This is the link to our project.
baller6136, yankees02, vikinggirl15
http://deadlystorm.webs.com/
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Why can't Ostrichs fly?
Study: Ancient flying birds began to forage on ground, lost ability over time
By Jennifer Viegas
updated 3:40 p.m. ET, Thurs., Jan. 28, 2010
The bird family tree just gained a new and distinctive member, according to Chinese paleontologists.
They have found a long-legged, toothy, stubby-armed, three-fingered dinosaur that was an important early member of the lineage that includes birds and their closest dino relatives.
The 160-million-year-old dinosaur, Haplocheirus sollers, is about 10 million years older than what is believed to be the world's first known bird,Archaeopteryx, and exhibits characteristics associated with both dinos and birds.
As a result, the new species helps to fill in the fossil record and cement the long-held view that birds did indeed emerge out of the Maniraptora "hand snatcher" clade.
"Many dinosaurs are very birdlike and early birds are dinosaurlike," co-author Xing Xu told Discovery News, adding that there is still debate over the exact moment when birds first emerged.
"It is more or less depending on what you call a bird a bird, which is somewhat an arbitrary procedure," said Xu, a professor in the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology & Paleoanthropology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences. "For example, Epidexipteryx (a small, feathered "dinosaur") could be considered to be the earliest representative of the avian lineage."
For the study, published in the latest issue of Science, Xu and his colleagues analyzed the new dinosaur, discovered in orange mudstone beds at Junggar Basin in Xinjiang, China. According to Xu, the researchers determined it was "a relatively small carnivorous dinosaur" about 6.5 feet long with a slender head and "numerous small teeth."
The "hand snatcher" description seems quite appropriate in this case, since the dinosaur's hands had three strong fingers, with the middle finger being "much more robust than the others."
H. sollers belonged to the Alvarezsauroidea group of dinosaurs, now thought to have originated in Asia. Later members possessed a single, massive claw on each hand that was probably used for digging. The impressive middle finger on the new dinosaur likely represented an early evolutionary stage for this claw.
The new dinosaur, which was big for a bird but small for a dino, also shows how some dinosaurs shrunk down to bird size over time.
H. sollers is the world's largest and oldest known alvarezsauroid — 63 million years older than other known members of this group.
A second important dinosaur study this week, published in Nature and again co-authored by Xu, shows how another bird trademark — feathers — originated. Scientists previously wondered if they were first used for flight, insulation or display.
How I Feel
In the first place, I feel this question is weird. I never knew that Ostrich were ancient animals and could even possibly fly. This article though really informed me of the open world. Lastly, in this article they use dinosaur a lot so, if someone were looking blindly at this paper they would think it was about dinosaurs. that is how I feel about this article.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35129642/ns/technology_and_science-science/
Thursday, January 28, 2010
Math Blog
Over 300,000 children are being used as child soldiers right now. This means they are being used soldiers , for sexual purposes, spys and even cooks. UNICEF has to go into Africa and rescue these poor children. Lastly, Lots more people are donating to this cause. What can you do to help?
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Feeling That Cold Wind? Here’s Why.
Feeling That Cold Wind? Here’s Why.
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: January 9, 2010
A bitter wind has been blowing over parts of North America, Europe and Asia. Some places have been colder than ever, like Melbourne, Fla., which dipped to 28 degrees last Thursday, a record low. Europe has been walloped by snowstorm after snowstorm.
Brian Rea
What’s going on? Global cooling?
Nope. A mass of high pressure is sitting over Greenland like a rock in a river, deflecting the cold air of the jet stream farther to the south than usual.
This situation is caused by Arctic oscillation, in which opposing atmospheric pressure patterns at the top of the planet occasionally shift back and forth, affecting weather across much of the Northern Hemisphere.
What’s notable this year is that the pattern of high pressure over the Arctic is more pronounced than at any time since 1950.
In most years over the past few decades, the opposite has been true: there has been lower-than-average pressure over the Arctic, and higher-than-average pressure over the mid-latitudes — the middle of which cuts through Maine, across the Great Lakes and on to Oregon.
That pattern allows the jet stream to blow unimpeded from west to east and keeps the cold Arctic air largely north of the United States. The result tends to be warmer temperatures across much of the United States east of the Rocky Mountains.
No one is quite sure what drives these flip-flops in air pressure.
“I tend to think of it as a random thing,” said John M. Wallace, who is a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington. “I don’t think we understand any reasons why it goes one way one year and the other way another year.”
What does seem clear is that these oscillations have nothing to do with global warming, or, for that matter, global cooling. For one, they’re not new. And this winter’s cold has not been global. Santa, by North Pole standards, has been experiencing a balmy winter.
“Pretty much all of the Arctic is above normal,” said Dr. Walter Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo. In some areas, the temperatures are as much as 15 degrees Fahrenheit above normal.
In terms of global average temperature, this winter’s arctic oscillation “probably roughly cancels out,” Dr. Meier said. (In fact, last year ranked as the fifth-warmest year on record since 1850, the United Kingdom’s Met Office says.)
And it is certainly not the coldest air that has descended on the United States. In a great blizzard that swept across the East Coast in 1899, even parts of Florida dropped to below zero.
“We’re not close to those types of things,” said Michael Vojtesak of the National Weather Service
I feel that this topic explains lots about global warming and the reason for colder weather when it should always be warm. They tell us about our air in Greenland and how that is the reason we are experiencing colder weather here. They included that near the equator it is more hotter ,but up north or south it is very cold. That is my feelings for these topics.
Friday, December 11, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Experts Say Swine Flu Mutations Do Not Warrant New Alarm
Experts Say Swine Flu Mutations Do Not Warrant New Alarm
The World Health Organization tried this week to dampen fears about mutations seen in the swine flu virus in several countries, noting that both mutations had been found in very few people.
A change that created Tamiflu resistance has been found in about 75 people around the world, said Dr. Keiji Fukuda, chief flu adviser to the W.H.O.’s director general. Two clusters, in cancer units at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina and a hospital in Wales, were both among patients whose immune systems had been severely suppressed by cancer treatment; some had had their bone marrow, which produces infection-fighting white blood cells, wiped out so that replacement blood stem cells could be injected.
Such patients are more likely to develop resistant viruses when on Tamiflu because they can not clear a virus on their own. But the mutant strain appears not to spread easily in people with normalimmunity, like hospital workers.
“We don’t know the full answer, but it is more likely that we are not seeing a major shift,” Dr. Fukuda said.
Widespread Tamiflu resistance is a serious problem in the seasonal H1N1 virus, but it has not crossed over into the swine H1N1.
Dr. Fukuda also said W.H.O. scientists were “not sure” of the level of threat posed by a separate mutation that helps the virus reach the lungs. It has been found in Norway, Ukraine, Brazil, China, Japan, Mexico and the United States, in both serious and mild cases.
Experts still need to see whether the mutation — whose shorthand name in virology is D222G or D225G — is becoming more common, and how often it leads to severe disease, he said.
One isolate from Ukraine with the mutation had changed so thatswine flu vaccine probably would not protect against it well, Britain’s national medical laboratory reported Friday.
Flus mutate so fast, Dr. Fukuda cautioned, that announcing each change is “like reporting changes in the weather.”
More than 100 million swine flu shots have been administered in 40 countries, and the side effects are similar to or lower than those from regular flu shots, he added.
Six cases of anaphylaxis were widely reported in Canada when it was found that all were from one batch of vaccine, which was recalled. Anaphylaxis is an allergic reaction, usually to egg protein, that can range from mild hives to fatal airway swelling. All six patients recovered, and Dr. Fukuda pointed out that there were 172,000 doses in the batch, most of which caused no problems, so it was unclear whether the cause was a bad batch or just a coincidence.
My Thoughts...
I think that swine flu is very bad and people should be a lot more careful. Also,
with 75 people dead with this disease we should be a lot more careful. Lastly, there
are a bunch of other affected places.
Sunday, November 22, 2009
Glaciers disappearing from Kilimanjaro
Glaciers disappearing from Kilimanjaro
(CNN) -- The ice and snow that cap majestic Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania are vanishing before our eyes.
If current conditions persist, climate change experts say, Kilimanjaro's world-renowned glaciers, which have covered Africa's highest peak for centuries, will be gone within the next two decades.
"In a very real sense, these glaciers are being decapitated from the surface down," said Lonnie Thompson, professor of earth sciences at Ohio State University. Thompson is co-author of a study on Kilimanjaro published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study's authors blame the disappearing ice on increases inglobal temperatures and diminished snowfall at Kilimanjaro's summit.
Previous studies of Kilimanjaro's glaciers have relied on aerial photographs to measure the rate of the retreating ice. For this new survey, scientists climbed the mountain and drilled deep into the glaciers to measure the volume of the ice fields atop the 19,331-foot (5,892-meter) peak.
The ice sheet that capped Kilimanjaro in 2007 was 85 percent smaller than the one that covered its plateau in 1912, paleoclimatologists explained in the study.
The mountain's ice cover shrank about 1 percent a year from 1912 to 1953, a rate that has accelerated in recent years. From 1989 to 2007, that rate jumped to 2.5 percent a year. Since 2000, the plateau's three remaining ice fields have shrunk by 26 percent, scientists found.
Thompson and his team of researchers have spent seven years measuring the glaciers of Kilimanjaro, whose snow-capped profile rises dramatically over the surrounding tropical plains.
Using 110 "porters," or local residents, they carried 6 tons of equipment to the mountain's plateau. Battling temperatures as low as 35 degrees below zero, and with very little oxygen, Thompson and his crew lived atop Kilimanjaro for nearly two months, drilling and collecting core ice samples buried thousands of feet below the glaciers' surface.
The new data shows that both the Northern and Southern ice fields atop Kilimanjaro have thinned dramatically in recent years, while the smaller Furtwangler Glacier shrank as much as 50 percent between 2000 and 2009.
As the glaciers break up into smaller pieces, more of the darker surface of the crater is exposed. This causes temperatures to rise on the mountain and accelerates the melting of the ice, scientists say.
"The shrinkage and ultimate disappearance of these glaciers will create tremendous ecological and social problems in the near future," said Doug Hardy, senior research fellow in the Climate Systems Research Center at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Hardy contributed research to the new study.
"The Kilimanjaro glaciers are indicators for a larger-scale process," Thompson said. "It's not just Kilimanjaro, it's every tropical glacier in Africa, in the tropical Andes of South America, it's the glaciers in New Guinea. We are losing all those glaciers in today's world."
A snowless Mount Kilimanjaro also could have economic effects.
Kilimanjaro is a tourist attraction and a crucial revenue generator for Tanzania, one of the world's poorest counties. A study published by the Overseas Development Institute in January estimated that 35,000 to 40,000 people visit Kilimanjaro every year, spending almost $50 million annually in the country.
My thoughts.....
Mount Kilimanjaro can only be changing or melting to be exact for one reason. I think that reason is Global Warming. The ice caps are melting so we know that it must be because of global warming. This could also be bad for business and i'm not talking about pollution. I am talking about how much money they will lose with the glaciers melting.Those are my thoughts.
http://edition.cnn.com/2009/TECH/science/11/02/kilimanjaro.glaciers/index.html
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