Nathan Hrushkin - Boy Finds 69 Million Year Old Dinosaur Fossil

Nathan Hrushkin - Boy Finds 69 Million Year Old Dinosaur Fossil | Boy, 12, Discovers Rare Dinosaur Skeleton 

A 12-year-old boy made the discovery of his lifetime when he found a dinosaur skeleton dating back 69 million years. The amateur palaeontologist was out hiking with his father in a fossil-rich part of Alberta, Canada this July, when he saw bones protruding from a rock. On Thursday, the skeleton's excavation was completed.

The boy, Nathan Hrushkin, says when he first laid eyes on the bones, he was "literally speechless". "I wasn't even excited, even though I know I should have [been]," he tells the BBC. "I was in so much shock that I had actually found a dinosaur discovery." Nathan, who has been interested in dinosaurs since he was six, often goes hiking in the Nature Conservancy of Canada's protected site in the Albertan Badlands with his father.

"I've always just been so fascinated with how their bones go from bones like ours, to solid rock." A year ago, they had found small fragments of fossils, and his father guessed that they were falling down from the rock above. So this summer Nathan decided to inspect. The fossilised bones were poking out of the side of a hill. "Dad, you got to get up here!" he called to his father.

His father knew Nathan had found something by the tone of his voice. They looked like bones made of stone - you could not mistake them for anything else," his father, Dion Hrushkin, said. "It looked like the end of a femur - it had that classic bone look to it - sticking straight out of the ground."

Human Composting - Living Mushroom Coffin Help Bodies Decompose

Human Composting - Living Mushroom Coffin Help Bodies Decompose | Guy Created A Living Mushroom Coffin That Turns Your Body Into Compost In Less Than 2 Years | Loop in Netherlands 

There’s a saying that we are but mere guests on this planet. So, we ought to treat it with love and respect just like we would any other home. And just like it applies to our lifetimes, so it should apply in the afterlife. Loop, a startup based in Delft, the Netherlands, has come out with a solution to an eco-friendly afterlife with its Loop Living Cocoon coffin made from wood chips and mycelium that quicken the process of decomposition and help nature acquire vital nutrients more effectively.

Dutch researcher Bob Hendrikx designed an eco-friendly coffin made out of mushroom fiber—mycelium. So, Delft University of Technology Researcher Bob Hendrikx has designed what he calls a living coffin that is made from mycelium, the vegetative part of a fungus or fungus-like bacterial colony.

Girl Is Allergic To Water | Aquagenic Urticaria

Girl Is Allergic To Water | Aquagenic Urticaria 

A woman with a 1 in 156 million allergy is left unable to shower daily due extreme pain when water touches her skin.

Rachael Fetter, 23, was diagnosed with Aquagenic Urticaria - an allergy to water - in July 2019 after she began developing painful hives every time she washed her hands, took a shower or got caught in the rain. The veterinarian technician, from Rathdrum, Idaho, explained that she even breaks out in bright red rashes whenever she sweats too much, and can only drink half a cup of water (120ml) at a time. And due to her water allergy - which affects just 50 people on the planet - Rachael can only shower twice a week, because the experience makes her skin break out in agonizing hives and causes extreme burning pain, which can last for days.

Leather Made from a Cactus | Cactus Leather

Leather Made from a Cactus | Cactus Leather

Two entrepreneurs in Mexico have developed a durable vegan leather from cactus, and it could very well replace animal leather! 

Adrian Lopez Velarde and Marte Cazarez came together to create a cruelty-free alternative to animal leather, and just last month, they debuted Desserto, a first-of-it’s-kind organic leather made entirely from nopal or prickly-pear cactus. 

Apart from being natural and cruelty-free, the material also meets the specifications of several industries and can be used in: 

• Fashion 
• Leather goods 
• Furniture 
• Automobiles 

It’s also flexible, breathable and durable, making it an ideal replacement for animal and synthetic leather. The touch and feel of the material is also soft and very similar to real leather. “After two years of research and development, we managed to produce a suitable material that complies with the features and technical/mechanical specifications required by those industries that use animal and synthetic leather,” said Lopez. 

The product is also highly sustainable with a lower carbon footprint than other leather alternatives. It also happens to be: 

• Less water intensive 
• Free from phthalates 
• Free from toxic chemicals 
• PVC-free 

The duo showcased the product last month at the International Leather Fair Lineappelle in Milan, Italy. 

Plant-based leather alternatives are a growing market, with innovators turning to pineapple, olives and coconuts to produce eco-friendly materials. Earlier this year, high-street retailer H&M unveiled a vegan jacket made from pineapple leather, while German footwear brand thies launched a line of leather shoes made from olive leaves. Closer to home, Kerala-based brand Malai fashions leather and accessories from coconuts!

Totally Unique Language in the Himalayas (Researchers Discover )

A Koro speaker talks to National Geographic Fellow Gregory Anderson in Arunachal Pradesh, India, as he makes a recording of the language.

In the foothills of the Himalayas, two field linguists have uncovered a find as rare as any endangered species—a language completely new to science.

The researchers encountered it for the first time along the western ridges of Arunachal Pradesh, India's northeastern-most state, where more than 120 languages are spoken. There, isolated by craggy slopes and rushing rivers, the hunters and subsistence farmers who speak this rare tongue live in a dozen or so villages of bamboo houses built on stilts.

The language—called Koro—was identified during a 2008 expedition conducted as part of National Geographic's Enduring Voices project. The researchers announced their discovery Tuesday in Washington, D.C. So many languages have vanished world-wide in recent decades that the naming of a new one commanded scientific attention.

"Their language is quite distinct on every level—the sound, the words, the sentence structure," said Gregory Anderson, director of the nonprofit Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages, who directs the project's research. Details of the language will be documented in an upcoming issue of the journal Indian Linguistics.

Prized for its rarity as an unstudied linguistic artifact, the Koro language also offers researchers a catalogue of unique cultural experience, encoded in its mental grammar of words and sentence structure that helps shape thought itself.

Languages like Koro "construe reality in very different ways," Dr. Anderson said. "They uniquely code knowledge of the natural world in ways that cannot be translated into a major language."

In an era of globalization, languages have been disappearing by the hundreds, edged out by English, Chinese and Spanish or suppressed by government practices. Of the 6,909 known languages, about half are expected to disappear in this century; every two weeks, the last fluent speaker of a language dies. This newest, with only 800 or so speakers, may be no exception.

"Even though this is new to science, this language is on the way out," said linguist K. David Harrison at Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia. Many younger villagers, often educated at boarding schools where only Hindi or English are spoken, are abandoning their parents' language. "Young people are not speaking it in the villages," Dr. Harrison said. "If the process continues, Koro will almost certainly become extinct."
Link via Ace of Spades HQ

Scientist Pouring Molten Metal Into Ant Nests

A plaster cast of a large Pogonomyrmex badius nest. This nest consisted of 135 chambers and 12 meters of vertical shafts. The top-heavy distribution of chamber area and spacing is typical for the species, as are the helical shafts and the decrease of chamber size with depth.

Superficial chambers from Pogonomyrmex badius nests of increasing size, shown in side and top views. These “chambers” are probably produced by a modification of the behavioral program producing shafts throughout the deeper portions of the nest. Note the increasingly interconnected and loop-like morphology as the shafts become extended and enlarged.

A. The descending shafts of Pogonomyrmex badius nests form a helix. B–D. Chambers are constructed outward from the outside of this helix, so that the intersection between chambers and the helical shaft forms an angle between 25 and 70°. The angle may be either right or left of vertical (compare A and B with C and D). E–F. Chambers are initiated at the outside of the helix as small, flat-bottomed niches.

Chambers of Pogonomyrmex badius nests become more lobed in outline as workers enlarge them. Chambers begin as small indentations in the wall of the shaft (left). Large chambers often appear to wrap around the shaft (right).

The ratio of the actual perimeter of Pogonomyrmex badius nest chambers to the perimeter of a circle of equal area estimates the complexity of the chamber outlines. Most of this increase results from an increase in the number of lobes. Because the largest chambers are located in the upper third of the nest, the greatest deviations from circularity occur in this part of the nest.

Casts of Pogonomyrmex badius nests of increasing size: (A) a very small nest with a single vertical chamber series and shaft; (B) a medium-small nest with the beginning of a second vertical series and shaft; (C) a large-mature nest with 4 vertical series and shafts. The right nest (C) cast is of dental plaster, the middle (B) of aluminum, and the left (A) of zinc. The middle cast is incomplete, the lowest chambers having failed to fill with metal. Its maximum depth was probably intermediate between the large and small casts.

The total chamber area of Pogonomyrmex badius nests grows more slowly than does the population of workers that excavate the nest. For every 10-fold increase in the number of mature workers, the area increases 7.5-fold. The space per workers therefore decreases as nests grow. However, workers are very unevenly distributed within the nest.

The uppermost portions of a medium-small Pogonomyrmex badius nest (top) and a small one (bottom). Note the ribbon-like descending shaft in the larger nest, but not the smaller.

Pogonomyrmex badius nests grow through the addition of chambers, chamber enlargement and nest deepening. Patterns are shown by decile (increments of 10% of the maximum nest depth) and colony size class. A. More chambers are added in the upper regions of the nest than the lower. B. The mean size of chambers at each depth increases with nest size. C. The combination of increased numbers and mean size of chambers greatly increases the total area in each decile, much more in the upper regions than the lower. D. The increase of total area and maximum depth are proportional, so that the distribution of the percent of the total area in relation to the percent of the maximum depth does not change much as colonies grow. In other words, the size-free shape of the depth-area distribution does not change with colony size.

The vertical spacing between Pogonomyrmex badius nest chambers increases to a maximum in the 7th or 8th deciles then decreases again. This pattern does not change much with nest size because nest deepening and chamber addition occur simultaneously, preserving spacing. One nest in size class 2 contained outliers in the 5th and 6th deciles. None of the other size classes were different in how spacing varied with depth.

The proportional decrease in chamber area with depth of Pogonomyrmex badius nests is similar no matter what the colony size. Every 10-fold increase in depth is associated with a 75% decrease in summed chamber area in the decile (note log-log scale). Depths are the mean depths for each decile and size class. None of the slopes are significantly different from each other: slope of the log-log regression was - 0.59. Intercepts were: size class 0 = 1.69; size class 1 = 2.40; size class 2 = 2.72; size class 3 = 3.09; size class 4 = 3.35. These estimate the area at 1 cm depth, and have only mathematical reality. Actual mean areas in the uppermost deciles were 38, 190, 516, 1700 and 2670 cm2 for size classes 0 to 4, respectively.

The depth of shaft branch points is deeper in shallower nests of Pogonomyrmex badius nests than in deep ones (A), but is independent of total nest area (B).

Each additional vertical series of chambers of Pogonomyrmex badius nests contributes less to the total chamber area because the mean size of its chambers is smaller than higher series.

Plaster casts of Pogonomyrmex badius nests excavated by 250 workers taken from the uppermost chambers, the middle-depth and the bottom of a mature nest. Each group was penned in an escape-proof enclosure for 4 days, after which workers coming to the surface were recaptured, and a plaster cast of their nest was made. The figure shows one of 4 similar replicate sets.

All measures of nest excavation were highest for the older workers taken from the top of a mature Pogonomyrmex badius nest, intermediate for the middle group and lowest for the youngest group from the nest bottom. A: rate of excavation, as grams of plaster per worker per day; B: cm of shaft per worker per day; C: number of chambers in nest.

Most of the differences in the size of the excavated Pogonomyrmex badius nests were associated with the number of workers actively digging. Only actively digging workers could be recaptured at the surface as they brought up soil to discard. Younger workers from deeper in the nest were rarely recaptured. Because replicates began with varying numbers of workers (125 to 250), digging rate is plotted against fraction recaptured.

The carbon dioxide concentration in air taken from Pogonomyrmex badius nest chambers of increasing depth. The concentration in the deepest chambers is about 5 times that at the surface (2 replicates). B. The distribution of nest area by decile is roughly the mirror image of the carbon dioxide concentration, suggesting that the carbon dioxide concentration gradient might serve as a template for nest excavation and worker assortment. The steepest gradient is in the top half-meter or so, and this is also the zone with the most rapid decrease in chamber area.

A. The “ant hotel” used to test the depth preference of young and old workers. B. Initially, each “hotel room” contained 25 young workers taken from the bottom of a mature Pogonomyrmex badius nest, and 25 old workers from the top (each also contained 10 larvae and pupae). Each chamber thus contained 17% of each age group. After allowing 4 days for reassortment, old workers moved upward so that a large proportion of them were recaptured in the upper chambers. The downward movement of young workers was less dramatic.

Tags: Scientist, Pouring, Molten Metal, Ant Nests

Common toads can detect earthquakes in advance

Believe it or not, common toads can detect quakes up to five days in advance, say scientists.

For centuries, animals, from dogs to rats, snakes and chickens, are said to have behaved strangely before a quake -- but their impulses have never been scientifically established.

Now, a team at The Open University has found that the toads are able to predict imminent earthquakes, after studying a population of common toads outside L'Aquila in central Italy before last year's tremors hit.

They noticed that even though it was the creature's important breeding season, nearly 96 per cent of male toads abandoned the area five days before the earthquake struck in April, 'The Daily Telegraph' reported.

The number of paired toads at the breeding site also dropped to zero three days before the earthquake. No fresh spawn was found at the site from the date that the earthquake struck to the date of the last significant aftershock.

Breeding sites are male-dominated and the toads would normally remain in situ from the point that breeding activity begins, to the completion of spawning, the scientists say.

Lead author Dr Rachel Grant said: "Our study is one of the first to document animal behaviour before, during and after an earthquake.

"Our findings suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues such as the release of gases and charged particles, and use these as a form of earthquake early warning system."

It is believed that just before an earthquake radon gas and gravity waves are released from the earth which are then reflected back by the atmosphere and detected by toads, according to the scientists.

The findings have been published in the 'Journal of Zoology'.

Some dinosaur species changed skull shape during growth

Some dinosaur species went through drastic changes in their skull shape during normal growth because of different juvenile and adult feeding behaviours, a new research has showed.

After examining the fossil of a young sauropod dinosaur rediscovered in the collections of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, paleontologists at the University of Michigan found that the skull of diplodocus, a 150 million-year-old sauropod, went through drastic changes.

They said that these changes in skull shape may have been tied to feeding behaviour, with adults and juveniles eating different foods to avoid competition. Young diplodocus, with their narrower snouts, may also have been choosier browsers, selecting high quality plant parts.

The team led by John Whitlock and Jeffrey Wilson, who wrote their research in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, said the fossil offers a rare chance to look at the early life history of Diplodocus which was found in western North America.

"Adult sauropod skulls are rare, but juvenile skulls are even rarer. What we do know about the skulls of sauropods like Diplodocus has been based entirely on adults so far," said Whitlock.

Wilson said, "Diplodocus had an unusual skull. Adults had long, square snouts, unlike the rounded or pointed snouts of other sauropods. Up until now, we assumed juveniles did too."

The small Diplodocus skull, however, suggests that major changes occurred in the skull throughout the animal's life.

"Although this skull is plainly that of a juvenile Diplodocus, in many ways it is quite different from those of the adults," Whitlock said.

"Like those of most young animals, the eyes are proportionally larger, and the face is smaller. What was unexpected was the shape of the snout -- it appears to have been quite pointed, rather than square like the adults ".

"This gives us a whole new perspective on what these animals may have looked like at different points in their lives."

They said, "This little Diplodocus skull was discovered in 1921, and more than 80 years passed before we recognised its significance.

New pre-human species offers evolutionary clues

Australopithecus Sediba skeletons
Two partial skeletons unearthed in a South African cave belong to a previously unclassified species of pre-human dating back almost 2 million years and may shed new light on human evolution, scientists said on Thursday.

Fossils of the bones of a young male and an adult female suggest the newly documented species, called Australopithecus sediba, walked upright and shared many physical traits with the earliest known human Homo species.

The finding of the pre-human, or hominid, fossils -- which scientists say are between 1.78 and 1.95 million years old -- was published in the journal Science and may answer some key questions about where humans came from.

Lee Berger of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, who led the team that found the fossils in August 2008, told a news conference held near the cave outside Johannesburg the discovery was "unprecedented."

"I am struck by the exceptional nature of something right on our doorstep ... there are more hominid fossils than I have ever discovered in my entire career," he said.

"When we found it we never imagined that we were looking at a new species."

Berger earlier told reporters by telephone the team were hoping to reveal a possible two further skeletons from the same site.

He was reluctant to define the new species as a "missing link" in human evolutionary history, but said it would "contribute enormously to our understanding of what was going on at that moment where the early members of the genus Homo emerged."

Powerful Hands South African Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe told the news conference: "As any parent knows, one of the most common questions a child asks is, 'where do I come from?' It has become clear the answer is 'Africa'.

"With the World Cup in 63 days, we will now be able to welcome people from the world with fresh news of our past."

Many experts believe the human genus Homo evolved from the Australopithecus genus about 2 million years ago. One of the best-known pre-humans is "Lucy," the skeleton of a species called Australopithecus afarensis, and this new species is about 1 million years younger than "Lucy," the scientists said.

The fossils, a juvenile male and an adult female, were found in the Malapa caves in the "Cradle of Humankind" World Heritage Site, 40 km (25 miles) outside Johannesburg.

The species had long arms, like an ape, short powerful hands, a very advanced pelvis and long legs capable of striding and possibly running like a human, the researchers said.

The scientists estimate both hominids were about 1.27 meters, although the child would have grown taller.



The brain size of the younger one was probably between 420 and 450 cubic centimeters, which is small when compared with the human brain of about 1200 to 1600 cubic centimeters, they said.

"These fossils give us an extraordinarily detailed look into a new chapter of human evolution ... when hominids made the committed change from dependency on life in the trees to life on the ground," said Berger.

Paul Dirks of James Cook University in Australia, who also worked on the study, said he and a team of researchers from around the world identified the fossils of at least 25 other species of animals in the cave, including saber-toothed cats, a wildcat, a brown hyena, a wild dog, antelopes and a horse.



Bureau Report
Images: Wits University; skeletons Science/AAAS

A robotic underwater vehicle powered by ocean movement

A robotic underwater vehicle that is powered entirely by natural, renewable, ocean thermal energy has been developed, holding out promise of almost indefinite monitoring of the ocean depths for climate and marine life studies.

Researchers have successfully demonstrated the Sounding Oceanographic Lagrangrian Observer Thermal RECharging (SOLO-TREC) autonomous underwater vehicle that uses a novel thermal recharging engine, powered by the natural temperature differences found at different ocean depths.

Scalable for use on most robotic oceanographic vehicles, this technology breakthrough could usher in a new generation of autonomous underwater vehicles.

A map of Solo-Trec's three-month journey off the Hawaiian coast.
(Credit: NASA/JPL/SIO/NOAA/U.S. Navy/NGA/GEBCO/Google)

Researchers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL), Pasadena, California and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, completed the first three months of an ocean endurance test of the prototype vehicle off the coast of Hawaii in March.

"People have long dreamed of a machine that produces more energy than it consumes and runs indefinitely," said Jack Jones, a JPL principal engineer and SOLO-TREC co-principal investigator.

"While not a true perpetual motion machine, since we actually consume some environmental energy, the prototype system demonstrated by JPL and its partners can continuously monitor the ocean without a limit on its lifetime imposed by energy supply," added Jones.

"Most of Earth is covered by ocean, yet we know less about the ocean than we do about the surface of some planets," said Yi Chao, JPL principal scientist and SOLO-TREC principal investigator.

"This technology to harvest energy from the ocean will have huge implications for how we can measure and monitor the ocean and its influence on climate," Chao added, according to a JPL release.

So far, SOLO-TREC has completed more than 300 dives from the ocean surface to a depth of 500 meters (1,640 feet). Its demonstration culminates five years of research and technology development by JPL and Scripps and is funded by the Office of Naval Research.

Missing link between man and apes found in South Africa

Homo habilis lived 2.0-1.6 million years ago and had
a wide distribution in Africa Photo: SPL

In a find that could rewrite the history of human evolution, palaeontologists claim to have found the "missing link" between humans and their apelike ancestors.

An international team has found a two-million-year-old skeleton of a child, which it claims belongs to a new species of hominid that may have been an intermediate stage as apemen evolved into advanced humans known as Homo habilis.

According to the palaeontologists, the skeleton shares characteristics with Homo habilis, whose emergence 2.5 million years ago is seen as a key stage in the evolution of humans. The team, led by Lee Berger of the University of Witwatersrand, found the skeleton while exploring cave systems in the Sterkfontein region of South Africa, near Johannesburg, an area known as "the Cradle of Humanity".

Phillip Tobias, an eminent human anatomist and anthropologist at the university who was one of three experts to first identify Homo habilis as a new species of human in 1964, described the discovery as "wonderful" and "exciting".

"To find a skeleton as opposed to a couple of teeth or an arm bone is a rarity. It is one thing to find a lower jaw with a couple of teeth, but it is another thing to find the jaw joined onto the skull, and those in turn uniting further down with the spinal column, pelvis and the limb bones.



"It is not a single find, but several specimens representing several individuals. The remains now being brought to light by Dr Berger and his team are wonderful", the Daily Telegraph quoted him as saying.

The skeleton was found along with a number of other partially complete fossils, encased within breccia rock inside a limestone cave known as Malapa cave. Simon Underdown, an expert on human evolution, said the new finding could help scientists gain a better understanding of our evolutionary tree.

The discovery is the most important find from Sterkfontein since an almost-complete fossil of a 3.3-million- year-old Australopithecus, nicknamed Little Foot, was found in 1994.

Oriental Yeti discovered in China

This bizarre creature dubbed the oriental yeti has baffled scientists after
emerging from ancient woodlands in remote central China. Photo: CEN

Scientists will examine a mysterious creature captured in China that has been dubbed the "oriental yeti".

The hairless animal, which was trapped by hunters in Sichuan province in the country's remote central woodlands, will be shipped to Beijing for DNA tests amid speculation it is a mythical beast described in local legend.

"It looks a bit like a bear but it doesn't have any fur and it has a tail like a kangaroo," the Telegraph quoted hunter Lu Chin as saying.

"It also does not sound like a bear — it has a voice more like a cat and it is calling all the time — perhaps it is looking for the rest of its kind or maybe it's the last one?

"There are local legends of a bear that used to be a man and some people think that's what we caught."

It is hoped the DNA tests will shed light on the mystery beast.

Photo: CEN

New lizard species discovered in Philippines

A new giant species of monitor lizard has been discovered in the forests of the Northern Philippines, scientists have said.

The two-metre (6ft 6in) brightly coloured lizard is a secretive, fruit-eating species which was found in the forests of the heavily populated and largely deforested Luzon Island.

The discovery of the monitor lizard was described as an "unprecedented surprise" by scientists documenting the find in the Royal Society Biology Letters journal.

It has become rare to discover previously unknown species of larger animals, they said.

The species (Varanus bitatawa) is restricted to the forests of the central and northern Sierra Madre range, where biologists have conducted relatively few surveys of reptiles and amphibians.

Genetic tests revealed it was a different species from a closely related monitor lizard, from which it is geographically separated by three non-forested river valleys on the island.

The researchers suggested it was a highly secretive species which never left forests to cross open areas.

The scientists said the monitor lizards, which highlighted the "unexplored nature of the Philippines", could become a flagship species for conservation efforts to preserve the remaining forests of the region.

Seasons Discovered on Neptune's Moon Triton

Neptune's largest moon Triton undergoes seasonal variations just like the Earth and is presently experiencing summer in its southern hemisphere, astronomers have found.

In a first-ever infrared analysis of Triton's atmosphere with the help of ESO's Very Large Telescope, the researchers have found presence of frozen nitrogen, carbon monoxide and methane on the moon’s thin surface which turn into gas as the southern hemisphere warms up by the Sun. The thin, icy atmosphere then thickens as the season advances during Neptune's 165-year orbit around the Sun.

“We have found real evidence that the Sun still makes its presence felt on Triton, even from so far away. This icy moon actually has seasons just as we do on Earth, but they change far more slowly,” said Emmanuel Lellouch, lead author of the paper reporting the results in Astronomy & Astrophysics journal.

The average surface temperature of Triton is about -235 degree Celsius and a season in the moon lasts a little over 40 years. While it is summer in its southern hemisphere, the northern hemisphere is witnessing winter.

While carbon monoxide was known to be present as ice on Triton's surface, the researchers' team has now found that the moon's upper surface layer is enriched with carbon monoxide ice by about a factor of ten compared to the deeper layers, and that it is this upper “film” that feeds the atmosphere. While the majority of Triton’s atmosphere is nitrogen, much like on Earth, the methane in its atmosphere, first detected by Voyager 2, and only now confirmed in this study from Earth, plays an important role as well.

"Climate and atmospheric models of Triton have to be revisited now, now that we have found carbon monoxide and re-measured the methane," said co-author Catherine de Bergh.

Triton is Neptune's largest of 13 moons and is the seventh largest moon in the Solar System. The moon has fascinated astronomers due to its geologic activity, presence of different types of surface ice, such as frozen nitrogen as well as water and dry ice. Its unique retrograde motion, i.e, a motion in the opposite direction to its planet's rotation, has also caused curiosity among researchers.

Moa bones and adze head find may date to 1400s

Moa bones and a Maori adze head are discovered on an historic building site on Auckland's North Shore. Photo / NZPA
A highly significant archaeological find including Moa bones and a Maori adze head has been discovered on an historic building site on Auckland's North Shore.

The bones and adze head were uncovered at Torpedo Bay, Devonport, where a new navy museum is being developed and due to open in August.

On a scale of one to 10 the find rated as a 10 for its historic value, an archaeologist with Opus International Consultants Limited, the principal design consultants for the museum project Mica Plowman told NZPA.

The find was thought to be more than 500 years old, possibly dating back to the 1400s.

The adze head and bones of the large, flightless and now extinct moa were found in a large fire pit.

The bones were part of a bird which was killed, cooked and eaten by Maori, Ms Plowman said.

The find was hugely significant because "first-settlement sites" were very rare and few had been excavated in Auckland.

Where the bones were found in the cooking pit indicated they had been discarded, indicating those who had eaten the bird had not been worried about running out of moa bones, highly useful for carving and working into items for everyday life.

Moa were believed to have become extinct in New Zealand about 500 years ago. They grew to about four metres tall and were heavily hunted by Maori, leading to their eventual extinction.

The site was found during work to renovate old defence buildings in Torpedo Bay, an historic part of Devonport and the site of a navy base since 1866.

Torpedo Bay was used in the late 1800s as a submarine mining station to defend Auckland against a possible invasion from the Imperial Russian Fleet. The mines spanned the harbour entrance and could be detonated from the shore if an enemy ship came up the harbour to attack.

It was also the base for the spar torpedo boats which were fitted with a long spar with an attached warhead and used to ram enemy ships. The boats were never used in conflict in New Zealand. They were highly unstable and considered to be more dangerous for the crew than for enemy ships.

Ms Plowman said the historic site was about 50 metre back from the harbour but when Maori used it, the site would have been on the water's edge.

It was a rare, exciting and very significant find, she said.

Early settlement sites were rare because they were often beach front sites which did not survive.

"Moa bones were a very valuable commodity in early Maori society. It was a robust large bone which enabled them to make large fish hooks and things out of it."

Historians say Torpedo Bay had many layers of history from the early days of Maori settlement in Auckland.

Kupe, the great Maori navigator, was thought to have landed his canoe in the bay about 900AD and named it Te Hau Kapua (cloud bank carried along by the wind).

Later one of the great `seven canoe' fleet commanded by Chief Hoturoa landed the Tainui people who were thought to have named a spring in the area `Takapuna', which later came to refer to the surrounding area.

In 1917, during World War 1, German Captain Felix Graf von Luckner was held prisoner at Torpedo Bay before being transferred to the island prison at Motuihe in the Hauraki Gulf.

The cell in the cliff where von Luckner was held still existed and would be part of the new navy museum's outside exhibits.

Fossil Found May Be Rare Dinosaur

Mountain Range H.S. Science Teacher May Have Found 'Ankylosaurid' Skull.

A Mountain Range High School science teacher with a hobby for paleontology has discovered what federal authorities said could be the first skull fragment from a rare dinosaur.

Kent Hups, a teacher at Westminster's Mountain Range High School, discovered the fossil in the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area in western Colorado.

Tests are pending, but the Bureau of Land Management said Saturday that the fragment appears to be the first from an armadillo-like dinosaur called the Ankylosaurid. The bone fragment is embedded in a rock weighing more than 100 pounds.

"It took 10 hours to get it out with a rock saw," Hups said. "It was exhausting work."

Hups digs for dinosaur fossils under a BLM paleontological use permit. The teacher has findings displayed in two Colorado science museums. In 2008, Hups found a perfectly preserved footprint of an Ankylosaurid.

"As the crow flies, this (skull) was about 1 1/2 miles from we found the print,"Hups said.

Hups said if the skull fragment is confirmed as an Ankylosaurid, it would be the first fossil of its kind from that dinosaur. However Hups is tentative to claim anything yet. He said it could take a year or longer before the specimen is properly identified.

The fossil will be brought to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science for analysis.

"We knew what kind of dinosaur it is based upon of the material we’ve pulled out before," Hups said. "We've got stuff that people have never seen before. We have stuff that is articulated, meaning it is how it was found in life.

"It is definitely something very unique and very different."

Fossil hunting brings many to western Colorado, and Grand Junction tourism officials are hoping the find sparks new interest in bone hunting.

Earthworms take group decisions, travel in herds

Contrary to the long-held belief that earthworms lack social behaviour, a new research has found the creatures, which play an important ecological role, use touch to communicate and take 'group decisions' to travel in the same direction as part of a single herd.

Researchers at University of Liege in Gembloux in Belgium, who have discovered this striking behaviour in the earthworm 'Eisenia fetida' for the first time, said a social cue influences earthworm behaviour "Our results modify the current view that earthworms are animals lacking in social behaviour," said researcher Lara Zirbes.

"We can consider the earthworm behaviour as equivalent that of a herd or swarm."

Zirbes and colleagues were originally interested in knowing how earthworms interact with other microorganisms in the soil.

However, they noticed that the earthworms formed herds to interact with each other.

"In experiments, I noticed that earthworms frequently clustered and formed a compact patch when they were out of the soil," Zirbes told the BBC.

The surprising behaviour fascinated the scientists to do more research as to how earthworms decided where to go, and whether they preferred to travel alone or in groups.

For their study, the researchers chose the earthworm Eisenia fetida, which tends to live near or at the soil surface, and carried out a series of experiments.

First, they placed 40 earthworms into a central chamber, from which extended two identical arms. The idea was to leave the animals alone, and then to see how many earthworms moved to either arm over a 24-hour period.

Over 30 identical repeats of the trial, the worms preferred to group within one chamber over the other.

"We noted that earthworms moving out of the central chamber influenced the directional choice of other earthworms.

"So our hypothesis was confirmed: a social cue influences earthworm behaviour," said Zirbes.

In another test, the researchers placed one worm at the start of a soil-filled maze, with two routes to a food source at the end.

After the worm chose its route to the food, the researchers added a second worm to see if it followed the same route as the first.

However, after repeated trials, the second worms were no more likely to take the same route as their predecessors. This indicated that the worms did not leave a chemical trail behind them that communicated their direction of travel.

Yet if two worms were placed together at the start of the maze, they were more likely to follow one another, suggesting that they used touch to communicate where they were going. In two-thirds of these trials, the worms followed each other.

"I have observed contact between two earthworms.

Sometimes they just cross their bodies and sometimes they maximise contact. Out of soil, earthworms can form balls," said Zirbes.

A modelling study then showed that, by using touch alone, up to 40 earthworms could follow each other in a similar way, explaining how herds of the animals preferred to move together into one chamber in the initial experiments.

"To our knowledge this is the first example of collective orientation in animals based on contact between followers," the researchers wrote in the journal Ethology.

Novel way to turn water into hydrogen fuel found

A team of MIT researchers has genetically modified a virus that can exploit sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen.

Splitting water is one way to solve the basic problem of solar energy: It's only available when the sun shines.

By using sunlight to make hydrogen from water, the hydrogen can then be stored and used at any time to generate electricity using a fuel cell, or to make liquid fuels for cars and trucks.

Other researchers have made systems that use electricity, which can be provided by solar panels, to split water molecules, but the new biologically based system skips the intermediate steps and uses sunlight to power the reaction directly.

The team, led by Angela Belcher, the Germeshausen Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering, engineered a common, harmless bacterial virus called M13 so that it would attract and bind with molecules of a catalyst (the team used iridium oxide) and a biological pigment (zinc porphyrins).

The viruses became wire-like devices that could very efficiently split the oxygen from water molecules.

The advance is described in a paper published on April 11 in Nature Nanotechnology.

Roman-era mummy found in Egyptian oasis

Egyptian archaeologists discovered an intricately carved plaster sarcophagus portraying a wide-eyed woman dressed in a tunic in a newly uncovered complex of tombs at a remote desert oasis, Egypt's antiquities department announced Monday.

It is the first Roman-style mummy found in Bahariya Oasis some 186 miles (300 kilometers) southwest of Cairo, said archaeologist Mahmoud Afifi, who led the dig. The find was part of a cemetery dating back to the Greco-Roman period containing 14 tombs.

"It is a unique find," he told The Associated Press, confirming that initial examinations indicate a mummy is inside the coffin.

The carved plaster sarcophagus is only 3 feet (1 meter) long and shows a woman wearing a long tunic, a headscarf, bracelet and shoes, as well as a beaded necklace. Colored stones in the sarcophagus' eyes gave the appearance she is awake.

Afifi said they had not dated the new find yet, but the burial style indicated she belonged to Egypt's long period of Roman rule lasting a few hundred years and starting 31 B.C.

He said his team first thought they had stumbled across a child's tomb because of its diminutive stature, but the decorations and features indicated it was a woman.

Afifi said it was still unclear who the woman was but said it was most likely she was a wealthy and influential member of her society, judging by the effort taken on the sarcophagus.

Mummies of people of diminutive stature have been unearthed in other parts of Egypt, where they appeared to have importance in local religions at the time, he added.

The archaeologists also found a gold relief showing the four sons of the Egyptian god Horus, other plaster masks of women's faces, several glass and clay utensils and some metal coins.

The metal coins are being checked to see whether they can date the era of the tomb more precisely.

Afifi said the find suggested the presence of a larger tomb complex, but said humid weather in the area may have destroyed similar sites.

He said none of the other 13 graves were as complete as that of the woman.

The find was made after archaeologists had made a series of exploratory digs ahead of a local council plan to build a youth center on the land. The area is known for its relics from the Greco-Roman period.

Bahariya Oasis rocketed to fame a decade ago with the discovery of the "Valley of the Golden Mummies," a vast cemetery that has yielded up hundreds of mummies, many covered in gold leaf, from the Greco-Roman period.

Those sarcophagi were decorated in a more traditional ancient Egyptian style, rather than the Roman style of the current find.

The discoveries from this period indicate the comparative wealth and prosperity of the oases at the time due to their location on major desert trading routes.

An extremely rare black penguin discovered

Photo via Andrew Evans of the National Geographic.

King Penguins are notorious for their prim, tuxedoed appearance -- but a recently discovered all-black penguin seems unafraid to defy convention. In what has been described as a "one in a zillion kind of mutation," biologists say that the animal has lost control of its pigmentation, an occurrence that is extremely rare. Other than the penguin's monochromatic outfit, the animal appears to be perfectly healthy -- and then some. "Look at the size of those legs," said one scientist, "It's an absolute monster."

The under-dressed penguin was photographed by Andrew Evans of National Geographic on the island of South Georgia near Antarctica. As the picture circulated, some biologists were taken aback -- including Dr. Allan Baker of the University of Toronto. His first response was disbelief:

Wow. That looks so bizarre I can't even believe it. Wow.

While multicolored birds will often show some variation, Dr. Baker explains that what makes this all-black King Penguin so rare is that the bird's melanin deposits have occurred where they are typically not present -- enough so that no light feathers even checker the bird's normally white chest.

Andrew Evans:

Melanism is merely the dark pigmentation of skin, fur -- or in this case, feathers. The unique trait derives from increased melanin in the body. Genes may play a role, but so might other factors. While melanism is common in many different animal species (e.g., Washington D.C. is famous for its melanistic squirrels), the trait is extremely rare in penguins. All-black penguins are so rare there is practically no research on the subject -- biologists guess that perhaps one in every quarter million of penguins shows evidence of at least partial melanism, whereas the penguin we saw appears to be almost entirely (if not entirely) melanistic.

Whether or not the all-black look catches on in the penguin fashion world, it's nice to see someone dressing-down for once.

Stephen Messenger is a correspondent at TreeHugger, where this post originally appeared.

Tags: National Geographic, King Penguins, pigmentation, photographed, Discovered