Timmay Geek-o-ramma

[11B4V]

http://www.newser.com/story/177283/nasa-dumbfounded-by-6-tailed-comet.html?utm_source=part&utm_medium=united&utm_campaign=rss_top

NASA 'Dumbfounded' by 6-Tailed Comet

(Newser) – The Hubble telescope has spotted a spectacular, perplexing object in the middle of the Asteroid Belt: a rock with six "comet-like" dust tails streaming behind it. "We were literally dumbfounded when we saw it," David Jewitt, the head of the astronomy team studying the P/2013 P5, said in a NASA release. "Even more amazing, its tail structures change dramatically in just 13 days as it belches out dust. That also caught us by surprise. It's hard to believe we're seeing an asteroid."

The team hypothesizes that the sun's radiation set the 260-yard-wide rock spinning—thanks, Discovery explains, to the Yarkovsky-O'Keefe-Radzievskii-Paddack effect—so quickly that it lost structural integrity. Using modeling, one team member calculated six dates when the asteroid likely ejected dust into space. So far, it has likely ejected as much as 1,000 tons of dust into space, but that's still a tiny fraction of its mass. "This is just an amazing object to us, and almost certainly the first of many," Jewitt says. "In astronomy, when you find one, you eventually find a whole bunch more."

http://www.newser.com/story/177190/massive-king-of-gore-dinosaur-found-in-utah.html

Massive 'King of Gore' Dinosaur Found in Utah

(Newser) – Tyrannosaurus rex may have ruled the land in its day, but a newly discovered species, its closest known relative, was the top dog some 10 million years earlier. Lythronax argestes—which translates to "the king of gore from the southwest"—lived 80 million years ago in the central region of North America, and with a skull "designed for grabbing something, shaking it to death, and tearing it apart," the feathery, scaly beast ate whatever it fancied, researchers tell the AP. Fossils of the new species were found in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah in 2009 but it took paleontologists four years to dig them up and confirm they belonged to an undiscovered dinosaur.

"This shows that these big, banana-tooth bruisers go back to the very first days of the giant tyrant dinosaurs," says one paleontologist. "This one is the first example of these kind of dinosaurs being the ruler of the land." With a short, narrow snout and eyes that slanted forward for an overlapping field of vision, it had the view of a hunter, the BBC reports, though at 24 feet long and 8 feet tall at the hip, it would have been smaller than T. rex. But the Lythronax probably won't be the last T. rex ancestor to be found. "There's a slew of new tyrannosaurs waiting to be discovered out there," a paleontologist tells the Christian Science Monitor. "We are just beginning to understand this 80-million-year-old ecosystem." Click for another fascinating fossil find: a "platypus-zilla."

www.newser.com/story/177218/alien-life-maybe-believers-were-right-all-along.html

Alien Life? Maybe Believers Were Right All Along

(Newser) – The editors at Bloomberg aren't exactly making the case that little green men are out there, but they think it's high time we all wrapped our heads around the possibility of alien life. Consider that just this week, a study found that billions of Earth-like planets exist, each with the theoretical ability to harbor life. "Isn't it possible, as we learn more about the cosmos, that Trekkies, alien abductees and UFO conspiracy theorists were right all along?" the editors ask. "Which is to say, it is more rational to believe in alien life than it is to not believe in it."

That notion was largely dismissed in the scientific community only a generation ago, but it's gaining credibility there, too. This week's study could help in that it gives researchers a better sense of where to look, and of which planets seem the most likely candidates. A long shot? Of course, but the question of whether we're not alone "only grows more compelling, and more perplexing, with each new discovery." Click for the full editorial.

http://www.newser.com/story/177034/new-fossil-find-platypus-zilla.html

New Fossil Find: 'Platypus-Zilla'

(Newser) – As if platypuses weren't weird enough already, scientists in Australia have come upon a fossilized tooth of what they're calling "platypus-zilla"—a creature some three feet long, or at least twice the size of your everyday platypus. "It probably would have looked like a platypus on steroids," says researcher Mike Archer, citing a "gigantic monstrosity that you would have been afraid to swim with." But the find, which lived between 5 million and 15 million years ago, won't just haunt researchers' dreams; it reveals a lot about the evolutionary history of the platypus, the BBC reports.

Scientists had thought "maybe it was just one lineage of strange animals bumbling its way through time and space at least for the last 60 million years," Archer says. Instead, platypus-zilla "indicates there are branches in the platypus family tree that we hadn't suspected before." The tooth's bumps and other local fossils suggest it ate crustaceans, fish, turtles, and frogs, the BBC notes; modern platypuses have teeth only while young, Australia's ABC News notes.

http://www.newser.com/story/177174/big-meteor-strikes-way-more-common-than-thought.html

Big Meteor Strikes Way More Common Than Thought

(Newser) – A meteor strike like the one in Chelyabinsk, Russia, earlier this year might seem like a once in a lifetime event, but a new study in Nature says that isn't the case. Using data from sensors around the world, researchers found that big asteroids have hit Earth's atmosphere with "surprising frequency," the BBC reports—it's just that most explode over oceans or remote areas. "Something like Chelyabinsk, you would only expect every 150 years on the basis of the telescopic information. But when you look at our data and extrapolate from that, we see that these things seem to be happening every 30 years or so," says the lead author. The frequency of such hits might be up to seven times greater than previously thought, reports AP.

Ideally, scientists would have had a few days or weeks' notice of the strike, which is why "having some sort of system that scans the sky almost continuously and looks for these objects just before they hit the Earth, that probably is something worth doing." says the researcher. Meanwhile, a separate study in Nature has found the source of Russia's meteor strike. Researchers think the rock that hit Chelyabinsk broke off from a mile-wide asteroid known as 86039—resulting in an impact that created 30 times the explosive power of the Hiroshima bomb, the Independent reports. "If humanity does not want to go the way of the dinosaurs, we need to study an event like this in detail," says one professor.

http://www.newser.com/story/177029/there-are-billions-of-earth-like-planets-in-our-galaxy.html

There Are Billions of Earth-Like Planets in Our Galaxy

(AP) – Space is vast, but it may not be so lonely after all: A study finds the Milky Way is teeming with billions of planets that are about the size of Earth, orbit stars just like our sun, and exist in the Goldilocks zone—not too hot and not too cold for life. In a study published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, astronomers used NASA data to calculate for the first time that in our galaxy alone, there are at least 8.8 billion stars with Earth-size planets in the habitable temperature zone. For perspective, that's more Earth-like planets than there are people on Earth.

As for what it says about the odds that there is life somewhere out there, it means "just in our Milky Way galaxy alone, that's 8.8 billion throws of the biological dice," says a study co-author Geoff Marcy. The next step, scientists say, is to look for atmospheres on these planets with powerful space telescopes that have yet to be launched. That would yield further clues as to whether any of these planets do, in fact, harbor life. The findings also raise a blaring question, Marcy says: If we aren't alone, why is "there a deafening silence in our Milky Way galaxy from advanced civilizations?"

[garbon]

Is this your way of asking him to the dance?

[11B4V]

Is this your way of asking him to the dance?

Naw, I pulled open Newser and these stories where across the headlines. I thought of Tim. 

[CountDeMoney]

Should've named the thread Timmay a-Go-Go.

[The Brain]

King of Gor dinosaur?

[Ed Anger]

T-Rex will be watered

[DontSayBanana]

King of Gor dinosaur?

Cabot!