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Saturday, March 13, 2010 | Categories: Episodes
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Dinosaur's Oldest Ancestor
Reconstruction of Asililsaurus, M.H. Donnelly
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The oldest known relative of the dinosaur has been found in Tanzania. It is called Asilisaurus kongwe and it lived 245 million years ago, more than 10 million years before the oldest dinosaur. A nearly complete skeleton was assembled using fossils from 14 different animals found at the same site. Dr. Randall Irmis, the paleontology curator at the Utah Museum of Natural History and an Assistant Professor of Geology and Geophysics at the University of Utah, and one of a group of scientists who helped describe the fossils, says Asilisaurus is not what they were expecting. Paleontologists thought the relatives of dinosaurs would be two-legged carnivores. But Asilisaurus kongwe, which stood about a metre tall and three metres long, walked on four legs and was both a plant and meat eater.
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Paper in NatureNews from University of TexasNews release from the University of UtahResearch group that found the fossilsDr Irmis' web pageCBC News storyMotivation by Anticipation
Ready for your final exam?
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Just knowing when you will receive the results of a test or job interview can influence your performance. That's the finding of a new study by PhD student Keri Kettle at the University of Alberta's School of Business. Of 271 students who took part in the study, those who were told to expect the results from a class presentation within hours, scored in the top 40 percent. The theory here is that when the possibility of disappointment is close, you do what it takes to avoid it. Those told they'd have to wait more than two weeks to hear how they performed, scored in the lower 40 percent.
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Related Links
Paper in Psychological ScienceNews release from the University of AlbertaKeri Kettle's web pageBlog entry at Not Exactly Rocket ScienceGrasping the Gribble's Gobble
Gribbles, Dr. Simon
Cragg/Graham Malyon Institute of Marine Sciences, School of Biological
Sciences, University of Portsmouth, UK
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The gribble is a small marine invertebrate with a ravenous appetite
for wood. This is bad news if you're the owner of a wooden ship, but
intriguing if you're interested in producing biofuels. Like termites
and some cockroaches, the gribble can break down wood into sugars for
food, which is the first step to producing biofuels. Gribbles, however,
don't depend on a gut full of micro-organisms, working in a complex
ecosystem, to break down wood. They do it themselves, using
biochemistry encoded in their own genes. Professor Simon McQueen-Mason,
a biologist in the Centre for Novel Agricultural Products at the
University of York, in England, has been working to understand the
gribble's digestion. He hopes it will lead to novel and perhaps simpler
ways to produce biofuels.
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Cold War Invasions
Rose-ringed parakeet in mid-blitzkrieg - courtesy Oregon State U.
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During the Cold War, the armies of the East and West faced each other in Europe, separated by the metaphorical "Iron Curtain", and each prepared to invade and strike deep into enemy territories. The Cold War in Europe never developed into a hot war, but Dr. Susan Shirley has discovered that there were many invasions of Western Europe that Eastern Europe managed to resist. Not invasions of troops, but of destructive alien species. Dr. Shirley, a Canadian research associate in the College of Forestry at Oregon State University, found in a study of invasive birds that, during the Cold War, dozens of invasive bird species arrived in Western Europe, largely brought in by the pet trade, while Eastern Europe actually saw a decrease in alien invaders.
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A Brilliant Darkness
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In 1938 a brilliant young Sicilian physicist named Ettore Majorana vanished from the face of the Earth. Majorana was a colleague and collaborator with some of the greatest minds in physics - Fermi, Heisenberg, Pauli and Bohr. His brilliant insights into the structure of matter are still being tested today. But Majorana was also a strange and disturbed young man who struggled with loneliness and depression. There has been much speculation on what happened to Majorana with theories ranging from suicide to fleeing to a new identity to kidnapping by sinister forces. In a new book, A Brilliant Darkness, theoretical physicist Dr. João Magueijo, who has been fascinated by the story for decades, explores the mystery of Majorana's life and disappearance.
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CBC's Rewind takes a look at space travel predictions since 1946. Listen to great clips from the CBC Radio Archives, with new commentary from Bob McDonald, about where space exploration should have taken us by now.
Want to hear about some of the latest popular science books from the people who wrote them? Check out our list of recent interviews with science authors.
We're coming to Halifax in early June for our annual Quirks Question Roadshow, and we want to see you there. Stay tuned to this space for details.
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