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Dinosaur’s Flesh Wound Preserved in Fossil Record
By Jon Tennant
Hadrosaur bones, courtesy U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Fossils, as we typically think of them, tell us about the death of an animal. The teeth, bones, shells, fragmented pseudopods and other weird and wonderful bits of carcass all only ever reflect one thing: a permanent geological limbo. These types of fossil are known as body fossils.
The other major group of fossils, that are generally less common, less researched, less known about, but arguably more important for guiding our understanding of the history of life on Earth, are trace fossils. The study of trace fossils is called ichnology, and the fossils don’t represent death; they represent life, behavior, activity. Often trace fossils are actually found in or on body fossils—anything from boring holes from bivalves on other bivalves, to bite marks on bones detailing a poor creature’s last painful seconds as a living animal. Or, in this case, an ancient injury preserved on a dinosaur’s skin.
Dinosaur skin is one of the rarest treasures the paleontological record can reveal to us. We now have a pretty good idea about the texture and nature of dinosaur skin, thanks to a couple of exceptional “dinosaur mummies” and the occasional fragments of skin preserved not as a mold of skin impressed on the surrounding sediment but of the actual fleshy flesh.
Chasing the Cascades’ Missing Grizzlies
By Eric Wagner
The first sign that we’re close is a sickly sweet odor among the otherwise clean scents of fir and spruce. Scott Fitkin, a biologist with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, pushes through a thatch of branches. “Here it is,” he says, coming to a large brush pile.
We are near Castle Mountain in Washington’s Pasayten Wilderness, about ten miles south of the US-Canada border. The pile sits within a perimeter of barbed wire called a snare corral. The brush is meant to mimic a grizzly bear food cache and so pique the bears’ interest. To entice them still more, Fitkin has poured a slurry of fermented salmon guts and cows’ blood over it. Now, in late September, the pile is a shambles—a good sign. If the bears have taken the bait, then they’ve left behind something even more valuable.
Fitkin begins a careful circuit, examining each barb. On four he finds fur, varying from a few strands to a generous tuft. He tweezes each barb’s worth into an envelope. DNA analysis will tell him later what species the hair belongs to, but he isn’t getting his hopes up: all of them are black, and probably from black bears.
Fitkin wants grizzlies. He has searched for them in these mountains for more than 20 years and has yet to see one. But in this, the final year of a three-year survey, he and his colleagues have gone all out. They’ve set up dozens of snare corrals throughout remote parts of the Cascade Mountains, miles from anywhere. If there are grizzlies to be found, then they will find them. Or so they hope.
Treating Mental Illness in the Digital Age
By Pete Etchells 
The Internet is a wonderful, terrifying thing. On the one hand, it gives us instant access to literally all of humanity’s collected knowledge, and connects us to those that we know and love. On the other, it all too often exposes an awful side to people who shroud themselves in anonymity in order to hurt others. When it comes to mental health, this darker reflection of the Internet can cause lots of serious problems. Thankfully though, an increasing number of people are exploiting the positive potential of the web, using digital tools in innovative ways to help both patients and professionals.
One such person is Kathy Griffiths. In the treatment of depression, “historically, peer-to-peer support has not been taken very seriously by professionals,” Griffiths says. She set out to change that in a recent study published in PLOS ONE, in which she and colleagues at the Australian National University in Canberra conducted a randomized controlled trial looking at the use of online support groups for treating depression.
Depressed individuals were assigned to one of four groups: an Internet Support Group, an online self-help program, both, or neither. The researchers found that the virtual support group on its own, and in combination with the web-based training tool, significantly reduced depression symptoms in participants up to a year after they’d taken part.
The More Names Change, the More They Sound the Same
Julie Sedivy is the lead author of Sold on Language: How Advertisers Talk to You And What This Says About You. She contributes regularly to Psychology Today and Language Log. She is an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary, and can be found at juliesedivy.com and on Twitter/soldonlanguage.
These days, I can’t seem to keep straight which of his friends my son is hanging out with on any given day—was it Jason, Jaden, Hayden, or Aidan? Their names all have a way of blurring together. My confusion reflects a growing trend for American boys’ names to sound more and more alike, according to a recent New York Times piece reporting on data gathered by Laura Wattenberg of BabyNameWizard.com.
It’s not as if the pool of available names is shrinking though. Quite the opposite. A couple of generations ago, parents mostly stuck with a handful of tried-and-true classics (James, Richard, William); the ten most common names were shared by more than a third of boys in 1950. These days, only nine percent of boys sport the ten most common names. But this recent burst of innovation in names shows more restraint than variety when it comes to their sounds. For example, 36 percent of newborn American boys have names that end in “n”, as compared to just 14 percent in 1950.
This might seem paradoxical, but in fact, it’s a fairly typical aspect of name invention (as my co-author Greg Carlson and I have discussed in our book Sold on Language). When creating a new word of any sort, whether it’s a common noun, verb, baby name or even a brand name, there’s a tendency to gravitate toward known sound patterns. Truly original names, like Quatergork, or Ponveen haven’t yet made it into my son’s social circle. Novelty, it seems, thrives best when it’s a variation on the familiar.
Soil Microbes Invisibly Shape Biodiversity
Carrie Arnold is a freelance science writer in Virginia. She blogs about the science of eating disorders at www.edbites.com, and frequently covers microbiology topics for national magazines.
Conservationists like to think large. Whether it’s identifying hundreds of square miles of Himalayan highlands as a tiger corridor or creating massive marine preserves, these scientists are definitely thinking on the macro scale.
However a small but growing group of scientists are beginning to think smaller when it comes to conservation—much smaller. They have begun to study the microbes living in the soil, and their results are showing just how important microscopic life is in the macrobiotic world. A healthy, diverse population of soil microbes results in a healthy, diverse ecosystem. Changing an ecosystem also changes its microbes, scientists have found, and this may permanently scar the environment.
“Soil is not sterile,” said Noah Fierer, a microbiologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder. “These microbes are crucial to maintaining soil fertility.”
Space Invaders: How NASA Tech Infiltrates Your Daily Life
Pete Etchells is a lecturer in biological psychology based in Bristol, UK. He writes about science in the news at Counterbalanced, but secretly wishes he were an astronaut. You can find him on Twitter at @drpeteetchells.
I’m never taking a photo of myself and sticking it up on Facebook ever again. How could anyone possibly contemplate it, when they’ve got to compete with self-portraits like this one? Thanks NASA.
Really, there’s so much awesomeness in this photo. It’s a picture of a robot, taken on another planet. A freaking robot! On another world! Evidently though, not everyone shares this sense of wonder. At around the same time that Curiosity was taking pictures of itself, Felix Baumgartner was being interviewed by the UK’s Telegraph, and had this to say:
“I think we should perhaps spend all the money going to Mars to learn about Earth. I mean, you cannot send people there because it is just too far away. That little knowledge we get from Mars I don’t think it does make sense.”
Disheartening words from someone who you would think would share so much in common with the Mars exploration mission, given his recent space jump. Baumgartner’s words completely miss the point, because Curiosity’s story isn’t just about what happens on Mars. It’s also about what happened on Earth before it left, and what is still happening now. It’s the story of extraordinary life-saving technologies, like heart pumps and advances in drug treatments, but it’s also the story of ordinary, everyday things like mattresses, hockey sticks and baseball bats. These are technologies that NASA and its offshoot companies never originally set out to develop; instead, they were born out of ingenious solutions to practical problems faced in the space program.
First Evidence of Life in Antarctic Subglacial Lake
Science journalist Douglas Fox is in Antarctica on assignment for DISCOVER Magazine as the WISSARD Embedded Journalist.
Microbiologists prepare the first samples from the lake.
The search continues for life in subglacial Lake Whillans, 2,600 feet below the surface of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet—but a thrilling preliminary result has detected signs of life.
At 6:20am on January 28, four people in sterile white Tyvek suits tended to a winch winding cable onto the drill platform. One person knocked frost off the cable as it emerged from the ice borehole a few feet below. The object of their attention finally rose into sight: a gray plastic vessel, as long as a baseball bat, filled with water from Lake Whillans, half a mile below.
The bottle was hurried into a 40-foot cargo container outfitted as a laboratory on skis. Some of the lake water was squirted into bottles of media in order to grow whatever microbes might inhabit the lake. Those cultures could require weeks to produce results. But one test has already produced an interesting preliminary finding. When lake water was viewed under a microscope, cells were seen: their tiny bodies glowed green in response to DNA-sensitive dye. It was the first evidence of life in an Antarctic subglacial lake.
Scientists First Glimpse Interior of an Antarctic Subglacial Lake
Science journalist Douglas Fox is in Antarctica on assignment for DISCOVER Magazine as the WISSARD Embedded Journalist.
Click to view photos from the drilling site.
Scientists have peered for the first time into the interior of a lake hidden beneath the Antarctic ice sheet. Subglacial Lake Whillans, located less than 400 miles from the South Pole, had sat isolated under the ice for hundreds of thousands of years—perhaps up to a million years. But over the last week a team of ice drillers has used a jet of hot water to melt a narrow hole into the lake through 2,600 feet of ice.
The WISSARD team celebrates successful deployment of the camera and probe down the 800-meter borehole.
Final confirmation that the lake had been reached unfolded inside a steel shipping container parked on the ice sheet on four massive skis. Seventeen people crowded into this mobile control room as a video camera was lowered into the borehole. All eyes were riveted to a computer monitor. A scene reminiscent of cosmic wormhole travel unfolded on it: the camera steered into the black void at the center of the screen; the smooth, round, undulating walls of ice-hole scrolled by on the edges.
Billowing clouds obscured the camera’s view in the lower reaches of the hole. Then, as the swirling silt settled, a fuzzy picture emerged: the camera lay on its side, its lens looking across a muddy brown bottom strewn with small rocks. Wisps of mud drifted above. The image, knitted in rows of grainy pixels, echoed the first pictures of the Martian surface, radioed back by the Viking lander almost 40 years ago.
Rain in the Arctic
Tom Yulsman is co-director of the Center for Environmental Journalism at the University of Colorado. His work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Climate Central, the Daily Climate and Audubon.
Courtesy NOAA
As cold temperatures swept into much of the United States on Monday, and wicked winter weather paralyzed much of Western Europe, the high temperature in Tromsø, Norway—above the Arctic Circle—topped out at nearly 40 degrees.
And it rained.
I know this for a fact, because I am here in Tromsø for the Arctic Frontiers conference, which ironically enough, is partly about climate change. The organizers handed out—yes, you guessed it—-umbrellas.
The long and short of the answer to what’s going on is, of course, complex—and not fully understood. What we take to be weird weather is certainly one of those things that happens from time to time. And in wintertime, one of the factors that can bring it on is a phenomenon known as the Arctic Oscillation.
Does Lead Exposure Cause Violent Crime? The Science is Still Out
Scott Firestone works as a researcher in evidence-based surgery, and recently started blogging about public health and environmental issues at His Science Is Too Tight, where this post originally appeared. You can find him on Twitter at @scottfirestone.
Kevin Drum from Mother Jones has a fascinating new article detailing the hypothesis that exposure to lead, particularly tetraethyl lead (TEL), explains the rise and fall of violent crime rates from the 1960s through the 1990s—at which point the compound was phased out of gasoline worldwide. It’s a good bit of public health journalism compared to much of what you see, but I’d like to provide a little bit of epidemiology background to the article. There’s so many studies listed that it’s a really good intro to the types of study designs you’ll see in public health. It also illustrates the concept of confirmation bias, and why regulatory agencies seem to drag their feet even in the face of such compelling stories as this one.
Drum correctly notes that the correlation is insufficient to draw any conclusions regarding causality. The research (pdf) published by economist Rick Nevin was simply looking at associations, and saw that the curves were heavily correlated, as you can quite clearly see. When you look at data involving large populations, such as violent crime rates, and compare with an indirect measure of exposure to some environmental risk factor such as levels of TEL in gasoline during that same time, the best you can say is that your alternative hypothesis of there being an association (null hypothesis always being no association) deserves more investigation. This type of design is called a cross-sectional study, and it’s been documented that values for a population do not always match those of individuals when looking at cross-sectional data.
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