Scientist Invent A Brand New Way To Play Table Tennis(Photos)

 

Marines Labels dolpins as the prime suspect for the murder of a pilot Whale

An injured pilot whale found this week on Scotland's Isle of Skye looks to have been the victim of a bottlenose dolphin attack, BBC reports.
Marine officials observed bite marks on the three-year-old female's body, and while final autopsy results are not yet complete, the nature of the marks points to bottlenose dolphins as the culprits.
The pilot whale had to be euthanized due to the extent of her injuries.
 
       Scottish waters hold the most northerly population of bottlenose dolphins, and they will on occasion interact with whales. It's unclear whether the injuries sustained by the whale came from playing with the dolphins or from an attack.
Officials said if results show bottlenose dolphins did cause the whale's death, it would be only the second such case in the U.K.
"Dolphins are wonderful creatures," conservation expert Charlie Phillips told the BBC, "but people should remember that they are not these fluffy cartoon characters, they have a dark side too."

Crazy Architects Build zombie Powered to protect Themselves from Potential zombie apocalypse

      Just in case Night of the Living Dead becomes a reality, zombie enthusiasts across the globe are gearing up to plan for the potential zombie apocalypse. The folks at Architects Southwest have devised a fun contest for designers and architects to create a Zombie Safe House. One horrific entry is a self-sustaining vertical farm that uses a zombie-powered energy system, and also keeps its human inhabitants safely out of reach of the brains-hungry power source.


      Lured by hanging bait traps with delicious warm-blooded rabbits inside, the zombies will flood into a giant turbine in a frenzy, ravenous for tiny rabbit brains. As they attempt to grasp the tasty snacks, they’ll run around and around, turning the turbine and powering the housing system above. Zombies may be slow, but their strength provides enough power to yield electricity and water pressure.
On the surface, the humans can live safely in a cantilevered structure, centered around a spiral staircase that leads to each level


  Living units are dispersed on lower levels, and the structure is capped off with a large penthouse. In the middle of the building will lie a vertical farm planting unit that grows edible crops for the humans to enjoy, as well as trees to sit and ponder beneath as the zombie apocalypse goes on outside. The plants will be irrigated via an underground water storage area, with the water being siphoned thanks to zombie power.
Should a zombie slave escape, each structure has a retractable bridge which would prevent a slow-moving zombie from gaining access to the living compound. Each unit is also equipped with an escape route, which elevates the living areas with a track system when zombies are near. Grouped together, the structures make up a comfortable Zombie Ranch that uses the power of the undead for good.
The Zombie Ranch was one of many great contenders to win the first prize Golden Shovel Award in the

Could This Tough Bacteria Survive on Mars

  

NASA's Curiosity rover, which landed on Mars in 2012, was extensively sterilized to avoid Earth-based bacteria from hitching a ride to the red planet. But concerns remain that a few really hardy microbes may have survived the trip.

  It would be extremely exciting to find life on another planet. How should we be looking for it, and does this discovery hold the key to finally discovering it?

Forty million spores of Bacillus pumilus SAFR-032, a highly resilient strain of bacteria, will ride a helium balloon to the edge of space so they can bask in the frigid cold, extreme low pressure and intense solar ultraviolet radiation at the edge of space.

       The idea is to simulate conditions that would be experienced on Mars so that scientists can better gauge which microbes or types of microbes pose the greatest risk of contamination.
“We want to make sure that if we find life on Mars we know we found life that is Martian life, not contamination we brought from the Earth,” said NASA lead scientist Ellen Stofan.
“Certainly in areas where there is water, we need to be cautious -- extremely cautious -- as we move toward exploring them. However, those areas could potentially be the most interesting areas to explore,” she added.
The strain of bacteria to be tested first is commonly found in clean rooms where spacecraft are assembled for launch. The experiment samples have been divided into four groups of 10 million spores each. One group will be exposed to the near-space environment for six hours, the next for 12 hours, the next for 18 hours and the last for 24 hours before the experiment chamber parachutes back to Earth for recovery.

It takes seven months or longer for a spacecraft to reach Mars, but scientists say they expect to see changes in the bacteria after even short exposures in the near-space environment.
“We do expect to see a pretty measurable decline in the viability of these spores … and we can extrapolate what this may look like for a longer period of time,” microbiologist David J. Smith, with NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, told Discovery News.
In addition to looking for surviving spores, scientists will analyze the genome of cells to look for changes due to exposure in the stratosphere.
“Hopefully, work like this will be able to tell us which contamination to expect. That’s basically the essence of the work,” Smith said.

Unlike similar experiments that have taken place outside the International Space Station, the upcoming Exposing Microorganisms in the Stratosphere (E-MIST) experiment spreads out the spores in a shallow layer so they cannot shelter beneath cells that have been killed off, he added.
The E-MIST experiment chamber completed a test run last year and is now certified for science flights. So far, weather conditions at the balloon launch site in New Mexico have not been suitable for flight. The next opportunity for launch is most likely on Saturday, Smith said.

Marble Medusa Head Found in Ancient Roman Ruins

In the ruins of a Roman city in southern Turkey, archaeologists have discovered a marble head of Medusa, somehow spared during an early Christian campaign against pagan art.
The head was unearthed at Antiochia ad Cragum, a city founded during the first century, around the rule of Emperor Nero, that has all the marks of a Roman outpost —bathhouses, shops, colonnaded streets, mosaics and a local council house.
With serpents for hair, wide eyes and an open mouth, Medusa was a mythical monster who could turn a person to stone with her gaze. At Antiochia, a Medusa architectural sculpture would have served an apotropaic function, intended to avert evil —but later, her likeness would have been considered idolatrous by the Christians who came to live at the site.
Photos: Ancient Roman Mosaic Revealed

 

     “The people living at Antiochia later were zealous Christians who were destroying art in much the same way that ISIS is destroying remnants of the ancient past,” Michael Hoff, a University of Nebraska–Lincoln art historian and director of the excavations, told Live Science. “These things were meant to be destroyed and put into a lime kiln to be burned and turned into mortar.” [See Photos of the Medusa Head and Ancient Antiochia Site]

         Antiochia, which covers more than 7 acres (3 hectares), is located on the sparsely populated outskirts of the town ofGazipa?, atop craggy cliffs in an area that is today dominated by wheat fields. Little is known about the city from ancient sources, and though the archaeological site had been identified in the early 19th century, it had never been given much attention by scholars until recently, Hoff said.
“The fact that it’s somewhat of an unknown city makes it fascinating for us as archaeologists,” he added. The evidence Hoff and his colleagues have dug up so far suggests Antiochia might have actually been an economic player during the Roman Empire, a center for the trade and production of wine, agriculture and glass.

             “The result of all this economic activity is a pretty high degree of cultural output,” Hoff said. In 2012, they discovered an enormous poolside mosaic covering 1,600 square feet (150 square meters) with intricate geometric patterns. They also found the marble head of an Aphrodite sculpture in 2013.
Photos: Pieces of Earliest Games Recovered
Much of the Roman artwork from the site has been lost. Sometime after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fourth century, several churches were built at Antiochia. Hoff said his team has found lots of broken sculptural parts and bits of statues that had smashed into pieces; they’ve also found evidence of the Christian kilns where the marble artwork would become mortar.
A group of Turkish students discovered the Medusa head near the foundations of a building that may have been a small temple. Hoff and his colleagues have reconstructed the head and other marble fragments found nearby, showing that Medusa’s head was not part of a freestanding statue, but rather it would have been incorporated into the pediment of the building.
When the team returns to the site next year, they plan to further excavate the city’s bouleuterion, the seat of the local legislature that may have doubled as a music hall or theater. Hoff said they also plan to investigate the rows of shops that line a Roman street to find out what was being sold in the marketplace.
Original article on Live Science.

• Gallery: Magnificent Roman Mosaic
• The 7 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth
• In Photos: A Journey Through Early Christian Rome

Scientist explains why Only Vultures Can Eat The Most Odd Meals On EARth

The world’s largest bird of prey, the Eurasian black vulture, is built tougher than the rest of us, finds a new genetic study.
Published in the journal Genome Biology, the study determined that the over-30-pound bird’s unique genetic makeup allows it to digest even the most putrid of carcasses. The bird can also guard itself against nearly every known pathogen.

     “It is known that they are all but immune to botulism and that they can happily eat the flesh of an animal coated in Bacillus anthracis that causes anthrax,” co-author Jong Bhak of The Genome Institute in Korea told Discovery News.
Bhak added, “They also have no problem eating an animal infected with rabies, hog cholera and numerous other diseases that would ultimately be lethal to most other scavengers.”

   The study presents the first-ever sequenced genome of an Old World vulture. The researchers compared the genome of the Eurasian black vulture, Aegypius monachus, to that of the closely related North American bald eagle and turkey vulture. The scientists found genetic signatures of the dietary and environmental adaptations that enable the Eurasian black vulture’s scavenging lifestyle.
Co-author Yun Sung Cho of the Genome Institute told Discovery News that the vulture has “specific amino acid changes on genes associated with gastric acid secretion.”
Bhak said that the vulture’s stomach is probably acidic enough to melt metals, and is among the highest in acid content for all animals.
“The acidity seems related to (eating) carrion, rather than digesting hard food,” Bhak explained.

    Vultures are social birds, helping each other to spot carcasses from the air. They will often circle over a target area, honing in on the precise spot and scoping out the surrounding territory. The Eurasian black vulture, also known as the cinereous vulture, is one of the world’s heaviest flying birds. It is a wonder that their hefty bodies can even stay airborne, revealing how strong their long wings are.

   Although the birds are quite social, as this image of a flock indicates, there often isn’t enough carrion to go around. This is especially true when considering that vultures are not the only scavengers in their territories.
“To sustain their body sizes, they should take whatever is available and compete against large land predators by growing a body mass that’s even larger,” Cho said. There are drawbacks to being a big bird, however.
As Cho said, their “large body size makes them less efficient to hunt prey, making them feed even more on carrion.”

          All of the vultures in this flock have ironclad stomachs. Other birds with extremely acidic stomachs include the common buzzard (1.1 pH), white-back vulture (1.2 pH), bald eagle (1.3 pH) and peregrine falcon (1.8 pH).
Bhak said to consider that battery acid has a pH of .8, which is very close to that of scavenging birds and certain other birds of prey.

Rare Venomous Sea Snake Last Seen 30 Yrs ago Reappears in California Beach

A sick, venomous yellow-bellied sea snake spotted on California's Silver Strand State Beach has caused a stir in recent days.
Yellow-bellied sea snakes (Pelamis platurus) are not something one would expect to see as far north as waters off Southern California, experts say. It's the northernmost spotting of the species on the Pacific Coast of North America, a Los Angeles County Natural History Museum scientist told ABC News.
Indeed, the species is accustomed to warmer, tropical waters. But this year is an El Nino year, when Pacific Ocean waters heat up, which likely explains the northerly sighting of the sea snake.

First Snake Crawled On Four Feet: Photos

The lifelong sea-dwellers do not venture on land, unless they're sick or hurt, and the snake died before wildlife officials were able to offer assistance.

Yellow-bellied snakes are highly venomous, but ABC News reports they are not usually a threat to humans unless someone attempts to handle them. And even then it's "incredibly rare" for a person to receive a fatal bite.