August 1, 2011

Good Morning,

Chinese submarine technology breaks records as it dives
deeper than any other manned submersible. Check out the details on this project and the test dive in the third article.

Until Next Time,
Erin

Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
Email your comments

P.S. You can discuss this issue or any other topic in the new Gizmorama forum. Check it out here...
http://gizmorama.gophercentral.com
------------------------------------------------------------

'Earliest' bird subject of controversy

LINLYI CITY, China - The Archaeopteryx, long considered the oldest and most primitive bird on Earth, might not have been a bird after all, a controversial Chinese study says. Spectacular fossils of Archaeopteryx were discovered in 1861, an animal with the feathered wings of a bird, but the teeth and tail of a dinosaur. Paleontologists have long considered the creature as marking the beginning of the evolution of birds and feathered flight. That view has been challenged by researchers in China who say Archaeopteryx may not have been one of the earliest birds but rather just another feathered dinosaur, Britain's The Guardian newspaper reported. Xing Xu at Linyi University says a new Archaeopteryx-like fossil from the Tiaojishan Formation in eastern China shares several features with Archaeopteryx, including long, sturdy forelimbs that presumably allowed it to fly. But when Xu's team reconstructed family trees to create a place for Xiaotingia zhengi, they found the creature belonged not in the lineage of birds, but to a group of dinosaurs called deinonychosaurs, who walked on two legs but did not fly. More importantly, the researchers said, Archaeopteryx appeared to belong in the same group. While the finding is tentative, it bolsters the arguments of those doubting the special status of Archaeopteryx following the discovery of other bird-like dinosaurs and dinosaur-like birds over the past decade or so, The Guardian said.


'Follow-the-leader' asteroid discovered

PASADENA, Calif. - Astronomers studying data from an orbiting NASA observatory say they've discovered the first known "Trojan" asteroid orbiting the sun in the Earth's orbit. Trojans are asteroids that share an orbit with a planet near stable points in front of or behind the planet, but can never collide with it as they maintain their leading or following position, a NASA release said. Neptune, Mars and Jupiter and two of Saturn's moons share their orbits in our solar system with Trojans. Scientists had long predicted Earth should have Trojans, but they have proven difficult to find because they are relatively small and would appear near the sun from Earth's point of view. "These asteroids dwell mostly in the daylight, making them very hard to see," said Martin Connors of Athabasca University in Canada, lead author of a new paper on the discovery using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. "But we finally found one, because the object has an unusual orbit that takes it farther away from the sun than what is typical for Trojans. WISE was a game-changer, giving us a point of view difficult to have at Earth's surface." The researchers' hunt through the WISE data resulted in two Trojan candidates, and one known as 2010 TK7 was confirmed as an Earth Trojan after follow-up observations with the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii. The asteroid is about 1,000 feet in diameter and is about 50 million miles from Earth. "It's as though Earth is playing follow the leader," said Amy Mainzer of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. "Earth always is chasing this asteroid around."


Chinese submersible in deep test dive

BEIJING - China says its Jiaolong manned deep-sea submersible reached a depth of 16,900 feet during a test dive in the eastern Pacific. The submersible took photos and video and made a topography scan at the ocean floor during Thursday's 3.5-hour dive, China's state-run news agency Xinhua reported. The craft, named after a mythical sea dragon, is the world's first manned submersible designed to reach a depth of 23,000 feet, Jiaolong chief designer Xu Qinan said. Thursday's test dive was in preparation for an attempt to reach that record-breaking depth set for 2012, China's State Oceanographic Administration said. China is the fifth country to send a man more than 11,000 feet below sea level, following the United States, France, Russia and Japan, Xinhua reported.



Skin cells turned into brain cells

SAN FRANCISCO - Researchers in California say they've discovered a method of converting human skin cells into brain cells, offering new hope for regenerative medicine. In an article in the journal Cell Stem Cell, Sheng Ding, a scientist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco, reported on a way of transforming adult skin cells into neurons that are capable of transmitting brain signals, a Gladstone release reported Thursday. "This work could have important ramifications for patients and families who suffer at the hands of neurodegenerative diseases such Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Huntington's disease," Lennart Mucke, director of neurological research at Gladstone, said. Ding's work builds on the cell-reprogramming work of another Gladstone scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, who in 2006 discovered a way to turn adult skin cells into cells that act like embryonic stem cells. Ding used two genes and a microRNA to convert a skin sample from a 55-year-old woman directly into brain cells that exchanged the electrical impulses necessary for such cells to communicate with each other. "These cells are not ready yet for transplantation," Ding said. "But this work removes some of the major technical hurdles to using reprogrammed cells to create transplant-ready cells for a host of diseases."

------------------------------------------------------------
Check out Viral Videos on the Net at EVTV1.com
http://www.evtv1.com/
EVTV1.com