Whoa!

Freakin' What?????

//Heinemeier’s method, they found that the smallest of the sharks they caught—those around seven feet long—were born after the bomb pulse, while the largest animals were born well before it. With the help of a mathematical model that linked size with age, they estimated that one sixteen-foot female was at least two hundred and seventy-two years old, and possibly as much as five hundred and twelve years old. Because it is difficult to establish background carbon-14 levels in the ocean, and because Nielsen and his colleagues didn’t know which part of the ocean the sharks had been born in, the figure was inexact. Still, it firmly established Greenland sharks as the longest-living vertebrates on Earth. In theory, the biggest ones could be nearly six centuries old.

The question now is how the sharks do it. Increasingly, scientists are searching the natural world for the genetic and behavioral mechanisms that endow creatures with their special abilities—that make elephants virtually immune to cancer, say, or axolotls capable of regenerating a lost limb. There may be Greenland sharks alive today that were born before Christopher Columbus; the species is not even thought to reach sexual maturity until around a hundred and fifty years of age. Why? The answer likely has to do with a very slow metabolism and the cold waters that they inhabit. But for now, Nielsen said, it’s yet another mystery. “I’m just the messenger on this,” he told me. “I have no idea.”//

I did not see that coming.

Gosh-wow, Science!!!

Saturn's rings may be only 150 million years old.

Rings may have been created when something unsettled previous generation of Saturn's moon, shredding one of them.

I ask again...

... how is this even possible?

How do we suddenly discover a "new" species of shark that has been around since the dinosaurs?

I would think we'd have discovered everything larger than an office desk by now.

It makes me wonder if there really isn't a population of Deep Ones that have escaped our attention.

Science P*rn.

The smallest star ever observed is the size of Saturn.

Makes you wonder what would've happened if Jupiter and Saturn had ignited.

This is simply an amazing feat of engineering.

Cassini dives between Saturn's rings and the cloud tops of Saturn.

When I contemplate the fact that scientists are controlling an object millions of miles away, much less got it there in the first place, I get a sense of the "gosh-wow" impact of science.

We are far too blase about these things.

Gosh-wow! Science.

Shades of "Lost World."

//Most creatures in Movile Cave are believed to have arrived over five million years ago when limestone sealed the entrance. Most insects have since adapted to the complete darkness by losing their eyes and pigmentation. Many have also developed longer legs and antennae to feel around in the dark. There are unique species of spiders, waterscorpions (above), centipedes, pseudoscorpions (top), leeches (below), and more.

The ecosystem relies entirely upon chemosynthetic bacteria that extract carbon from the air without the aid of light. The most numerous bacteria use carbon dioxide, and others get their carbon from methane. The bacterial film on the water and walls is where all the nutrients enter this ecosystem, and it’s the only known example of such a system. Small animals eat the slime, and larger animals eat them.//

New species spotted for second time in 20 years.

How is it even possible to spot a new species of mammal at this late date?

Ili Pika Seen for 1st Time in 2 Decades, Shows 'Teddy Bear Face' in China

Excuse me but...

....WTF????? 

Hoax.

Shark, twice the size of the Great White, and previously thought extinct, captured off the coast of Pakistan.

//The giant creature first thought to be a great white shark was rapidly declared by experts to be an unknown species of shark as it’s great weight and size were unheard of. Analysis of the teeth suggest the shark to be a parent of the Megalodon, an extinct species of shark that lived approximately 28 to 1.5 million years ago, during the Cenozoic Era.

The sea creature that measures an incredible 10.4 meters and weighs an astounding 15.6 tons is the largest living shark ever caught to date, great white sharks reaching an impressive 7 tons at full growth, a size that is no match for this giant prehistoric shark that can reach an imposing 20 meters in length and possibly weight up to 30 tons, depending on estimates.

It seems like we are finding more and more undiscovered animals these days.

And now for the obligatory "end of the world" plug:

//“Are rising sea temperatures forcing these beasts to come up closer to the shores or was this animal simply hurt and suffering from a disorienting handicap, these questions are left unanswered” claims local marine biologist Rajar Muhammar.//

Quick!  Get that man some funding!!!!

Off course, it's World News Daily, so let's wait for confirmation.


Update.....hoax.

Too bad.

The world is little poorer.

The Secret Life of Cats.

Kind of a fun and interesting article on what cats do when they think no one is watching.

Aliens...obviously.

Scientists don't know what caused an event that exploded on radar like a thunderstorm, spread nearly 10 miles wide and a mile high, and lasted for nine hours - all while being virtually invisible to the naked eye.

Goshwow! Science

Butterflies remember a mountain that hasn't existed for millennia:

The amazing part of the journey is the sudden eastward turn that monarchs take over Lake Superior. Monarchs fly over the lake, necessarily, in one unceasing flight. That alone would be difficult, but the monarchs make it tougher by not going directly south. They fly south, and at one point of the lake turn east, fly for a while, and then turn back toward the south. Why?

Biologists, and certain geologists, believe that something was blocking the monarchs' path. They believe that that part of Lake Superior might have once been one of the highest mountains ever to loom over North America. It would have been useless for the monarchs to try to scale it, and wasteful to start climbing it, so all successfully migrating monarchs veered east around it and then headed southward again. They've kept doing that, some say, even after the mountain is long gone.

Begin with a bang...

...end like a blown out candle.

Higgs Boson theorist theorizes that universe may end because the universe is unstable:

In the meantime, physicists have tightened their estimates of the particle's mass: Hill said the current estimate from the Compact Muon Solenoid is 125.8 billion electron volts, or 125.8 GeV, plus or minus 0.6 GeV. The figure from the LHC's other Higgs-boson detector, known as ATLAS, is 125.2 GeV, plus or minus 0.7 GeV.

Those figures can be factored into equations that point to the long-term fate of the universe, said Joseph Lykken, a theoretical physicist at Fermilab.

So what's the outlook?

"If you use all the physics that we know now, and we do what we think is a straightforward calculation, it's bad news," Lykken said. "It may be that the universe we live in is inherently unstable. At some point, billions of years from now, it's all going to be wiped out."

He said the parameters for our universe, including the Higgs mass value as well as the mass of another subatomic particle known as the top quark, suggest that we're just at the edge of stability, in a "metastable" state. Physicists have been contemplating such a possibility for more than 30 years. Back in 1982, physicists Michael Turner and Frank Wilczek wrote in Nature that "without warning, a bubble of true vacuum could nucleate somewhere in the universe and move outwards at the speed of light, and before we realized what swept by us our protons would decay away."

Lykken put it slightly differently: "The universe wants to be in a different state, so eventually to realize that, a little bubble of what you might think of as an alternate universe will appear somewhere, and it will spread out and destroy us."

That alternate universe would be "much more boring," Lykken said. Which led him to ask a philosophical question: "Why do we live in a universe that's just on the edge of stability?" He wondered whether a universe has to be near the danger zone to produce galaxies, stars, planets ... and life.

Even Hill found it interesting that the parameters of particle physics put our universe right along the critical line. "That's something new, which we didn't know before, and which leads some of us to that there's something else coming," Hill said.

Amazon Review

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				All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals Price: $8.99
Puts the "Gosh-wow!" in "Gosh-wow! Science.", December 7, 2012 Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?) This review is from: All Yesterdays: Unique and Speculative Views of Dinosaurs and Other Prehistoric Animals (Kindle Edition) Back in 1977, I heard Ray Bradbury give a lecture where he said that if he was given control of a television network for two hours, he would make one hour about dinosaurs and the other hour about Egyptian mummies, because everyone loved dinosaurs and mummies. Given the success of Jurassic Park, Bradbury was, as always, well ahead of his time. Dinosaurs fascinate. Their size and the oddness fascinate. Who hasn't wondered, what would it have been like to see these animals as they actually looked, rather than seeing their dessicated bones and the odd bits of life that an artistic imagination can breathe into their fossilized remains. Those artistic conceptions have become iconic - the T Rex roaring as muscular and sleek body chases down its prey, the herd of triceratops, their sleek bodies standing shoulder to shoulder in a defense perimeter, sauropods with their long necks extending horizontally out from their body for over a dozen meters, etc. And, yet, according to All Yesterdays, those iconic images may be wrong or misconceived or simply need to be reconsidered. New findings from paleontologists in the field are suggesting that dinosaurs may not have looked uniformly like large, sleek iguanas, but may have sported feathers and "fur." Further, the tendency of artists to treat the fossil record as an opportunity to show off their knowledge of anatomy by conceiving of dinosaurs as "stripped down" versions of what they might have been. One of the most effective parts of All Yesterdays is its conceit of imagining the reconstruction of modern animals from fossil records bereft of knowledge of the "integuements" of the actual animal. The results are amazing and humorous, with sleek and graceful cows built for speed and elephants with "nose bulbs" and highland grazing manatees and vampire humming birds. That kind of misconception delivers the message that dinosaurs may not have looked at all like what we've been trained to think they look like. And with that as the take-off point, the authors and illustrators give us puffball versions of cute polar dinosaurs, and dinosaurs so covered with feathers that their form is indistinct, and dinosaurs that look like hedgehogs, and spiny, non-sleek triceratops. We are also treated to artistic renditions of dinosaurs engaged in play and other odd behaviors that animals actually engage in when they are not running in fear from predators or engaging in predation, i.e., during most of their life. This is a thin book, around 100 pages and 60 illustrations. The reader can gobble it up in under an hour, or dip into it as the spirit moves. It is not a scholarly book for those who want the academic low-down on recent discoveries, but it does have the great virtue of scratching that itch we all have for a time machine that will let us see what dinosaurs may have been like so very long ago. Comment | Permalink

Cool Science.

Ichthyosaurs survived longer than previously thought.

This work shows that the ichthyosaurs were not subject to a major extinction at the end of the Jurassic era (145 million years ago). It furthermore also shows that the ichthyosaurs remained very diversified until their definitive extinction, around 94 million years ago. These two results, springing from joint work produced by university and museum researchers in Belgium, the United Kingdom and Germany, and published in the Tuesday, January 3, 2012 edition of the open access journal PLoS One, contradicts earlier theories which considered the cretaceous ichthyosaurs as the final survivors of a group in its death throes.
 

I wonder what caused their extinction?

Gosh-wow Science!

Scientists observe galaxy that is almost as old as the universe:

Our universe is a mind-boggling 13.7 billion years old, and now astronomers say they have found a galaxy that has been around since the universe was a spry 420 million years old, reports LiveScience. Called MACS0647-JD, the 13.3-billion-year-old galaxy is tiny, cosmically speaking, just 600 light years wide (compared to, say, 150,000 light years for our Milky Way), and astronomers believe it is the most distant object seen in the universe.

"This object may be one of many building blocks of a galaxy," says the lead scientist. "Over the next 13 billion years, it may have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of merging events with other galaxies and galaxy fragments." The discovery was made as part of a program that uses a cluster of galaxies so massive their gravity warps space-time to act as a natural lens and boost telescopes' power. MACS0647-JD was first spotted by the Hubble telescope, then confirmed by the Spitzer telescope, which can scan the heavens in infrared. The new galaxy takes the title of "most distant galaxy" away from the 12.91-billion-year-old galaxy sighted in June.

Cool History-Science Mash-up.

Eerie red crucifix seen in the night sky in 774 AD may have been a supernova.

Nah, that's not possible. Everyone knows that ancient folks were superstitious idiots who just made things up.

Space P*rn.

Black hole discovered to be moving at millions of miles an hour.

As if black holes weren't already scary enough, it now appears that they can move — and they can move fast. New observations from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory have revealed a massive black hole that is careening away from its host galaxy at a speed of several million miles per hour. Astronomers speculate that the black hole collided and merged with another black hole and received a powerful recoil kick from the gravitational wave radiation. The finding suggests that large black holes may be roaming undetected out in the vastness of space.

Gosh! Wow!

You just know that some environmentalist is going to find a way to pin this on human activity.


Mysterious objects poking holes in Saturn's rings.

Gosh-wow! Science - Evolution P*rn Division.

Urchin predation "causes" Sea Lillies to "walk."

Nature teems with examples of evolutionary arms races between predators and prey, with the predator species gradually evolving a new mode of attack for each defensive adaptation that arises in the prey species.

These adaptations are often portrayed as reciprocal, with prey and predator acting as two sides in an endless evolutionary tug of war known as co-evolution.

Now a University of Michigan paleontologist and his colleagues report an example of a much more one-sided, asymmetrical predator-prey relationship. The predators in this case are sea urchins, and over a nearly 200-million-year span they appear to have been in the driver's seat, forcing evolutionary adaptations upon marine animals called crinoids, which include the sea lily.

Hungry sea urchins even drove the formerly stationary, or sessile, sea lilies to develop the ability to escape by creeping along the ocean floor.

Of course, can we really say that there is a "cause and effect" relationship. Sea Lillies would have been throwing off the mutations that permitted creeping in any event. Can we say that random chance wouldn't have led to creeping even without Urchin predation?

The other problem with the idea of "cause" is that Urchin predation doesn't "cause" the mutation. In fact, how there can be any development of new structures at all is a mystery.

But it is, nevertheless, really cool!

Goshwow Science - Jupiter is Huge.

From Io9:

A breathtaking reminder of just how gigantic Jupiter really is -

If you're looking for a reminder of how impossibly huge Jupiter is, just take a gander at this image from Cassini. That tiny satellite in front is Io...which is almost the same size and relative distance as our own Moon.

Of course, other than their closeness in size - Io and the Moon are the 13th and 14th largest objects in the solar system, with the Moon about 86.8% the volume of the Moon - the two objects aren't all that similar. While the Moon is more or less geologically dead, Io is the most volcanic body in the solar system. What's amazing is that the distance of Io to Jupiter and the Moon to Earth are both roughly 350,000 to 400,000 kilometers. As you can probably remember from the Apollo photographs, Earth doesn't look quite as big as Jupiter from such a distance.