Newsworthy Science

Zuul-on-Zuul violence: Paleontologists find evidence of dinosaurs clubbing each other​

Damage to the armoured fossil of an ankylosaur suggests injuries from another ankylosaur​

It's a picture we thought we understood. Ankylosaurs, tank-like armoured dinosaurs possessed an intimidating weapon — a powerful muscular tail tipped with a massive bony club. It used that tail to defend itself against terrifying predators like Tyrannosaurus rex, dealing mighty blows against the huge carnivores.

But a new study of one of the best preserved ankylosaurs ever discovered, an animal known as Zuul crurivastator, housed at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, is telling a different story. Ankylosaurs might have developed their weapon to fight each other in violent battles over mates or territory.

Paleontologist Victoria Arbour, of the Royal BC Museum in Victoria, has been studying the fossil since its discovery, and was part of the team responsible for naming the species. The first part of the name, Zuul, came from the similarity between the fossil's head and the demon Zuul in the original Ghostbusters movie. The second part of its name translates to "destroyer of shins," reflecting what they imagined the ankylosaur's mighty tail could do to the legs of T.rex or another predator.

But the new study of Zuul's remains gives support to a suspicion Arbour had been cultivating for some time — that ankylosaurs mostly tangled with each other, rather than predators.

Arbour's team published their work in Biology Letters.

"Herbivorous animals often don't really fight predators unless it's like the very last resort to not getting eaten," she said in an interview with Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald.

"But lots of herbivorous animals fight each other for mates and territory. So if you think about things like bighorn sheep or deer, they've got these weapons on their heads and they really use those for fighting each other, usually at mating time."

During initial study, important parts of Zuul's body weren't visible, as they were still encased in more than 30 tonnes of rock. But as that rock was removed at the museum, evidence of Zuul-on-Zuul violence appeared, said Arbour

"We saw that some of the very big triangular spikes along the flanks actually we're missing tips and the tips had sort of healed and grown back into a sort of new shape."

These hand-sized bony spikes were part of Zuul's armour, but the damage to them wasn't consistent with the tearing bites of a predator's sharp teeth. They looked more like the result of a blunt force strike with a large heavy object. And the fact that the damage was on the animal's flanks was also significant.

"Based on where those broken spikes are found, we think that that's more consistent with it having been inflicted by another Zuul."

Paleontologist Micheal Ryan from Carleton University, who wasn't involved in the study, thinks that's a reasonable conclusion to draw. "I see that as being more typical of the interspecific interaction between two ankylosaurs than I do with a large theropod attacking."

These tail whipping battles could have been extremely violent, and Zuul might have gotten off easy in its fights, with damage only to its armour.

"We also know that from some other ankylosaurs, there are examples of broken ribs," said Arbour. "Certainly ankylosaurs could swing their tails with enough force to break bone and really cause some major damage to whoever they were hitting them with."

Nevertheless, Zuul's tail-fighting strategy might have an advantage over that of modern herbivores who use antlers or horns on their heads in fights, said Arbour.

"Your head is where your brain and your eyes and your mouth, all these important parts of your body for survival are located. So maybe in some ways having your weapon on your tail is actually a little bit of a better idea, because if you break your tail, at least you can keep going about your day."

Some dinosaurs likely did use their heads for this type of competition, though. Micheal Ryan's specialty is horned dinosaurs like Triceratops, which had three horns projecting from its face. Fossils of horned dinosaurs have been found with scrapes and even punctures on the bony shields that surrounded their heads.

"Those horns were slipping across each other's shields and sometimes one of them would have punctured through," said Ryan. "And again, the analogy with modern herbivores and the fact that you know things like the horns of bighorn sheep, or the antlers and horns of of moose and deer and stuff evolved essentially for intraspecific [within species] conflict."

What the fossil doesn't tell is why Zuul might have been fighting another ankylosaur. Arbour points out that he most spectacular battles in modern herbivores are often between males over mates. Think of bighorn sheep butting heads, or moose or deer wrestling with their antlers. But there's no reason to assume this was the case with dinosaurs — perhaps the females fought over mates or territory 75 million years ago. And in any case Arbour says they haven't been able to determine Zuul's sex.

What Arbour has more confidence in is that the picture these findings support changes the focus on what fights were really important in the life of ankylosaurs, and takes the focus off the kill-or-be-killed picture we have of dinosaur life. "The whole reason that tail clubs evolved probably wasn't necessarily as an anti-predator defence, but really more for fighting within their own species."
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/quirks/dec...ce-of-dinosaurs-clubbing-each-other-1.6679241
 
www.reuters.com

U.S. to announce scientific breakthrough on fusion energy -sources

The U.S. Department of Energy will announce on Tuesday that scientists at a national lab have made a breakthrough on fusion energy, the process that powers the sun and stars that one day could provide a cheap source of electricity, two sources with knowledge of the matter said.
www.reuters.com www.reuters.com
Let's hope it is a really significant breakthrough.
Curiously most advances in fusion lately are happening in inertial and stellerator reactors, not tokamaks. May ITER have chosen the wrong way?
 
Looks like it's the same thing announced as a year ago - https://www.sciencealert.com/for-th...nerated-more-energy-than-absorbed-by-the-fuel. Not sure why it's being announced again now, maybe some sort of reconfirmation.

It's a very very long way from anything resembling power generation though, and it's important not to let too much hype get going. When they say net energy at this stage they don't mean all the energy being used, they mean the fraction that gets applied to the target.

Side note: good on the Guardian for grasping the key thing in their coverage. So many of the hype articles miss this:

According to a report in the Financial Times, which has yet to be confirmed by the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California that is behind the work, researchers have managed to release 2.5 MJ of energy after using just 2.1 MJ to heat the fuel with lasers
[...]
And there is another point: the positive energy gain reported ignores the 500MJ of energy that was put into the lasers themselves.
Click to expand...

I get that the 2.1 being less than the 2.5 is a physics achievement but not mentioning the input actually being two orders of magnitude higher is such a big failing of so much coverage.
 
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But experts have stressed that while the results would be an important proof of principle, the technology is a long way from being a mainstay of the energy landscape. To start with, 0.4MJ is about 0.1kWh – about enough energy to boil a kettle.
Click to expand...

And all that had to do was build this thing :D

5267.jpg
 
EgonSpengler said:
Someone on the radio said a practical application wouldn't make 2050, which is the target date for the US to cut carbon emissions by half, but I still think this story gets a
Spoiler :
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I am more optimistic, 2050 is the date most people though a couple of years ago but last months have seen a number of important achievements, new reactors built and a number of records beaten, still a long way to go but things look going faster than expected.
 
things do not look going faster than expected . Supposedly they would be declaring they got 6 to 8 times more energy than they used and commercial feasibility supposedly needs one of 10 to 1 ... They just say they have fusion to make a check mark on a list that was first prepared during the famous times of the hole in the Ozone layer . 1990s something ...

like ı think ı would go purple in 2019 when Lockmart would release the first commercial fusion reactors , right ?
 
Yeah I wouldn't be betting on it happening in the lifetimes of anyone here
 
actually ı don't recommend people to go for old posts after Xenforo really butchered the ones that came before the first upgrade in 2016 or so but the joke is ı have a post in 2014 or thereabouts that claims Lockmart would forgive if ı let them do the thing by '19 ...
 
EgonSpengler said:
Someone on the radio said a practical application wouldn't make 2050, which is the target date for the US to cut carbon emissions by half, but I still think this story gets a
Spoiler :
tenor.png
Click to expand...
We could cut carbon emissions in half using fission+renewables, so while fusion research is great, it's not necessary for decarbonization IMO.
 
Some folks on the radio are talking about Massachusetts' effort to be "carbon neutral" by 2050. There's a 1200-megawatt wind project that was supposed to go into service in 2028 that's now on wobbly legs. :undecide:

WBUR, 16 December 2022 - "Offshore wind company asks state to pull deal, says it will rebid"

WBUR said:
Avangrid on Friday asked Massachusetts regulators to scrap the agreements the company reached with utilities and reopen a new round of bidding, saying that its Commonwealth Wind project, the largest offshore wind farm in the state's pipeline, "cannot be financed and built" under existing contracts.

Avangrid filed a motion with the Department of Public Utilities seeking dismissal of the power purchase agreements it reached with utility companies in May, which would render them moot, and a reopening of the process of procuring the project's 1,200 megawatts of clean wind energy.
Click to expand...

EDIT: Someone pointed out that the contract being on hold doesn't [have to] mean the project is on hold. I feel that's just another way of saying "the state could just accede to the developer's demands", but maybe I'm being too cynical.
 
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Dads older than mums since dawn of humanity, study suggests

Men have consistently had children later in life than women throughout human history, suggests a study. The research used genetic mutations in modern human DNA to create a timeline of when people have tended to conceive children over the past 250,000 years1, since our species first emerged. The timeline suggests that men have, on average, conceived children around seven years later then women.

Without historical records, knowing at what point in their lives people had children is tricky. In recent years, sequencing technologies and large genetic data banks have allowed researchers to mine DNA for clues. But previous estimates have been limited to approximately the past 40,000 years2,3. To look further back in time, Richard Wang, an evolutionary geneticist at Indiana University in Bloomington, and his colleagues tracked spontaneously arising mutations in modern human DNA.

All children have new mutations that their parents don’t. These mutations emerge when DNA becomes damaged before conception, or owing to random errors during cell division. Research suggests that older parents pass on more mutations than younger parents, with differences between men and women.

Wang and his colleagues used software to comb through data from a study of around 1,500 Icelanders and their parents that tracked age of conception and genetic changes between three generations4. The program learnt to associate certain mutations and their frequencies with the age and sex of parents. The team then applied the newly trained model to the genomes of 2,500 modern people living around the world, to identify mutations that emerged at various points in human history.

By dating when these mutations emerged, the team was able to map out the average age of mums and dads over the millennia. The researchers found that 26.9 years was the overall average age of conception during the past 250,000 years. But breaking this down by sex showed that men averaged around 30.7 years when they conceived a child, compared with 23.2 years for women. The numbers fluctuated over time, but the model suggested that men consistently had children later in life than women.

The longer generation times for men can be generally explained by the fact that men are biologically able to have children later in life than women, bringing up the average age of fatherhood, says Wang.

The finding could also point towards social factors, says Mikkel Schierup, a population geneticist at Aarhus University in Denmark, such as pressure on men in patriarchal societies to build status before becoming fathers.

Population geneticist Priya Moorjani of the University of California, Berkeley, says the model doesn't account enough for other factors — including environmental exposure — that could shape when mutations pop up. This means that mutations with various causes might be unfairly attributed to the age of parents, potentially skewing the results of studies like this, Moorjani and others argued in a preprint posted in June5.

Although this is a valid concern, Wang says that his team’s study does account for some other mutation-causing factors. Definitively reconstructing when people became parents will require sampling more populations, says Schierup. In the meantime, this study provides “sensible estimates” that can help researchers to gain insight into the lives of early humans, he says.​
 
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Way back in my YEC recovery days, I couldn't figure out how mutations didn't accumulate in the germline from generation to generation. I can even find old posts by me. I was already fully atheist, but I knew I didn't understand.
 
Disruptive science, or that which turns our understanding on its head, is slowly dying off.

www.nature.com

‘Disruptive’ science has declined — and no one knows why

The proportion of publications that send a field in a new direction has plummeted over the last half-century.
www.nature.com www.nature.com

Hopefully it is a reflection of the low hanging fruit being taken, or the knowledge requirements going up yearly, and not something more sinister.
 
A lot of the infrastructure prevents good work. As well, there is a deliberate under-funding, so we diffuse out less research than I'd like into ways that generate compounding returns. Many schools are more interested in pumping out grad students than getting them to do big projects, so lots of projects are done with the intention of getting out a paper in time.
Everyone knows about the 'military industrial complex' speech. But in the very same speech, he warns of a military scientific complex.

There is the low-hanging fruit aspect, though.
 

City lizards are just built different — right down to their DNA​

Study finds lizards have genetically evolved to adapt to urban life​

If you've recently been to a Puerto Rican city, you may have noticed a woman wandering the streets with a fishing pole, looking for lizards.

That would be New York University biologist Kristin Winchell, a.k.a. "the Lizard Lady."

Winchell has just published a study showing that city lizards are genetically different from their counterparts in the forest.

But before she could study the critters' DNA, she and her colleagues first had to catch them — a feat they accomplished using a fishing pole with a tiny lasso fastened to the end.

"That's the best part of this job. We just walk around the forests or in the urban areas … and whenever we see a lizard, we take out our fishing pole," Winchell told As It Happens host Nil Köksal.

"A lot of people seem to think we're looking for Pokemon, actually. I don't know why a fishing pole would play into that, but that's a common question we get."

But Winchell and her team found something rarer than the rarest of Pokemon — hard evidence that perfectly backed up their scientific hypothesis.

She and her colleagues had already shown Anolis lizards living in cities are physically different from those that dwell in nature.

Despite being mostly indiscernible at a glance, city lizards, in fact, have bigger toe pads and specialized scales that help them cling to urban surfaces like glass and pavement, and longer limbs that help them sprint more quickly across hot pavement.

But the new findings — published Thursday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences — shows those differences are far more than skin deep.

Jaw-dropping findings​

The study analyzed 96 Anolis cristatellus lizards, comparing the genetic makeup of forest-dwellers to those living in Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan, as well as the northern city of Arecibo and western city of Mayaguez.

They found that 33 genes within the lizard genome were common across all three otherwise genetically distinct urban populations.

The fact that the exact same genetic changes happened across three populations independent of each other means they are likely the direct result of urbanization.

"Practically speaking, that means [for] that any of these populations of lizards across the island, if a city were to spring up, that ancestral population of forest lizards has the genetic machinery to produce the same type of adaptations," Winchell said.

"So if they were to bulldoze a forest and build up a city, the lizards would probably have the same long limbs and large toe pads with lots of extra scales."

The lizards live roughly seven years, and the genetic changes can occur within 30 to 80 generations.

She and her team had suspected the city lizards were genetically adapting to their environment, but the evidence, she said, was almost too perfect.

"Honestly, when we got some of these findings, my jaw dropped," Winchell said.

"I didn't believe it at first, but I ran analysis after analysis, and my co-authors had to stop me at a certain point and said, 'Kristin, you've shown the same thing using five different analyses. It's real. Let's go ahead and publish this now.'"

Wouter Halfwerk, an evolutionary ecologist and professor at Vrije University Amsterdam who was not involved in the study, said he was impressed that the scientists were able to detect such a clear genomic signature of adaptation.

"You can hardly get closer to a smoking gun," he told The Associated Press. "The ultimate goal within the field of urban adaptive evolution is to find evidence for heritable traits and their genomic architecture."

Lizard Lady longs to look for lady lizards​

One limitation of the study, Winchell said, is that it only looked at male lizards.

It wasn't Winchell's preference, but she says almost all the previously existing literature about the species focused on the males. It's a common problem in biology writ large, she says, and it's a cycle that tends to perpetuate itself.

"In order to both build hypotheses that are founded in the previous literature and to be able to compare with that previous literature, we decided to focus on the same subset of animals," she said. "So it's an unfortunate legacy of how a lot of biology has been done."

It's a cycle she hopes to break in future studies.

"That's definitely an area that I want to explore: to try and understand how the ecology of the female urban lizards differs from the male urban lizards, and what the consequences are for the evolution of these animals in cities," she said.

So she may yet be out again on the streets of Puerto Rico with her fishing pole.

"I have a couple of nicknames," she said. "One is Lizard Lady and the other is Total el Dia" — which means "all day" in Spanish" — "because I'm often in these neighbourhoods and areas all day long looking for lizards."
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/city-lizards-1.6713249
 
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