Science

Traveling at 2.5 million miles per hour

A strong solar flare is barreling toward Earth at 2.5 million miles per hour, but scientists say its worst effects will likely bypass the planet when it expectedly arrives by the weekend.

Solar flares from the sun occur with frequency and, when unleashed toward Earth, can cause so-called solar storms. This particular one is categorized as a low-level X-class flare, the most severe of the three classes.

A storm of this size hasn’t headed toward Earth in several years, Tom Berger, the director of the Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo., told the Associated Press. But, he added, “we’re not scared of this one.”

Earth’s atmosphere largely protects people on the ground from the radiation effects of a solar flare, but such blasts do have the potential to knock out power systems and disrupt satellite communications. Berger told the AP that the one heading toward Earth could slightly disturb some satellite and radio communications.

Storms categorized as “Extreme” have the potential to cause massive damage to electrical and communication systems and even pose a health hazard to passengers and crew in high-flying planes.

Here’s video footage from NASA of the solar flare in the middle of the sun on Wednesday:

Most of North Africa is no more than a sun-scorched desert today, but 95 million years ago the landscape was crisscrossed by rivers, dotted with marshes and populated with all sorts of reptilian monsters. The German paleontologist Ernst Stromer stumbled on this lost world back in 1912. Among the fossils he brought back to Munich were a few bones from a strange-looking predator he called Spinosaurus aegyptiacus—notably a long, thin jawbone studded with sharp teeth and a backbone festooned with enormous spines. The animal was clearly a predator, and the bones were so huge that this new creature could, he thought, be even bigger than T. Rex.

Unfortunately, most of Stromer’s fossil collection was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid during World War II, leaving just his drawings and descriptions. That record has obsessed University of Chicago paleontologist Nizar Ibrahim since he read about them as a child, and, says Nizar, “I always wanted to go back to do the same thing Stromer did a century ago.”

A few years ago, he did. The results have just appeared in a new report in Science. And it turns out that Spinosaurus was even stranger than Stromer realized. “There are so many ways it was unusual,” says Ibrahim, “that it’s hard to come up with my top three favorites.” At nearly 50 ft. long, he says the creature was in fact bigger than T. Rex—the biggest predatory dinosaur ever found, by about nine feet. “It had a long snout like a crocodile,” he says. “It had a big sail on its back.”

And perhaps most important from a scientific perspective, Spinosaurus is the first swimming dinosaur ever discovered (ichthyosaurs weren’t dinosaurs, so they don’t count). “It had relatively puny hind legs,” says Ibrahim’s University of Chicago colleague Paul Sereno, who co-authored the new paper, “with wide feet and flat claws that are ideal for paddling.”

Its tail, unlike that of T. Rex, was flexible, which would have helped propel it through the water, and its nostrils were high up on its head, allowing it to breathe as it searched for its underwater prey—freshwater sharks, among other things. “The skull,” says Ibrahim, “resembles the skull of fish-eating crocodiles, and the tip of the snout, with its slanted, interlocking teeth, is like a fish-catching trap.” The sail—the biggest ever found on a dinosaur—was almost certainly used to attract females, since it didn’t have a rich system of blood vessels that would have marked it as an adaptation for getting rid of excess heat. For that reason, says, Sereno, “It was probably brightly colored.”

If Spinosaurus is the biggest, weirdest predatory dino ever found, and the tale of its discovery a mystery story lasting nearly a century, the way it was reconstructed was almost equally unusual: the scientists digitized Stromer’s old drawings of the bones he’d found, digitized images of the bones they’d found, and merged them with a computer to figure out what the whole creature must have looked like—a process you’ll see, along with the story of Spinosaurus’ discovery and rediscovery, on a National Geographic/NOVA special airing on PBS on Nov. 5 at 9 p.m. You can see Spinosaurus itself, meanwhile, at the National Geographic Museum in Washington, D.C., starting September 12.

And if Spinosaurus itself isn’t strange enough to grab you, there’s plenty more to come. “We’ve collected an entire menagerie of strange predators,” says “Ibrahim, “and we’ll be publishing more papers. I’m interested in Spinosaurus, but also in the world it lived in. Spinosaurus had bizarre adaptations,” he says, “but they make sense once you understand the bizarre river system it ruled.”

Finally, some good news about the environment

The depleted protective ozone layer that has left a gaping hole over Antarctica is showing signs of recovering, a UN panel of scientists said Wednesday.

The report found early indications of an increase in total ozone levels, which stabilized around 2000 after two decades of decline. The hole over Antarctica that appears every year, which grew to about 30 million square km in 2006, has also stopped expanding, according to the report.

Scientists realized in the 1970s that chemicals used in refrigerants and aerosol cans known as chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were wearing down the ozone layer, which helps the Earth repel potentially harmful radiation from the sun. But an international movement to ban or replace CFCs, buttressed by the 1987 Montreal Protocol, has helped reduce the amount of CFC in the atmosphere.

“It’s a victory for diplomacy and for science and for the fact that we were able to work together,” chemist Mario Molina, one of the coauthors of a 1974 study predicting ozone depletion, told the Associated Press.

While past studies have found slowing ozone depletion, the UN report Wednesday is the first to show indications of an increase in total ozone, Geir Braathen, a senior scientific officer with the World Meteorological Organization, which co-produced the report, told Reuters.

Selfies are no longer just a human trend

The Mars Curiosity Rover isn’t the only lunar explorer that knows how to take a selfie these days.

The first of its kind—the Rosetta Spacecraft was designed to orbit and land on a comet in outer-space. This mission, which was launched by the European Space Agency in 2004, has finally approached the comet it was set to land on, and was at a distance of approximately 50 kilometers away from the comet when the selfie was snapped.

A special camera onboard Rosetta’s Philae Lander called CIVA (Comet Nucleus Infrared and Visible Analyzer) captured the image above using multiple exposures to bring out the fine details in both the comet and spacecraft.

Come November, the Rosetta Spacecraft will deploy its Philae Lander and attempt history’s first comet landing.

Burial mounds, sun-aligned pits and ancient delights galore

For a disenchanted visitor to Stonehenge in the south of England, the iconic array of 4,000-year-old pillars may have signified little more than a pile of rocks. But a new discovery that Stonehenge was actually the heart of a huge complex of ancient burial mounds and shrines could win over even the most cynical observer.

Researchers at the University of Birmingham have found a host of previously unknown monuments, including ritual structures and a massive timber building that was likely used for burial of the dead during a complicated sequence of exposure and de-fleshing.

“New monuments have been revealed, as well as new types of monument that have previously never been seen by archaeologists,” Professor Vincent Gaffney, the project leader, said in a statement Wednesday. “Stonehenge may never be the same again.”

The project, which made use of remote sensing techniques and geophysical surveys, discovered large prehistoric pits, some of which are aligned with the sun, and new information on Bronze Age, Iron Age and Roman settlements and fields.

Stonehenge draws more than 1.2 million visitors a year, including President Barack Obama last week, the Associated Press reports.

The massive, plant-eating sauropod may have weighed as much as several elephants

Paleontologists have unearthed a new species of dinosaur in Tanzania, a long-necked, plant-eating giant that crops up in varied forms on every continent, but rarely ever has been found in the continent of Africa.

The fossils of the newly minted Rukwatitan bisepultus were spotted in in the Rukwa Rift Basin of southwestern Tanzania, embedded into a cliff wall. Paleontologists from the University of Ohio excavated the fossils over several months, unearthing vertebrae, ribs, limbs and pelvic bones.

The fossils clearly belonged to a creature within the family tree of sauropods, the long-necked giants that frequently turn up in the soil of South America, but CT scans revealed a distinct species that had developed unique traits from its cousins across the pond. The bones offer new evidence that the flora and fauna of the region, some 100 million years ago, may have been uniquely adapted to the area’s prehistoric environment. “With the discovery of Rukwatitan and study of the material in nearby Malawi, we are beginning to fill a significant gap from a large part of the world,” said study author Eric Gorscak.

A new study of cetacean pelvic bones reveals how pleasing the ladies gave some male ocean mammals a reproductive edge

It’s hard to imagine what a dolphin or a whale needs a pelvic bone for. Sure, the structure was important 40 million years ago, when the ancestors of these seagoing mammals were walking around on land and had actual legs attached to actual hips. But for a legless swimmer, there doesn’t seem to be any point. No wonder evolutionary biologists have long considered these small, apparently useless bones purely vestigial, destined eventually to vanish.

“Apparently” is the key word here, however. A team of biologists has figured out what the pelvic bones of dolphins and whales are good for—and it’s a lot more fun than walking. The bones anchor muscles that control the animals’ penises, and far from fading away, they appear to be evolving to give the animal even more, well, finesse.

“We’ll never be able to ask a female whale, ‘was it good for you?'” says Jim Dines of the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, co-author of a new study in the journal Evolution. “But it’s plausible that if you can maneuver the penis in a slightly different way, there could be an evolutionary advantage.”

The advantage, in case it’s not obvious, is that keeping a female cetacean happy (“cetacean” being the umbrella term that covers both whales and dolphins) would give a particularly expert lover a better chance of getting his sperm to its destination. That in turn would give him more descendants with the ideal, pelvis-anchored musculature to keep their partners happy, producing even more descendants, and so on. The triumph of the agile penis.

That’s the theory, anyway, and while it’s not quite a slam-dunk, there’s plenty of circumstantial evidence to support it. To start with, Dines and his co-authors examined the pelvic bones of 130 whales and dolphins from 29 different species—not just superficially, but using a laser scanner that made exquisitely detailed 3-D models of the bones that could be digitally compared for similarities and differences.

It turned out that the animals with the largest pelvic bones in relation to overall body size also had larger testicles than the other species. That’s important, says co-author Matthew Dean, of the University of Southern California: “Species that are the most promiscuous tend to have the largest testes.” The reason: the animals’ strategy for providing their sperm to as many receptive females as possible is to make a whole lot of it. For example, he says, “chimpanzees have gigantic testes—they’re almost as big as their brains.” Now that this image is forever lodged in your head, the more important point is that there’s a direct line from larger, more evolved pelvic bones to larger testicles to more sperm to more babies—which is the entire point.

When it comes to whales and dolphins particularly, things are more complex still. Consider that cetacean penises are, for want of a better word, prehensile. “The penis of a whale or a dolphin is very dextrous,” says Dean. “It has a mind of its own.” Specifically, it’s controlled by two strong muscles that pull with differing tension to let the organ change shape. “I think of it like a trick kite, controlled by two strings and capable of complex motion. That’s a whale’s penis to me.” And now, surely, to all of us.

To make sure the authors weren’t kidding themselves, they also looked at the ribs of big-testicled cetaceans to rule out the possibility that the relationship between large gonads and large pelvic bones was a coincidence—that all of the bones in the skeletons of these species were oversized and the pelvis bones were just going along for the ride. But nope, a bigger pelvic bone didn’t correspond with bigger rib bones. Improved sexual performance remained the leading theory.

The pelvic structures that make certain cetacean species such sexual virtuosos probably evolved very rapidly. “Male genitalia evolve much faster than other parts of the body,” says Dean, because even the slightest mating advantage can give an individual more offspring. Still, in the case of the cetaceans’ maneuverable penises, Dean concedes, “It’s a speculation. We don’t know for sure.”

Here’s hoping they prove it soon; it’s too good a story not to be true.

World Meteorological Organization warns that record highs of greenhouse gases would have warming effect on earth's climate

The concentration of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere climbed at a faster rate last year than any year since 1984, according to a new study from the World Meteorological Organization.

The study also measured new highs in concentrations of methane and nitrous oxide, which the United Nations agency’s scientists warned would have a warming effect on the earth’s climate.

Preliminary data suggests that greenhouse gases may have risen not only because of emissions, but also because of a reduced uptake of carbon by the oceans and the biosphere. Together, they absorb 50% of carbon emissions, the study’s authors note, resulting in record high rates of ocean acidification.

“We know without any doubt that our climate is changing and our weather is becoming more extreme due to human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud.