Clipmarks |

Mummified Dino Uncovered - Skin and All

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 16:29:36 GMT

clipped by: invictus
clipper's remarks: Sounds fantastic...

Using tiny brushes and chisels, workers picking at a big greenish-black rock in the basement of North Dakota's state museum are meticulously uncovering something amazing: a nearly complete dinosaur, skin and all.

Unlike almost every other dinosaur fossil ever found, the Edmontosaurus named Dakota, a duckbilled dinosaur unearthed in southwestern North Dakota in 2004, is covered by fossilized skin that is hard as iron. It's among just a few mummified dinosaurs in the world, say the researchers who are slowly freeing it from a 65-million-year-old rock tomb.

"This is the closest many people will ever get to seeing what large parts of a dinosaur actually looked like, in the flesh," said Phillip Manning, a paleontologist at Manchester University in England, a member of the international team researching Dakota.

Tags: dinosaurs, fossils, mummy, palaeontology, science

At Least He Died Happy

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 22:27:45 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

A 4,000-year-old skeleton has been unearthed by experts working on building Britain's biggest ever greenhouse - clutching a pint of beer.

The Bronze Age man's body was dug up by archaeologists who were called in after a team of builders working on the construction of the giant Thanet Earth project in Monkton, Kent, uncovered the skeleton last week.

According to experts the skeleton - that of a high status male - was found in shallow grave holding a "type of beer mug".

Marion Green, of the Canterbury Archaeological Trust, said that the find last week was one of the best preserved Bronze Age skeletons she had ever seen.

She added: "It is a beautifully decorated pot which could have been used as a type of beer mug."

Tests on beer mugs from other sites show that Bronze Age man was an ale lover - making the booze from grain.

Tags: my, hero

Fascinating facts about William Shakespeare

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 17:34:45 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: The last one made me laugh

Clip Source: www.cummingsstudyguides.net

Fascinating Facts About William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was born on April 23 and died on April 23, evidence indicates.

In his will, Shakespeare left his wife his "second-best" bed.

Shakespeare's name may have meant "Shaker of Spears," indicating warrior ancestry

Shakespeare was said to have enjoyed playing the part of the ghost in Hamlet.

Shakespeare was 17 or 18 when he married. His wife, Anne Hathaway, was 26.

Shakespeare's original grave marker showed him holding a bag of grain. Citizens of Stratford replaced the bag with a quill in 1747, perhaps in anticipation of the tourists who would come to see the final resting place of the world's greatest wielder or quills.

The motto of the Globe Theatre was totus mundus agit histrionem (all the world's a stage).

No one knows how Shakespeare died. Among the possibilities are kidney disease, murder most foul, and too much to drink

Some researchers claim that Queen Elizabeth I wrote Shakespeare's plays. Few scholars take this claim seriously

Proof of six degrees of separation

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 10:09:33 GMT

clipped by: Fast T friend
clipper's remarks: well... in fact its 6.6

Clip Source: www.imdb.com

Clip Source: www.news.com

In a research paper from June 2007, titled "Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF)," Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

Six degrees of separation posits that a person is a step away from people they know and two steps distant from people known by the people they know--thus the magic number six.

The dataset contains summary properties of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people. From the data, we construct a communication graph with 180 million nodes and 1.3 billion undirected edges, creating the largest social network constructed and analyzed to date.

Tags: six, degrees, separation, connectivity

Generics: Just As Good?

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 18:38:38 GMT

clipped by: debbyski

Clip Source: www.latimes.com

The Generic Pharmaceutical Assn. touts them with a slightly catchier slogan: "Same Medicine. Same Results." But sometimes, patients and their doctors beg to differ.

n a number of cases documented in medical journals and recounted in interviews with physicians, a generic version of what is often called a "pioneer" drug simply doesn't appear to work as well for many patients.

"The reasonable people I know aren't pounding their fists saying all generics are bad," Kowey said. "They're saying to the FDA, 'C'mon guys, there may be some situations in which [these differences] may turn out to be important.' "

Jillian Bealer of Buffalo, N.Y., is a fan of generics and the savings they bring. But she says her faith in their equivalence to brand-name drugs was shaken by a nasty recurrence of depression she suffered recently when she switched to a new generic for Wellbutrin XL.

Tags: maybe, not, sometimes

The weirdest lakes on Earth

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:30:45 GMT

clipped by: amgumen

Clip Source: news.softpedia.com

Asphalt is an organic rock usually found in geological deposits, mostly associated with oil.

When subterranean bitumen (from which asphalt is mostly done) leaks to the surface, it creates a large puddle or lake, improperly called tar pits. By now, only on five places on Earth asphalt lakes have been found, all in the Western Hemisphere.

The Trinidad Lake Asphalt Co exports $3 million worth of pitch annually.

In the asphalt, archaeologists found Amerindian pottery, along with the remains of prehistoric animals such as the mastodons and the giant sloth.

In Venezuela there’s the second asphalt lake in the world: Guanoco (Bermudez) Lake (close to Macaraibo Lake), in the Orinoco basin.

The third site where tar pits are found is

n Hancock Park, in the urban heart of Los Angeles

Methane gas also seeps up, causing bubbles which make the asphalt look like it’s always boiling.

Besides animals, in the pits was discovered a partial skeleton of a Native American woman, 9,000 years old.

Tags: geology

70% of Iraqis want US forces to leave

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:24:21 GMT

clipped by: masbury
clipper's remarks: And 1 of 4 have lost a family member

Clip Source: rawstory.com

LONDON (AFP) - More than two-thirds of Iraqis believe US-led coalition forces should leave, according to a poll conducted for British television ahead of the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion.

The ORB/Channel 4 News survey suggested that 70 percent thought multinational forces should withdraw.

Yet some 40 percent of the 4,000 people surveyed said they wanted the United States to play a bigger role in rebuilding Iraq and 36 percent wanted more British involvement.

A quarter of those surveyed said they had lost a family member to murder. In Baghdad, that figure rose to nearly half (45 percent).

Less than a quarter (23 percent) thought military action would prove to have been in Iraq's long-term interests but 55 percent were optimistic about the future

Four out of five people said their own area was already trouble-free.

Tags: iraq, politics, war