Latest Science in the news

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Here is a quick roundup of some of the latest science stories in the news during the past couple of days …

Dinosaurs Significantly Taller Than Previously Thought, Research Suggests

It might seem obvious that a dinosaur’s leg bone connects to the hip bone, but what came between the bones has been less obvious. Now, researchers at the University of Missouri and Ohio University have found that dinosaurs had thick layers of cartilage in their joints, which means they may have been considerably taller than previously thought. The study is being published this week in the journal PLoS ONE (Public Library of Science).

“Our study of the limbs of modern-day relatives of dinosaurs shows that dinosaurs were significantly taller than original estimates,” said Casey Holliday, lead author of the study and an anatomy professor in the MU School of Medicine. “The ends of many dinosaurs’ long bones, which include leg bones such as the femur or tibia, are rounded and rough and lack major articulating structures like condyles, which are bony projections. This indicated that very thick cartilages formed these structures, and therefore the joints themselves, and would have added significant height to certain dinosaurs. This study offers new data into how and why reptiles, and mammals, such as humans, build their joints with such different amounts of bone and cartilage.”

Holliday and Lawrence Witmer, a professor of anatomy at the Ohio University College of Osteopathic Medicine, conducted research on ostriches and alligators, the closest, modern-day relatives of dinosaurs, and then studied the fossilized limbs of different dinosaurs including Tyrannosaurus rex, Allosaurus, Brachiosaurus and Triceratops. The team determined that the lengths of alligators’ and ostriches’ limbs included between 6 and 10 percent cartilage.

Using a “cartilage correction factor,” Holliday determined that many theropod dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus, were only modestly taller whereas ornthischian and sauropod dinosaurs, such as Triceratops and Brachiosaurus, may have been 10 percent taller or more. For example, Brachiosaurus, previously thought to be 42 feet tall, may actually have been more than a foot taller with the additional joint cartilages.

Science Daily: Continue Reading …

Spring on Titan Brings Sunshine and Patchy Clouds

The northern hemisphere of Saturn’s moon Titan is set for mainly fine spring weather, with polar skies clearing since the equinox in August last year. The visual and infrared mapping spectrometer (VIMS) aboard NASA’s Cassini spacecraft has been monitoring clouds on Titan regularly since the spacecraft entered orbit around Saturn in 2004.

Now, a group led by Sébastien Rodriguez, a Cassini VIMS team collaborator based at Université Paris Diderot, France, has analyzed more than 2,000 VIMS images to create the first long-term study of Titan’s weather using observational data that also includes the equinox. Equinox, when the sun shone directly over the equator, occurred in August 2009.

Rodriguez presented the results and new images at the European Planetary Science Congress in Rome on Sept. 22.

Though Titan’s surface is far colder and lacks liquid water, this moon is a kind of “sister world” to Earth because it has a surface covered with organic material and an atmosphere whose chemical composition harkens back to an early Earth. Titan has a hydrological cycle similar to Earth’s, though Titan’s cycle depends on methane and ethane rather than water.

A season on Titan lasts about seven Earth years. Rodriguez and colleagues observed significant atmospheric changes between July 2004 (early summer in Titan’s southern hemisphere) and April 2010 (the very start of northern spring). The images showed that cloud activity has recently decreased near both of Titan’s poles. These regions had been heavily overcast during the late southern summer until 2008, a few months before the equinox.

Science Daily : Continue Reading …

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UK Centre for Intelligent Stupidity

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An article appeared in the Guardian a few days ago announcing … UK Centre for Intelligent Design claims it will focus on science, not religion The Centre for Intelligent Design features a video introduction from Dr Alastair Noble, who has argued that ID should not be excluded from the study of origins. He says, among … Read more

Ig Nobel 2010 winners

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Well here they are at last … the list of our learned friends who have, in their attempts to push the boundary of knowledge, taken a left-hand turn into what can be best described as the “WTF” zone …. enjoy :-) … the official prize ceremony took place last Thursday evening at Harvard. ENGINEERING PRIZE: … Read more

Wild Science – Pushing the boundaries of understanding

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Here is a science article from MIT Technology Review that is not just reporting a discovery, but instead is exploring beyond what we know and understand. I’ve a few things to say, but first the article …

Time Likely To End Within Earth’s Lifespan

There is a 50 per cent chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years, according to a new model of the universe

Look out into space and the signs are plain to see. The universe began in a Big Bang event some 13 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since. And the best evidence from the distance reaches of the cosmos is that this expansion is accelerating.

That has an important but unavoidable consequence: it means the universe will expand forever. And a universe that expands forever is infinite and eternal.

Today, a group of physicists rebel against this idea. They say an infinitely expanding universe cannot be so because the laws of physics do not work in an infinite cosmos. For these laws to make any sense, the universe must end, say Raphael Bousso at the University of California, Berkeley and few pals. And they have calculated when that is most likely to happen.

Their argument is deceptively simple and surprisingly powerful. Here’s how it goes. If the universe lasts forever, then any event that can happen, will happen, no matter how unlikely. In fact, this event will happen an infinite number of times.

This leads to a problem. When there are an infinite number of instances of every possible observation, it becomes impossible to determine the probabilities of any of these events occurring. And when that happens, the laws of physics simply don’t apply. They just break down. “This is known as the “measure problem” of eternal inflation,” say Bousso and buddies.

In effect, these guys are saying that the laws of physics abhor an eternal universe.

The only way out of this conundrum is to hypothesise some kind of catastrophe that brings an end to the universe. Then all the probabilities make sense again and the laws of physics regain their power.

When might his be? Bousso and co have crunched the numbers. “Time is unlikely to end in our lifetime, but there is a 50% chance that time will end within the next 3.7 billion years,” they say.

That’s not so long! It means that the end of the time is likely to happen within the lifetime of the Earth and the Sun.

But Buosso and co have some comforting news too. They don’t know what kind of catastrophe will cause the end of time but they do say that we won’t see it coming. They point out that if we were to observe the end of time in any other part of the universe we would have to be causally ahead of it, which is unlikely.

In other words we’ll run headlong into this catastrophe before we can observe its effects on anything else.

MIT Technology Review: Continue reading …

Its not only a wild idea but is also outrageously fascinating. Here we have a great example of the manner in which science does not stand still, but instead ambitious thinkers will attempt to push the boundary and probe the unknown. Its all about gathering data, speculating about what it might imply by forming a hypothesis, then testing to see if it stands or falls. From that we get more data, and so our understanding grows. Is the above article correct? I simply don’t know, but its an interesting idea. If others come along and pull it apart with a detailed explanation, will the author be offended, or discard the newer evidence and cling to the above as an act of faith? Of course not, they will instead discard the dis-proven hypothesis, embrace newer thinking and proceed to run with that instead. Science is not about being right or wrong, but is instead a joint effort to explore.

In stark contrast, belief generally stands still and does not change very much. Challenge a belief with facts that contradict it and you quickly meet resistance, many believers will not accept reality but prefer to embrace the fairy tale.

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Bible questions … How well did the Atheists do?

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Details of a US religious knowledge survey has been published and the results are quite surprising. The US has a reputation for being quite religious, yet despite this, the depth of bible knowledge demonstrated is quite low. The questions were not too hard, here is a quick sample

  • What is the first book of the Bible?
  • Name the first four books of the New Testament
  • Where, according to the Bible, was Jesus born?

But its not just about the Bible, they included questions about other beliefs such as …

  • When was the Mormon religion founded? (They were not looking for a precise date, choices such as pre 1800 or post 1800 were suggested)
  • The Dalai Lama is …Catholic, Jewish, Buddhist, Mormon, Hindu
  • In which religion are Vishnu and Shiva (SHEE-va) central figures?

OK, I think you get the idea. These are not challenging questions, so what results did they come up with? Well, what is quite interesting is that they included a lot of questions to precisely identify the beliefs of those that answered, so they are able to give an accurate breakdown of how followers of the various beliefs scored.

On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Jews and Mormons do well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7.

However, there is one group that stands out as the most knowledgeable, and did far better than any of the above … and that was …

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