An unusual dinosaur has been shown to have a skull that functioned like a fish-eating crocodile, despite looking like a dinosaur. It also possessed two huge hand claws, perhaps used as grappling hooks to lift fish from the water.

Dr Emily Rayfield at the University of Bristol, UK, used computer modelling techniques – more commonly used to discover how a car bonnet buckles during a crash – to show that while Baryonyx was eating, its skull bent and stretched in the same way as the skull of the Indian fish-eating gharial – a crocodile with long, narrow jaws.

Dr Rayfield said: “On excavation, partially digested fish scales and teeth, and a dinosaur bone were found in the stomach region of the animal, demonstrating that at least some of the time this dinosaur ate fish.

LONDON, January 14 /PRNewswire/ --

The 2008 Fitter Schools UK Challenge, launched today by Fit For Sport and ex-Arsenal and England football hero Ian Wright, is a national initiative designed to help improve children's fitness levels, establish life-long activity habits and make them healthier.

The 2008 Challenge, which is free to enter, is open to all schools including independent schools, specialist sports colleges and SEN schools from Y1 to Y11.

Fit For Sport is confident that the 2008 Challenge will surpass the achievements of the inaugural (2007) Challenge which included:

- 1m school children improved their fitness levels on average by 14.5%

- 3,000 schools participated.

Vegetable-tanned leather, a bio-diesel ready engine and sustainable carpet materials? It's the luxury SUV Leonardo DiCaprio won't be afraid to drive.

The LRX hybrid cross-coupe concept is Land Rover's attempt to create a new market - expensive autos for progressive rich people. It's also the first all-new Land Rover since Gerry McGovern became the company's design director.

LRX is conceived as being powered by a 2.0-liter, turbodiesel engine, capable of running on bio-diesel.

An international study of 20,000 people found seven new genes that influence blood cholesterol levels, a major factor in heart disease, and confirmed 11 other genes previously thought to influence cholesterol.

The international study led by researchers from the University of Michigan School of Public Health set out to identify or confirm genetic variants that influence lipid levels, and secondly, to see if those variants were linked to the decreased or increased risk of heart disease.

The results may lead the medical community to rethink the role of HDL (good cholesterol) and LDL (bad cholesterol) in heart disease, said Goncalo Abecasis, associate professor in the U-M School of Public Health.

University of Minnesota researchers have created a beating heart in the laboratory.

By using a process called whole organ decellularization, scientists from the University of Minnesota Center for Cardiovascular Repair grew functioning heart tissue by taking dead rat and pig hearts and reseeding them with a mixture of live cells.

“The idea would be to develop transplantable blood vessels or whole organs that are made from your own cells,” said Doris Taylor, Ph.D., director of the Center for Cardiovascular Repair, Medtronic Bakken professor of medicine and physiology, and principal investigator of the research.

Nearly 5 million people live with heart failure, and about 550,000 new cases are diagnosed each year in the United States.

Increasing amounts of ice mass have been lost from West Antarctica and the Antarctic peninsula over the past ten years, according to research from the University of Bristol and published online this week in Nature Geoscience.

Meanwhile the ice mass in East Antarctica has been roughly stable, with neither loss nor accumulation over the past decade.

Professor Jonathan Bamber at the University of Bristol and colleagues estimated the flux of ice from the ice sheet into the ocean from satellite data that cover 85% of Antarctica's coastline, which they compared with simulations of snow accumulation over the same period, obtained using a regional climate model.

In studies involving more than 35,000 people and a survey across the entire human genome, an international team supported in part by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) has found evidence that common genetic variants recently linked to osteoarthritis may also play a minor role in human height. The findings were released in Nature Genetics.

The variants most strongly associated with height in the new genome-wide association study lie in a region of the human genome thought to influence expression of a gene for growth differentiation factor 5 (GDF5), which is a protein involved in the development of cartilage in the legs and other long bones.

One of the most common human parasites, Toxoplasma gondii, uses a hormone lifted from the plant world to decide when to increase its numbers and when to remain dormant, researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have found.

The scientists report this week in Nature that they successfully blocked production of the molecule, known as abscisic acid (ABA), with a plant herbicide. Low doses of the herbicide prevented fatal T. gondii infection in mice.

"As a target for drug development, this pathway is very attractive for several reasons," says author L. David Sibley, Ph.D., professor of molecular microbiology. "For example, because of its many roles in plant biology, we already have several inhibitors for it.

Many researchers have tried to create a mathematical model of how cells pack together to form tissue, but most models have many different complicated factors, and no model is universal.

Researchers at Northwestern University have now created a functional equation -- using only two parameters -- to show how cells pack together to create the eyes of Drosophila, better known as the fruit fly. They hope that the pared-down equation can be applied to different kinds of tissues, leading to advances in regenerative medicine.

Sascha Hilgenfeldt, associate professor of engineering sciences and applied mathematics and of mechanical engineering in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, teamed up with Richard W.

The new journal Evolution: Education and Outreach is now available online and free to download. My contribution to the first issue is "Evolution as fact, theory, and path". Feel free to distribute this and any other papers from the journal as widely as you like, but please link to the journal website rather than re-posting papers.

There are now several available articles that discuss this important subject: