Science News

For decades Pluto, later joined by its moon Charon, had a wide swath to itself on astronomers' plots of the solar system--no other bodies were known to dwell beyond Neptune in the long-hypothesized debris field known as the Kuiper Belt. But in 1992 a pair of astronomers turned up 1992 QB1 , a body about 200 kilometers wide circling the sun at a distance of about 6.5 billion kilometers, well beyond Neptune's orbit. The Kuiper Belt, populated by leftovers from the solar system's formation, appeared to be real. [More]

NEW YORK--It's human nature to conserve and hoard, so a lot of Americans today take a certain pleasure in their trash habits when it comes to recycling paper, plastics, glass and cans. But in order to make sure we don't run out of resources as Earth's population peaks, the next garbage frontier is an "upstream" focus on solid waste management and getting industries to take more responsibility for collecting the trash that results from consumption of their products, a panel of speakers said here on March 23. [More]

Tyrannosaur bones are relatively familiar finds on the northern continents of the globe, cropping up everywhere from modern-day Colorado to China. But until now, they appeared to be oddly missing from the southern half of the globe. The discovery of a distinctively tyrannosaur-like hipbone in Victoria, Australia, however, might change the way scientists think about the distribution--and evolution--of this infamous group of dinosaurs. [More]

A Russian astronomer turned a few heads earlier this month when he published a paper noting that a dwarf star, currently 63 light-years away, will very likely dip into the outer edge of our solar system in fewer than two million years. [More]

The Internet Age is upon us. But rather than circulating online, the 23rd Decennial Census stuck with the tried-and-true, and flooded the U.S. Postal Service March 16 through 18 with surveys en route to more than 120 million households nationwide. The 10-question form, which probes for demographic information such as age, sex and race, will help determine how more than $400 billion will be allocated to communities across the country. Citizens and noncitizens alike are required by law to complete the form and mail it back to the U.S. Census Bureau in the accompanying prepaid envelope. That's a lot of mail, but that's not all of it.

In case the mail at your household gets picked up and thrown into the "we'll get to it later" pile, the Census Bureau took the extra step this year of sending out a "heads-up" letter in advance--a "state-of-the-art practice in survey research," according to Census Director Robert Grove's blog--to encourage participation. And in case that's not enough paper for you, an extra nudge was mailed out the week of March 22. This might sound excessive, but the mail-out/mail-back response rate for the 2000 census was only 65 percent, and the missing data has to be collected in person by enumerators at a cost of about $57 per household. So the nudge "more than pays for itself," Groves says.

The Last Supper. The final time that the apostles shared a meal with Jesus. They gathered together, listened to a sermon and really chowed down. At least if you believe more modern depictions. Because over the past thousand years, the portion size of the food shown in paintings of the Last Supper has grown larger. That finding, by researchers and brothers Brian and Craig Wansink, is dished up in the International Journal of Obesity . [See http://bit.ly/cJLS7I ] Brian studies eating habits at Cornell, while Craig is a religion professor at Virginia Wesleyan. Which puts them at the head of the table for this research effort. [More]

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) this week decided not to create any new international trade restrictions to protect five endangered shark species, all of which are highly prized for their use in the Chinese delicacy known as shark fin soup, or, as I call it, "extinction in a bowl."

Shark fin soup is particularly unappetizing dish to conservationists, as shark "finning" remains one of the most controversial hunting or fishing activities in the world. Sharks are caught, their fins are chopped off, and the bodies (which are not prized) are dumped back into the ocean--often alive, where they suffer a horrible death.