During the Cold War, U.S. and international monitoring agencies could spot nuclear tests and focused on measuring their sizes. Today, they’re looking around the globe to pinpoint much smaller explosives tests. Under the sponsorship of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation R&D, Sandia National Laboratories and Los Alamos National Laboratory have […]
Posts Tagged ‘Russel T Sajeev’
New 3-D Earth Model More Accurately Pinpoints Source of Earthquakes, Explosions
August 28th, 2013 
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Computer Simulations Indicate Calcium Carbonate Has a Dense Liquid Phase
August 24th, 2013 Riffin Computer simulations conducted at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) could help scientists make sense of a recently observed and puzzling wrinkle in one of nature’s most important chemical processes. It turns out that calcium carbonate — the ubiquitous compound that is a major component of seashells, limestone, concrete, antacids […]
New Bird Fossil Hints at More Undiscovered Chinese Treasures
August 23rd, 2013 Riffin The study of Mesozoic birds and the dinosaur-bird transition is one of the most exciting and vigorous fields in vertebrate paleontology today. A newly described bird from the Jehol Biota of northeast China suggests that scientists have only tapped a small proportion of the birds and dinosaurs that were living at that time, and that […]
Rising Mountains, Cooling Oceans Prompted Spread of Invasive Species 450 Million Years Ago
August 22nd, 2013 Riffin New Ohio University research suggests that the rise of an early phase of the Appalachian Mountains and cooling oceans allowed invasive species to upset the North American ecosystem 450 million years ago. The study, published recently in the journal PLOS ONE, took a closer look at a dramatic ecological shift captured in the fossil record […]
Ancient Cycads Found to Be Pre-Adapted to Grow in Groves
August 21st, 2013 Riffin The ancient cycad lineage has been around since before the age of the dinosaurs. More recently, cycads also co-existed with large herbivorous mammals, such as the ice age megafauna that only went extinct a few tens of thousands of years ago. Cycads that are living today have large, heavy seeds with a fleshy outer coating […]
Extinct Ancient Ape Did Not Walk Like a Human, Study Shows
August 20th, 2013 Riffin According to a new study, led by University of Texas at Austin anthropologists Gabrielle A. Russo and Liza Shapiro, a 9- to 7-million-year-old ape from Italy did not, in fact, walk habitually on two legs. The findings refute a long body of evidence, suggesting that Oreopithecus had the capabilities for bipedal (moving on two legs) […]
Ancient Mammal Relatives Cast Light On Recovery After Mass Extinction
August 19th, 2013 Riffin As growing numbers of species in the modern world face extinction because of global climate change, habitat destruction, and over-exploitation, scientists have turned to the fossil record to understand how mass extinctions in the past proceeded, and how species and ecosystems recovered in the aftermath of such events. Much work so far suggests that the […]
Shortening Tails Gave Early Birds a Leg Up
August 18th, 2013 Riffin A radical shortening of their bony tails over 100 million years ago enabled the earliest birds to develop versatile legs that gave them an evolutionary edge, a new study shows. A team led by Oxford University scientists examined fossils of the earliest birds from the Cretaceous Period, 145-66 million years ago, when early birds, such […]
Fossil of History’s Most Successful Mammal: Prehistoric ‘Rodent’ May Have Set the Stage for Life in Trees, Herbivorous Diets
August 17th, 2013 Riffin The 160 million-year-old fossil of an extinct rodent-like creature from China is helping to explain how multituberculates — the most evolutionarily successful and long-lived mammalian lineage in the fossil record — achieved their dominance. This fossil find — the oldest ancestor in the multituberculate family tree — represents a newly discovered species known as Rugosodon […]
Slow Earthquakes May Foretell Larger Events
August 16th, 2013 Riffin Monitoring slow earthquakes may provide a basis for reliable prediction in areas where slow quakes trigger normal earthquakes, according to Penn State geoscientists. “We currently don’t have any way to remotely monitor when land faults are about to move,” said Chris Marone, professor of geophysics. “This has the potential to change the game for earthquake […]
