Scientists discover new species of three horned dinosaur

Scientists analysing fossil records have discovered a new three-horned dinosaur, dating back 66 to 80 million years, that sported a hoodie-like growth on the back of its head.

The giant creature may be the oldest known cousin of Triceratops and Torosaurus — the best-known horned dinosaurs — yet, researchers say.

Judiceratops tigris has been identified based on fossils from north central Montana, further underscoring the diversity of large, plant-eating horned dinosaurs among the fauna of western North America 66 to 80 million years ago.

Representational image: Reuters

By now, fossil remains of at least 18 closely related dinosaurs from the region have been identified as distinct species, and Yale researcher Nicholas Longrich expects others will be discovered.

“We keep finding new species, because cerotopsids — horned dinosaurs — evolved so rapidly,” said Longrich, who identified the latest addition to the family.

“These species show up for just a couple million years, or even a far shorter time, before another species replaces it.

As you move up into younger rocks or down into older rocks, you get new species and no longer see the old ones. There was a lot of turnover,” said Longrich.

Identified by analysis of skull fragments belonging to four previously collected specimens in the Peabody’s collection, Judiceratops lived during the late Cretaceous era, about 78 million years ago, or 12 million years before the more familiar Triceratops and Torosaurus.

Judiceratops is the earliest known member of the chasmosaurines, a group of horned dinosaurs characterised by an enlarged frill on the back of the skull. It does not appear to be a direct ancestor of Triceratops and Torosaurus, Longrich said.

Judiceratops was likely a large plant-eating dinosaur that fed on low-growing vegetation, such as ferns, like other members of its family. It had two large horns over the brow and a smaller horn on its nose.

The three-horned Judiceratops differs from all other horned dinosaurs in the shape and arrangement of the scallops on the edge of the frill, which are large and triangular toward the front, and low and blunt toward the back.

The ornate frills might have been a way for the dinosaurs to attract mates and intimidate rivals, Longrich speculates, as some birds (modern dinosaurs) do through elaborate plumage or song.

“These are very bold, conspicuous display structures,” Longrich said of the frills, which might also have served a defensive purpose.

Multiverse Identified

The "Dark Flow" & the Existence of Other Universes --New Claims of Hard Evidence (Weekend Feature)

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/06/the-dark-flow-the-existence-of-other-universes-new-claims-of-hard-evidence.html

Is our universe merely one of billions? Evidence of the existence of 'multiverse' revealed for the first time by a cosmic map of background radiation data gathered by Planck telescope. This past week, the first 'hard evidence' that other universes exist has been claimed to have been found by cosmologists studying the Planck data. They have concluded that it shows anomalies that can only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes.

"Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago," says George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge University."But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe."
Scientists had predicted that it should be evenly distributed, but the map shows a stronger concentration in the south half of the sky and a 'cold spot' that cannot be explained by current understanding of physics. Laura Mersini-Houghton, theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Richard Holman, professor at Carnegie Mellon University, predicted that anomalies in radiation existed and were caused by the pull from other universes in 2005. Mersini-Houghton will be in Britain soon promoting this theory and, we expect, the hard evidence at the Hay Festival on May 31 and at Oxford on June 11.

Dr Mersini-Houghton believes her hypothesis has been proven from the Planck data that data has been used to create a map of light from when the universe was just 380,000 years old. "These anomalies were caused by other universes pulling on our universe as it formed during the Big Bang," she says. "They are the first hard evidence for the existence of other universes that we have seen."

Cool Paint

Conductive paint lands in pens and pots for creatives

London-based Bare Conductive Ltd. makes electrically conductive paint called Bare Paint. The substance allows the painting of "liquid wiring" on any surface. Except for skin, you can apply its paint on walls and assorted surfaces to conduct electricity. "Bare Paint" began as a project by the inventors, then students, at the Royal College of Art. Despite all the jokes about Wikipedia as a questionable knowledge crutch, the inventors credit Wikipedia as having helped them to learn what they had to know about working with conductive materials to get something going. In 2011 the RCA graduates were able to introduce Bare Paint.

Nontoxic and drying at room temperature, the product has caught on with educators, DIY makers and inventors. They have a number of products on sale, and Radio Shack stocks their paint pen.. Paper as a vehicle for delivering more information than immediately meets the eye via the painted object—that is what they see as their opportunity. Applications for their paint can easily translate into talking billboards and walls, where objects on surfaces turn interactive. A light switch painted on paper, when touched, can turn on a light, or a touch on a poster object can make a sound.

Wanting to expand in recognition, they hope to appeal to a wide creative gamut of hobbyists, artists, and engineers for innovative ways to use their products. Bare Paint, they emphasized, is the first non-toxic electrically conductive paint available. As such the substance is child friendly, which opens the door to educational projects, including toys, and touch-sensitive paper drawings that play sounds.

"We generally split applications into two simple classifications, signaling and powering," they said. "Signaling could include using the Paint as a potentiometer while interfacing with a micro-controller, as a conduit in a larger circuit or as a capacitive sensor. Powering a device would include lighting LED's or driving small speakers. The most interesting stuff happens when you combine these properties into something new."

According to the company, Bare Paint has a surface resistivity of approximately 55 ohms/square at 50 microns layer thickness.

The product is water-based but it is not waterproof. One can paint over it with a waterproof paint or varnish, they said, depending on the application. The paint is only available in black, but it can be over-painted with any material with a wide range of other paints.

Graphene Sensor for Photography

Graphene sensor is 1,000 times more sensitive to light, could enable ultra-low-light photography

 

 

 

Hey, historians! Add extremely low-light, broadband photography to graphene’s miraculous list of potential applications. Researchers in Singapore are reporting that they’ve created a graphene photodetector that is roughly 800 times more sensitive than previous graphene photodetectors, and around 10 times more sensitive than the CMOS-based sensors in today’s digital cameras.

We have long known that graphene, along with being incredibly strong and electrically conductive, also has the ability to absorb light over a very broad wavelength range. Furthermore, researchers have recently confirmed that graphene has a very sensitive, hot carrier response to light (multiple electrons are fired off for every photon that hits a sheet of graphene). Both of these properties make graphene, in theory, perfect for camera sensors, photovoltaic cells, and fiber-optic communications. Now, it seems, researchers at Nanyang Technological University have actually proven it in practice.

The Singaporean graphene photodetector has a photoresponsivity of 8.61 A/W, up from previous graphene photodetectors which only manage 10 mA/W — or an increase in sensitivity of around 860 times. Hard data for silicon photodetectors, as found in your digital camera, is hard to come by, but the average seems to be around 0.8 A/W — or around 10 times less sensitive than the new graphene photodetector. This new sensor is also sensitive to a wide range of wavelengths, including visible, and near- and mid-infrared light.

To achieve such high sensitivity, the researchers first create a transistor with a graphene monolayer (one-atom-thick) channel. They then deposit a varying-thickness layer of titanium on top of the graphene. This titanium layer is then etched away, leaving an array of graphene quantum dot-like (GQD) structures. This GQD then acts as the photodetector: When photons hit the GQD, the transistor turns on. Strap enough of these graphene transistors together and voila: You now have an imaging sensor.

In reality, though, and contrary to some big-name publications, this graphene sensor isn’t going to replace the silicon sensor in your camera. Graphene is still incredibly hard to work with on a commercial scale (here the researchers are still mechanically exfoliating graphene and placing it on a silicon substrate with tweezers), and there’s no indication that this method would ever scale up. What is far more likely is that these graphene photodetectors might be used in optoelectronics, where optical and electronic components are squeezed into the same system/chip, or in enabling faster fiber-optic networks.

 

SkyScrapers SunSet

Manhattanhenge! A skyscraper sunset stops traffic in New York City

New Yorkers were wowed on Wednesday by a sunset that was perfectly framed by skyscrapers, thanks to an urban astronomical phenomenon known as Manhattanhenge.
The same planetary tilt that determines the seasons also dictates exactly where the sun will go down each evening — and because of the way that Manhattan's dominant street grid is laid out, killer sunsets are potentially visible from some of the borough's best-known east-west streets in late May and mid-July.

Tuesday's ceremony was rained out, but the skies were clear enough on Wednesday to make for some beautiful postings on photo-sharing sites such as Instagram and Twitter, Flickr and Facebook.

Edgar Gonzalez captured a picture-perfect view of Wednesday's Manhattanhenge sunset from 34th Street.

Read More : 

http://cosmiclog.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/05/29/18590956-manhattanhenge-a-skyscraper-sunset-stops-traffic-in-new-york-city?lite

How Much Light Has The Universe Created Since the Big Bang?

MAY 27, 2013

The universe, most cosmologists tell us, began with a bang. At some point, the lights turned on. How much light has the universe produced since it was born, 13.8 billion years ago?

It seems a difficult answer at first glance. Turn on a light bulb, turn it off and the photons appear to vanish. In space, however, we can track them down. Every light particle ever radiated by galaxies and stars is still travelling, which is why we can peer so far back in time with our telescopes.

A new paper in the Astrophysical Journal explores the nature of this extragalactic background light, or EBL. Measuring the EBL, the team states, “is as fundamental to cosmology as measuring the heat radiation left over from the Big Bang (the cosmic microwave background) at radio wavelengths.”

Turns out that several NASA spacecraft have helped us understand the answer. They peered at the universe in every wavelength of light, ranging from long radio waves to short, energy-filled gamma rays. While their work doesn’t go back to the origin of the universe, it does give good measurements for the last five billion years or so. (About the age of the solar system, coincidentally.)

This all-sky Fermi view includes only sources with energies greater than 10 GeV. From some of these sources, Fermi’s LAT detects only one gamma-ray photon every four months. Brighter colors indicate brighter gamma-ray sources. Credit: NASA/DOE/Fermi LAT Collaboration

http://www.universetoday.com/102403/how-much-light-has-the-universe-created-since-the-big-bang/

Einstein's exoplanet

May 27, 2013

Einstein's exoplanet, Kepler-76b, is a Jupiter-sized planet discovered using an effect of Einstein’s relativity. It orbits its star every 1.5 days. Credit: David A. Aguilar, CfA

Eight hundred and eighty nine exoplanets (planets around stars other than our Sun) have been discovered to date. Most of them were found using the Kepler satellite, which spots small dips in a star's light as an orbiting planet periodically blocked our view (a "transit"). The satellite recently halted its operations due to a faulty gyroscope, and so its mission could possibly be over, but there remain a large dataset of possible other exoplanets for study. Meanwhile, NASA has selected a new mission for development: TESS (the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite), on which CfA astronomers, who have played active roles in exoplanet research, continue their leadership.

The Kepler dataset has been steadily mined for transiting planets. In a dramatic first, CfA astronomer Dave Latham and four of his colleagues have discovered a new planet in the Kepler data by searching not for transits but for a less well known effect of Einstein's relativity: relativistic beaming. (Latham is being honored this week with a conference entitled, "Exoplanets in the Post-Kepler Era.")

The effect can occur when an orbiting planet induces a slight wobble in the star's motion with a corresponding modulation of stellar brightness. The effect in an exoplanet context was first predicted by two CfA astronomers in 2003, Avi Loeb and Scott Gaudi, in a paper the referee claimed would never lead to practical results; the variation in the brightness is typically only a few parts per ten thousand.

http://phys.org/news/2013-05-einstein-exoplanet.html