Giant predatory shark fossil unearthed in Kansas

The fossilised remains of a gigantic 10m-long predatory shark have been unearthed in Kansas, US.

Scientists dug up a gigantic jawbone, teeth and scales belonging to the shark which lived 89 million years ago.

The bottom-dwelling predator had huge tooth plates, which it likely used to crush large shelled animals such as giant clams.

Palaeontologists already knew about the shark, but the new specimen suggests it was far bigger than previously thought.

The scientists who made the discovery, published in the journal Cretaceous Research, last week also released details of other newly discovered giant plankton-eating fish that swam in prehistoric seas for more than 100 million years.

But this new fish, called Ptychodus mortoni, is both bigger and more fierce, having a taste for flesh rather than plankton.

It may even have been the largest shellfish-eating animal ever to have roamed the Earth.

Dr Kenshu Shimada of DePaul university in Chicago, Illinois, US found the fossilized remains of the shark in rocks known as the Fort Hays Limestone in Kansas.  …

via BBC – Earth News – Giant predatory shark fossil unearthed in Kansas.

Sculptures made from sticky tape

These see-through models of a fisherman, jelly fish and pregnant woman – all made from sticky tape – are entries in an art competition.

They are made by by sticking bits of tape together in a “free-form” style or by wrapping them around objects which are then removed from the piece.

The fisherman and pregnant woman are each made from four rolls of tape. But a drum set is made from a staggering 48 rolls and an office desk is made from 36.

There are also models of a dragon, a postman and a child on a swing.

Other materials, such as wire, cardboard and paint, can make up to 10 per cent of the model if used to support or enhance it. …

via Sculptures made from sticky tape – Telegraph.

New Species Of Dinosaur Found In Utah Rock

Fossils of a previously undiscovered species of dinosaur have been found in slabs of Utah sandstone that were so hard that explosives had to be used to free some of the remains, scientists said Tuesday.

The bones found at Dinosaur National Monument belonged to a type of sauropod — long-necked plant-eaters that were said to be the largest animal ever to roam land.

The discovery included two complete skulls from other types of sauropods — an extremely rare find, scientists said.

The fossils offer fresh insight into lives of dinosaurs some 105 million years ago, including the evolution of sauropod teeth, which reveal eating habits and other information, said Dan Chure, a paleontologist at the monument that straddles the Utah-Colorado border.

“You can hardly overstate the significance of these fossils,” he said.

Of the 120 or so known species of sauropods, complete skulls have been found for just eight. That’s mostly because their skulls were made of thin, fragile bones bound by soft tissue that were easily destroyed after death.

“This is absolutely No. 1 in terms of projects I’ve had the opportunity to work on,” said Brooks Britt, a Brigham Young University paleontologist who co-authored a study on the fossils along with University of Michigan researchers.

The new species is called Abydosaurus mcintoshi. Researchers say it’s part of the larger brachiosaurus family, hulking four-legged vegetarians that include sauropods.

The findings are being published this week in the peer-reviewed science journal Naturwissenschaften.

via New Species Of Dinosaur Found In Utah Rock – Family News Story – WLWT Cincinnati.

Those are very sharp looking teeth for a plant eater.

Loud crash at 3 a.m.? It may be exploding head syndrome

Marie Raymond sometimes wakes up in the middle of the night, heart pounding, freaked out by the sound of her name being shouted loud and clear. Other times she’ll be awakened by the sound of a huge crash, as if someone has broken a window or knocked over a set of dishes.

“The sound is terrifying — super loud, like someone has broken in,” says Raymond, a 38-year-old arts administrator from Seattle. “But when I get up to look around, nothing’s amiss and everything’s quiet.” After dealing with it off and on for the last several months, Raymond believes she may have exploding head syndrome. She hasn’t seen a doctor about it, but has done some research online.

As strange as the name sounds, exploding head syndrome is actually a rare and relatively undocumented sleep phenomenon. While sleeping or dozing, a person with the condition hears a terrifically loud sound in their head, such as a bomb exploding, a clash of cymbals or a gun going off.

“It’s usually described as a loud bang or pop that occurs in the first third of the night,” says Dr. Neil Kline, sleep physician and representative of the American Sleep Association in Wilmington, Del. “It’s a sensory phenomenon. The individual senses that some type of explosion has occurred nearby, but ultimately realizes it’s in their head. It’s not associated with pain or with any disorder that we know of and there are no physiological medical consequences that are associated with it.”

Thought to be brought on by anxiety or extreme fatigue and occurring in clusters during stressful periods, exploding head syndrome is not dangerous, according to the American Sleep Association Web site.

It can be disconcerting, though, stirring up images of a David Cronenberg movie. “Individuals can develop an aversion to falling asleep,” says Kline. “They’ll develop insomnia because they’re concerned by these occurrences. But they’re usually rare. I’ve never heard of it occurring regularly.”

First described in 1920 as a “snapping of the brain,” there is little to be found on the phenomenon in medical literature. Some patients experience a bright flash of light along with the loud explosion or crash, according to a 1989 study in the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry that looked at 50 patients suffering from the syndrome. In almost every case there are physical aftereffects, such as “a sense of alarm, together with a cold sweat, labored breathing and tachycardia” (a rapid heart rate). …

via Loud crash at 3 a.m.? It may be your exploding head – The Body Odd – msnbc.com.

Thousands Give Last Rites To Dead Whale

Thousands of Vietnamese fishermen are giving a royal send-off to a 15-ton dead whale, gathering at a southern Vietnamese village to pay homage at a funeral for the creature they call “Your Excellency.”

Nearly 10,000 people have converged in Bac Lieu province to bid farewell to the 52 foot (16-meter) whale since he was dragged ashore Monday, said coast guard official Do Tien Ha.

They burned incense in his honor and planned to build a temple at the site of his burial, which was scheduled for Tuesday. Nearly 3,000 people will attend the whale’s last rites, to be held at the mouth of the Cai Cung River.

In Vietnam’s fishing culture, whales are considered sacred. They are referred to by the title “ngai,” the same honorific used for kings, emperors and other esteemed leaders.

“Whenever whales arrive, dead or alive, local fishermen believe they bring luck and safety,” Ha said by phone from Bac Lieu.

The dead whale was spotted 26 miles (42 kilometers) off the coast Sunday, and several dozen fishermen on 10 boats spent a day hauling it ashore, he said.

via Thousands Give Last Rites To Dead Whale – Cincinnati News Story – WLWT Cincinnati.

Arizona dog is world’s tallest

An Arizona canine is now the world’s Top Dog. Giant George — all 43 inches (1.09 meters) tall and 245 pounds (111 kg) of him — was named the world’s Tallest Living Dog and Tallest Dog Ever by Guinness World Records on Monday.

The four-year-old gray Great Dane from Tucson, Arizona, made it into the record books after Guinness dispatched its own inspector to verify his height, measured from paw to shoulder.

Giant George, who has his own website — www.giantgeorge.com — as well as Facebook and Twitter pages, beat out his nearest rival, Titan, a Great Dane from San Diego, California.

And there’s no dog house for this plentiful pooch, who consumes about 110 pounds (50 kg) of food each month. Owner Dave Nasser says George sleeps on his own queen-sized bed inside the house

via Arizona dog is world’s tallest | Oddly Enough | STV News.

DNA evidence tells ‘global story’ of human history

In recent years, DNA evidence has added important new tools for scientists studying the human past. Now, a collection of reviews published by Cell Press in a special issue of Current Biology published online on February 22nd offers a timely update on how new genetic evidence, together with archaeological and linguistic evidence, has enriched our understanding of human history on earth. “To understand what it is to be human, it is essential to understand the human past,” says Colin Renfrew of the University of Cambridge, who first coined the term “archaeogenetics” and is the author of a guest editorial in the special issue. “Nearly all civilizations have their own origin or creation myth. Now we can use archaeogenetics to tell a global story that is robust and applicable to all human communities everywhere.”

The journey started around 60 to 70 thousand years ago in Africa, where modern humans evolved more than 150 thousand years ago, and where human diversity is still the highest among all continents in terms of genetic variation and languages. From there, humans settled Europe and South Asia and reached Oceania. The Americas (apart from the remote Oceanian islands) were settled last.

The course and the extent of these first migrations remains evident in the genetic makeup of humans living today, but later migrations and the cultural practices that people carried with them—farming in particular—have also left their legacy. That legacy looks remarkably similar wherever farming spread, in Europe, Africa, and East Asia. Natural selection also left its mark: A review by Jonathan Pritchard of the University of Chicago examines evidence for the genetic basis of human adaptations and the extent to which differences among human populations in characteristics such as lactose tolerance have been selected for over evolutionary time. …

via Paleontology news: DNA evidence tells ‘global story’ of human history.

Mouse Gets Human Liver

A mouse has been given an almost completely human liver so that it is susceptible to human liver infections, including Hepatitis B and C, and responds to human drugs, opening a door to new study methods and treatments for debilitating human liver diseases, researchers say.

Many infectious diseases are host-specific, meaning they are well adapted to infecting certain organisms, but not others. For example, only humans and chimpanzees can catch Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C. This specificity helps to prevent widespread infection across species, but it makes it hard to study human diseases in other animals.

The usual way around this problem is to grow and treat human cells in a dish, but this isn’t possible with liver cells, called hepatocytes. “Human hepatocytes are almost impossible to work with as they don’t grow and are hard to maintain in culture,” explains study-author Inder Verma, a professor in the Laboratory of Genetics at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, Calif.

Mice whose own hepatocytes have been replaced with human liver cells, a “chimeric mouse,” provide a solution to all these hurdles.

Verma and his colleagues had previously generated a mouse with a partially “humanized” liver, but wanted to improve their method to achieve almost complete transformation. They use a special mouse that has liver problems of its own, but whose problems can be kept in check with a drug called NBTC. Taking away NBTC allows transplanted human hepatocytes to take hold and populate the mouse liver with human cells.
With the new system, nearly 95 percent of the liver cells are of human origin.

Importantly, unlike normal mice, these chimeric mice could develop Hepatitis B and Hepatitis C. And when given the standard drugs for treating these diseases, the “humanized” liver inside the mouse responds just like a normal human liver.

“This robust model system opens the door to utilize human hepatocytes for purposes that were previously impossible. This chimeric mouse can be used for drug testing and gene therapy purposes, and in the future, may also be used to study liver cancers,” Verma said.

The model may also be sued to test therapies for other diseases that involve the liver, including malaria, said Karl-Dimiter Bissig, a post-doctoral researcher at the Salk Insititue.

The results were published online today the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

via Mouse Gets Human Liver | LiveScience.

Kids on ADHD drugs do 10 times worse at school than kids who avoid medication

CHILDREN with ADHD who use prescription drugs to manage their condition are 10 times more likely to perform poorly at school than ADHD kids who avoid medication, a new report reveals.

The report also finds stimulant drugs such as Ritalin and dexamphetamine make no significant difference to the level of depression, self-perception and social functioning of a 14-year-old with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.

Those consistently using medication had significantly higher blood pressure at age 14 than children who had never taken drugs, a side-effect that could increase the risk of heart attack and stroke even into adulthood.

The report’s co-author, Lou Landau, said the world-first study into the long-term effects of stimulant medication on children with ADHD, to be published today, showed “drugs over the long term don’t have an impact on improving performance”.

“They don’t improve outcomes for those with ADHD, they make no difference to levels of depression, social functioning and self-perception, and for those on medication it is 10 times as likely that classroom performance will be below average,” he said.

Professor Landau, principal medical adviser to the West Australian Department of Health, which funded the research, said that was not to say drugs should never be used to treat ADHD. “There may be some children for whom the need to manage the condition in the short term will outweigh the long-term effects.”

The report is groundbreaking because it uses data from the Raine Study, which has been tracking the progress of more than 2800 families for two decades. Parents of the 131 children diagnosed with ADHD under the study have been providing information since the children were born. The outcomes were measured when the children were 14 years old. …

via Kids on ADHD drugs `poor at school’ | The Australian.

The kids already know this.  They hate taking these meds.  They’ve been trying to tell adults this for 20 years.  Teachers love the stuff, however, because it makes kids more “manageable”.  Poor performance from a depressed non-troublemaker is better, from the teacher’s point of view, than good performance from someone disrupting the classroom.

Placebo treatments stronger than doctors thought

When it comes to the placebo effect, it really may be mind over matter, a new analysis suggests.

In a review of recent research, international experts say there is increasing evidence that fake treatments, or placebos, have an actual biological effect in the body.

The doctor-patient relationship, plus the expectation of recovery, may sometimes be enough to change a patient’s brain, body and behavior, experts write. The review of previous research on placebos was published online Friday in Lancet, the British medical journal.

“It’s not that placebos or inert substances help,” said Linda Blair, a Bath-based psychologist and spokeswoman for the British Psychological Society. Blair was not linked to the research. “It’s that people’s belief in inert substances help.”

While doctors have long recognized that placebos can help patients feel better, they weren’t sure if the treatments sparked any physical changes.

In the Lancet review, researchers cite studies where patients with Parkinson’s disease were given dummy pills. That led their brains to release dopamine, a feel-good chemical, and also resulted in other changes in brain activity.

“When you think you’re going to get a drug that helps, your brain reacts as if it’s getting relief,” said Walter Brown, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown and Tufts University. “But we don’t know how that thought that you’re going to get better actually translates into something happening in the brain.”

With growing proof that placebos work, some doctors are trying to figure out how to capitalize on their effects, without being unethical.

Blair said that to be completely honest with patients – to tell them they were receiving a fake treatment – would sabotage their belief in the drug, and thus, undermine any potential benefit.

But Brown didn’t agree. For certain patients, like those with mild depression or anxiety, he said placebos were likely to work just as well as established therapies.

He said that even if doctors acknowledge they are giving such patients a placebo medication, but say it could be beneficial, “it might just actually work.”

via Placebo treatments stronger than doctors thought.