hiding under wet seaweed or in tidal pools. Mudskippers are quite active when out of water, feeding and interacting with one another, for example to defend their territories. They are found in tropical, subtropical and temperate regions, including the Indo-Pacific and the Atlantic coast of Africa.

Cantor’s Giant Softshell Turtle (Pelochelys cantorii)

The Asian Giant Softshell Turtle is a freshwater turtle which lives in inland slow-moving rivers and streams in Southeast Asia (including Indonesia and Malaysia), the Indian subcontinent, China and the Philippines.  

It can grow up to 6 feet in length and spends most of its life buried in sandy riverbeds with only its eyes and mouth protruding from the sand.  It mainly feeds on crustaceans, molluscs, and fish, although it will eat some aquatic vegetation.  These turtles are rare and are not well-studied.  Like many turtle species, these turtles are easily caught by trappers who sell them to international traders or eat them.

Giant century plant in Southern California, USA

National Geographic | February 1958

patchwork phonograph

Bumpy-Headed Reptile Fossils Discovered

New fossils of an ancient reptile called Bunostegos akokanensis indicate that it probably wasn’t winning any prehistoric beauty contests.

“Imagine a cow-sized, plant-eating reptile with a knobby skull and bony armor down its back,” Linda Tsuji, leader of a new study on the critter, said in a statement.

But the specimens, discovered in northern Niger, are giving the University of Washington’s Tsuji and colleagues a glimpse into the Middle and Late Permian periods (266-252 million years ago), when all of Earth’s landmasses were joined into a single supercontinent called Pangaea. (See a prehistoric time line.)

B. akokanesis belonged to a group of  large reptiles called pareiasaurs that were common across Pangaea. The new Niger specimens show that species in the genus Bunostegos were related to older, more primitive pareiasaurs, according to an analysis published June 25 in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology…

(read more: National Geo)    

After you die, your remains can help save a coral reef

Cremated remains are mixed into “100 percent natural cast concrete” to create a “pearl.” Once the pearl has been cast, the family can personalize it with handprints or messages etched into the damp concrete and add small mementos.

On the dedication day, a boat is chartered for friends and family to observe the reef ball as it is placed in the reef where it will become an established habitat. The fish, turtles and other forms of sea life are happy — and there’s one less urn of ashes to get lost in the attic.

grist

gay flamingos adopt baby

A pair of gay flamingos have become foster parents after taking an abandoned chick under their wings.

Carlos and Fernando had been so desperate to start a family that they had resorted to stealing eggs at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (WWT) in Slimbridge, Gloucestershire.

But their egg-sitting and hatching skills impressed staff so much that when one of the flamingo nests was abandoned last week, they were considered the number one choice to adopt the chick.

The unhatched egg was taken to an incubator where it was warmed up and monitored.

Hours later a healthy chick emerged, but staff were concerned that the duo would not bond with the newborn because the process normally begins when the chicks are ‘calling’ them from inside the egg.

So the chick was carefully placed in an old eggshell, which was taped up and returned to the couple’s empty nest.

The pair were soon seen ‘talking’ to the chick inside the egg and a little while later it hatched for a second time - to be greeted by its new parents…

(read more)

microalgae for energy

 "...the world’s first (building) to have a “bio-reactor facade” – panels filled with algae which produce energy and can cool the interior"

The tiny green algae will play a huge role in determining the future potential of this technology, which aims to provide shade and a renewable fuel source for the experimental apartment.

The BIQ house was built as part of this year’s International Building Exhibition (IBA) in Hamburg. With 200m² of integrated photo-bioreactors, this innovative passive-energy house generates microalgae biomass and heat as renewable energy resources. At the same time, the system integrates additional functionalities such as dynamic shading, thermal insulation and noise abatement, highlighting the full potential of this technology.

The microalgae used in the facades are cultivated in flat panel glass bioreactors measuring 2,5m x 0,7m. In total, 129 bioreactors have been installed on the south west and south east faces of the four-storey residential building. The heart of the system is the fully automated energy management centre where solar thermal heat and algae are harvested in a closed loop to be stored and then fermented to generate hot water. arup

abandoned railways become greenways

in manhattan 

green building

Milky way’s Black Hole Snacks on Hot Gas

The Herschel space observatory has made detailed observations of surprisingly hot gas that may be orbiting or falling towards the supermassive black hole lurking at the center of our Milky Way galaxy. Herschel is a European Space Agency mission with important NASA participation.

“The black hole appears to be devouring the gas,” said Paul Goldsmith, the U.S. project scientist for Herschel at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “This will teach us about how supermassive black holes grow.”

Our galaxy’s black hole is located in a region known as Sagittarius A* — or Sgr A* for short — which is a nearby source of radio waves. The black hole has a mass about four million times that of our sun and lies roughly 26,000 light-years away from our solar system…

(read more: Jet Propulsion Laboratory)

BUILDING BLOCK FOR LIFE FOUND IN MARS METEORITE

Scientists have found a potential building block for life in a Martian meteorite recovered from Antarctica.

Parts of the rock contain rich concentrations of boron, which biochemists suspect played a key role in the development of ribonucleic acid, or RNA.

RNA is a biological molecule, which scientists believe was the stepping stone for life on Earth. It, like deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA, which evolved later, can store and transmit information to cells.

What does this mean for Curiosity on the Red Planet? 

(read more: Discovery News)

meteor strike

the ocean floor

human infested waters

how tornadoes form

Phellodon sinclairii, New Zealand

doping

Paul Morstad's map paintings

sphincter muscles

I got into an argument with someone last weekend about the number of sphincters in the human body. She (with a PhD in physical therapy who took anatomy) argued that there were only 4, I argued that there were a lot more and about 12 large/primary ones that she should know about.  

"A sphincter is an anatomical structure, a circular muscle that normally maintains constriction of a natural body passage or orifice and which relaxes as required by normal physiological functioning. Sphincters are found in many animals; there are over 50 types in the human body, some microscopically small, in particular the millions of precapillary sphincters."
Examples: 

The sphincter pupillae, or pupillary sphincter, belonging to the iris in the eye.

The orbicularis oculi muscle, a muscle around the eye.

The upper oesophageal sphincter.

The cardia (lower esophageal sphincter), or cardiac sphincter, at the upper portion of the stomach. This sphincter prevents the acidic contents of the stomach from moving upward into the oesophagus.

The pyloric sphincter, at the lower end of the stomach.

The ileocecal sphincter at the junction of the small intestine (ileum) and the large intestine, which functions to limit the reflux of colonic contents back into the ileum.

The sphincter of Oddi, or Glisson's sphincter, controlling secretions from the liver, pancreas and gall bladder into the duodenum.

The sphincter urethrae, or urethral sphincter, controlling the exit of urine from the body.

At the anus, there are two sphincters which control the exit of feces from the body (see internal anal sphincter and external anal sphincter). The inner sphincter is involuntary and the outer is voluntary.

The microscopic precapillary sphincters function to control the blood flow into each capillary in response to local metabolic activity.

1031 phages

With deadly new viruses emerging these days in Saudi Arabia and China, it can be hard to imagine that viruses can be good for anything. It’s easy to forget that we are home to trillions–perhaps quadrillions–of viruses on our healthiest days. And, according to a team of California scientists, those viruses are our symbiotic partners, creating a second immune system. These viruses serve as a defensive front-line, keeping bacteria from invading our gut lining and causing deadly infections.

The viruses in question are far less familiar than, say, influenza viruses or Ebola viruses. They are known as bacteriophages, which means “eater of bacteria.” And yet bacteriophages (or phages for short) are vastly more common than viruses that infect humans. They’re more common than all the viruses that infect every animal on Earth. The reason is simple arithmetic: there are far more hosts for phages to multiply in than there are for viruses that infect our own cells. They’re in the ground, in the oceans, under ice, and in the air. By some estimates, there are 1031 phages on Earth. That makes phages the most abundant life form, period.

Read more:natgeo

Sea World. By Alexis Rockman

“Rockman likes to play with our expectations of what’s normal. In the painting called Sea World, an audience watches as a collection of marine animals performs tricks, but the animals are nothing like the killer whales and dolphins we’re used to seeing.

“They’re familiar because of their roles,” says Rockman. “Some of them are familiar from paleontological history. You have a Dunkleosteus, which to me is the most frightening predator in history. It’s a Devonian fish that’s now, luckily for humans, extinct, but it was enormous and very frightening.”

The sea creatures, somehow restored to life in a theme park, hint at a future where cloning makes re-creating extinct animals possible.

“That’s part of his signature style — to make the familiar seem foreign to make our world seem otherworldly,” says Joanna Marsh, curator of the exhibition. And genetic engineering, she says, “is a recurring subject in Rockman’s work.” npr

Ocean Acidification Threatens Baby Squid

by Stephanie Pappas

Squid could be in trouble as the oceans grow more acidic, new researchfinds.

As humans pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the oceans absorb about a third of the greenhouse gas. This buffers terrestrial creatures from even more extreme effects of climate change — without the oceans, Earth’s atmosphere would contain far more than the approximately 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide that it does today. However, the dissolved carbon dioxide makes the oceans more acidic, possibly affecting thousands of marine species.

Squid, it seems, may be among the most vulnerable, with consequences that could trickle through the marine ecosystem. A new study published today (May 31) in the journal PLOS ONE finds that squid raised in more highly acidified ocean water hatch more slowly and are smaller when they hatch than squid raised in ocean water at today’s pH levels…

(read more: Live Science)                         

(photo: Roger Hanlon)

pangea

Pangea (a supercontinent that formed roughly 300 million years ago) mapped with contemporary geopolitical borders.

Map by Massimo Pietrobon, full size version here:http://bit.ly/12nCIsy

manul

Pallas’s cat (Otocolobus manul), also called the manul, is a small wild cat having a broad but patchy distribution in the grasslands and montane steppe of Central Asia. The species is negatively affected by habitat degradation, prey base decline, and hunting, and has therefore been classified as Near Threatened by IUCN since 2002.

Pallas’s cat was named after the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas, who first described the species in 1776 under the binomial Felis manul.

sea serpent from 1775

The Great Sea Serpent.  As depicted in the Natural History of Norway

flowered wall

growing US cities

shell head

sasha

Tattoos by Russian tattoo artist Sasha based in St. Pete, Florida.