Gizmorama
December 27, 2010
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Good Morning,
Researchers in Chicago look back at an evolutionary diet
change in prehistoric dinosaurs. Read all the details on
this exciting discovery in the first article.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Dinosaurs said to have undergone diet swap
CHICAGO - Many dinosaur species long considered strictly
meat-eaters may have evolved into plant eaters at some point
in their history, U.S. scientists say. Researchers at
Chicago's Field Museum say velociraptors and Tyrannosaurus
rex, two-legged dinosaurs known as theropods, were defini-
tively carnivores but the diet of their direct ancestors took
some surprising turns over the years, the Chicago Tribune
reported Tuesday. Through tens of millions of years of evolu-
tion some shifted away from a meat diet, becoming herbivores
or omnivores, which eat both plants and meat, their study
appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sci-
ences says. "Most theropods are clearly adapted to a preda-
tory lifestyle, but somewhere on the line to birds, predatory
dinosaurs went soft," Lindsay Zanno, a Field Museum post-
doctoral student, says. "Our common historical image of
theropods is out of date." A handful of theropod species,
including the direct genetic ancestors of velociraptors,
went from eating meat to plant diets and then inexplicably
returned to meat diets after millions of years, the resear-
chers say. Of 90 theropod species studied, 44 yielded evi-
dence of being either exclusive plant-eaters or omnivores,
Zanno says. Changes in flora, fauna and geography caused
theropods to turn away from the violence of hunting and
assume the gentler activity of browsing for plants for their
food, she says. The changes seem to coincide with the period
when flowering plants first appeared and spread across the
world, as well as when the continents split and moved apart
from each other, creating new ecological niches for animals
to exploit and occupy, she says.
Habitat loss putting ocean fish at risk
WASHINGTON - Billfish and tuna, important commercial and rec-
reational fish species, are vulnerable to fishing pressure
as a result of shrinking habitat, U.S. scientists say. Sci-
entists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administra-
tion say a growing zone of low oxygen, known as a hypoxic
zone, in the Atlantic Ocean is affecting these species' pre-
ferred oxygen-abundant habitats, forcing them into shallower
waters where they are more likely to be caught, a NOAA re-
lease said Wednesday. While hypoxic zones occur naturally in
the world's tropical and equatorial oceans, scientists worry
these zones are expanding and occurring closer to the sea
surface, and are expected to continue to grow as sea temper-
atures rise. "The hypoxic zone off West Africa, which covers
virtually all the equatorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean,
is roughly the size of the continental United States, and
it's growing," Eric D. Prince, NOAA's Fisheries Service re-
search fishery biologist, says. "With the current cycle of
climate change and accelerated global warming, we expect the
size of this zone to increase, further reducing the available
habitat for these fish." Loss of habitat can lead to more
fish being caught since the fish will actively avoid waters
low in oxygen and are concentrated near the surface, scien-
tists say.
Robot built to walk like senior citizens
TOKYO - Robots have been made to run, jump and even dance,
but they might be more useful if they could walk like a
senior citizen, Japanese researchers say. Scientists at
Japan's National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science
and Technology have developed a robot that leans on objects
in its environment to support itself as it moves around and
completes tasks, NewScientist.com reported Wednesday. "Ro-
boticists usually just see objects as obstacles to be
avoided," the institute's Sebastien Lengagne says. "But they
can help us." Lengagne and his colleagues are developing
humanoid robots capable of using their entire bodies and any
surrounding objects to move around cluttered environments
and complete complex balancing tasks without getting stuck
or falling over. "If I ask you to look below your desktop,
you will put your hand on the desktop for support," Lengagne
says. "But most methods will try to get the robot to do the
task without touching the desktop." The robot, HRP-2, acts
more like a human, placing both arms on a table to maintain
its balance when trying to sit down in a chair or using one
arm for support when taking a big swinging kick at a ball,
the researchers say.
Meteorite yields building blocks of life
GREENBELT, Md. - U.S. scientists say they've found amino
acids where they shouldn't be -- on a meteorite that formed
from an asteroid so hot it should have destroyed the acids.
NASA researchers say the amino acids, the building blocks of
life, may have formed through some mechanism that does not
require water, increasing the chances of finding life beyond
the solar system, ScienceNews.org reported Tuesday. "Amino
acids are forming in environments that we really didn't think
were possible," Daniel Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight
Center in Greenbelt, Md., says. He and his colleagues found
the material in a fragment of the asteroid 2008 TC3 that was
spotted before it slammed into Earth's atmosphere and rained
meteorites onto the planet's surface. The sample they ana-
lyzed was classified as a ureilite meteorite, a kind that
originates from parent asteroids devoid of water and thus
unable to form amino acids by known mechanisms. Any new way
of naturally producing amino acids "really increases the
likelihood, in my opinion, of life existing elsewhere in the
universe," Glavin says. The finding shows, he says, "that
synthesis of amino acids in nature can occur in unexpected
places and ways, and that we should keep a very open mind
about how and where prebiotic chemistry can occur."
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