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My picks from ScienceDaily

Fossil Is Missing Link In Elephant Lineage: A pig-sized, tusked creature that roamed the earth some 27 million years ago represents a missing link between the oldest known relatives of elephants and the more recent group from which modern elephants descended, an international team that includes University of Michigan paleontologist William J. Sanders has found. Saving Threatened Turtles In The Caribbean: Ecology and conservation experts from the University of Exeter are urging international governments to work together to protect threatened Caribbean sea turtle populations. The Cayman Islands…

Swine flu: while we wait . . .

There will be an update from CDC later today and WHO's expert committee established under the new International Health Regulations (IHR) meets via teleconference this morning North American east coast time at 10 am (4 pm Geneva time) to consider whether the swine flu situation merits declaring it “a public health event of international concern.” If they do, WHO Director General Margaret Chan may respond by raising the pandemic threat alert level from the current phase 3 (new virus: no or limited human to human transmission) to phase 4 (new virus, evidence of increased human to human…

Shrinking Glaciers, Growing Problems

Most of us already know that climate change is shrinking glaciers, but two recent articles paint an alarming picture of how quickly glaciers are receding â and what that means for millions of people relying on them. An Economist article cites a World Bank team prediction that runoff from Andean glaciers may dry up altogether in just 20 years. Peru will be particularly hard hit, since two-thirds of its residents live on the desert coast (Lima, with a population of 8 million, is the worldâs second-largest desert city, after Cairo) and the countryâs agriculture relies heavily on irrigation.…

Tattoos and infections

I have an admission. I am tattooed. Twice. A small thing, but it's pretty incredible at the visceral reactions I sometime receive when people find out. (They're not in oft-seen areas under normal attire, but neither are they anywhere "naughty.") I get head shakes and tongue-clucks from many of my elders; nose crinkles from folks of my own generation who simply think tattoos are unattractive (either on anyone, or on women specifically), or compliments from people who are inked themselves. I understand the range of reactions and hey, to each their own--I'm all for diversity of opinion.…

Ankylosaur week, day 4: Panoplosaurus

Panoplosaurus mirus was a large nodosaurid (reaching 6 m) and a particularly close relative of the even larger Edmontonia (for a quick intro to nodosaurids see the day 2 article). One of several Canadian dinosaurs from the Campanian Dinosaur Park Formation named by Lawrence Lambe, Panoplosaurus was described in 1919 for a skeleton collected by Charles M. Sternberg. As in Edmontonia but unlike other nodosaurids, Panoplosaurus lacked premaxillary teeth and grew an oval scute in the cheek cavity adjacent to its teeth. These nodosaurids must, therefore, have possessed fleshy cheeks (an…

My picks from ScienceDaily

Greenland's Constant Summer Sunlight Linked To Summer Suicide Spike: Suicide rates in Greenland increase during the summer, peaking in June. Researchers speculate that insomnia caused by incessant daylight may be to blame. Karin Sparring Björkstén from the Karolinska Institutet, Sweden, led a team of researchers who studied the seasonal variation of suicides in all of Greenland from 1968-2002. They found that there was a concentration of suicides in the summer months, and that this seasonal effect was especially pronounced in the North of the country - an area where the sun doesn't set…

Mammals Began to Diversify Prior to K/T-Boundary

Andrewsarchus was the largest carnivorous land mammal that ever lived. It lived about 32-60 million years ago. (Image: BBC Walking With Beasts) Contrary to popular belief, a new study shows that the rise of mammals was not connected to the extinction of dinosaurs that occurred 65 million years ago. The evidence challenging this connection comes from the most complete family tree ever compiled for mammals. This supertree, comprised of genetic and fossil data reveals the relationships between mammals such as primates, rodents and hoofed mammals, including when they evolved into separate…

Missile Firing off LA

A missile was, allegedly, fired off the California coast, near Los Angeles monday night, to some consternation. It was most likely a US Navy launch of a realistic target missile for an Anti-Ballistic Missile test underway over the last few days with the Japanese Navy. It was, most certainly, despite any denials and claims from the Navy, a US Navy missile, probably being fired as part of an interesting ongoing exercise. NBC video with video from CBS traffic helicopter. Notice to Mariners, 45/2010 has a clear warning: 434/10(18). EASTERN NORTH PACIFIC. CALIFORNIA. MISSILES. 1.…

Public health researchers, activists gather for 143rd annual meeting: Highlights from Day 3

Kim Krisberg and I are with our public health colleagues this week at the 143rd annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA). More than 12,000 researchers, practitioners, and advocates from across the US and the globe have gathered in Chicago to swap best practices, share new science and organize for healthier communities. Here are some highlights from yesterday’s events courtesy of the APHA Annual Meeting Blog.  “Stop asking for a seat at the table…we belong at the head of the table": In April in Baltimore, after the civil unrest that followed the death of Freddie Gray…

Religious Right Response to Oklahoma Case

So I posted the other day about the Federal judge striking down Oklahoma's law that prohibited them from recognizing adoptions by gays performed in other states. You had to know the religious right was going to react by throwing a blizzard of empty catchphrases around, right? Here's the little snippet in Agape Press, which labels the report Sooner State judge overrules pro-family statute: "Another example of judicial activism at its worst." That's how the head of the Family Research Council is reacting to the latest court ruling favoring homosexuals. A U.S. district court judge has declared…

Do we live inside a Wormhole's neck?

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read." -Groucho Marx "While no one has proved that wormholes exist, that does not for a moment keep the more adventurous of thinkers from trying to figure how they might behave." -Michael Lemonick, Time magazine Wormholes. We've all heard the word before, and we're used to the concept (thanks to science fiction) that wormholes could be tunnels to either completely different locations in space or in time! How so? You see, when you get enough mass (or other form of energy) in a small enough space, it becomes…

Brooch and Ruin Dwellers

With two days of digging and one day of backfilling left at Stensö Castle, trenches A and B have already given a rich harvest of new information. The northern tower was a green ruin mound when we came to site. We now know that the tower was built entirely of greystone, it was round with a diameter of about 5.5 m, and it was planned and built together with the perimeter wall. The lost western half of the latter did not join the tower on a radial line. Instead more than half of the tower's circumference was outside of the perimeter wall, allowing flanking, where bowmen in the tower could strafe…

Quantum Optics from the Opposite Direction: QED Limits on Laser Intensities

Most of the time, when we talk about seeing quantum effects from light, we talk about extremely weak beams-- looking at intensities where one photon more or less represents a significant change in the intensity of the light. Last week, though, Physics Buzz wrote up a paper that goes in the other direction: they suggest a limit on the maximum strength of a laser pulse due to quantum effects, specifically the creation of particle-antiparticle pairs. This is a little unusual, in that most of the time when people talk about really intense lasers, they end up discussing them as an oscillating…

'Pre-Existing Condition' Fueled Killer Cyclone

A "pre-existing condition" in the North Indian Ocean stoked the sudden intensification of last year's Tropical Cyclone Nargis just before its devastating landfall in Burma, according to a new NASA/university study. The cyclone became Burma's worst natural disaster ever and one of the deadliest cyclones of all time. Scientists at the National Taiwan University, Taipei; and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., used data from satellite altimeters, measurements of ocean depth and temperature and an ocean model to analyze the ocean conditions present at the time of the catastrophic…

Anti-Vax in OK, AGAIN

I dont know about you all, but if you ask me to picture an anti-vaxer, I picture a white, middle-to-upper-class woman who lives on one of the Coasts. Its 'liberal' anti-science, along with anti-food-technology and animal liberation, a counterpart to 'conservative' anti-science like Creationism and global warming denial. So living in OK, Im totally used to 'conservative' anti-science... but when a 'liberal' anti-science situation pops up, Im like 'WTF??' One that keeps getting me is anti-vaxers/anti-vax sympathizers. In Oklahoma?? Wat?? Yes, we have them here too. Some are still the middle-…

Course Report: Atoms and Molecules in Three Classes

I got way behind on my reports from my Modern Physics class-- the last one was over month ago, and the class has since ended. There's enough material left to be really awkward as a single post, though, so I'm going to take my cue from Brandon Sanderson and split it into three parts. The remaining material is from the sprint-to-the-end "Applications of Quantum Mechanics" portion of the class, and breaks into three roughly equal chunks. The first of these is dealing with atomic and molecular physics. Class 22 presents the full quantum model of Hydrogen, starting from the Schrödinger equation…

Pros and Cons of Interactive Classes

A number of people have commented on the big New York Times article about the new intro physics classes at MIT: At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required -- classical mechanics and electromagnetism -- but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants, the professor makes brief presentations of general principles and engages the students as they work out related…

Carbon nanotechnology in an 17th century Damascus sword

In medieval times, crusading Christian knights cut a swathe through the Middle East in an attempt to reclaim Jerusalem from the Muslims. The Muslims in turn cut through the invaders using a very special type of sword, which quickly gained a mythical reputation among the Europeans. These 'Damascus blades' were extraordinarily strong, but still flexible enough to bend from hilt to tip. And they were reputedly so sharp that they could cleave a silk scarf floating to the ground, just as readily as a knight's body. They were superlative weapons that gave the Muslims a great advantage, and…

Blood Falls - bacteria thrive for millions of years beneath a rusty Antarctic glacier

Antarctica normally conjures images of white and blue, but the frozen continent can sometimes bear more unexpected colours. Take the Taylor Glacier - when geologist Griffith Taylor first explored it a century ago, he found a bizarre reddish stain that seemed to spill waterfall-like from the glacier's snout. The area became evocatively known as Blood Falls.  The source of the blood-red colour is an underground saltwater lake that was trapped by the encroaching glacier at least 1.5 million years ago. The temperature of the water is -5 Celsius, but it's so salty that it doesn't freeze. It's…

Autism-vaccine subpeona update

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about Kathleen Seidel, a blogger at neurodiversity.com, who was being intimidated via subpeona by a lawyer for anti-vaccinationists. The lawyer, Clifford Shoemaker, represents plaintiffs in a lawsuit against vaccine manufacturers alleging that mercury in their vaccines caused autism in children. The subpeona filed by Mr. Shoemaker was particularly intrusive, and Seidel filed a motion to quash. The motion to quash has not been responded to yet. Also, Ms. Seidel is now receiving gracious and helpful legal council from the 1st Amendment team at Public Citizen.…

Light from Dark

Back in 1986 a biologist named Cindy Lee Van Doverwas poking around the innards of shrimp from the bottom of the sea. They came from a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic, where boiling, mineral-rich water came spewing up from cracks in the Earths crust and supported rich ecosystems of tube-worms, microbes, crabs, and other creatures. The animals that lived around these vents were generally blind, which wasnt surprising considering that no sunlight could reach them. But Van Dover noticed that they had two flaps of tissue running along their backs that connected to nerves. Closer inspection…

Out-of-Body Experiences Enter the Lab

Here's a juicy one from the Aug 24 Science. Labs in Switzerland and the UK have independently used visual tricks to induce "out-of-body" experiences in healthy lab volunteers. At the UK lab -- the ever-productive Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging in London -- they seem to have combined some visuo-sensory illusions of the sort pioneered by V.S. Ramachandran with some fancy head-mounted display goggles to fool the person into seeing his or her own body elsewhere -- and then feel it when the phantom body gets tapped. As Greg Miller's news story in Science puts it Out-of-body experiences…

Music participation doesn't appear to diminish performance in other schoolwork

When school budgets are cut, programs in music and the arts are often the first to get axed. While this makes a certain amount of sense because music isn't always considered "essential" to education, recently in the U.S. we're starting to see another justification for cutting music out of schools. The No Child Left Behind Act demands that students meet a certain basic level of academic success, or a school's budget can be cut. "Extras" like music classes and recess only distract from the primary goals of learning English, math, science, and history, some say. But does music participation…

I get email

Nathan Moran wrote to chastise me. I feel bad for him…I get these things all the time and the stream-of-consciousness reaction I have to them is never flattering to my correspondents. Maybe they should stop. Kent Hovind & Your Point of View/Opinion I would extremely promote you to debate Dr. Kent Hovind, when he is accessible [When he gets out of prison?]. I guarantee you, afterwards you won't look very smart [Yeah, what would I be thinking, debating a lunatic ex-con with a mail-order degree?] PROFESSOR [Is there a salary raise with my promotion to ALL-CAPS PROFESSOR?] PZ Myers [He…

Esau, the living missing link

From Life. Starting on May 1, 1901 the great Pan-American Exposition delighted visitors for six months in Buffalo, New York. Organized to "promote commercial and social interests among the States and countries of the Western Hemisphere" the show displayed the modern wonders of art, science, and technology. Among the varied exhibits was Esau the chimpanzee.* *[The infamous "Cardiff Giant" was also on display.] Featured in the exhibit "The Evolution of Man", Esau was among the first performing apes in America. Others, like the first incarnation of Consul, had come before in Europe, but Esau…

Casual Fridays: Is your relationship more superficial than your grandparents'?

Aren't grandparents adorable? They're sweet and kind, they've been married for decades, and they've got wonderful archaic 1920s names like Edward and Edwina. Last week, based on the anecdotal evidence of my own grandparents and a couple from an NPR report, we speculated that couples from that older generation were more likely to have similar names than couples from the current generation. It seems plausible, but is it really true? We invited readers to give us the names of their own grandparents, as well as their current significant others, and they responded with over 3,000 names. Then we…

The Marvelous Migrating Whooping Crane

They used to hunt whooping cranes. Between that and habitat loss, the number dropped from nearly 20,0000 to a mere 1,400 during the first half of the 19th century, and continued to drop to an all time low of 15 birds in 1941. Fifteen birds, in 1941, represented the entire species. All those birds were members of a single flock that migrated between the Aransas National Wildlife Refuge in Texas, USA and Wood Buffalo National Park in Canada. Most people know the story, or at least, the vague outlines of the story. Much has been written about them, including several books such as Cranes:…

Trends in Inequality of Mortality in the U.S.

Inequality in mortality is the most poignant reminder of persistent, often multi-generational differences in socioeconomic status (SES). Poor people are more likely to get sick and die than rich people. As a society develops over time, one would hope that this disparity would be reduced, but in fact, it often increases. Recent research published in PLoS Medicine heralds this bad news. This study is fairly unique in that it examines life expectancy across counties, which are the smallest demographic unit for which the appropriate kind of data are collected. The study examines death rates…

Lott responds to my questions

Lott has made some more responses to some of the questions asked and comments made. First, he has responded to my remaining questions I asked a while ago. Let's see how he went: Why did Lott repeatedly make false claims that the 98% figure came from other studies and from Kleck? Lott says: As to attributing things, in op-eds or talks I simply don't go through and explain where every statistic that I mention comes from. This isn't an answer at all. I didn't ask why he didn't give a source, I asked why he gave an incorrect source many times. Even Lott cannot possibly be…

Friday Fractal L: Achilles Flower

Here we are, at my 50th Friday Fractal. I have yet to tire of the beautiful spiraling and branching forms of the Mandelbrot set. I've found no shortage of matching forms in nature, either. Even in my own garden, I find lovely fractal shapes, some as delicate as a feather, but as hardy as a weed. But don't get me wrong... this layered fractal, with a leafy Mandelbrot base, isn't meant to mimic a weed, but one of my favorite plants: Yarrow (Achillea millefolium 'Moonshine') I should note, the native yarrow in Colorado is white, not yellow. I picked this one up at the nursery a few years ago…

Lott's reason for removing his name

John Quiggin comments on the collateral damage the Lott affair has inflicted on Lott's allies and supporters. Chris Lawrence has an update to his earlier post. Tapped has a brief summary of the latest installment in the saga. Julian Sanchez and Kevin Drum mention Lott's response, posted by Glenn Reynolds. Lott says that reason that he removed his name from the paper was because of an editorial dispute with the Stanford Law Review: When I agreed to do the paper for the Stanford Law Review that responded to Ayres and Donohue's attack on my work, I got a promise…

Earthquake in Illinois: What's up with Wabash Valley?

Every time there's an earthquake in the Midwest, my mother emails me, just in case I want to move back home to study it. So that's how I heard about yesterday morning's earthquake in Illinois - a bit less exciting than waking up to it, but that's fine with me. This is not earthquake enough to reverse the geoscientific brain drain from the Midwest to the West Coast (there's also the weather to think about)... but for an ostensibly stable part of the continental interior, thousands of miles from the nearest plate boundary, Illinois and Indiana have seen an awful lot of seismic action over the…

Stealing a genome: surreptitious DNA testing goes genome-wide

New Scientist has a fascinating piece in which reporters Peter Aldhous and Michael Reilly demonstrate - with a little cash, and more than a little effort - the possibility of obtaining large-scale genetic data from someone without their knowledge or permission. The reporters started with a glass that Aldhous had drunk water from; Reilly swabbed the glass and sent the sample to an unnamed commercial lab for whole-genome amplification (a technique widely used in forensics and research applications, which allows small amounts of DNA to be converted into larger amounts). An initial attempt to…

Israeli-Imposed Travel Restrictions Force Palestinians to Lose Fulbright Scholarships

Something very unfortunate happened this week. The US had to revoke eight Fulbright Scholarships for students from Gaza to study in the US due to Israeli-imposed travel restrictions. From CNN: The U.S. government has taken Fulbright scholarships away from eight students in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, citing Israeli travel restrictions imposed on the Hamas-ruled zone, a U.S. official said Friday. The scholarships, which bring international students to the United States to study at American universities, will be given to students in the West Bank, said Stacey Barrios, a spokeswoman for…

The Coalescent

One of the most important developments in evolutionary biology in the past few decades has come without much fanfare outside of a small circle of population geneticists. The early models of population genetics were limited when it came to analyzing the nucleotide sequence polymorphism data that began to appear in the 1980s. New statistical techniques were developed to analyze this data, and they all fell under the umbrella of coalescent theory. If you want to understand the evolution of populations, you're missing a lot if you do not understand the coalescent. When I wrote about the best…

A Sputnik moment for virus-infecting viruses

The vermin only teaze and pinch Their foes superior by an inch. So, naturalists observe, a flea Has smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bite 'em, And so proceed ad infinitum. Jonathan Swift, "On Poetry: A Rhapsody" There's so much to love about this story from Nature News. While surveying genetic snippets from a hypersaline lake in Antarctica, an Australian research team found a virus that preys on other viruses. And they sorted out the ecology of the lake well enough to figure out that the virus infected by the virus-infecting virus is a major predator on the…

Finns as European genetic outliers

Dienekes & John Hawks have already blogged a new paper, Geographical structure and differential natural selection amongst North European populations: Population structure can provide novel insight into the human past and recognizing and correcting for such stratification is a practical concern in gene mapping by many association methodologies. We investigate these patterns, primarily through principal component (PC) analysis of whole genome SNP polymorphism, in 2099 individuals from populations of Northern European origin (Ireland, UK, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Australia and…

In a previous life, this would have been my bathroom

(Bath mosaic from Herculaneum, 79CE. From Joe Wilkins.)

New and Exciting in PLoS ONE

There are 27 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites: A New Basal Sauropodomorph Dinosaur from the Lower Jurassic Navajo Sandstone of Southern Utah: Basal sauropodomorphs, or 'prosauropods,' are a globally widespread paraphyletic assemblage of terrestrial…

The archaeology of some Polish vampires

Apotropaic magic is designed to ward off or control evil. In vampire fiction, as well as in real life in cultures that include a belief in vampires, apotropaic objects might be crucifixes, cloves of garlic, etc. Apotropaic methods are known to have been used in burials. In the photograph above, a sickle blade has been placed across a person's neck at burial time, probably to keep them from reanimating and becoming all vampiry (Individual 49/2012 (30–39 year old female) with a sickle placed across the neck, from the paper cited below.) Some people have believed that a regularly occurring…

Role Models in Science & Engineering Achievement: Lisa Perez Jackson -- Chemical engineer, First African American to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Adopted when she was two weeks old, Lisa Perez Jackson grew up in the New Orleans, LA area of Pontchartrain Park with her adopted parents Benjamin Perez (a postal worker), his wife Marie and their two sons. While exploring less fortunate neighborhoods of New Orleans as an adolescent, she noticed the unsafe and polluted waterways and canals that plagued these areas caused by oil refineries and drilling. Lisa often expressed concern over the negative impact that these problems had on the surrounding environment and its residents. It was most then that she began considering a career in…

BLASTing through the kingdom of life

No biology course is complete these days without learning how to do a BLAST search. Herein, I describe an assignment and an animated tutorial that teachers can readily adopt and use, and give teachers a hint for obtaining the password-protected answer key. Development of the tutorial and the activity were supported by funding from the National Science Foundation. This is reposted from the the original DigitalBio blog. This popular activity, designed to accompany the BLAST for beginners tutorial, has been updated to incorporate student comments and teacher requests. Originally developed for…

Solving a crime wave with DNA

I may be one of the few people in the world of TV watchers who has never seen a single episode of CSI: Whatever, a show featuring (I am told) "scientific" forensics work. Mrs. R., however, is fond of watching another show, Bones, which features a forensic anthropologist who works with a team that routinely accomlishes astounding feats of scientific detection (example: "That bug we found on the corpse is found only in a parking lot across from a school in Arlington, Virginia. Let's go. The new kidnap victim is probably there.") They can also reconstruct faces from fragments of skull bone and…

Occupational Health News Roundup

As the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq approaches, itâs clear that the U.S. is still having trouble ensuring that injured veterans get what they need â whether thatâs care for a brain injury, mental health services, or sufficient recovery time. Hereâs the news from the past week: An Army task force report completed in May and released last week highlighted several problems with brain injury screening for returning veterans, according to USA Today. The task forceâs chair praised improvements in screening and other areas, but urged further work in gauging neurological deficits and…

Alexornis and other 'alexornithiforms'

Again, more recycled text from the Mesozoic bird section of the fieldguide... Alexornis antecedens from the Upper Cretaceous (?Campanian) La Bocana Roja Formation of Mexico was first described in 1976; its remains were discovered in 1971 by H. J. Garbani and J. Loewe. The bones they found - various elements from the shoulder, wing and leg - were tiny, and evidently from a bird similar in size to a modern finch [adjacent life restoration by Ken Kirkland, from Hilton (2003)] This discovery pre-dated the 1981 recognition of enantiornithines as a distinct group of Mesozoic birds (see the article…

Ankylosaur week, day 1: Hungarosaurus

My to-do list has once again reached epic proportions, and includes three technical projects that now need urgent attention, about ten editorial jobs that need to be dealt with, several overdue book reviews, a lot of consultancy work, and a book synopsis. Plus of course this is all done in 'spare time' given family life and the day-job. In an effort to catch up with this back-log I'm going to let Tet Zoo lay fallow for a week, sort of. We haven't really had enough dinosaurs on Tet Zoo lately and, frankly, most of the stuff that I have lined up for the near future isn't on dinosaurs either,…

Answers in Genesis mentions the name of the devil!

I am astounded. Usually AiG simply refers to me as "the Professor" or "the atheist", but in their latest screed they actually mention me by name…and they even spell it correctly! Of course, they get everything else wrong. A well-known University of Minnesota-Morris professor who has a history of hate speech against creationists—especially Answers in Genesis and the Creation Museum1—inadvertently admitted recently that we were not wrong. This was kind of a blessing in disguise and also reveals much about his character. Professor Paul (P.Z.) Myers said: First, there is no moral law: the…

Andrew Sullivan on blogging

Andrew Sullivan, who blogs on the vastly popular Daily Dish (one of the few sane conservatives out there and very informative and entertaining to read) just published a long essay in The Atlantic - Why I Blog? Worth your time and effort to read - just a short excerpt: From the first few days of using the form, I was hooked. The simple experience of being able to directly broadcast my own words to readers was an exhilarating literary liberation. Unlike the current generation of writers, who have only ever blogged, I knew firsthand what the alternative meant. I'd edited a weekly print magazine…

Tarbosaurus Takes Japan for Lunch

tags: dinosaurs, Tarbosaurus bataar, paleontology, fossils, Tyrannosaurs rex The newly unveiled fossil skeleton of the juvenile Tarbosaurus bataar in its protective jacket. Discovered in 2006, a near-perfect complete skeleton of a juvenile Tarbosaurus find was made available for public viewing for the first time today by the Hayashibara Museum of Natural Science in Okayama, western Japan. This fossil was originally unearthed from a chunk of sandstone in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia by a team of Mongolian and Japanese researchers. The fossil of the young dinosaur is roughly 70 million years…

Science on Tap: Science communication at its best

Last night we went to a pub to hear about some new technology for diagnostic testing. A wonderful speaker, Karen Hedine from Micronics came and told us about the work that her company is doing. She brought along a demonstration machine and passed the machine and several plastic test chambers around the pub so we could all take a look. The technology, microfluidics, is fascinating stuff. I've written about it a little before( "From Louis Pasteur to "Lab on a chip""). A biological sample (blood, poop, urine, saliva, a vaginal smear) is drawn into the card. Molecules move into the card via…