Chile Volcano Erupts With Ash, Lava, Lightning

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Conductors! They’re everywhere!

 

Vaccine for Ebola?

One of the world’s deadliest diseases, caused by the Ebola virus, may finally be preventable thanks to US and Canadian researchers, who have successfully tested several Ebola vaccines in primates and are now looking to adapt them for human use.

Dr Anthony Sanchez, from the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia is presenting an overview of Ebola vaccine development today (Monday 31 March 200 at the Society for General Microbiology’s 162nd meeting being held this week at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre.

“The biothreat posed by Ebola virus cannot be overlooked. We are seeing more and more naturally occurring human outbreaks of this deadly disease. With worldwide air travel and tourism the virus can now be transported to and from remote regions of the world. And it has huge potential as a possible weapon of bioterrorism”, says Dr Sanchez. “We desperately need a protective vaccine”.

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New “Sea Monster” Species Identified

The remarkably well-preserved fossil of a dinosaur-era sea creature found in a Canadian mine is turning out to be a gold mine for paleontologists.

The Cretaceous-period reptile, dubbed Nichollsia borealis, is not only a new species—it represents a whole new genus, scientists announced on March 20.

It’s also one of the oldest and most complete plesiosaur fossils ever unearthed in North America.

Plesiosaurs were carnivorous reptiles that roamed the seas between about 205 million to 65 million years ago.

Mine workers found the intact creature about 200 feet (60 meters) deep in a surface mine in Alberta in 1994. The Syncrude company extracts oil from the mine’s sandy soil.

A “tomb” of sandstone preserved the 8.5-foot-long (2.6-meter-long) creature almost perfectly—unlike other plesiosaur fossils that are often found in porous shale.

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Aurora Borealis as seen from the International Space Station

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Blooms Taxonomy

Here’s the Bloom’s worksheet for your assessment
Bloom’s Worksheet

 

Giant Marine Life Found in Antarctica

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — Scientists who conducted the most comprehensive survey to date of New Zealand’s Antarctic waters were surprised by the size of some specimens found, including jellyfish with 12-foot tentacles and 2-foot-wide starfish.

A 2,000-mile journey through the Ross Sea that ended Thursday has also potentially turned up several new species, including as many as eight new mollusks.

It’s “exciting when you come across a new species,” said Chris Jones, a fisheries scientist at the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “All the fish people go nuts about that — but you have to take it with a grain of salt.”

The finds must still be reviewed by experts to determine if they are in fact new, said Stu Hanchet, a fisheries scientist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research.

But beyond the discovery of new species, scientists said the survey, the most comprehensive to date in the Ross Sea, turned up other surprises.

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Workers Uncovering Mummified Dinosaur

BISMARCK — Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota’s state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It’s among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

“This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh,” said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.

“This is not the usual disjointed sentence or fragment of a word that the fossil records offer up as evidence of past life. This is a full chapter.”

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Nerve-tapping neckband used in ‘telepathic’ chat

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a “voiceless” phone call for the first time.

With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

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Japan ‘cross-breeding cows with whales’

An official scientific review of Japan’s bizarre experiments with test-tube minke babies and attempts at cross-breeding cows with whales has exploded the claim whale slaughter is “research”.

Scientists have analysed the 43 research papers produced by Japan after 18 years of killing whales and concluded they are useless, strange and esoteric.

Some of the experiments involved injecting dead minke sperm into cow eggs, others attempt to produce test-tube whale babies and thawing frozen whale sperm to see if it remained fertile.

Japan’s Institute of Cetacean Research also injected cow and pig egg cells with minke cells as part of its whaling program.

Australian delegates to this weekend’s London meeting of the International Whaling Commission (IWC) will argue the “scientific research” loophole in the worldwide ban on commercial whaling that allows Japan to hunt the sea giants should be closed.

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