A flightless ibis (Xenicibis xympithecus) that lived on Jamaica until about 10,000 years ago had wings that evolved into weapons. It would use its club-like wings to beat predators and perhaps other ibis in defense of its territory and young. However, these club-like wings proved useless when humans finally showed up and the birds were extinct shortly afterwards.
“Working with Olson, Longrich went to Jamaica and found more fossils – including curved hefty handbones.
He thought the first he found was a deformity, but as he found others, including a couple that had been cracked and healed, he realized they had been used as clubs. The new fossils also showed the wrists were hinged so the hands could swing like flails.
“I would guess that they would try to grab each other using the beak and then just proceed to pound each other using the wings,” Longrich told Discovery News.”
In 1875 a body was dug up while building a new train depot in Philadelphia. Thought to have been buried originally in 1800, the entire body has been turned into soap.
“This unusual preservation occurred because water seeped into the casket and brought alkaline soil with it, turning the fats in his body to soap through a type of hydrolysis known as saponification.”
Japanese scientists from Kyoto University have announced that they’ve managed to create a “palladium-like” alloy using what they label as “present-day alchemy.” They used nanotechnology to combine rhodium and silver into the new alloy, which they say could eventually replace the real thing in consumer electronics.
Professor Hiroshi Kitagawa and his team used nanotechnology to combine rhodium and silver to produce an alloy with similar properties to palladium, which is located between rhodium and silver on the periodic table. These two metals usually would not mix, as rhodium has 45 electrons and silver 47, and so are stable elements unable to react with each other under normal conditions. The research team overcame this hurdle by mixing rhodium and silver in solution which was then turned into a mist and mixed with heated alcohol. This process produced particles of the new alloy that are around 10 nanometres in diameter.
Recently, in the city of Elista in the Kalmykia Republic, spotlights strange lights were witnessed by hundreds of residents. The former head of the republic, and current president of the World Chess Federation, Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, said that he was not surprised because he has met with these aliens before.
“Aliens told me: “You, humans, have not contributed anything to the development of the civilization, and you are cannibals. Isn’t this a manifestation of madness – being a cannibal?” the newspaper quoted the official as saying.
In Kentucky, being unidentifiable and having no fur in winter can be a deadly combination.
Mark Cothren shot and killed an animal on Dec. 18 because he said he feared what it was, since he did not recognize it. He said the animal walked from the woods onto his front yard around 3 p.m. Cothren lives on Mount Carmel Church Road in Lebanon Junction.
“I was like: ‘every animal has hair, especially this time of year!’ What puzzled me is how something like that could survive through a winter with no hair,” Cothren said.
India’s space agency experienced its second launch failure of the year when a rocket carrying a communication satellite exploded shortly after takeoff.
Yashpal, a retired Indian scientist and independent commentator, said he was very disappointed by Saturday’s failure, but other countries too have experienced such problems.
“I hope it’s just one of those things,” Yashpal, who uses one name, told reporters.
New Zealand’s military has released hundreds of documents from 1952-2009 containing drawings of UFOs and also supposed to contain examples of alien writing.
The Soviet 1K17 laser tank used 66-pound synthetic ruby rods to produce lasers designed for blinding pilots and enemy weapons systems. It doesn’t melt incoming missiles, but still, laser tank!
The Democratic Republic of Congo (not to be confused with the Republic of Congo immediately to the west…. Seriously) has a surprisingly rich history of space programs and rocket launches.
The story first begins back when the DRC was known as Zaire back in the late 1970s. A German company by the name of Orbital Transport und Raketn Aktiengesellschaft (OTRAG) decided to set up a rocket testing and launch facility in the Shaba Province of Zaire and signed an agreement with the government in 1976. To sweeten the deal, Zaire would be given one experimental satellite and a reduced rate for any future rocket launches. Logistical reasons that Zaire was chosen were the low population density near the launch site and because it was near the equator where rockets are just a tad easier to put into orbit.
However, the main reason why OTRAG didn’t set up in West Germany was a combination of two factors. The first factor was the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967 which states that all rockets fired in international air space must be flagged from the country of origin. This directly conflicted with the 1954 Treaty of Brussels which, in part, prohibits the production of long-range or guided missiles on German territory. Zaire had no issue with providing the rockets with a Zaire flag and they placed no restrictions on OTRAG for missile development.
Rockets were launched beginning in 1977 with both successful launches and failures. However, due to intense pressure from the Soviet Union and France, two countries none too pleased with German rocket advancement, Zaire closed the program down in 1979. The video below is one of the failures.
NASA engineers have proposed a system comprised of a two-mile-long rail gun and a scramjet to launch a spacecraft into orbit. The rail gun would have a 240,000- horsepower motor that would convert 180 megawatts into enough force to accelerate the scramjet down the rail gun to Mach 1.5 in under 60 seconds. The scramjet would then launch from the track carrying the payload. Once it hit 200,000 feet at Mach 10 the spacecraft would separate from the scramjet and fire its rockets into orbit.
The system calls for a two-mile-long rail gun that will launch a scramjet, which will then fly to 200,000 feet. The scramjet will then fire a payload into orbit and return to Earth. The process is more complex than a rocket launch, but engineers say it’s also more flexible. With it, NASA could orbit a 10,000-pound satellite one day and send a manned ship toward the moon the next, on a fraction of the propellant used by today’s rockets.
Located off the eastern coast of Australia, the clusterwink snail (Hinea brasiliana) uses a luminescent shell-flashing defense when its shell is tapped or when it detects predators nearby. Scientists think that this could either be a technique for attracting predators of the predator or perhaps a trick to scare them away. Recent experiments have shown that some crabs are frightened away by bioluminescent glowing creatures.
“When threatened, fingernail-sized H. brasiliana generates pulses of bioluminescent light from a single spot on its mushy body. The light pulses are variable, lasting as short as 1/50th of a second to as long as a few seconds. But the opaque shell diffuses only the blue-green color of light it generates — and no other color — like a highly selective frosted light bulb.”
Bound to be the hottest tourist spot next year, the 30-mile radius surrounding Chernobyl is set to open for day trips starting next year. While “illegal” tours already operate in the zone, these new tours will be government sanctioned.
“The Chernobyl zone isn’t as scary as the whole world thinks,” ministry spokesperson Yulia Yurshova told The Wall Street Journal. “We want to work with big tour operators and attract Western tourists, from whom there’s great demand.”
New World Transparent Specimens offers marine creatures from the Japanese artist Iori Tomita that are transparent with colored bones. Using a method that involves the dissolution of natural proteins Tomita adds red dye to hard bones and blue dye to soft bones.
At this point it seems that the collection is limited to marine creatures only.
A flightless ibis (Xenicibis xympithecus) that lived on Jamaica until about 10,000 years ago had wings that evolved into weapons. It would use its club-like wings to beat predators and perhaps other ibis in defense of its territory and young. However, these club-like wings proved useless when humans finally showed up and the birds were extinct shortly afterwards.
