Science News
Cretaceous Thanksgiving
Feathered dino ate true bird
By Susan Milius
More than 120 million years before the first Thanksgiving — before the first turkey even — at least one dinosaur was feasting on a bird.
A fossil Microraptor gui from northeastern China — still a dinosaur despite winglike feathers on all four limbs — has bird bones in its abdomen, report Jingmai O’Connor and her colleagues at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing. The position of the bird feet and partial wing suggest the dinosaur swallowed some now-extinct, tree-perching bird whole, the researchers contend in a paper published online November 21 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. They propose that Microraptor frequented trees and hunted deftly enough to snag what was probably an adult bird.
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A Rare Isotope Helps Track an Ancient Water Source
By FELICITY BARRINGER
The Nubian Aquifer, the font of fabled oases in Egypt and Libya, stretches languidly across 770,000 square miles of northern Africa, a pointillist collection of underground pools of water migrating, ever so slowly, through rock and sand toward the Mediterranean Sea.
The aquifer is one of the world’s oldest. But its workings — how it flows and how quickly surface water replenishes it — have been hard to understand, in part because the tools available to study it have provided, at best, a blurry image.
Now, to solve some of the puzzles, physicists at the Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois have turned to one of the rarest particles on earth: an elusive radioactive isotope usually ricocheting around in the atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour.
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Technology News
Midweek Tech Scan: The e-reality of Thanksgiving, circa 2011
Too bad those colonists who celebrated their first Thanksgiving on American soil didn't have credit cards, especially on the day after that first Turkey Day.
By Skip Ferderber
It’s a good time to think about the reality of the holiday, circa 2011: a four-day period to kick back, gather together with your family, watch some football, and get ready for the central event of the season: Black Friday. I’ll leave the moral implications of that to others.
Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, was for a few years the one day where the country united to blow as much money as possible in a single 24-hour period. Unfortunately, some have desecrated this most American of events by offering Black Friday sales as early as last week. But for those convinced that November 25 is their day to find that Chippendale bicycle seat cover or 150-inch HDTV they’ve always coveted, I offer you probably the best website that pulls together most major retailers’ Black Friday ads together: The Black Friday.com.
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AT&’T Temporarily Withdraws FCC Application for T-Mobile Merger
By Christina Bonnington
AT&T has temporarily withdrawn its application with the FCC to acquire T-Mobile, and will instead focus on getting approval from the Justice Department for the merger. This comes just days after FCC chairman Julius Genachowski sent out a draft proposing an additional administrative hearing on the proposed AT&T buyout of T-Mobile.
In addition to putting the brakes on its FCC application, AT&T also expects to take a $4 billion pretax charge to account for “potential break up fees” that would be due to Deutsche Telekom for the deal. AT&T made this announcement through a press release on its website.
If AT&T’s aquisition of T-Mobile ever happens, it would make AT&T the largest wireless carrier in the nation. But the acquisition is receiving a lot of friction — from government bodies, competing carriers and consumers.
In late August, the Justice Department filed an antitrust suit to block AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, claiming that the merger would “would remove a significant competitive force from the market.” A number of T-Mobile subscribers rejoiced at this announcement. Sprint also filed suit against the merger, saying it would create a duopoly between the wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon.
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Environmental News
Polar Bears get a Thanksgiving present this year
Brendan Cummings, Center for Biological Diversity
More than 187,000 square miles (approximately 120 million acres) along the north coast of Alaska were designated today as "critical habitat" for the polar bear as a result of a partial settlement in an ongoing lawsuit brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Greenpeace against the Department of the Interior. This designation under the Endangered Species Act is intended to safeguard those coastal lands and waters under U.S. jurisdiction that are vital to the polar bears' survival and recovery.
The habitat rule comes at a critical juncture for the polar bear. The Interior Department is under court order to reconsider by Dec. 23 elements of its 2008 decision to list the polar bear as "threatened," rather than the more protective "endangered" — a decision that could affect whether the Endangered Species Act can be used as a tool to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the primary threat to the species. At the same time, the Interior Department is also considering whether to allow oil companies to drill for oil in the polar bear's newly designated critical habitat in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas off Alaska.
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Maryland environmental law clinic focuses on enforcement
University program under fire for pursuing pollution case
By Timothy B. Wheeler, The Baltimore Sun
Thelma Boyd and her Cheverly-area neighbors were at their wits' end when they connected with the University of Maryland's environmental law clinic.
She and other residents of distressed, predominantly black neighborhoods on the outskirts of Washington had tried in vain to get local officials to keep a concrete plant from being built in their midst. Fearing a potential health threat, they felt their only recourse was to go to court but couldn't find a lawyer to take their case.
"That's not the kind of case people will take," said Boyd, 87, who's lived there 56 years. "They want money. We have no money."
The Prince George's County fight is one of a dozen environmental disputes being handled this year by the Baltimore clinic, which has become embroiled in political controversy over another case, a pollution lawsuit against an Eastern Shore chicken farm and the Perdue Farms poultry company. Gov. Martin O'Malley, a Maryland law graduate himself, recently joined the chorus of criticism from farm groups and Eastern Shore lawmakers, accusing the clinic of pursuing a "questionable" case that threatens to drive the fourth-generation farm out of business. Some lawmakers say they plan to try to cut the clinic's funding or limit who it can sue.
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Medical News
Thanksgiving feast loaded with salt: Reason for concern?
By Ryan Jaslow
(CBS/AP) When you sit down for your Thanksgiving feast, will your blood pressure go up? Unless your meal is cooked entirely from scratch, there's a good chance it contains lots of pressure-raising sodium
"For Thanksgiving or any meal, the more you can cook from scratch and have some control over the sodium that's going in, the better," says Bethany Thayer, a registered dietitian from the American Dietetic Association.
Look no further than traditional fixings to see how easily you can surpass 2,000 milligrams of sodium in one sitting.
Raw turkey may be naturally low in sodium, but poultry is often plumped up with salt water injections before it even reaches the store - tacking on another 320 mg of sodium per serving. Double that number if you buy a fully cooked bird.
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Jaw Size Linked to Diet: Could Too Soft a Diet Cause Lower Jaw to Stay Too Short and Cause Orthodontic Problems?
University of Kent
ScienceDaily (Nov. 22, 2011) — New research from the University of Kent suggests that many of the common orthodontic problems experienced by people in industrialised nations is due to their soft modern diet causing the jaw to grow too short and small relative to the size of their teeth.
The research, which was conducted by Dr Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel from the University's School of Anthropology and Conservation, tested the long-debated theory that the transition from a largely hunter-gatherer to an agricultural subsistence strategy across many parts of the world has had a knock-on effect on the growth and development of the human skull and lower jaw.
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Space News
Thanksgiving in Space? Five-Year-Old Turkey
Long-duration missions to Mars means food that can last for five years. Creating that has not been an easy mission for NASA.
By Irene Klotz
Aged beef? Sure, why not? Five-year-old peas? Not so much.
NASA has a long road ahead in its quest to be able to provide foods to astronauts with super-long shelf life, a necessity for missions to Mars and other destinations in the solar system.
Scientists recently tested 13 items that had been stored for three years, exposed them to temperatures of about 95 degrees Fahrenheit to simulate another two years of storage and then extrapolated the results to 65 entrees, based on the ingredients. Most of the foods are available to astronauts living on the International Space Station.
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On Mars Rover, Tools to Plumb a Methane Mystery
By KENNETH CHANG
There are no cows on Mars.
Of that, planetary scientists are certain, which leaves them puzzling over what could be producing methane gas detected in the thin Martian air. Methane molecules are easily blown apart by ultraviolet light from the Sun, so any methane around must have been released recently.
Could the gas be burbling from something alive? Cows, after all, burp methane on Earth. Other creatures, including a class of micro-organisms that live without oxygen, also produce methane.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration could get some answers soon. On the launching pad at Cape Canaveral in Florida is a spacecraft, the Mars Science Laboratory, that is scheduled to lift off on Saturday and reach Mars next August. It will deliver an S.U.V.-size rover named Curiosity that carries an instrument that can detect methane in the air, and if it does, it will unleash new excitement about the prospect of life on Mars.
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Odd News
Pumpkin Chuckers Aim To Squash Football As Top Thanksgiving Sport
David Moye
One of the highlights of Thanksgiving is gathering around the TV to watch an oblong spheroid fly through the air.
For millions of Americans, the object zipping through the sky is a football, but a small, passionate coterie prefer seeing pumpkins fly more than pigskins.
For those people, there is "Punkin Chunkin," a special competition being simulcast Thanksgiving night on both the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel. It focuses on the annual world championship that has been held for 25 years during the first week of November by the World Championship Punkin Chunkin Association.
The competition takes place in a cornfield in Sussex County, Del., and various teams of tenacious "punkin chunkers" try to squash their rivals by building homemade contraptions designed to propel pumpkins as far as they can go using slingshots, catapults, centrifugals, trebuchets, or pneumatic air cannons.
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