Fossils of giant pliosaurs discovered in England

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10 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Paleontologists have discovered four Jurassic pliosaurid neck vertebrae in the Kimmeridge Clay Formation near Abingdon, Oxfordshire, England.

The post “Giant Pliosaurus Fossils Discovered in England” first appeared on Sci.News: Breaking Science News.

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A possible meteorite hit a house in New Jersey, no one was hurt

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News Brief: US counts old growth forests, Canadian scientists march for higher wages, and condor dung reveals ancient history of birds | The science

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A possible meteorite hit a house in New Jersey, no one was hurt

Published

9 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Jan Topete

HOPEWELL TOWNSHIP, NJ (AP) – Metal object, presumably meteorites blew a hole in the roof of a downtown New Jersey home this week, crashing into the wood floor and bouncing around the bedroom. The family that owns the house found a black stone the size of a potato in the corner, still warm.

No one was hurt and no major damage was done to the home, police said in the town of Hopewell, north of the state capital Trenton. The object measures about 4 by 6 inches (10 by 15 centimeters) and weighs about four pounds (1.8 kilograms), police said.

Susie Cope, whose family owns the home, said they initially thought someone had thrown a rock into the upstairs bedroom on Monday, but soon realized that wasn’t the case. The family plans to meet with an astrophysicist who will study the object further.

“We think it’s a meteorite, it went through here, hit the floor here because it’s completely damaged, it ricocheted up to this part of the ceiling, and then finally came to rest on the floor there,” Cope said. KYW TV in Philadelphia. “I touched this thing because she thought it was a random stone, I don’t know, and it was warm.”

Cope said chemical protection officials came to their home to test it, along with her family, in case they were exposed to any radioactive material, but all of those tests were negative.

SCIENCE

News Brief: US counts old growth forests, Canadian scientists march for higher wages, and condor dung reveals ancient history of birds | The science

Published

11 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Jan Topete

FOREST ECOLOGY

US increased the number of old forests

Last year, President Joe Biden surprised forest scientists by ordering an Earth Day inventory of state holdings of mature and old-growth forests. This sparked a fight from the US Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management to create a formal definition of what constitutes “mature” and “old growth” forests and apply those definitions to millions of hectares. Meeting the April 22 deadline last month, the agencies released their findings in a report noting that of the nearly 72 million hectares of forest they manage, 45% are mature and 18% are old-growth. Figures that exceed estimates published by non-federal researchers include 9 million hectares of pine-juniper forest (pictured here in Utah), a type of forest rarely previously classified as old-growth. The report’s findings are likely to spark a heated debate on how to manage old forests and make them resilient to climate change.

SCIENTIFIC SECURITY

The chemist received house arrest

United States District Judge Last week, former Harvard University chemist Charles Lieber was sentenced. to 6 months house arrest and fined $50,000 for lying to federal agencies about his dealings with a Chinese university and failing to report payments from it. The ruling ended the most notorious case of about two dozen recent prosecutions of American academic scientists with research ties to China. In December 2021, Lieber’s connections with Wuhan University of Technology led to his conviction in court. Prosecutors have asked for a 90-day jail sentence and a $150,000 fine for 64-year-old Lieber, who has terminal blood cancer and left Harvard earlier this year. His lawyers requested that he not be sentenced to prison due to his poor health. The case was initiated by the Chinese government, aimed at curbing economic espionage by the US rival. The campaign was renamed last year to clarify that it applies to cancerous subjects from anywhere in the world. The government has a controversial reputation for harassing academics; several were acquitted or had their cases dismissed, while several were found guilty of offenses similar to Lieber’s and sentenced to prison.

MARINE BIOLOGY

unknown underwater

Scientists suspect they have described less than 10% of the marine species on Earth. To learn more about the ocean’s remaining inhabitants, researchers, businesses and philanthropists have teamed up to identify some 100,000 new sea creatures from an estimated 2 million as yet unidentified species over the next decade. V ocean census, launched last week, will combine DNA sequencing with machine learning to create a kind of cyber-taxonomy, classifying organisms collected on expeditions across the world’s seas. The results could help conservation and give scientists a better understanding of the role marine life plays in oxygen and food production, and in the carbon cycle. With financial support from the Nippon Foundation, Japan’s largest philanthropic organization, the British Institute of Marine Science and Conservation, called Nekton, will coordinate the collection of ships, divers, submarines and deep-sea robots. Ocean Census will make its data, along with 3D digital images of all new species, available to both researchers and the public. With the disappearance of corals, sharks and other marine species in recent decades, “we are in a race against time,” says project leader Alex Rogers, a marine biologist at the University of Oxford.

PALEONTOLOGY

Welsh fossils highlight early life

This 462-million-year-old fossil represents a new species, a clam-like creature with long appendages.JOE BOTTING

In Wales, paleontologists have discovered a rich source of 462-million-year-old fossils that show a greater match than expected between animals that evolved in the Cambrian explosion 40 million years ago and the ancestors of modern species. The researchers thought these ancestors had replaced the Cambrian creatures, but the new site – a small quarry in a sheep field – shows a much more gradual transition, say Jo Botting and Lucy Muir of the Amgedfa Simru National Museum in Wales. Among the many fossils, the couple cataloged 170 marine species, including glass sponges, crustaceans called horseshoe shrimp, and six-legged arthropods that may have given rise to insects. Nearly all of the animals are tiny, many ranging from the size of a sesame seed to a pencil eraser, and their soft bodies are perfectly preserved, giving insight into what they ate and how they lived, the research team reports this week in Ecology of nature and evolution. The quarry, according to Julien Kimmig, a paleontologist at the Karlsruhe State Museum of Natural History, who was not involved in the work, “could certainly be as famous” as the famous Burgess Shale in Canada, a rich source of Cambrian fossils from 500 million years ago.

EDUCATION

Indian classes got rid of Darwin

Scientists in India are protesting the decision to exclude discussion of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from the textbooks used by millions of ninth and tenth graders. More than 4,000 people have signed a petition from the Society for Breakthrough Sciences to recover the material. The non-profit advocacy group for science reports that the National Council for Educational Research and Training, an autonomous government group that sets curricula for India’s 256 million primary and secondary school students, has dropped the theme as part of a “content rationalization” process. The removal “distorts the idea of a comprehensive secondary education,” says evolutionary biologist Amitabh Joshi of the Jawaharlal Nehru Center for Advanced Science. Others fear it indicates a growing interest in pseudoscience among Indian officials and see it as unlikely that NCERT will back down.

SCIENCE POLICY

EU trial defense fund blown up

The European Union was ill-prepared to increase funding for defense research, report published last week own financial supervisory authority. Between 2017 and 2019, the EU spent around €90m on 18 projects under the Defense Research Preparatory Action, a fund designed to “pave the way” for the much larger €8bn European Defense Fund, which began operations in 2021 and will last until 2027. But the European Audit Chamber report says the previous pilot fund did not fully function as a “test bed” for the larger program as projects were shelved and made “limited progress”. The auditors also warned that the European Commission is too understaffed to cope with rising spending on defense research.

ECOLOGY

Condor feces reveal their history

Andean condor in flight — Andean condor nests hold a messy archive of their diet going back thousands of years.JACK DIKING/NPL/MINDEN PICTURES

To find out how the Andean condor’s diet has changed over millennia of environmental change, researchers climbed a cliff in Argentina’s Patagonia region to collect samples of bird droppings from a donut-shaped mound. Based on radiocarbon dating and other clues, scientists have found that condors have nested on this slope for about 2,200 years. However, guano has shown that between about 300 and 1300 AD. Andean condors became scarce as ash from nearby volcanic eruptions covered the landscape and killed the animals whose carcasses they hunted. The scientists also learned that the careers of condors have changed over the years. Traces of llama DNA predominate in older layers of guano deposits, while introduced sheep and cattle are more visible in more recent layers. The researchers say the findings illustrate the value of studying long-term nesting sites for reconstructing a species’ ecological history.

SCIENCE COMMUNITY

Demand for Canadian PhDs on the rise

Thousands of scientists across Canada left work May 1 to protest against the low wages of graduate and doctoral students. Sarah Laframboise, Doctor of Biochemistry, University of Ottawa, at an event on Canada’s Parliament Hill. A student and executive director of the grassroots organization Support Our Science cited a study that found 86% of graduate students were stressed and worried about their finances. The organization behind the one-day protest is asking the federal government to increase pay for graduate and postdoc students, who are funded by federal scholarships and fellowships. In August 2022, he sent an open letter to the government asking for more investment in the next generation of scientists. But there were no such changes in this year’s federal budget, released in March.

SCIENCE

Rock that hit New Jersey house could be 5 billion-year-old debris from Halley’s comet

Published

12 hours ago

May 11, 2023

Jan Topete

A rock believed to be a meteorite crashed into a New Jersey home on Monday (May 8), damaging the bedroom but causing no injuries.

Susie Cope’s home in Hopewell Township, New Jersey, was empty when the space rock entered. CBS News Philadelphia (will open in a new tab), which first reported the unusual event. The meteorite touched down around 1:00 pm ET, broke through the roof, and landed in a bedroom owned by Cope’s father. Judging by the damage, the meteorite fell to the floor, bounced up to the ceiling and stopped in the corner of the room. The size of the metal rock is about 4 inches by 6 inches (10 by 15 centimeters).

“I touched this thing because I thought it was a random stone… and it was warm,” Kop told CBS News.

Authorities are still investigating the origin of the visible space rock, but Derrick Pitts (will open in a new tab), chief astronomer at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, told CBS News it could be four to five billion years old. Perhaps the meteorite was part of an ongoing Eta Aquarid meteor shower, which roughly occurs between April 19 and May 29 each year and reaches its peak around May 5 and 6. On peak days, the shower can produce hundreds of “shooting stars” per hour, most of which are meteors that burn up into the atmosphere. These meteors are rock debris left behind by Halley’s comet that become visible from Earth every 75 to 79 years. NASA (will open in a new tab).

“For it to actually get into a house so people can pick up the phone is really unusual and has happened very few times in history,” Pitts said.

Meteors constantly enter the Earth’s atmosphere, but most of them burn up before they hit the ground. On rare occasions, those who land cause damage to buildings. For example, in 2015, a 1.6 pound (712 grams) meteorite crashed into a house in San Carlos, Uruguay. destroy the bed and TV (will open in a new tab). In 2021, a British Columbian woman woke up to a loud noise to find a fist-sized rock between her pillows; it turned out fragment of a meteor that exploded in the air (will open in a new tab), causing a fireball. In November 2022, it was believed that a meteorite fall could cause House on fire in California.

Small meteorites were also reported to have crashed into buildings in Sumatra in 2020, in Connecticut (will open in a new tab) in 1982 and Auckland (will open in a new tab) in 2004. Fortunately, no one was hurt in these incidents; the only known example man hit by a meteorite (will open in a new tab) occurred in Alabama in 1954 when an 8.5-pound (3.8 kg) space rock crashed into a woman’s home, hit her radio, and struck her leg, leaving a large bruise.

In the meteorite event that caused the most injuries, no one was directly hit by the space rock. In February 2013, a meteor approximately 59 feet (18 m) in diameter crashed into Earth’s atmosphere and exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The resulting fireball blew out windows and damaged buildings, injuring more than 1,600 people from flying glass and debris. NASA (will open in a new tab).