Scientists have found the fossil of a 60-million-year-old creature in Morocco, which is the rabbit sized ancestor of the modern day elephant.
Paleontologist Emmanuel Gheerbrant discovered the rabbit-size proto-elephant’s skull fragments in a basin 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Casablanca, Morocco.
The creature, called Eritherium azzouzorum, bolsters the case that whole new orders of mammals were already around less than 6 million years after global catastrophe ended the age of reptiles some 65.5 million years ago.
Elephant ancestors now join the likes of rodents and early primates as some of the first known mammals to walk the Earth during the Paleocene era, 65.5 to 55 million years ago (prehistoric time line), according to Gheerbrant.
Continue reading ‘60-mln yr old rabbit-sized elephant ancestor found in Morocco’
Round-the-world balloooning pioneer Bertrand Piccard unveiled his solar-powered aircraft in Switzerland on Friday, ready for another trend-setting circumnavigation of the globe powered solely by the sun.
The wasp-shaped prototype of Solar Impulse, with the wingspan of a jumbo jet, was rolled out before some 800 guests at an airfield near Zurich after six years of development.
Ten years after Piccard and Briton Brian Jones achieved the first non-stop flight around the globe in the Orbiter balloon, the Solar Impulse team are aiming to demonstrate that reliance on renewable energy is not a pipedream.
Continue reading ‘Swiss team unveil pioneering solar plane’
Pigeons may sometimes appear to randomly target city sculptures with their droppings, but according to a new Japanese study they also have the potential to become discerning art critics.
Researchers at Tokyo’s Keio University say they have found that the birds have “advanced perceptive abilities” and can distinguish between “good” and “bad” paintings, recognising beauty the way humans do.
The team — which previously published research saying that pigeons can tell a Monet from a Picasso — was seeking to find out whether the animals may also be able to prefer one to the other.
For their experiment, the scientists took paintings by elementary school children and selected those that were commonly deemed to be “good” and “bad” by teachers and a control group of other adults.
Continue reading ‘Japan study : Pigeons have Eye for Paintings’
Scientists at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, along with researchers in Italy, have found two types of liquid water that have long been suspected to exist below water’s normal freezing point.
Unlike most liquids, water becomes less rather than more dense when it freezes — and it is densest not when it is coldest (at 0 degrees Celsius, just before it freezes) but at 4 degrees C.
These are just two of water’s host of anomalous properties, some of which are crucial to its behaviour in the natural environment.
In 1992, Gene Stanley of Boston University, Massachusetts, and his co-workers carried out computer simulations of water, which suggested that hydrogen bonds in water might produce two different types of liquid if water was made very cold and squeezed to high pressures.
Continue reading ‘Scientists found mysterious forms of Water’
Vladimir Putin
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