The LHC collider has been producing proton-proton collisions at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV for two months now, and the integrated luminosity collected by the CMS experiment has surpassed the mark of 4 inverse femtobarns (see figure below). That's already about 80% of the total bounty of 2011!
This is not a story of Lost Tribes, but of lost history--the discovery of "Jewish genes" in Hispano Christian populations of the American Southwest. Jon Entine, author of Abraham's Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chose People, reports.
“Let us remember all of our Jewish brothers and sisters, who through their faithfulness to One God, inspired all Christians.”
Researchers announced the discovery of Afrasia djijidae, a new early anthropoid fossil.
The 37-million-year-old Afrasia djijidae resembles another early anthropoid, Afrotarsius libycus, recently discovered at a site of similar age in the Sahara Desert of Libya. That close similarity between Afrasia and Afrotarsius indicates that early anthropoids colonized Africa only shortly before the time when these animals lived. The colonization of Africa by early anthropoids was a pivotal step in primate and human evolution, because it set the stage for the later evolution of more advanced apes and humans there.
There was a time when giant insects ruled the skies and it corresponded to high oxygen levels.
After the evolution of birds, about 150 million years ago, insects got smaller - despite rising oxygen levels. What gives?
Insects reached their biggest sizes about 300 million years ago during the late Carboniferous and early Permian periods. This was the reign of the predatory griffinflies, giant dragonfly-like insects with wingspans of up to 28 inches - creepy. The leading theory attributed their large size to high oxygen concentrations in the atmosphere (over 30 percent, compared to 21 percent today), which allowed giant insects to get enough oxygen through the tiny breathing tubes that insects use instead of lungs.
Dear squid blog, I am sorry that so many other projects have been keeping me from you lately! My love for squid remains undimmed. Just to prove it, I will share with the world a helpful chart that I drew several years ago and recently unearthed.
The Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas) and the purpleback flying squid (Sthenoteuthis oualaniensis) can look very similar. If you're fishing in a location where only one of them lives (like Indonesia for Sthenoteuthis or California for Dosidicus), no problem. But in certain areas of the Pacific Ocean--oh look I have a map--their ranges overlap, so there is confusion. Panic. Mayhem. Which squid is it?
Michael Richmond of Rochester Institute of Technology created a simple example for how to determine the astronomical unit - the distance from Earth to the Sun and therefore the basis for all modern measurements in space for the CLEA workshop in 2004, the last time we had a transit of Venus - and it won't happen again in our lifetimes so tomorrow is the last chance to see it.
For the second and last time this century, the planet Venus will pass over the visible disk of our Sun for observers located in the Americas (in the evening of June 5th) and western Europe (in the morning of June 6th). The event has a noteworthy scientific value -particularly for exoplanetary searches-, but it is also quite spectacular to observe, if you have some modest equipment (but you should be able to spot it with your naked eye, provided you only look through a thick-smoked glass; never look at the Sun directly!). The added value is that probably none of us will be around the next time this event occurs, in 2117.
A new durable, environmentally-benign (we all hope) blue pigment has also been found to have unusual characteristics in reflecting heat - it's much better at it than most blue pigments in use. The compound just received patent approval and was discovered by Oregon State University scientists who were instead studying some materials for their electrical properties.
Is immortality really ideal? Is the confusion and befuddlement worth surviving the times and ages? Much like Mary Shelley’s monster that arose from the dead, would we be wretched, dejected, and distraught by the prospects of a future that we can’t even hope to fathom? Frankenstein’s monster is composed of the separate body parts found at a morgue, the monster has lived in a previous era and was spawned in Frankenstein’s time. His creation had once died but was reborn in the future.
Very different complex networks, like global air traffic and neural networks, share very similar 'backbones', say a group of mathematicians, and by stripping each network down to their essential nodes and links, they found each network possesses a skeleton which shares common features, much like vertebrates do.
Mammals have evolved to look very different despite a common underlying structure and now it appears real-world complex networks have common descent in a similar way.
