A
fossil
dinosaur heart has been found!
A CT scan shows that this dinosaur had
a four-chambered heart, like mammals and birds, and unlike
modern reptiles. This is strong evidence that dinosaurs,
like us, were warm-blooded.
A
fossil
dinosaur heart has been found!
A CT scan shows that this dinosaur had
a four-chambered heart, like mammals and birds, and unlike
modern reptiles. This is strong evidence that dinosaurs,
like us, were warm-blooded.
“This is a landmark discovery in the field,” said Jack Horner, a dinosaur expert at Montana State University and the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman. “This means that dinosaurs were warm-blooded. That’s a fantastic. It’s way cool.”Horner said that because of the discovery, he and other researchers will now start doing CT scans on any intact dinosaur fossils they find.
The
Gashlycrumb Tinies, by Edward Gorey, is an
abecedary in Gorey's usual whimsically morbid style.
(I suspect this site is violating Gorey's copyright,
since the only credit is a pointer to another Gorey
Web site, but I can't resist linking. If you represent
Gorey's estate, and wish me to cease and desist, contact
me at the email address above.)
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development has announced that
125,000
people were killed in road crashes in its 29 member
countries in 1999. They point out that this is enough
people to fill 300 jumbo jets. That's the
good news: there were 5000 fewer road deaths in
1999 than in 1998, though other injuries from car crashes
increased.
Since the deaths came two or three at a time, instead of in an airplane, it's not news: I found this on Yahoo!'s "Oddly Enough" keeping company with stories about television stations offering breast enlargements, and a man taping himself to a tree. Meanwhile, a plane crash that killed 130 people is considered real news. Remember, "news" means it's unusual: plane crashes are news because their rare, car crashes are too routine to be noticed--if only because a serious consideration of the problem could paralyze most of industrial society.
We've known for years that cigarette smoking
can kill. The British government now wants to warn
smokers that, more immediately, smoking can
cause
impotence. A smokers'-rights advocate argues that
Now the attack is on the vanity of smokers - if you are a man you are told you will be impotent, if you are a woman you are told you will suffer premature ageing and wrinkles. It is just ludicrous.From here, it seems as though much of the appeal of smoking is a matter of image, so why not address things from that viewpoint?
Dream of warm nights: a new study argues that
echidnas,
like placental mammals, do have REM sleep--but only if the
temperature is just right. While this suggests that REM sleep
only evolved once--not separately in mammals and birds--it
doesn't help anyone figure out what it's for. Oxygenating
the corneas, maybe? Whatever it is, echidnas can live without
it: some of them live where they never sleep at the
appropriate temperature.
The
current
Onion not only has a
graphic
on the lessons of Columbine, a lead story
discusses the implications of MIT's new invention,
time:
Using time, one event can be positioned chronologically so as to be the cause of another. For example, a man's death may result in a gun being fired at him. Or the other way around. We're still working out some of the kinks.
If you've been wondering where the phrase
"she's like"
to mean "she said" or "she thought" came from, this
summary won't tell you, but it does explain why it's likely
to remain in use.
When galaxies collide: a
simulation
of the merger of the Milky Way and Andromeda
galaxies, three billion years from now.
Redefining art:
untrained
blind adults can pick up a pen and, within minutes, produce
realistic, recognizable drawings. The researcher who has been
working with, and encouraging, them believes that this is strong
evidence that drawing is an innate human skill, and specifically
that realism is part of our biological heritage.
Most donated organs go to people in need--with one
exception. Burn victims are
denied
much-needed skin grafts because the skin is being sold to
cosmetic surgeons. This isn't mentioned on donor consent forms,
of course:
"We don't want to give them the impression that their loved one's skin is going into (an actress's) lips," Collagenesis' DeVore said, adding that "he'd be in another business" without his tissue-bank partners.Do you suppose that's because the families signing those consent forms would want a share of the profits? [via Lake Effect]
I understand
medicinal
leeches, but leech-based face cream?!
[registration required]
Amaze your friends: the
Roman
numeral calculator not only cheerfully multiplies
XII by CLIV, it comes with calendar conversions and an
explanation of some of their pitfalls.
Quote of
the day: I was talking to a coworker who recently quit smoking.
She mentioned some of the things she's done with
the money she saved, and I was encouraging her to buy more
clothes or a nice vacation, not just put the money in the
bank. The conversation ended with
I need to remember why I quit--other than not dying, that is.
This collection of
paintings
by Frederic Church is good, and has many links to other
Church resources on the Web.
The only thing wrong with it is that even the large versions
of the image aren't big enough to make good screen wallpaper.
(Church was one of the foremost artists of the Hudson River
School, a group of nineteenth-century American artists who were
inspired by the landscape.)
A perfect
snapshot of contemporary corporate capitalism:
Unilever has announced that it is
buying
both Ben and Jerry's ice
cream and Slimfast diet drinks.
The point isn't that either is good or evil (though my feeling
is that ice cream is good and weird diet concoctions are
bad), but that corporations don't care what they sell, as long
as there's money in it: they'd be
particularly pleased if you bought a pint of high-fat ice cream
and a can of Slimfast, because someone who does that
is likely to be back for more.
The Martian
South
Polar Cap is strange territory, not yet understood:
these photos will help, though my image of the south polar
cap, now and maybe
always, includes the water ice and carbon dioxide caves from
Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy.
The
Onion's
personal
safety tips may not protect you from everything, but they're
on the money when it comes to alien attackers.
Salon presents a Christo
portfolio.
I hadn't realized how pretty some of his work is.
Columbine
explains
"Why I
Don't Like Transgender Fiction, and much else besides.
Warning: if you're inclined to think someone is sharing too
much about their life, you won't want to read this.
Just as there is a relatively narrow
habitable zone in the solar system,
galaxies
may have limited zones where Earth-like planets
can exist.
The
Campaign
Against Censorship of the Internet in Britain has been
forced to move to a US Web server in the wake of the
Godfrey v. Demon libel settlement. This Web log is also
in the US, and therefore should survive posting this link.
Sharks
do
get cancer.
No surprise here:
the British Medical Journal reports that
downsizing
is bad for your health--even if you're one of the lucky
ones and don't lose your job.
This might
solve a few problems, and annoy a few marketroids: John
Gilmore is suggesting a GPL-style
patent
pool:
Under his license, "Anybody who has no patents is free to use my ideas," he says. "Anybody who has patents and licenses them on these terms, or better, can also use them free of charge. Otherwise, come talk to me about a license" -- and bring a checkbook.
Copyright 1999, 2000 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@interport.net.
If you like this, you might also like my home page.