Antigravics

http://www.physorg.com/news85843069.html

>> The results of the research by Vanderbilt's Kenneth Catania, assistant professor of biology, were reported Dec. 21 in the science journal Nature. He became curious when he observed that a mole he was studying blew a lot of bubbles while swimming.

"When mammals adapt to living in water, their sense of smell usually degenerates. The primary example is the cetaceans, whales and dolphins, many of which have lost their sense of smell."

Catania devised a series of experiments to determine whether the star-nosed mole and another small, semi-aquatic mammal - the water shrew - can smell objects underwater. Using a high-speed camera, he discovered how they do it. After observing that the moles were blowing bubbles out of their nostrils and then sucking them right back in, he determined they were exhaling and inhaling the bubbles rapidly, between five and 10 times per second. That is about the same rate as the sniffing behaviour of comparably sized land mammals, like rats and mice. "Rats and mice don't sniff the way we do," Catania said. "They push air 'out-in out-in' in a fashion strikingly similar to what the star-nosed mole is doing, except that it is doing it under water."

Catania mounted a high-speed video camera so that it pointed up through the bottom of a glass tank. Then he stuck various objects on the bottom of the tank – pieces of earthworm, small fish, insect cuticle and blobs of wax and silicon – and observed the moles' behavior. He saw that, when the moles approached one of these targets, they would blow bubbles that came into contact with the target's surface and then were sucked back into the nostrils.

"Because the olfactory nerves in the nose are covered with mucous, odourant molecules are all water soluble," Catania said. "So, when these bubbles come into contact with an object, it is almost inevitable that odourant molecules will mix with the air and be drawn into the nose when the bubble is inhaled."

Just because the moles are getting whiffs of interesting odours underwater doesn't necessarily mean they smell them. So Catania devised some additional tests.

One of the complicating factors was the star-nosed mole's unusual nose, which is ringed by a star-shaped set of fleshy appendages. It uses its star like a super-sensitive set of fingers to identify objects it encounters while burrowing and swimming. So, at the same time it is sniffing at an object it is also fingering it with its star.

To determine if the mole can identify edible objects by sniffing alone, Catania created underwater scent trails leading to food and recorded how well the moles' could follow them. To keep the moles from using their tactile star, he put a grid-work between the animals and the scent trails. The openings in the grid were too small for the star appendages to squeeze through but large enough so the air bubbles could pass without difficulty.

These trials demonstrated that the moles could follow the scent trail by sniffing alone (without the tactile star).

Five moles were tested on earthworm scent trails and followed the trail to its reward with accuracies ranging from 75 percent to 100 percent accuracy. Two moles were tested with fish scent trails and followed them with 85 percent and 100 percent accuracy.

When the grid was replaced with a screen with openings too small for the air bubbles to pass through, however, the moles' performance dropped down to the level of chance, the same as their performance with no-scent trails.

In order to see if this capability was limited to the star-nosed mole or if other small semi-aquatic mammals also have it, Catania captured some water shrews and began testing them. He found that they also exhibit this underwater sniffing behaviour and can use it to follow underwater scent trails.

"Now, the question is, 'What other semi-aquatic mammals do this?'" Catania said. "Do animals like otters and seals do anything similar? Or is there a size limit and it only works for smaller mammals?"

http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stor ... 817039.htm

>> The fossilised remains of a gargantuan plant-eating dinosaur, one of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth, has been found in Spain.

The giant would have been up to 38 metres long and weighed as much as seven elephants.

Turiasaurus riodevensis, named after the region and village in Spain where it was found, lived about 145 million years ago, the research team reports today in the journal Science.

It was a sauropod, the familiar kind of dinosaur with a long neck, long tail and massive body that walked on four stout legs.

Sauropods are the largest land animals in Earth's history and this particular one is the largest dinosaur ever found in Europe.

Previous dinosaurs of this scale have been found mostly in the Americas and Africa.

This one is emblematic of a previously unrecognised branch of European sauropod evolution, the scientists say.

"This discovery is the dream of a palaeontologist," says co-author Dr Luis Alcala of Fundación Conjunto Paleontológico de Teruel-Dinopolis in Spain. "Really, I'm not dreaming?"

The dinosaur came from a time right at the boundary between the latter two periods of the Age of Dinosaurs, the Jurassic and Cretaceous. Relatively little has been known about European dinosaurs dating from then.

Scientists believe this dinosaur spent its days munching plants in an area close to the shoreline of the ancient Tethys Sea, forerunner of the Mediterranean Sea.

The first bones were found in an abandoned wheat field near the village of Riodeva in northeastern Spain in May 2003, Alcala says.

Alcala says it weighed 40-48 tonnes and was 36-38 metres long. Tyrannosaurus rex was a baby by comparison, weighing just 6 tonnes and about 13 metres long.

The Spanish dinosaur's humerus, the bone in the front leg that extends from shoulder to elbow, was as big as a full-grown man.

Turiasaurus rivals the size of the largest known dinosaurs, all sauropods, and its remains were more complete than those of many of them.

These include the African giant Paralititan, Seismosaurus in North America and Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus in South America.

"It's a tremendously large animal, not quite to the scale of the 'land whales', things like Argentinosaurus and Puertasaurus or Sauroposeidon. But it's pretty darned big," says Dr Thomas Holtz, a dinosaur expert at the University of Maryland who was not involved in the research.

"This is the first real super-giant from Europe," Holtz says.

Other fossils found at the site indicates Turiasaurus lived alongside other dinosaurs, including two-legged meat eaters, other sauropods and plant eaters similar to the armoured Stegosaurus. Turtles and crocodile-like reptiles were also around at the time.

The researchers say Turiasaurus was more primitive from an evolutionary perspective than other known giant sauropods.

The team found 70 pieces of the fossilised remains representing about a quarter of its skeleton, including fragments of the skull, leg, back, toes, ribs, shoulder blade and teeth.

Finding most of the key parts, the only vital missing piece was the pelvic girdle, allowed the scientists to ascertain its dimensions and appearance.

Other well-known sauropods include Apatosaurus (formerly known as Brontosaurus), Brachiosaurus and Diplodocus.

Comment
A thicker atmosphere, higher field spin rate and large creatures flourish.
Over the millennia the size of creatures has shrink quite considerable.

The organisms in the mine drainage, which live in a pink slick on pools of acidic green water, obtain energy by oxidizing iron - that is, generating rust -- and in the process create sulfuric acid and dissolve pyrite (iron sulfide or fool's gold) to release more iron and sulfur. This self-sustaining process creates the acidic drainage that pollutes creeks and rivers, including those around the researchers' study site, the Richmond Mine at Iron Mountain, Calif. The mine is one of the largest Superfund sites in the country.

Banfield has been trying to understand how the extremophiles - microbes that live in extreme environments - live together and generate the acid drainage that makes such mines toxic hazards. The green runoff from the mine, captured and treated by the Environmental Protection Agency, is a hot 108 degrees Fahrenheit, as acidic as battery acid, and loaded with toxic metals - zinc, iron, copper and arsenic.

Baker probed the gene fragments more thoroughly to turn up three Archaea from a totally unknown group, probably representing a new phylum among the several dozen known phyla of Archaea. They fall within a large class of microbes known as thermophiles, which are Archaea that live in warm and even scalding conditions. Many of these thermophiles have been recovered from hydrothermal vents in the deep mid-ocean ridges, where lava boils up between continental plates.

Once Baker had found gene segments (ribosomal RNA) from three Archaea, he was able to fish the microbes out of the slime soup and found that they were extremely small, around 200 nanometers in diameter, the size of large viruses. Bacteria average about five times this diameter.

These therefore could be the smallest organisms ever found, though Baker needs to culture them before confirming this. Because they're so small, however, they may not be free-living.

"We're not sure they can live independently, whether they have enough genes to fend for themselves, but instead are symbiotic with another organism or are feeding off another organism," Baker said.

http://www.physorg.com/news85938047.html