December 2011 Archives

Hope you all have a happy holidays and a rather spiffing New Year.

I'm going to have a bit of a rest now for a week or so, but don't doubt that Weird Science will be back in 2012 - bigger and better than ever before.

Excelsior!

Daniel

Competitive human sprinters are built like cheetahs and greyhounds, a study has found.

Bones in the front portion of their feet are longer than those of non-sprinters, research has shown.

Their ankle joints also rotate differently due to a shorter plantarflexor moment arm (pfMA), a measurement of leverage.

Similar characteristics are found in the world's fastest sprinting animals, such as the cheetah and greyhound.

Velociraptor used its famous oversized toe claw like an eagle's talon to pin down struggling victims which were eaten alive, according to a new theory.

The dinosaur's sickle-like claw was probably not employed to disembowel and dispatch prey, as suggested in the movie Jurassic Park, it is claimed.

A comparison with modern birds of prey indicates that instead it was a tool designed for grasping and restraining.

It is not only the celebrities that visit Glastonbury who have been described as out of this world as it emerged the town is believed to be a UFO hotspot.

Official figures show that in the last five years 27 calls were made to police detailing alien events in Somerset, including sightings near Glastonbury and Street.

Avon and Somerset Police released the figures to the Central Somerset Gazette following a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

A rocky planet virtually identical in size to the Earth has been discovered orbiting a distant Sun-like star.

It is the first time such an Earth twin in another solar system has been detected.

Although the planet, Kepler-20f could have a thick water-vapour atmosphere, its surface is believed to be too hot for life.

A second planet in the same system, Kepler-20e, is only slightly smaller than Earth and even hotter.

A computer programme could soon be challenging music tycoon Simon Cowell's "hitman" reputation.

Scientists at the University of Bristol have come up with a "hit potential equation" that can predict a top five hit with 60% accuracy.

The formula brings together musical features such as tempo, timing, song duration and loudness, as well as more detailed information such as chord and harmonic complexity.

Long before the arrival of penguins, giant plant-eating dinosaurs roamed Antarctica.

Scientists discovered a fossil tail bone belonging to a titanosaur, a family that included the largest land animals ever to walk the Earth.

Titanosaurs were sauropods, four-legged herbivorous dinosaurs with long necks and tails.

Sauropods included some 150 species whose remains have been found around the world, but never in Antarctica until now.

Astronomers have taken a dramatic snapshot of one of the brightest galaxies in the sky, revealing its striking beauty in unprecedented detail.

NGC 253 is a spiral galaxy 11.5 million light years away in the constellation of Sculptor.
Also known as the "Silver Coin" or "Silver Dollar" galaxy, it is peppered with hot young stars which have just ignited.

Radiation from these "stellar nurseries" makes the surrounding hydrogen gas glow brightly.

The new image of NGC 253 was taken with the European Southern Observatory's 2.6 metre VLT Survey Telescope (VST), which has an exceptionally wide field of view.

VST, located at Paranal on a mountain top in Chile's Atacama desert, is the largest telescope in the world designed exclusively to survey the sky in visible light.
It is the newest telescope at the Paranal observatory, which also houses the Very Large Telescope array of four eight-metre telescopes.

Red-breasted robins may be an essential part of Christmas, but their distinctive plumage has far greater significance for the birds themselves, a study has shown.

The red breast varies in size and coloration with age and sex, suggesting it may communicate information about it's owner, scientists believe.

As long ago as the 1940s, British ornithologist David Lack carried out a study in which a violent hen robin attacked a headless stuffed specimen.

The experiment revealed that it was the red breast that triggered her aggression.

A diver finds himself in a bit of a tight spot.

Click on the image to embiggen.