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
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge asteroid that smashed into Earth 65 million years ago with the force of a billion atomic bombs, scientists said, hoping to lay an age-old debate to rest once and for all.
Artist’s rendition released by NASA shows an asteroid belt in orbit around a star. A huge asteroid that smashed into Earth with the force of a billion atomic bombs wiped out the dinosaur, scientists said, hoping to lay to rest a long-running debate over a mass extinction 65 million years ago. (AFP/NASA/File)
The definitive verdict came from an international panel of experts who reviewed 20 years’ worth of evidence about what caused the Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) extinction that wiped out more than half the species on the planet.
They determined it was a massive asteroid, measuring around 15 kilometers (nine miles) wide, which smashed into what is today Chicxulub in Mexico.
The event marked a pivotal point in history because it cleared the way for mammals to become the dominant species on Earth.
“The asteroid is believed to have hit Earth with a force one billion times more powerful than the atomic bomb at Hiroshima,” the researchers said in a report published in the journal Science.
“It would have blasted material at high velocity into the atmosphere, triggering a chain of events that caused a global winter, wiping out much of life on Earth in a matter of days.”
The panel of 41 scientists hope their findings will lay to rest once and for all the debate about what caused the KT extinction.
Some scientists have argued that dinosaurs and species including bird-like pterosaurs and large sea reptiles were wiped out by a series of volcanic eruptions in what is now India that lasted some 1.5 million years.
The eruptions spewed enough basalt lava across the Deccan Traps in west-central India to fill the Black Sea twice and were thought to have caused a cooling of the atmosphere and acid rain on a global scale.
But the evidence gathered for the study published in Science showed that marine and land ecosystems were destroyed rapidly in the KT extinction, leading the scientists to rule out volcanic activity as the culprit, because its effects would have whittled away at dinosaurs and other species over time.
Dinosaurs were wiped out by a huge asteroid that smashed into Earth 65 million years ago with the force of a billion atomic bombs, scientists said Thursday, hoping to lay an age-old debate to rest once and for all. (AFP/Graphic)�
“Despite evidence for relatively active volcanism in the Deccan Traps at the time, marine and land ecosystems showed only minor changes within the 500,000 years before the time of the KT extinction,” the scientists said.
“Computer models and observational data suggest that the release of gases such as sulphur into the atmosphere after each volcanic eruption… would have had a short-lived effect on the planet and would not cause enough damage to create a rapid mass extinction of land and marine species.”
The Chicxulub asteroid, on the other hand, could very well have made short shrift of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and other species, the scientists said.
The impact of the large asteroid would have “triggered large-scale fires, earthquakes measuring more than 10 on the Richter scale, and continental landslides which created tsunamis,” said Joanna Morgan, a lecturer in geophysics at Imperial College, London and co-author of the study.
The asteroid hit Earth 20 times faster than a speeding bullet and exploded into a deadly mix of hot rock and gas which would have “grilled any living creature in the immediate vicinity that couldn’t find shelter,” said Gareth Collins, a research fellow at Imperial College.
“The final nail in the coffin for the dinosaurs happened when blasted material was ejected at high velocity into the atmosphere,” shrouding the planet in darkness and causing a global winter that killed off species that “couldn’t adapt to this hellish environment,” added Morgan.
Another clue that the KT extinction was caused by a huge asteroid and not volcanic activity was evidence in geological records of “shocked” quartz in rock layers at KT boundary levels around the world.
Quartz is “shocked” when it is hit very quickly by a massive force — such as a 15-kilometer-wide asteroid traveling 20 times faster than a bullet.
The KT extinction marked the end of the 160-million-year reign of the dinosaurs and allowed mammals, and eventually humans, to become the dominant species on earth.
President Obama visits Glenside, Pennsylvania today promoting his health care plan and points out that most people in DC are more worried about the political score instead of results.
GENEVA (Reuters) – Dark matter, which scientists believe makes up 25 percent of the universe but whose existence has never been proven, could be detected by the giant particle collider at CERN, the research centre’s head said Monday.
Rolf-Dieter Heuer told a news conference some evidence for the matter may emerge even in the shorter term from mega-power particle collisions aimed at recreating conditions at the “Big Bang” birth of the universe some 13.7 billion years ago.
“We don’t know what dark matter is,” said Heuer, Director-General of the European Organization for Nuclear Research on the Swiss-French border near Geneva.
“Our Large Hadron Collider (LHC) could be the first machine to give us insight into the dark universe,” he said. “We are opening the door to New Physics, to a discovery period.”
Astronomers and physicists say that only 5 percent of the universe is known currently, and that the invisible remainder consists of dark matter and dark energy, which make up some 25 percent and 70 percent, respectively.
“If we can detect and understand dark matter, our knowledge will expand to encompass 30 percent of the universe, a huge step forward,” Heuer said.
HIGHEST ENERGY
The LHC, the world’s largest scientific experiment centered in a 27-kilometre (16.78 mile) oval-shaped tunnel deep underground, is presently moving to colliding particles by the end of the month at the highest energy ever achieved.
These multiple collisions at a total of 7 tera-electron volts, or TeV, will each create mini-Big Bangs, producing data that thousands of scientists at CERN and in laboratories around the globe will analyze.
One widely publicized aim of the LHC is to try to find the theoretical particle that gave mass to the matter that spewed out after the primeval explosion and thereby made possible the emergence of stars, planets and eventually life — on earth and perhaps elsewhere.
The mysterious particle has been dubbed the Higgs boson after the Scottish physicist who three decades ago proposed it to explain the origin of mass in the universe.
“We know everything about this particle. The only thing we don’t know is if it exists,” said Heuer, a German physicist who took over at CERN 14 months ago. “And if it does not exist, we are bound to find something that is very much like it.”
Once collisions in the LHC are begun at 7 TeV, they will continue with only very brief breaks until the end of 2011, and then the machine will be shut down for a year to prepare it for years more of experiments at 14 TeV.
