A new genus and species of carnivorous amphibian from western Pennsylvania, Fedexia striegeli, provides the earliest widespread evidence of terrestrial Vertebrates, say researchers from Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

The fossil skull, found in 2004 near Pittsburgh International Airport, was recovered from rocks deposited approximately 300 million years ago during the Late Pennsylvanian Period.  The rocks where Fedexia was found are nearly 20 million years older than the localities of its fossil relatives, suggesting that the expansion and diversification of this group occurred much earlier than had been recognized previously. 

The findings are detailed  in the Annals of Carnegie Museum

If you're trying to pick winners for this year's NCAA basketball tournament, ignore a team's seeding, which is statistically insignificant after the Sweet Sixteen, a new Journal of Gambling Business and Economics study reports.

The paper suggests that picking the higher-seeded team to beat a lower-seeded opponent usually works only in the first three rounds of the tournament. Once the tournament enters the Elite Eight round, a team's seed in the tournament is irrelevant.

Babies may be born with a predisposition to dance and find music - specifically, rhythm and tempo - more engaging than speech, according to a study of infants aged between five months and two years old.

While predisposition towards music may be innate, researchers are unsure why it developed in humans. "One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing," the authors write.

For the study, 120 infants listened to a variety of audio stimuli including classical music, rhythmic beats and speech. Their spontaneous movements were recorded by video and 3D motion-capture technology and compared across the different stimuli.

Understanding Climate : #1 - Components Of Climate


The difference between weather and climate

Weather is what you see every day: whatever the sky is doing, that is your local weather.  Sun, rain, hail, snow, thunder and lightning - all these are weather.  Fluffy white clouds, thunderheads, tornados, hurricanes - all are weather.

Wherever you live in the world you can pretty much guess what sort of weather you will get season by season and what weather you won't get.  The range of your local weather throughout the year doesn't change much from year to year.  If you live in one region, snow may be common - in another region snow may be unheard of.

The Real Scuttlebutt On Sailing Slang


There are plenty of sites around the web which will give you the origins and meanings of nautical slang.  Mostly the wrong ones.  Etymology is a science: you can't just make stuff up.


What's the scuttlebutt?

Just a reminder, the deadline to enter our spring University Science Writing Competition is tomorrow, March 15th at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Time.  (and thanks to daylight savings time, you just lost an hour this morning!)

The competition is open to all graduate students.

What Is Science?

Some time ago I was visiting a college in Pakistan.  I thought I was just there as an observer.  My mistake.  I was introduced to a physics class with final words that filled my soul with dread:
" ... from England who is going to give a talk on the topic What is science? ".

Now, when you are put on the spot like that, what do you do?  Well - it's science, so you can't just make stuff up.  You have to tell it like it is.  Fortunately, my bottom line for what constitutes science is all a matter of questions and answers.  Purely from memory, here is my little talk.

What is science?

Don't Say Cheese



Following a thorough scientific assessment of the risks involved in an experiment in the effects of gravity on round cheeses, a 200 year long experiment has been brought to a premature close.

Said a spokesmouthpiece for Tewkesbury Borough Council:

"We did some sums on the back of an envelope and it looks like all those cheeses rolling down the hill are creating a local gravitational anomaly.  It's sucking in people from the other side of the world."

The council claims that the following picture in their press release shows architectural distortions due to local gravitational anomalies.

I was delighted to receive news this afternoon of three new interesting results produced by the DZERO collaboration in the analysis of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD) processes.

QCD, the theory of strong interactions between quarks and gluons, is the "boring" part of the physics of high-energy hadron-hadron collisions. It used to be more more exciting twenty years ago, when the theoretical calculations were not as refined as they are now, and there was still a lot to understand in the physics of strong interactions between quarks and gluons. But nowadays, things are much more clear.

The first cases of Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (often referred to as electro-hypersensitivity or even EHS) were studied in the 1970s and yet decades later few people are even aware of the condition. We living human beings are more than just flesh and blood; we are also a highly complex electromagnetic system. This also means that we interact with external electromagnetic radiation (EMR). But try switching off every single electrical device in your home and work and ponder on how dependent we now are on these devices. The problem is that no importance is given to how detrimental all this EMR is to human health.