WASHINGTON - March 24, 2005 - For more than a century, the study of dinosaurs has been limited to fossilized bones. Now, researchers have recovered 70 million-year-old soft tissue, including what may be blood vessels and cells, from a Tyrannosaurus rex.
The soft tissues were recovered from the thighbone of a T. rex, known as MOR 1125, that was found in a sandstone formation in Montana. The dinosaur was about 18 years old when it died.
The bone was broken when it was removed from the site. Schweitzer and her colleagues then analyzed the material inside the bone.
"The vessels and contents are similar in all respects to blood vessels recovered from ... ostrich bone," they reported in a paper bring published Friday in the journal Science.
Because evidence has accumulated in recent years that modern birds descended from dinosaurs, Schweitzer said she chose to compare the dinosaur remains with those of an ostrich, the largest bird available.
Full article at the jump http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7285683/
For obvious reasons, scientists long have thought that salt water couldn't be burned.
So when an Erie man announced he'd ignited salt water with the radio-frequency generator he'd invented, some thought it a was a hoax.
Rustum Roy, a Penn State University chemist, held a demonstration last week at the university's Materials Research Laboratory in State College, to confirm what he'd witnessed weeks before in an Erie lab.
It's true, it works," Dr. Roy said. "Everyone told me, 'Rustum, don't be fooled. He put electrodes in there.
But there are no electrodes and no gimmicks, he said
As such, Dr. Roy, a founding member of the Materials Research Laboratory and expert in water structure, said Mr. Kanzius' discovery represents "the most remarkable in water science in 100 years
Dr. Roy said he's scheduled to meet tomorrow with U.S. Department of Energy and Department of Defense officials in Washington to discuss the discovery and seek research funding.
First watch this video to get an idea of what I'm talking about
What if a fleet of cars was put out by a city to do this sort of thing? It would minimize traffic by speeding up reaction times. It would force better mileage and hence better emissions. Tons of money could be saved by a constant travel speed, through minimizing the speeding up and slowing down that makes us dump so much gas. If anyone had a problem with it, they'd be perceived as a belligerent Mr. Wheeler who has no basic respect for the law; akin to someone disregarding the necessary order imposed by traffic signals. It could force certain speeds at times of high traffic. It would be like a speed limiting line made up of parts of city fleet automobiles going exactly the speed limit. Whomever could bring this about would probably be hated by many buttheads who, usually barely conscious much less remorseful of the act, break the law by speeding every day. This hate from the lack of "free speed" I think would probably anger people for generations. It could also strike another tone. So much of commerce is time dependent, that the inability to speed could hit corporate profit margins and levels of financial flexibility. How much state money would be lost from lack of tickets? How would it effect healthcare professions that deal with trauma and rehab? How much would the demand for oil fall, given more efficient usage of fuel? How would it change the overall level of driving sanity when there's nothing one can do to go past the posted speed limit?
Check out this report by the Surface Transportation Policy Project(pdf). 40000+ deaths and 3million injuries from car crashes in 2001 that might have been greatly diminished by something like this. Notice the geometric progression of the fatality rate with reference to increasing speeds. How many more fatalities and injuries would we have without traffic signals?
Imagine how many lives this could save. Without a discrepancy in common speed, people would have no motivation to run up other drivers' behinds, or switching lanes for anything but exiting. It might have the negative effect of sending more traffic through residentials, but who's to say that major residential streets couldn't eventually have these too? Roving fleets of speedkeepers...makes my mind churn. So much potential for lessening road rage and stress while driving. When there's nothing you can do short of accosting a line of uniformly roaming police/municipal workers, or trying to drive around the line at legal consequence; the rage would mostly disappear because of the inherent acceptance of the good of the law. This is akin to how traffic lights are viewed. Sure, it would be nice to just stop and go whenever you want to while driving, but we as a society have come to accept traffic lights as a small impairment to our convenience in light of the overwhelming returns in overall safety levels. People still scowl at traffic lights, but always come to accept the value of their necessity due to the acknowledgment of it being a self imposed system that benefits virtually everyone. The idea portrayed in the video above could be viewed in exactly the same light. This would make all of driving like participating in some huge train that one could just merely link up to when traveling in an automobile. I think it would virtually kill the concept of speeding as we know it, ushering the end of "free speed" as a god-given American right.
Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, August 14, 2007; Page A01
Nasdaq is set to launch tomorrow what its executives are calling one of the most significant developments on Wall Street in decades -- a private stock market for super-wealthy investors.
Minimum requirement for traders: $100 million in assets.
Any private firm can list on Nasdaq's new platform, which is called the Portal Market, and raise money by selling stock to an elite group of shareholders. These companies would remain private and not have to make public their financial statements or submit to federal regulation, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley corporate accountability law.
For the first time last year, corporate America raised more money -- $162 billion -- from private investors than from initial public offerings, which raised $154 billion from the three major U.S. stock markets -- Nasdaq, the New York Stock Exchange and the American Stock Exchange.
Ordinary investors can only participate indirectly if their mutual fund creates an account to trade on the private markets.
These markets are creating an alternative and exclusive investment world buffeted from the turmoil that has roiled the major stock indicators in recent weeks. In the public markets, investors dumped stock during a credit crisis caused by the deteriorating mortgage industry. Private-market traders generally are sophisticated financial groups that take a long-term view of their investments.
"One of the problems that business faces in America today is what I would call 'short-termism,' " said Howard S. Marks, chairman of Oaktree Capital, an investment firm that was the first to list on the private market developed by Goldman Sachs called GSTrUE. "There's a lot of expense and complication associated with being a public company today. . . . Now it is possible to gain most of the advantages of being public while sidestepping the disadvantages."
In just a few years, Nasdaq officials predict, stock offerings on private markets will far exceed IPOs on public exchanges.
The rise of private money has created a new class of powerbrokers on Wall Street who have enriched themselves even as they have provided billions of investment dollars to companies in all kinds of industries. But the trend is causing a backlash among working-class Americans who generally are shut out from investing directly in those circles, said Colin Blaydon, director of the Center for Private Equity and Entrepreneurship.
Analysts say the new ease-of-use is another incentive for super-wealthy investing groups to shun the public markets and focus on making money in the private sphere.
How cool is this. Almost 40% of electricity spent on lighting goes to street lights and this could save 90% of that. that is a lot of money saved. I can think why cities wouldn't all jump at the idea, given it would pay itself off in no time flat.
Lunar resonant streetlights sense and respond to ambient moonlight, dimming and brightening each month as the moon cycles through its phases. Utilizing available moonlight, rather than overwhelming it, saves energy and mitigates light pollution, while facilitating the urban experience of one of the most fundamental and beautiful cycles of nature."
They note that streetlights account for 38% of all electricity used for lighting in the US, and that 2/3 of Americans can no longer see the stars. A combination of LEDs and lunar resonance could save 90% of this electricity, and kids could see stars again. ::Lunar Resonant Streetlights via ::PSFK
A recent survey put Fox News viewers second to last in level of political knowledge. Daily Show viewers did the best, and it's medium is satire for god's sake. It is a sad day, and also very telling, when political satire offers better content and critique than the MSM. In New Zealand they have outlawed satirical criticism of the govt, so that something like the Daily Show cannot even EXIST there.
The Eco-Media Player is a wind-up MP3/video player created by Trevor Baylis, inventor of the Freeplay wind-up radio. One minute of winding gives you 40 minutes of playback, and the device can also charge mobile phones and has a built-in flashlight. It plays mp3, wma, asf, wav, mp4, and has an FM radio, an analog recorder, and a photo-viewer. You can wind it for 20 hours' worth of playback. Link (via Shiny Shiny)
Leave it to Bose to diversify beyond acoustics and absolutely OWN the whole industry, with their engineering might. Check the Knight Rider style turbo boost at the end. Absolutely amazing. This revolutionizes the field of car suspension technology as we have previously known it.
