Science News

While taking a walk on a lunch break from fieldwork in Alberta, Canada, paleontologist Michael Ryan came across a couple of bones. In one hand he gripped an antler from a modern mule deer. In the other he held a piece of an ornithischian dinosaur bone. Ryan couldn't help but notice that both bones bore highly similar bite marks . And that's when it hit him. [More]

By Janelle Weaver

The loss of genes that guide the development of fins may help to explain how fish evolved into four-limbed vertebrates, according to a study.

In the late Devonian period, around 365 million years ago, fish-like creatures started venturing from shallow waters onto land with the help of eight-fingered limbs. [More]

By Declan Butler

"With this profound new knowledge, humankind is on the verge of gaining immense, new power to heal. [More]

South Africa will lift on Friday its nearly three-year-old ban on commercial abalone fishing, a move that a wildlife group says will send the highly valued and highly poached species spiraling toward extinction.

Known in South African as perlemoen, abalone (specifically the Haliotis midae species) has long been a cash cow for the nation's fishermen, with thousands of tons taken from coastal waters every year. Although there is a legal, regulated abalone industry in South Africa, much of that catch has been illegal; it is caught by unlicensed poachers and smuggled to Asia where abalone is valued as a purported aphrodisiac . Organized crime syndicates, primarily Chinese triad gangs, have been the major players in this field. The Triads often pay for the perlemoen with methamphetamine , which in turn has fueled an increase in violent crime throughout South Africa. In 2006 South African authorities confiscated more than one million perlemoen from smugglers (representing just a portion of the total amount believed to have been poached).

The Orbiting Carbon Observatory was meant to precisely measure carbon dioxide throughout Earth's atmosphere. Instead, it wound up shattering on the Pacific Ocean* near Antarctica in 2009, a victim of a failed fairing--the aerodynamic nose cone shroud that keeps the satellite from burning up during launch. [More]

The final planned space shuttle mission, currently slated for mid-November at the earliest, may not lift off until February 2011, according to a NASA spokesperson. [More]

A long-studied planet orbiting a star 150 light-years away has been given a new look, thanks to a novel method of studying extrasolar planets from Earth. [More]

“Six thousand billion of them are going through your body every second.” That’s physicist Lawrence Krauss on neutrinos, on the June 15th weekly Science Talk podcast. “Neutrinos are the lightest elementary particles we know of. The name comes from the fact that they had to be neutral because we couldn’t see them in detectors. But they had to be light. So Enrico Fermi called them "a little neutron," in Italian is neutrino. So they were baby neutrons, which were the only other neutral particles at the time that were known.”

Now astrophysicists [Shaun Thomas, Ofer Lahav and Filipe Abdalla] have put a best-guess upper limit on the mass of the neutrino. The research is being reported this week at the Weizmann U.K. conference at University College London and will appear in an upcoming issue of Physical Review Letters .

By Scott Haggett

Moviemakers continue to up the ante in their quest to make film animation as realistic as live action, thanks to improvements in 3-D computer-generated (CG) graphics. These efforts can pay off in big ways--James Cameron's Avatar earned a mountain of money and three Academy Awards. But, as New Zealand digital effects–maker Weta Digital can attest, painstakingly creating three-meter-tall blue bioluminescent aliens required an unprecedented amount of computing power and data storage--and those resources are likely be dwarfed by subsequent projects. [More]