Here’s a big Nope-asaurus for ya: Reconstructions of most dinosaurs with their tongues out and wriggling like this guy’s are wrong, according to a new study. (Credit: Spencer Wright)
When it comes to fleshing out dinosaurs, so to speak, based on their nearest living relatives, paleontologists can look to birds or the crocodilians. But a new study says depicting most dinosaur tongues like those of birds with particularly mobile mouthpieces, well, thatâ ...read more
The 2018 Geology World Cup continues! Remember, vote for the other groups so far: Group A, Group B, Group C, Group D.
Group E
Brazil
The mouth of the Amazon River, seen from space in 1990. NASA.
Let’s not beat around the bush, Brazil has the Amazon. One of the most remarkable river systems on the planet, it dominates the central portion of the country and flushes an amazing amount of sediment from the base of the Andes to the west out into the Atlantic to the east. But that&a ...read more
Investigators working a crime scene have a potential new tool: a field technique that could quickly determine the age of the person who left behind a bloodstain, whether victim or suspect. (Credit: FBI)
There’s a significant gap between the information that real-world forensics teams can glean from a crime scene and what turns up in glamorized tv shows such as “CSI.� Today, however, that gap gets a little smaller: Researchers reveal it& ...read more
Chimera: A genetically modified mouse embryo successfully grew a beating heart from rat stem cells. (Credit: Salk Institute)
More than 100,000 people in the United States need an organ transplant, but demand always outpaces supply. An average of 20 people in the nation died every day in 2016 because organs were unavailable, and that was despite record annual donations of more than 33,000.
Physicians have proposed many solutions to encourage organ donations, including payment. But scientists a ...read more
The cinder/spatter cone being built by Fissure 8, here reaching 50 meters at its rim on June 16, 2018. USGS/HVO.
The eruption on Kīlauea’s lower East Rift Zone continues onward, with Fissure 8 building an impressive cinder cone similar to the one that was formed during the 1960 eruption that the current lavas have wrapped around (see map below). The cinder cone, built by the fountaining of lava from fissure 8, is now over 50 meters (170 feet) tall wi ...read more
An animation of GOES-16 weather satellite imagery showing a complex of thunderstorms over Iowa on June 14, 2018, with an overlay of lightning mapping. (Source: RAMMB/CIRA GOES-16 Loop of the Day)
As a giant complex of thunderstorms blew across Iowa and into Illinois and Missouri on June 14, the GOES-16 weather satellite was watching — and mapping the crackling lightning discharges.
The result is the video above, originally posted to the terrific GOES-16 Loop of the Day ...read more
A white post to the left of the cliff base marks the location where the grave of Anzick-1 was found half a century ago. (Credit: PNAS)
He is arguably the most famous ancient American baby: an infant First American whose partial remains were found 50 years ago on a Montana ranch. But while Anzick-1, as the child is known, changed our understanding of the human history of the Americas, critics have complained the dates around the burial are messy, and throw the significance of the site into quest ...read more
Here’s how surface temperatures around the globe in May varied from the long-term average for the month. Last month was the fourth warmest May globally on record. (Source: NASA/GISS)
In their monthly climate reports released today, both NASA and NOAA agree that last month was fourth warmest among all Mays dating back to 1800.
This means that the period 2014 through 2018 has brought the five warmest Mays in 138 years of record-keeping, according to NOAA&ac ...read more
I’ll have another post later today with some of the geology news of the weekend, including the eruptions in Kīlauea and Fernandina, along with the earthquake in Japan. However, first I’ll give everyone a chance to vote for Groups C and D in the Geology World Cup. If you haven’t voted in Group A or Group B, do it!
Group C
Part of the Great Barrier Reef, seen from space. NASA.
Australia: The only country that is also a whole con ...read more
The Cizhutuo fossil, a 22,000-year-old giant panda skull. (Credit: Yingqi Zhang and Yong Xu)
When Qiaomei Fu got her hands on a 22,000-year-old panda skull in 2014, she was both surprised and elated.
An expert in paleogenomics, Fu had done most of her past work on the DNA of ancient humans, but she has a personal interest in pandas. Now, in 2018, she and her team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are the first to have sequenced the entire mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome of an ancient giant p ...read more
