A 9-foot dinosaur from northeastern China had evolved all the hallmark anatomical features of Tyrannosaurus rex at least 125 million years ago, 30 million years before its descendant would rule the world. University of Chicago paleontologist Paul Sereno and five co-authors describe the newly discovered dinosaur in the Sept. 17 Science Express.
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When you think of Tyrannosaurus rex, a small set of striking physical traits comes to mind: an oversized skull with powerful jaws, tiny forearms, and the muscular hind legs of a runner. But, researchers have just unearthed a much smaller tyrannosauroid in China, no more than three meters long, that displays all the same features – and it predates the T. rex by tens of millions of years.
Results: For the first time, MIT scientists have observed ferromagnetism in an atomic gas, addressing the decades-old question of whether gases could show properties similar to a magnet made of iron or nickel. Specifically, the team observed the ferromagnetic behavior in a gas of lithium atoms cooled to 150 billionth of 1 Kelvin above absolute zero (-273 degrees C or -459 degrees F). Team members used the lithium-6 isotope, which consists of three protons, three neutrons and three electrons.
In recent years several Large-Scale Scientific Facilities (LSSF) for nuclear, hadronic, and particle physics have been upgraded and constructed in China. The Cooling Storage Ring of Heavy Ion Research Facility in Lanzhou (HIRFL-CSR) was completed in 2007, which aims at the exploration of physics with radioactive ion beams (including the structure of unstable nuclei, isospin dependence of nuclear matter, heavy-ion fusion, superheavy nuclei synthesis), hadronic physics, physics of high-energy density matter, physics of highly charged ions, and applications.
There's a new way to explore biology's secrets. With a flash of light, scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of California, Berkeley zeroed in on the type of neural cell that controls swimming in larval zebrafish.
Using innovative light-activated proteins and gene expression techniques, the scientists zapped several zebrafish with a pulse of light, and initiated a swimming action in a subset of fish that was traced back to the neuron that drives the side-to-side motion of their tail fins.
Will all of the ice on Greenland melt and flow out into the sea, bringing about a colossal rise in ocean levels on Earth, as the global temperature rises? The key concern is how stable the ice cap actually is, and new Danish research from the Niels Bohr Institute at the University of Copenhagen can now show the evolution of the ice sheet 11,700 years back in time – all the way back to the start of our current warm period. The results are published in the esteemed journal Nature.
So you're a manufacturer about to introduce a new consumer product to the marketplace. Will that product or the manufacture of the product contribute to global warming through the greenhouse effect? Until now, there was no clear way to answer that question. Scientists are reporting development of a new method for screening molecules and predicting how certain materials, ranging from chemicals used in carpeting to electronics, will contribute to global warming. Their study is scheduled for the Nov. 12 issue of ACS' Journal of Physical Chemistry A, a weekly publication.
An editorial and letter, published simultaneously by the BMJ and Lancet today, warn that failure to agree radical cuts in carbon dioxide emissions at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen this December spells a global health catastrophe.
Thanks to a new analytical method employed by researchers at the University of Delaware, scientists can now pinpoint, at the millisecond level, what happens as harmful environmental contaminants such as arsenic begin to react with soil and water under various conditions.
Quantifying the initial rates of such reactions is essential for modeling how contaminants are transported in the environment and predicting risks.
If the future warming trends that scientists have projected are realized, one of the country's most aggressive exotic plants will have the potential to invade more U.S. land area, according to a new study published in the journal Invasive Plant Science and Management. The study found that tamarisk——prevalent today in some parts of the region, but generally limited to warm and dry environments——could expand its range into currently uninvaded areas.
URBANA - The composition of some of our nation's forests may be quite different 200 to 400 years from today according to a recent study at the University of Illinois. The study found that temperature and photosynthetic active radiation were the two most important variables in predicting what forest landscapes may look like in the future. The uncertainties became very high after the year 2200.
Ecologists have discovered that timber plantations in Hawaii use more than twice the amount of water to grow as native forests use. Especially for island ecosystems, these findings suggest that land management decisions can place ecosystems – and the people who depend on them – at high risk for water shortages.
TORONTO, ON – Physicists at the University of Toronto have discovered that changes in the Earth's ozone layer due to climate change will reduce the amount of ultraviolet (UV) radiation in northern high latitude regions such as Siberia, Scandinavia and northern Canada. Other regions of the Earth, such as the tropics and Antarctica, will instead face increasing levels of UV radiation.