University of ChicagoScientists have discovered fossils of a 375-million-year-old fish, a large scaly creature not seen before, that they say is a long-sought missing link in the evolution of some fishes from water to a life walking on four limbs on land.
A model of the 375 million-year-old fish, which exhibits changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals.
In two reports today in the journal Nature, a team of scientists led by Neil H. Shubin of the University of Chicago say they have uncovered several well-preserved skeletons of the fossil fish in sediments of former streambeds in the Canadian Arctic, 600 miles from the North Pole.
The skeletons have the fins, scales and other attributes of a giant fish, four to nine feet long. But on closer examination, the scientists found telling anatomical traits of a transitional creature, a fish that is still a fish but has changes that anticipate the emergence of land animals — and is thus a predecessor of amphibians, reptiles and dinosaurs, mammals and eventually humans.
A disk of potentially planet-forming debris has been found around a pulsar about 13,000 light-years from Earth, scientists announced today.
The debris is most likely material that has fallen back toward the star after a supernova, or star explosion. The material could clump together to form planets, astronomers say, but such planets would be unlikely to harbor life.
"This disk looks remarkably like those also seen around ordinary young stars in which planets are known to form," said Deepto Chakrabarty, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, who led the discovery team.
"But for the first time we may be seeing the start of planet formation in the very different, harsh environment that exists around an old dead star like a pulsar," he added.
"I said a little prayer before I actually did the fingerprint thing, and the picture," he said. "My prayer was basically: 'Let people see Christ through me. And let me smile.'
Blessed are the peacemakers. The bounty of beautiful roses from such
wonderful people has lifted my heart and will remain in my memory for the
rest of my life. Thank you for caring that others may live.
Helen Thomas
Columnist, Hearst Newspapers
Photograph by Paul Nicklen/NGSThe Republic of Kiribati in the South Pacific has designated an enormous swath of Pacific atolls, coral reefs, and deep ocean to become one of the world's largest marine reserves.
The Phoenix Islands Protected Area safeguards some of the planet's most pristine coral reef ecosystems. The new marine park is the world's third largest, topped only by Australia's Great Barrier Reef and the Northeastern Hawaiian Islands.
The protected region spans some 73,800 square miles (184,700 square kilometers)—a stretch of ocean twice the size of Portugal—and includes eight virtually uninhabited coral atolls.
The reserve is home to a panoply of marine life, including over 120 coral species and more than 500 types of fish—some found nowhere else.
Seabirds and turtles also frequent the region, which lies along key migration routes.
The park includes deep-ocean habitat found in no other marine reserve—protection extends even to seamounts on the ocean floor.
March 28, 2006—Pampering pets with designer goods isn't so unusual—and now even your houseflies can get outfitted in style.
An entry in a German science-photo competition, this image shows a fly sporting a set of "designer" lenses crafted and set in place with a cutting-edge laser technique. The glasses fit snuggly on the fly's 0.08-inch-wide (2-millimeter-wide) head.
Manufacturing firm Micreon GmbH submitted the insect's picture for the Bilder der Forschung (Photos of Science) 2005 competition. Selected images were on display last week in a Munich shopping center.
Micreon, based in Hannover, Germany (see map), created the fly's eyewear using ultrafast laser micro-machining. The firm notes on its Web site that the process can create objects with high precision at scales of less than a thousandth of a millimeter.
photo illustration by fourlegsgood
NASA’s once-canceled Dawn mission to visit a pair of asteroids has been reinstated following a mission review, space agency officials said Monday.
NASA initially canceled the Dawn mission, which calls for an ion-powered spacecraft to visit two large asteroids, earlier this month only to reverse that decision, which drew ire and opposition from planetary scientists at this month’s 37th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC).
After an in-depth study of the cost overruns and technical challenges plaguing Dawn’s development, NASA officials concluded that the mission should proceed towards a summer 2007 launch target.
“When you’re doing deep planetary missions….there are always pretty tall challenges,” NASA associate administrator Rex Geveden told reporters in a Monday teleconference. “And it looks like Dawn is ready to take those on and beat them.”
The decision buoyed Dawn mission scientists, who had mourned the project’s cancellation earlier this month.
Their visit came as more violence was reported across Iraq, including a terrifying incident earlier in the week in the western city of Ramadi. On Wednesday, armed insurgents burst into the classroom of Khidhir al-Mihallawi, an English teacher at Sajariyah High School, accused him of being an agent for the CIA and Israeli intelligence and beheaded him in front of his students, according to students, fellow instructors and a physician at a local hospital.
One teacher, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because he feared retaliation from insurgents, said that most students ran from the classroom but that some stayed to watch. Many stopped coming to school after the incident, he said. Another teacher, who said he moved his mathematics class to his home to accommodate frightened students, said Mihallawi had earlier been threatened because he worked as a translator for U.S. forces in Ramadi, a hotbed of the Sunni Arab insurgency.
Mihallawi "looked at us just like he was telling us that we do not have to be scared. Even as we were running out of the door, his looks were still telling us that nothing will happen and we do not have to be scared," said a student, whose father asked that his name not be used. "I heard him screaming for a few seconds, then stop screaming."
The father said his son has had trouble sleeping since the incident. "He always has nightmares and he always wakes up screaming and shaking, talking in his dreams," he said.
It has been a while since I have weighed in on the particulars of the illegal NSA spying scandal, mostly because Glenn Greenwald has this story covered so thoroughly and so well (and I'm sure you are all reading him every day.) But today we are reminded just how pernicious this scandal is: the Bush Justice department has asserted their right to ignore any law that congress makes, and which a former president signed, under a theory of executive power so sweeping that it essentially declares that this nation is a constitutional, elected monarchy (the elected part being debatable since the president could theoretically assert his unfettered powers to cancel elections.)
~snip~
...And these are the gravest of circumstances. There is nothing to be gained by Democrats abandoning anything in the name of civility Republicans will simply impeach the next Democratic president for double parking without so much as a second thought if they have the chance. They play the hardest of hardball and they do not see such minor setbacks as losing a few seats as any kind of repudiation. In fact, they see nothing as repudiation, not even Nixon's disgrace. They waited patiently for 30 years for the opportunity to reinstitute the imperial presidency and were operating under it even before 9/11.
The only thing that might make them repudiate Bill Clinton's impeachment would be George W. Bush's impeachment and I doubt that we will see either. But what we should see, and I dearly hope we will see, is a Democratic congress that puts the bright light of investigations on what this administration and its GOP allies have done --- and if we should get a Democratic president in 2008, a justice department that seeks out and punishes those who broke these laws. I don't think we should shut up for one minute about demanding accountability for what these people have done.
Back in 1974, I was in favor of pardoning Richard Nixon. I thought that it was wise to "bind up the country's wounds." I was wrong. The Republicans barely missed a beat and just went right on with the program. Whether George W. Bush can be charged with a crime, I don't know. But I have no doubt that it would be good for the country, not bad, if the Republicans were held to account for their undemocratic actions once and for all. They're impeaching, stealing eleactions and starting unnecessary wars now. What is it going to take before people realize that we are dealing with an outlaw political party?
Reuters/Siggi Bucher
Max Becherer/Polaris for the NYTimesAGHDAD, Iraq, March 25 — Mohannad al-Azawi had just finished sprinkling food in his bird cages at his pet shop in south Baghdad, when three carloads of gunmen pulled up.
In front of a crowd, he was grabbed by his shirt and driven off.
~snip~
Mr. Azawi's body was found the next morning at a sewage treatment plant. A slight man who raised nightingales, he had been hogtied, drilled with power tools and shot.
In the last month, hundreds of men have been kidnapped, tortured and executed in Baghdad. As Iraqi and American leaders struggle to avert a civil war, the bodies keep piling up. The city's homicide rate has tripled from 11 to 33 a day, military officials said. The period from March 7 to March 21 was typically brutal: at least 191 corpses, many mutilated, surfaced in garbage bins, drainage ditches, minibuses and pickup trucks.
~snip~
What frightens Iraqis most about these gangland-style killings is the impunity. According to reports filed by family members and more than a dozen interviews, many men were taken in daylight, in public, with witnesses all around. Few cases, if any, have been investigated.
Part of the reason may be that most victims are Sunnis, and there is growing suspicion that they were killed by Shiite death squads backed by government forces in a cycle of sectarian revenge. This allegation has been circulating in Baghdad for months, and as more Sunnis turn up dead, more people are inclined to believe it.
"This is sectarian cleansing," said Mahmoud Othman, a Kurdish member of Parliament, who has maintained a degree of neutrality between Shiites and Sunnis.
January 12, 2006 ©fourlegsgood
NASA/JPL/University of ArizonaNASA’s new red planet probe, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), has relayed spectacular test images using its super-powerful camera leaving mission scientists and engineers more than pleased with the initial imagery.
The views from MRO's High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera, which has called the most powerful camera ever sent to red planet, reached Earth early Friday.
“The quality of the images is fantastic!” HiRISE principal investigator Alfred McEwen, of the University of Arizona, told SPACE.com. “This demonstrates that both the HiRISE camera and the spacecraft pointing performed superbly.”
In the past 24 hours, we learned of allegations that Ben Domenech plagiarized material that appeared under his byline in various publications prior to washingtonpost.com contracting with him to write a blog that launched Tuesday.
An investigation into these allegations was ongoing, and in the interim, Domenech has resigned, effective immediately.
Aside from my own sentimental attachment to newspapers, I have no objection to all of us shifting over to the Internet and doing the same thing there. You'd still have the two big problems, however: A) How do you know if it's true? And, B) how do you put a lot of information into a package that's useful to people? If newspapers were just another buggy-whip industry, none of this would be of much note -- another disappearing artifact, like the church key. But while Wall Street doesn't care, nor do many of the people who own and run newspapers, newspapers do, in fact, matter beyond producing profit -- they have a critical role in democracy. It's called a well-informed citizenry.
We are in trouble.
The Project for Excellence in Journalism, run by Columbia University, has a new report out that finds the number of media outlets continues to grow, but both the number of stories covered and the depth of reporting are sliding backward. Television, radio and newspapers are all cutting staff, while the bloggers of the Internet either do not have the size or the interest to go out and gather news. Bloggers are not news-gatherers, but opinion-mongers. I have long argued that no one should be allowed to write opinion without spending years as a reporter -- nothing like interviewing all four eyewitnesses to an automobile accident and then trying to write an accurate account of what happened. Or, as author-journalist Curtis Wilkie puts it, "Unless you can cover a five-car pile-up on Route 128, you shouldn't be allowed to cover a presidential campaign." My emphasis added.
Reuters
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