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Sunday, 3 April 2011
Saturday, 2 April 2011
Robot Fish Detects Contamination in the Sea in Northern Spain
Thursday, 31 March 2011
Wednesday, 30 March 2011
ANCIENT EGYPT MUMMIES
ANCIENT EGYPTIAN MUMMIES: Dame Rai, Prince Ouabkhousenou, Ramses VI, Queen Anhapou and Unknown Woman
The mummy of the Dame Rai, thought to perhaps be the mother-in-law of Sethi I (19th dynasty) at Cairo Museum, Egypt.
Queen Anhapou (right) and a unknown woman (left) at Cairo Museum, Egypt. Ramses VI at Cairo Museum
What Wiped Out The Dinosaurs?
For over 100 million years, dinosaurs, and not mammals, were the dominant form of life on Earth. The pinnacle of evolution at the time, dinosaurs filled the niches of being the largest, most differentiated animals -- herbivores and carnivores both -- on the planet. As you well know from seeing their fossils, they would dwarf their modern, mammalian counterparts if they were still alive today.
But they're not still alive today, because a mass extinction event occurred 65 million years ago. And the fossil record indicates that it occurred all at once, which is unusual. The Earth was overrun with dinosaurs, everywhere. In just a few hundred thousand years, they were all gone. All of them. Large, small, it doesn't matter. That's what extinct means -- every last one.
But one of the best science questions ever -- and this is always true -- is how? How did the dinosaurs, and many, many other forms of life, all become extinct at once? When we look at rocks, we find that one type -- sedimentary rock, forms from deposits. These deposits make it relatively easy to date the rock, or to figure out when the rocks (and hence the fossilized organisms inside) were deposited there. Here's what sedimentary rock looks like.
Well, there's a layer of rock, known as the K-T boundary, that seems to have a plethora of dinosaur fossils below the boundary, but almost none above the boundary. What's very interesting is that we find this exact same boundary all over the world, dating to 65 million years ago, with dinosaurs found abundantly below it, with the few ones found above it thought to be geologically reworked (upturned and reburied).
This thin layer of ash -- the boundary between light and dark in the above picture -- is the split between when dinosaurs are found and when they aren't. What's amazing about this is that this tiny, thin film of a layer contains something in great abundance that the Earth doesn't have much of at all: the element iridium. Naturally, the Earth has so little iridium that it's inconceivable that this iridium could have come from Earth. Where could it have come from?
Space. If a large enough asteroid or comet hit the Earth, the collision would spew up whatever elements were on that foreign projectile into the atmosphere, and spread it all over the globe. It could do the following things:
But they're not still alive today, because a mass extinction event occurred 65 million years ago. And the fossil record indicates that it occurred all at once, which is unusual. The Earth was overrun with dinosaurs, everywhere. In just a few hundred thousand years, they were all gone. All of them. Large, small, it doesn't matter. That's what extinct means -- every last one.
But one of the best science questions ever -- and this is always true -- is how? How did the dinosaurs, and many, many other forms of life, all become extinct at once? When we look at rocks, we find that one type -- sedimentary rock, forms from deposits. These deposits make it relatively easy to date the rock, or to figure out when the rocks (and hence the fossilized organisms inside) were deposited there. Here's what sedimentary rock looks like.
Well, there's a layer of rock, known as the K-T boundary, that seems to have a plethora of dinosaur fossils below the boundary, but almost none above the boundary. What's very interesting is that we find this exact same boundary all over the world, dating to 65 million years ago, with dinosaurs found abundantly below it, with the few ones found above it thought to be geologically reworked (upturned and reburied).
This thin layer of ash -- the boundary between light and dark in the above picture -- is the split between when dinosaurs are found and when they aren't. What's amazing about this is that this tiny, thin film of a layer contains something in great abundance that the Earth doesn't have much of at all: the element iridium. Naturally, the Earth has so little iridium that it's inconceivable that this iridium could have come from Earth. Where could it have come from?
Space. If a large enough asteroid or comet hit the Earth, the collision would spew up whatever elements were on that foreign projectile into the atmosphere, and spread it all over the globe. It could do the following things:
- Block a lot of sunlight,
- Disrupt the food chain from the bottom,
- Cause mass extinctions all at once,
- Cause tsunamis and environmental disasters, and
- Leave a thin-layer deposit of minerals not necessarily found on Earth.
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