21 Nov Newly Discovered Fossil Fills in Gap Between Dinosaurs and Modern Birds

A skeleton from the Cretaceous found in Japan reveals an early bird with a tail nub resembling the avians of today.

Birds are ancient creatures. Every hawk, sparrow, pigeon and penguin alive today has ancestral roots dating back to the Jurassic, when the first birds were just another form of raptor-like dinosaur. Dozens of fossils uncovered and described during the last three decades have illuminated much of this deep history, but the rock record can still yield surprises. A fossil recently found in Japan is one such unexpected avian that raises questions about what else may await discovery.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.smithsonianmag.com

19 Nov NASA Picks SpaceX, Blue Origin and More to Join Private Moon Lander Project | Space

NASA has picked SpaceX, Blue Origin and three other companies to join its private moon lander project to deliver big payloads to the moon.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.space.com

19 Nov Black hole with nearly extreme spin attempts to regrow hair but could become bald again

Black holes ‘have no hair’: no attributes that can be used to tell them apart. Extreme black holes (spinning at maximally allowed rate) can have an additional property, permanent hair that is made of a massless scalar field. Nearly extreme black holes (like Gargantua, the black hole featured in the movie "Interstellar") have hair that is a transient phenomenon: nearly extreme black holes that attempt to regrow hair will lose it and become bald again.

The black holes of Einstein’s theory of relativity can be completely described by just three parameters: their mass, spin angular momentum, and electric charge. Since two black holes that share these parameters cannot be distinguished, regardless of how they were made, black holes are said to "have no hair"—they have no additional attributes that can be used to tell them apart.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: phys.org

17 Nov Github Code | Storing Code for the Apocalypse

What is common between Vatican archives, Italian movies and McDonalds’s "special sauce"?

If all the world’s open-source code was lost during the apocalypse, it would destroy computing and the internet as we know it. So Microsoft is storing it.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.popularmechanics.com

11 Nov Spiders and ants inspire metal that won’t sink

Researchers, inspired by diving bell spiders and rafts of fire ants, have created a metallic structure that is so water repellent, it refuses to sink—no matter how often it is forced into water or how much it is damaged or punctured.

Could this lead to an unsinkable ship? A wearable flotation device that will still float after being punctured? Electronic monitoring devices that can survive in long term in the ocean? All of the above, says Chunlei Guo, professor of optics and physics, whose lab describes the structure in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces

.The structure uses a groundbreaking technique the lab developed for using femtosecond bursts of lasers to “etch” the surfaces of metals with intricate micro- and nanoscale patterns that trap air and make the surfaces superhydrophobic, or water repellent.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.rochester.edu

11 Nov 2019: The International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements

2019 is the International Year of the Periodic Table of Elements. Here, we discuss the history of the periodic table as well as the designated year.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.comsol.com

11 Nov Bagged supermarket salads ‘fuelling bugs that could make people ill’

Supermarket salads are fuelling plant bugs that could make people ill, warns a new report.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theboltonnews.co.uk

07 Nov Blue Whales’ Migrations Depend on Their Memories and not on Their Current Food Location

A clever new study shows that blue whales lean on their memory to guide their epic migrations.

The blue whales of the North Pacific spend their winters in their breeding grounds off California and Costa Rica. Come spring, they swim up the coast of North America toward the food-rich summer waters of the Pacific Northwest. They could make the journey in two months (and they do, on the reverse trip back south). Instead, they take twice that time, pausing to gorge themselves on blooms of krill that appear along the way. It’s a leisurely season-long tour of a continent-wide buffet line.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.theatlantic.com

07 Nov Liquid-in-liquid printing method could put 3D-printed organs within reach

New technique makes it easier to build stable “tissues”

3D-printed tissues and organs could revolutionize transplants, drug screens, and lab models—but replicating complicated body parts such as gastric tracts, windpipes, and blood vessels is a major challenge. That’s because these vascularized tissues are hard to build up in traditional solid layer-by-layer 3D printing without constructing supporting scaffolding that can later prove impossible to remove.

One potential solution is replacing these support structures with liquid—a specially designed fluid matrix into which liquid designs could be injected before the “ink” is set and the matrix is drained away. But past attempts to make such aqueous structures have literally collapsed, as their surfaces shrink and their structures crumple into useless blobs.

Sourced through Scoop.it from: www.sciencemag.org