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Categories: Energy: Nuclear, Offbeat: Paleontology and Archeology

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Scientists have compared the relationship among the strength of flight bones, body mass, and the way modern birds fly to better understand the evolution of flight in birds and extinct animals, such as the Pteranodon.

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Caribou have been using the same Arctic calving grounds for more than 3,000 years. Female caribou shed their antlers within days of giving birth, leaving behind a record of their annual travels across Alaska and Canada's Yukon that persists on the cold tundra for hundreds or even thousands of years. Researchers recovered antlers that have sat undisturbed on the arctic tundra since the Bronze Age.

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Secret, coded letters penned by Mary Queen of Scots while she was imprisoned in England by her cousin Queen Elizabeth I have been uncovered by a multidisciplinary team of international codebreakers. Launched on the anniversary of Mary's execution, study reveals 50 new letters in cipher -- with some still believed missing -- shedding new light on her captivity.

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In the search for new forces and interactions beyond the Standard Model, an international team of researchers has now taken a good step forward. The researchers are using an amplification technique based on nuclear magnetic resonance. They use their experimental setup to study a particular exotic interaction between spins: a parity-violating interaction mediated by a new hypothetical exchange particle, called a Z' boson, which exists in addition to the Z boson mediating the weak interaction in the standard Model.

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The CT-scanned skull of a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish, pulled from a coal mine in England more than a century ago, has revealed the oldest example of a well-preserved vertebrate brain.

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Scientists have discovered a new way to investigate the structure of protons using neutrinos, known as 'ghost particles.'

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A new study has uncovered a new thalattosuchian -- an ancient 'sister' of modern-day crocodiles' ancestors.

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What drives crocodile evolution? Is climate a major factor or changes in sea levels? Determined to find answers to these questions, researchers discovered that while changing temperatures and rainfall had little impact on the crocodiles' gene flow over the past three million years, changes to sea levels during the Ice Age had a different effect.

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A research team has developed a new method to produce X-ray images in color. In the past, the only way to determine the chemical composition of a sample and the position of its components using X-ray fluorescence analysis was to focus the X-rays and scan the whole sample. This is time-consuming and expensive. Scientists have now developed an approach that allows an image of a large area to be produced from a single exposure, without the need for focusing and scanning.

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The discovery of more than 250 fossilized eggs reveals intimate details about the lives of titanosaurs in the Indian subcontinent, according to a new study.

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Crocodiles were mummified in a unique way at the Egyptian site of Qubbat al-Hawa during the 5th Century BC, according to a new study.

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Physicists have once again gained a deeper understanding of the mechanism behind superconductors. This brings researchers one step closer to their goal of developing the foundations for a theory for superconductors that would allow current to flow without resistance and without energy loss. The researchers found that in superconducting copper-oxygen bonds, called cuprates, there must be a very specific charge distribution between the copper and the oxygen, even under pressure.

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A study is providing a glimpse into dinosaur and bird diversity in Patagonia during the Late Cretaceous, just before the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct. The fossils represent the first record of theropods -- a dinosaur group that includes both modern birds and their closest non-avian dinosaur relatives -- from the Chilean portion of Patagonia. The researchers' finds include giant megaraptors with large sickle-like claws and birds similar to todays ducks and geese.

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The movement of people across the Bering Sea from North Asia to North America is a well-known phenomenon in early human history. Nevertheless, the genetic makeup of the  people who lived in North Asia during this time has remained mysterious due to a limited number of ancient genomes analyzed from this region. Now, researchers describe genomes from ten individuals up to 7,500 years old that help to fill the gap and show geneflow from people moving in the opposite direction from North America to North Asia.

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A new study posits that interstellar cloud conditions may have played a significant role on the presence of key building blocks of life in the solar system.

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A new study based on 297 ancient Scandinavian genomes analysed together with the genomic data of 16,638 present day Scandinavians resolve the complex relations between geography, ancestry, and gene flow in Scandinavia -- encompassing the Roman Age, the Viking Age and later periods. A surprising increase of variation during the Viking period indicates that gene flow into Scandinavia was especially intense during this period.

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Microraptor was an opportunistic predator, feeding on fish, birds, lizards -- and now small mammals. The discovery of a rare fossil reveals the creature was a generalist carnivore in the ancient ecosystem of dinosaurs.

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An international research team examines a rich fossil bed in the renowned Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada's Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest, where many 50-foot-long ichthyosaurs (Shonisaurus popularis) lay petrified in stone. The study offers a plausible explanation as to how at least 37 of these marine reptiles came to meet their ends in the same locality -- a question that has vexed paleontologists for more than half a century. The research presents evidence that these ichthyosaurs died at the site in large numbers because they were migrating to this area to give birth for many generations across hundreds of thousands of years.

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A grammatical problem which has defeated Sanskrit scholars since the 5th Century BC has finally been solved by a PhD student.

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Researchers have clarified the chemical compatibility between high temperature liquid metal tin (Sn) and reduced activation ferritic martensitic, a candidate structural material for fusion reactors. This discovery has paved the way for the development of a liquid metal tin divertor, which is an advanced heat-removal component of fusion reactors. A device called a divertor is installed in the fusion reactors to maintain the purity of the plasma. For divertors, there has been demand for liquid metals that can withstand extremely large heat loads from high-temperature plasma.