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Post and discuss interesting articles & videos about science and technology.

You don't need to be an expert - just interested in the wonders of modern science, technology, and the history of these fields.

Please keep it rational, and post articles from reputable sources.
Try not to editorialise headlines and keep the copy to just a paragraph with a link to the original source. When quoting excerpts from articles, I think the best method is to italicise the copy, and include a link to the source.

Have some fun with your comments and discussions... just keep the sources legitimate.

Other threads:
The Break Room has a number of other popular threads, so there is no need to post material here that is better suited to these other threads:

- Covid19-Coronavirus updates and news
- Conspiracy Thread Free For All
- The *religious* discussion thread


Please enjoy!
 
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The views expressed on this page by users and staff are their own, not those of NamePros.
Can you train yourself to be a morning person?

It is possible to make the switch, but it's not easy, said Michelle Drerup, director of behavioral sleep medicine at the Cleveland Clinic. "A true night owl doesn't really feel great first thing when they wake up, especially when they're starting to shift this."

A person's tendency to be a night owl, early bird or some place in between is known as their chronotype. Depending on their chronotype, people are likely to be more awake and alert during certain times of the day and sleepier during others.

Chronotype is determined by a combination of nature and nurture, scientists have found. On the nature side, a number of genes are known to play roles in determining whether a person prefers to be awake late at night or early in the morning, Drerup told Live Science. Hundreds of genes are associated with being a morning person, according to a 2019 study published in the journal Nature Communications. These genes influence a person's circadian rhythm, or their natural sleep-wake cycle, which leads to their chronotype.


Environment also plays a large role. People tend to participate in daily activities that reinforce their chronotype, Drerup said. For example, night owls feel more productive and alert at night, so they tend to exercise and socialize in the evening. These activities are stimulating and reinforce the person’s tendency to stay up late.

Can a night owl turn into an early bird? | Live Science


You certainly can.

A particular job I did for a 4 year period required me to start at 5am. It took me about a month to readjust my lifestyle and bodyclock, but I soon learnt to love it, and naturally woke up at 3:30am without setting an alarm clock. Early morning is a very special time of the day. It's very quiet and peaceful.
 
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First Flight of the Ingenuity Mars Helicopter: Live from Mission Control

Up, up, and away! The Ingenuity #MarsHelicopter is set to make history. It will make the first attempt at powered flight on another planet on Monday, April 19. Don’t miss your chance to watch live with helicopter team in mission control beginning at 6:15 a.m. EDT (10:15 a.m. UTC) as they receive the data and find out if they were successful.


First flight on Mars a success!

It's not as ground beaking a moment as the Wright Brothers first flight, but congratulations guys :)
 
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We flew an aircraft on another planet for first time ever. Not ground breaking but space breaking:xf.grin:
 
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We flew an aircraft on another planet for first time ever. Not ground breaking but space breaking:xf.grin:

What is really amazing is that there is not much atmosphere/air for the rotors to grab.

I think it is something like 1% of Earths atmosphere?

Those little blades were paddling their heart out ;)
 
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Single-use plastics dominate debris on the North Pacific's deep ocean floor

By doing video surveillance deep in the ocean, researchers working in the North Pacific have discovered the densest accumulation of plastic waste ever recorded on an abyssal seafloor, finding that the majority of this waste is single-use packaging.

The study, published March 29 in Marine Pollution Bulletin, highlights the huge environmental burden of single-use plastic, and also sheds more light on what happens to plastic once it goes into the sea.


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"The majority of plastic debris that [ends] up in the ocean [is] missing," said Ryota Nakajima, a marine biology researcher at the Japan Agency for Marine Earth-Science and Technology. "Each year, more than 10 million tons of plastics make their way into the ocean, but the abundance of plastics floating on the ocean surface represents merely a few percent of the plastics in the ocean."


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More precisely, between 4.8 million and 12.7 million tons of plastic makes its way into the ocean every year. Plastic in the ocean poses a huge threat to the safety of the environment, particularly when it deteriorates into microplastics. Plastic disrupts habitats, is mistaken for food by animals and spreads volatile toxins through the water.
 
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In fascinating new research, cosmologists explain the history of the universe as one of self-teaching, autodidactic algorithms.

The scientists, including physicists from Brown University and the Flatiron Institute, say the universe has probed all the possible physical laws before landing on the ones we observe around us today. Could this wild idea help inform scientific research to come?

In their novella-length paper, published to the pre-print server arXiV, the researchers—who received “computational, logistical, and other general support” from Microsoft—offer ideas “at the intersection of theoretical physics, computer science, and philosophy of science with a discussion from all three perspectives,” they write, teasing the bigness and multidisciplinary nature of the research.

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Here’s how it works: Our universe observes a whole bunch of laws of physics, but the researchers say other possible laws of physics seem equally likely, given the way mathematics works in the universe. So if a group of candidate laws were equally likely, then how did we end up with the laws we really have?

The scientists explain: “The notion of ‘learning’ as we use it is more than moment-to-moment, brute adaptation. It is a cumulative process that can be thought of as theorizing, modeling, and predicting. For instance, the DNA/RNA/protein system on Earth must have arisen from an adaptive process, and yet it foresees a space of organisms much larger than could be called upon in any given moment of adaptation.”

https://www.popularmechanics.co.za/science/the-universe-is-a-machine-that-keeps-learning/
 
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Researchers discover a new high-altitude Himalayan lake — and its waters are red
The reddish hue of the lake is likely due to iron-rich minerals in the area


Lakes come in all different sizes, shapes, and even colors: blue, pink, green, and brown.

Now, scientists from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) have reported a reddish-brown colored glacial lake in a remote region in the Northeast Himalayas. Scientists discovered this reddish lake using satellite images taken over the past 20 years.

This high-altitude lake is situated 5060 meters above sea level, near the Zanskar valley, Ladakh in the Himalayan range. It is 11 kilometers (~7 miles) from the nearest village, and covers an area of approximately 0.2 square kilometers — about the size of New York City’s Grand Central Station. The lake is being fed by a northeasterly glacier, and the researchers suggest that it has either been formed or expanded due to glacial melt caused by climate change.

The team predicts that the reddish hue of the lake is caused by the dissolution or mixing of iron-rich minerals such as hematite and goethite in the area; a reaction likely catalyzed by chlorine levels in the water or microbial weathering of sub-glacial bedrock. Because of the unique geochemistry in the area, the molecules in the lake are reflecting light at longer wavelengths, giving the lake the reddish color.


Google Maps
 
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Scientists probe mystery of 'thunderstorm asthma' event that sent thousands to the ER

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Calls to emergency departments spiked in the wake of a thunderstorm that swept over Melbourne, Australia, in 2016. It was a rare outbreak of "thunderstorm asthma," the most severe ever recorded.

Now, a new model, published April 14 in the journal PLOS One, hints that a combination of lightning strikes, wind gusts, low humidity and popping pollen grains may be to blame for the surge of asthma attacks following the storm, which contributed to the deaths of 10 people.
 
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Team recovers ancient genomes from dirt, revealing new history of North America’s bears

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When scientists need ancient DNA, they typically have to drill into teeth or bones—a process that can destroy delicate, sometimes irreplaceable, samples. And that’s assuming they have those teeth or bones in the first place.

Now, researchers have shown they can recover not just high-quality ancient DNA from dirt but also close approximations of whole genomes. The samples in question—from a cave floor in northern Mexico—not only reveal another way to get such genetic material, they help clarify the history of North America’s ice age bears.

The approach is a “huge breakthrough” for the ancient DNA field, says Anna Linderholm, an archaeologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved with the work. “We are just scratching the surface of what is possible when retrieving ancient DNA from sediments.”
 
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Quantum Internet: A Revolution In Knowledge Is Almost A Reality

IT’S NOT HYPERBOLE to say that a quantum-powered internet would be revolutionary. It would allow quantum devices to deliver astonishing levels of privacy and security, and the computational clout to solve the kinds of complex problems that would fry a classical computer.

The countries and companies that have been busily laying the groundwork for a quantum internet have so far only been able to connect two quantum devices. But now, physicists at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands have successfully connected three quantum devices.

This may not sound like much, but in quantum computing terms it’s huge.

“This is the first time a network has been constructed from quantum processors,” lead study author Ronald Hanson tells Inverse. Hanson is an experimental physicist, Distinguished Professor at Delft University of Technology, and principal investigator at QuTech, a research center devoted to quantum computing and quantum internet.

“A single direct link between two processors has been shown on many platforms in the past decade, but no network had been achieved.”

These findings were published on Thursday in the journal Science


WHAT IS THE QUANTUM INTERNET?

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Quantum computing enables powerful processing at more than a hundred million times the speed of a classical computer. Put simply, a quantum computer is capable of processing every possible answer to a problem simultaneously. How it does this is brain-meltingly complex because it harnesses the bizarre, and largely still pretty mysterious, behaviors of quantum physics.

Imagine the processing power of multiple quantum devices, or nodes, connected through a quantum internet. Experts predict that a global network of quantum computers could theoretically supply answers to some of our most challenging questions, like turning back climate change, curing disease, and solving world hunger. But the most immediate benefit is security.


“Quantum communication networks bring in a fundamentally new security paradigm, not threatened by any amount of computing power: the security is in the physics of it,” Harun Šiljak, an assistant professor at the School of Engineering at Trinity College Dublin, tells Inverse. Šiljak was not involved in the new study.

“When done right, such a secure communication protocol gives you the benefit of not having to trust anyone: hardware provider, software provider, network operator, or the state.”
 
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Study reveals the workings of nature's own earthquake blocker

A new study finds a naturally occurring "earthquake gate" that decides which earthquakes are allowed to grow into magnitude 8 or greater.

Sometimes, the "gate" stops earthquakes in the magnitude 7 range, while ones that pass through the gate grow to magnitude 8 or greater, releasing over 32 times as much energy as a magnitude 7.


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"An earthquake gate is like someone directing traffic at a one-lane construction zone. Sometimes you pull up and get a green 'go' sign, other times you have a red 'stop' sign until conditions change," said UC Riverside geologist Nicolas Barth.

Researchers learned about this gate while studying New Zealand's Alpine Fault, which they determined has about a 75 percent chance of producing a damaging earthquake within the next 50 years. The modeling also suggests this next earthquake has an 82 percent chance of rupturing through the gate and being magnitude 8 or greater. These insights are now published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
 
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Ocean currents modulate oxygen content at the equator

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Due to global warming, not only the temperatures in the atmosphere and in the ocean are rising, but also winds and ocean currents as well as the oxygen distribution in the ocean are changing. For example, the oxygen content in the ocean has decreased globally by about 2% in the last 60 years, particularly strong in the tropical oceans. However, these regions are characterized by a complex system of ocean currents. At the equator, one of the strongest currents, the Equatorial Undercurrent (EUC), transports water masses eastwards across the Atlantic. The water transport by the EUC is more than 60 times larger than that of the Amazon river.


For many years, scientists at GEOMAR have been investigating in cooperation with the international PIRATA program fluctuations of this current with fixed observation platforms, so-called moorings. Based on the data obtained from these moorings, they were able to prove that the EUC has strengthened by more than 20% between 2008 and 2018. The intensification of this major ocean current is associated with increasing oxygen concentrations in the equatorial Atlantic and an increase in the oxygen-rich layer near the surface. Such a thickening of the surface oxygenated layer represents a habitat expansion for tropical pelagic fish. The results of the study have now been published in the international journal Nature Geoscience.
 
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The real reason your cat sits on your laptop: To assert dominance

It’s also unlikely cats are solely drawn to the warmth your laptop generates, either. “Yes, laptops emit heat and hot spaces are attractive to cats. But you need to ask why your cat doesn’t just sit by a radiator, for instance,” says Sands.

The real attraction of your laptop to cats? Its scent. Or, to be more precise: the scent you regularly deposit there.

“You won’t be able to sniff it, but a cat can smell you all over the keyboard,” says Sands.

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“Cats are scent machines from the end of the tail to the tip of their nose. Their world is about scent – their eyesight’s developed for night-time hunting, meaning their sense of smell is really important at other times.”

However, while it’s possible your cat may sit on your computer as they enjoy this scent, another explanation is far more likely, according to Sands.

“It’s more probable your cat wants to deposit its own scent and supplant yours. It’s all about ownership – by doing this your cat is effectively saying ‘I own you!’
 
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US researchers seek citizen scientists as billions of Brood X cicadas set to emerge

As New Yorkers nervously await the emergence of billions of cicada bugs set to swarm through their city and the north-east of the US, researchers are seeking to enlist citizen scientists to track the coming plague.

The so-called Brood X of cicadas are set to emerge after 17 years underground. This particular cohort of the periodic insects will swarm in several large areas in the eastern US, as they prepare for one enormous mate fest, including New York’s Central Park and parts of the Bronx and Staten Island.

Tracking the cicadas is as easy as snapping a photo. Anyone with a smartphone can download the free Cicada Safari app to help with data collection. Once the media is uploaded the app automatically captures the time, date and geographical coordinates. Once the images are verified, the information is mapped.

https://www.namepros.com/threads/science-technology-news-discussion.1212824/page-106
 
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The real reason your cat sits on your laptop: To assert dominance

It’s also unlikely cats are solely drawn to the warmth your laptop generates, either. “Yes, laptops emit heat and hot spaces are attractive to cats. But you need to ask why your cat doesn’t just sit by a radiator, for instance,” says Sands.

The real attraction of your laptop to cats? Its scent. Or, to be more precise: the scent you regularly deposit there.

“You won’t be able to sniff it, but a cat can smell you all over the keyboard,” says Sands.

cat-keyboard-ce6b95f.jpg



“Cats are scent machines from the end of the tail to the tip of their nose. Their world is about scent – their eyesight’s developed for night-time hunting, meaning their sense of smell is really important at other times.”

However, while it’s possible your cat may sit on your computer as they enjoy this scent, another explanation is far more likely, according to Sands.

“It’s more probable your cat wants to deposit its own scent and supplant yours. It’s all about ownership – by doing this your cat is effectively saying ‘I own you!’

I think they also realise that it is obviously important to you, and the best way of getting attention is to annoy you by dominating that space.

On that subject, what is it with cats pushing us out of bed or off the couch? They are small...why do they need to dominate the whole mattress or couch?

And deliberately knocking things off the table... tapping it repeatedly with a paw till it reaches the edge and falls off, while watching your reaction. Arghhh!
 
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Tarantulas Are Basically All Over The Planet, And Scientists Can Finally Explain Why

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Few spiders elicit as much reaction from humans as the famous and feared tarantula. These giant, hairy arachnids are known for their remarkable size, brilliant colors, and distinctive physical attributes.

But it's not just the tarantula itself that is so impressively (albeit unsettlingly) large. So is the creature's footprint on the globe – which is surprising since tarantulas are relatively sedentary spiders; females and juveniles in particular rarely wander away from their burrows, if they do at all.

Nonetheless, tarantulas (the Theraphosidae family of spiders) are to be found virtually everywhere, living on all Earth's continents except for Antarctica.

"They are quite widespread and are found throughout the subtropical regions of every continent," a research team led by bioinformatician Saoirse Foley from Carnegie Mellon University explains in a new study.

"[Their] behaviors do not portend that tarantulas would be successful dispersers, yet they have spread across the globe and have colonized strikingly different ecological niches."

What can explain the successful migration of tarantula spiders to so many different corners of the globe?

Read on...

https://www.sciencealert.com/tarant...ywhere-and-scientists-can-finally-explain-why
 
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NASA's New Horizons reaches a rare space milestone

...on April 17 at 12:42 UTC (or April 17 at 8:42 a.m. EDT), New Horizons will reach a rare deep-space milepost—50 astronomical units from the sun, or 50 times farther from the sun than Earth is.

New Horizons is just the fifth spacecraft to reach this great distance, following the legendary Voyagers 1 and 2 and their predecessors, Pioneers 10 and 11. It's almost 5 billion miles (7.5 billion kilometers) away; a remote region where one of those radioed commands, even traveling at the speed of light, needs seven hours to reach the far flung spacecraft. Then add seven more hours before its control team on Earth finds out if the message was received.

New Horizons was practically designed to make history. Dispatched at 36,400 miles per hour (58,500 kilometers per hour) on Jan. 19, 2006, New Horizons was and is still the fastest human-made object ever launched from Earth. Its gravity-assist flyby of Jupiter in February 2007 not only shaved about three years from its voyage to Pluto, but allowed it to make the best views ever of Jupiter's faint ring, and capture the first movie of a volcano erupting anywhere in the solar system except Earth.

Read the full article:

https://phys.org/news/2021-04-nasa-horizons-rare-space-milestone.html


More information:

https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/newhorizons/main/index.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons

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Is happiness U-shaped everywhere? Age and subjective well-being in 145 countries

Abstract

A large empirical literature has debated the existence of a U-shaped happiness-age curve. This paper re-examines the relationship between various measures of well-being and age in 145 countries, including 109 developing countries, controlling for education and marital and labor force status, among others, on samples of individuals under the age of 70. The U-shape of the curve is forcefully confirmed, with an age minimum, or nadir, in midlife around age 50 in separate analyses for developing and advanced countries as well as for the continent of Africa. The happiness curve seems to be everywhere. While panel data are largely unavailable for this issue, and the findings using such data largely confirm the cross-section results, the paper discusses insights on why cohort effects do not drive the findings. I find the age of the minima has risen over time in Europe and the USA.

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Results From The World's Largest Wellbeing Study Are In: Here's What We Know

For decades, researchers have known that positive mental wellbeing seems to deliver significant improvements in physical health, development, and lifespan – which suggests looking after your mind and mental state is one of the most effective ways to care for the rest of your body as well.

But what's the best way to actually promote personal mental wellbeing? In a new study led by scientists in Australia, researchers cast a wide net, analyzing data from almost 420 randomized trials employing different kinds of psychological interventions to help improve mental states of wellbeing.

The results – a meta-analysis examining data from over 53,000 participants involved in hundreds of psychological experiments – is being billed as the world's largest study of its kind on wellbeing, giving perhaps the most comprehensive overview ever on how interventions can help towards a healthy mind and body.

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the myriad hardships it has brought all over the world, new insights on how to successfully bolster mental states are in high demand.

"During stressful and uncertain periods in our lives, pro-actively working on our mental health is crucial to help mitigate the risk of mental and physical illness," says mental health researcher Joep Van Agteren from the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute (SAHMRI).

"Our research suggests there are numerous psychological approaches people should experiment with to determine what works for them."

Read on...

https://www.sciencealert.com/result...er-wellbeing-study-are-in-here-s-what-we-know
 
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Winners of $20M contest make concrete to trap carbon dioxide

Organizers of a $20 million contest to develop products from greenhouse gas that flows from power plants announced two winners Monday ahead of launching a similar but much bigger competition backed by Elon Musk.


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Both winners made concrete that trapped carbon dioxide, keeping it out of the atmosphere, where it can contribute to climate change. Production of cement, concrete's key ingredient, accounts for 7% of global emissions of the greenhouse gas, said Marcius Extavour, XPRIZE vice president of climate and energy.

"So it's not surprising that the winning teams focused on reducing emissions associated with concrete, which will be a game-changer for global decarbonization," he said in a statement.

Meanwhile, Musk, the electric car and space entrepreneur, has pledged $100 million for researchers who can show how to trap huge volumes of carbon dioxide straight from the atmosphere and store the gas permanently. That competition will kick off Thursday, which is Earth Day.
 
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Microplastics found to alter shape of and de-cluster human lung cells

A growing body of research has started to illuminate the widespread impacts of plastic pollution, and the downstream effects of it on the environment and human health. A new study has delved into the kind of damage microplastics can cause to human lungs, with researchers observing changes to the shape of lung cells and a slowdown in their metabolism when exposed to these tiny plastic particles.

The research was carried out at Florida State University (FSU) and focuses on small fragments of plastic waste that have broken down in the environment. In the past few years, we've seen these microplastics turn up in Antarctic sea ice, near the summit of Mt Everest, in snowfall in the Arctic, and in human stool samples collected all around the world.


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At the same time, scientists have started to investigate how these tiny particles can impact the health of various organisms, with studies finding they can cause aneurysms in fish, impair shell selection in hermit crabs and build up in plants to stunt their growth. The World Health Organization also launched a health review into the microplastics in bottled drinking water, while in separate but related research last week, plasticizers used in BPA-like plastics were found to likely cause alarming damage to brain cells.


https://newatlas.com/science/microplastics-alter-shape-de-cluster-human-lung-cells/
 
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New Study Pushes Origins of Human-Driven Global Change Back Thousands of Years

Conventional scientific wisdom holds that human-driven global change only began within the last few hundred years. But that theory neglects thousands of years of human history.


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A new paper published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that people started changing the global landscape at least 12,000 years ago. This study, by scientists at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and others, explains how understanding people’s past land use strategies will help us better conserve global biodiversity now.

“It’s a story of shifting patterns of land use,” said Erle Ellis, a professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore and the lead author on the study.
 
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Earth's biggest mass extinction took ten times longer on land than in the water

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Our planet's worst mass extinction event happened 252 million years ago when massive volcanic eruptions caused catastrophic climate change. The vast majority of animal species went extinct, and when the dust settled, the planet entered the early days of the Age of Dinosaurs. Scientists are still learning about the patterns of which animals went extinct and which ones survived, and why. In a new study in PNAS, researchers found that while extinctions happened rapidly in the oceans, life on land underwent a longer, more drawn-out period of extinctions.

"People assumed that because the marine extinction happened over a short period of time, life on land should have followed the same pattern, but we found that the marine extinction may actually be a punctuation to a longer, more drawn-out event on land," says Pia Viglietti, a postdoctoral researcher at Chicago's Field Museum and the lead author of the PNAS study.
 
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Utah Dinosaur Graveyard Indicates T-Rex Was Social Predator

The Bureau of Land Management released a new study that indicted the fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex traveled in packs and were not lone hunters as previously thought.

The study, released Monday, came from years of work at a fossil site inside Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Southern Utah.

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BLM Palentologgist Dr. Alan Titus discovered the Rainbows and Unicorns Quarry site in 2014.

“We realized right away this site could potentially be used to test the social tyrannosaur idea. Unfortunately, the site’s ancient history is complicated,” Titus said. “With bones appearing to have been exhumed and reburied by the action of a river, the original context with which they lay has been destroyed. However, all has not been lost.”
 
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The Google Doodle for the day...

Johannes Gutenberg


... who introduced printing to Europe with his mechanical movable-type printing press. His work started the Printing Revolution and is regarded as a milestone of the second millennium, ushering in the modern period of human history.

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Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg
c 1400 - February 3, 1468


Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (/ˈɡuːtənbɜːrɡ/;[1] c. 1400[2] – February 3, 1468) was a German goldsmith, inventor, printer, and publisher who introduced printing to Europe with his mechanical movable-type printing press. His work started the Printing Revolution and is regarded as a milestone of the second millennium, ushering in the modern period of human history; an overview of the wide acclaim of Gutenberg’s accomplishments is found in several sources.[3] In 1999, the A&E Network ranked Gutenberg no. 1 on their "People of the Millennium" countdown.[4] In 1997, Time–Life magazine picked Gutenberg's invention as the most important of the second millennium.[5] Four prominent US journalists did the same in their 1998 resume, ranking his impact high in shaping the millennium.[6] The Catholic Encyclopedia describes Gutenberg’s invention as having made a practically unparalleled cultural impact in the Christian era.[7] It played a key role in the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, Age of Enlightenment, and Scientific Revolution, as well as laying the material basis for the modern knowledge-based economy and the spread of learning to the masses.[8][9][10][11]

Gutenberg in 1439 was the first European to use movable type. His many contributions to printing include: the invention of a process for mass-producing movable type; the use of oil-based ink for printing books;[12] adjustable molds;[13] mechanical movable type; and the use of a wooden printing press similar to the agricultural screw presses of the period.[14] His truly epochal invention was the combination of these elements into a practical system that allowed the mass production of printed books and was economically viable for printers and readers alike. Gutenberg's method for making type is traditionally considered to have included a type metal alloy and a hand mould for casting type. The alloy was a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony that melted at a relatively low temperature for faster and more economical casting, cast well, and created a durable type.[15]

In Renaissance Europe, the arrival of mechanical movable type printing introduced the era of mass communication which permanently altered the structure of society. The relatively unrestricted circulation of information—including revolutionary ideas—transcended borders, captured the masses in the Reformation and threatened the power of political and religious authorities; the sharp increase in literacy broke the monopoly of the literate elite on education and learning and bolstered the emerging middle class. Across Europe, the increasing cultural self-awareness of its people led to the rise of proto-nationalism, accelerated by the flowering of the European vernacular languages to the detriment of Latin's status as lingua franca. In the 19th century, the replacement of the hand-operated Gutenberg-style press by steam-powered rotary presses allowed printing on an industrial scale, while Western-style printing was adopted all over the world, becoming practically the sole medium for modern bulk printing.

The use of movable type was a marked improvement on the handwritten manuscript, which was the existing method of book production in Europe, and upon woodblock printing, and revolutionized European book-making. Gutenberg's printing technology spread rapidly throughout Europe and later the world. His major work, the Gutenberg Bible (also known as the 42-line Bible), was the first printed version of the Bible and has been acclaimed for its high aesthetic and technical quality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Gutenberg


Gutenberg.org has about 62K downloadable free e-books. A great resource for learners.
 
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