Saturday, 6 October 2012

Duck-bill dinosaurs had plant-pulverizing teeth more advanced than horses

Friday, October 5, 2012

A team of paleontologists and engineers has found that duck-billed dinosaurs had an amazing capacity to chew tough and abrasive plants with grinding teeth more complex than those of cows, horses, and other well-known modern grazers. Their study, which is published today in the journal Science, is the first to recover material properties from fossilized teeth.

Duck-bill dinosaurs, also known as hadrosaurids, were the dominant plant-eaters in what are now Europe, North America, and Asia during the Late Cretaceous about 85 million years ago. With broad jaws bearing as many as 1,400 teeth, hadrosaurids were previously thought to have chewing surfaces similar to other reptiles, which have teeth comprised of just two tissues?enamel, a hard hypermineralized material, and orthodentine, a soft bonelike tissue. But paleontologists who study the fossilized teeth of these animals in detail suspected that they were not that simple.

"We thought for a long time that there was more going on because you could just look at the surface of the tooth and see advanced topography, which suggests that there are many different tissues present," said Mark Norell, chair of the American Museum of Natural History's Division of Paleontology and an author on the paper.

To investigate the dinosaurs' dental structure and properties in depth, Norell worked with lead author Gregory Erickson, a biology professor at Florida State University, and a team of engineers on a series of novel experiments. Erickson sectioned the fossilized teeth and made microscope slides from them. These revealed that hadrosaurids actually had six different types of dental tissues?four more than reptiles and two more than expert mammal grinders like horses, cows, and elephants. Using a technique called nanoindentation, in which a diamond-tipped probe is indented and/or drawn across the fossilized teeth to mimic the grinding of abrasive food, the researchers determined the differential hardness and wear rates of the dental tissues.

Erickson, who describes hadrosaurid dinosaurs as "walking pulp mills," said, "We were stunned to find that the mechanical properties of the teeth were preserved after 70 million years of fossilization." He went on to comment that "if you put these teeth back into a living dinosaur they would function perfectly."

In addition to the four dental tissues found in mammals?enamel, orthodentine, secondary dentine that helps prevent cavities, and coronal cementum that supports the teeth's crests?the hadrosaurid teeth include giant tubules and a thick mantle dentine. These extra tissues are thought to provide additional prevention against abscesses. Also unlike mammalian teeth, the dental tissue distribution in hadrosaurids greatly varied in each tooth.

Together, these characteristics suggest that hadrosaurids evolved the most advanced grinding capacity known in vertebrate animals, which might have led to their extensive diversification.

"Duck-bills' advanced tissue modification appears to have allowed them to radiate into specialized ecological niches where they ate extremely tough plants like fern, horsetail, and ground cover that were not as easy for dinosaurs with shearing teeth to eat," Norell said. "Their complex dentition could have played a major role in keeping them on the planet for nearly 35 million years."

In addition, the findings provide strong evidence that dental wear properties are preserved in fossil teeth?an idea that was once questioned and overruled in this study with comparative tests on teeth from modern and fossilized horses and bison. This opens the door for studies on the dental biomechanics of fossils from wide-ranging groups of animals to better understand evolutionary modifications in diets.

###

American Museum of Natural History: http://www.amnh.org

Thanks to American Museum of Natural History for this article.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/124231/Duck_bill_dinosaurs_had_plant_pulverizing_teeth_more_advanced_than_horses

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Tuesday, 2 October 2012

Muslim militants shifting focus to N.Africa -Tunisia leader

CAIRO (Reuters) - Islamist militants are shifting their focus from southwest Asia to Arab North Africa and stepping up violence in the region, Tunisian President Moncef Marzouki said in an interview published on Tuesday.

Moderate Islamists who were harshly suppressed by secular Arab dictators have gained political power or prominence following popular uprisings in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt.

But armed, militant Islamist groups, including the North African wing of al Qaeda, have also benefited from lapses in internal security across the region wrought by the often chaotic transition to more democratic government.

Marzouki told pan-Arab daily al Hayat that some of Tunisia's hardline Salafists had links to al Qaeda and that North African countries would work before the end of the year to form a united front against the threat of rising Islamist militancy.

"The centre of the terrorist movement is moving now from Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Arab Maghreb region ... and the great danger is at our doors," Marzouki said.

He said around 3,000 Salafists in Tunisia were estimated to be potentially dangerous and described them as a "cancer" in the country, the first in the Arab world to bring down dictatorship in a wave of popular uprisings.

Marzouki, a secularist in office under a power-sharing deal with the moderate Islamist Ennahda party after it won a free election a year ago, said talks with such militants were futile and the threat they posed must be addressed with legal measures.

SECURITY VACUUM

"(Militants) are mainly present in Libya and Algeria, and especially in the south," Marzouki said, referring to the remote and thinly populated desert expanses of the Maghreb where policing is weaker and there has been traditional tribal resistance to central authority.

"There is a security problem now threatening the entire Arab Maghreb region ... All our southern borders are threatened with this problem now. There has to be a unified response from all the countries."

Last month, Salafists predominated in a crowd of protesters who ransacked the U.S. embassy in Tunisia in fury over a film insulting the Prophet Mohammad, killing two people, and the U.S. ambassador to Libya was killed in an Islamist militant ambush.

Al Qaeda's affiliate in North Africa then urged Muslims to kill more U.S. government representatives in the region - particularly in Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania.

AQIM, or Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, emerged out of Algeria's civil conflict but has gradually expanded south into the Sahara and raised its profile in recent years with hit-and-run attacks and kidnapping of Westerners for ransom.

There have been no Arab Spring-style revolts in Algeria or Morocco. But Algeria's government has long clashed with Islamist militants particularly from AQIM on its territory while Morocco has suffered occasional fatal bomb attacks.

Marzouki also said that Arab peacekeeping forces should enter Syria to prevent chaos in a transitional period if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad succumbed to an uprising now in its 18th month. "(Assad's) regime is finished and dead, and we must move now. Syria could enter a stage of overwhelming chaos."

Rivalries among world and regional Arab and Muslim powers have prevented effective foreign intervention in Syria's conflict.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/muslim-militants-shifting-focus-n-africa-tunisia-leader-112226394.html

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Solar cell consisting of a single molecule: Individual protein complex generates electric current

ScienceDaily (Oct. 2, 2012) ? An team of scientists, led by Joachim Reichert, Johannes Barth, and Alexander Holleitner (Technische Universitaet Muenchen, Clusters of Excellence MAP and NIM), and Itai Carmeli (Tel Aviv University) developed a method to measure photocurrents of a single functionalized photosynthetic protein system. The scientists could demonstrate that such a system can be integrated and selectively addressed in artificial photovoltaic device architectures while retaining their biomolecular functional properties.

The proteins represent light-driven, highly efficient single-molecule electron pumps that can act as current generators in nanoscale electric circuits.

The interdisciplinary team publishes the results in Nature Nanotechnology this week.

The scientist investigated the photosystem-I reaction center which is a chlorophyll protein complex located in membranes of chloroplasts from cyanobacteria. Plants, algae and bacteria use photosynthesis to convert solar energy into chemical energy. The initial stages of this process -- where light is absorbed and energy and electrons are transferred -- are mediated by photosynthetic proteins composed of chlorophyll and carotenoid complexes. Until now, none of the available methods were sensitive enough to measure photocurrents generated by a single protein. Photosystem-I exhibits outstanding optoelectronic properties found only in photosynthetic systems. The nanoscale dimension further makes the photosystem-I a promising unit for applications in molecular optoelectronics.

The first challenge the physicists had to master was the development of a method to electrically contact single molecules in strong optical fields. The central element of the realized nanodevice are photosynthetic proteins self-assembled and covalently bound to a gold electrode via cysteine mutation groups. The photocurrent was measured by means of a gold-covered glass tip employed in a scanning near-field optical microscopy set-up. The photosynthetic proteins are optically excited by a photon flux guided through the tetrahedral tip that at the same time provides the electrical contact. With this technique, the physicists were able to monitor the photocurrent generated in single protein units.

The research was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) via the SPP 1243 (grants HO 3324/2 and RE 2592/2), the Clusters of Excellence Munich-Centre for Advanced Photonics and Nanosystems Initiative Munich, as well as ERC Advanced Grant MolArt (no. 47299).

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Technische Universitaet Muenchen.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. Daniel Gerster, Joachim Reichert, Hai Bi, Johannes V. Barth, Simone M. Kaniber, Alexander W. Holleitner, Iris Visoly-Fisher, Shlomi Sergani, Itai Carmeli. Photocurrent of a single photosynthetic protein. Nature Nanotechnology, 2012; DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2012.165

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/top_news/~3/E-aMbUvEZnw/121002150029.htm

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Monday, 1 October 2012

Obama trying to avoid miscue in first debate

FILE - In this Sept. 30, 2012 file photo, President Barack Obama waves to supporters as he arrives at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. President Barack Obama has one mission heading into his first debate with Republican Mitt Romney: Don't screw things up. Less than five weeks from Election Day, Obama has political momentum and an edge in polls of the battleground states that will determine the election. But he's expected to face a blistering challenge from Romney, who needs to use Wednesday's debate in Denver to change the trajectory of the race. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken, File)

FILE - In this Sept. 30, 2012 file photo, President Barack Obama waves to supporters as he arrives at McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas. President Barack Obama has one mission heading into his first debate with Republican Mitt Romney: Don't screw things up. Less than five weeks from Election Day, Obama has political momentum and an edge in polls of the battleground states that will determine the election. But he's expected to face a blistering challenge from Romney, who needs to use Wednesday's debate in Denver to change the trajectory of the race. (AP Photo/Isaac Brekken, File)

(AP) ? President Barack Obama has one mission heading into his first debate with Republican Mitt Romney: Don't screw things up.

Less than five weeks from Election Day, Obama has political momentum and an edge in polls of the battleground states that will determine the election. But he's sure to face a blistering challenge from Romney, who needs to use Wednesday's debate in Denver to change the trajectory of the race.

Both parties say the first debate traditionally helps the challenger, whose stature tends to rise in the eyes of many voters by simply appearing on stage as the alternative. Seeking to mitigate that effect, Obama aides are working with the president on keeping command of the debate while not being overly aggressive.

The president retreated to a desert resort in Nevada for three days of intensive debate preparation for Wednesday night. He was joined by a cadre of top advisers, who are focused on helping Obama trim his often-lengthy explanations to fit the debate format. Equally important is coaching Obama to look calm and presidential during an onslaught of criticism from Romney.

Obama's campaign has tried ? to the point of hyperbole ? to lower expectations for the president and portray him as an underdog who hasn't had enough time to get ready.

"He has had less time to prepare than we anticipated," campaign spokeswoman Jennifer Psaki said Sunday. "It's difficult to schedule significant blocks of time when you're the president."

What the expectation-lowering aides leave out is that Obama, in fact, has had plenty of time to prepare at the White House and during long flights on Air Force One. And they never mention that only Obama, not Romney, has more experience with general election debates.

The president's aides also have tried to set sky-high expectations for Romney, casting him as a strong debater who won the GOP nomination in part because of the way he dispatched his many competitors in the crucial primary debates.

"Mitt Romney ... has been preparing earlier and with more focus than any presidential candidate in modern history," Psaki said. "Not John F. Kennedy, not President Bill Clinton, not President George Bush, not Ronald Reagan has prepared as much as he has."

The most pressing task for Obama, who once taught law at the University of Chicago, is shedding his often wordy, detailed explanations in favor of tighter answers. Aides say Obama isn't coming prepared with a series of "zingers," just more concise descriptions of his positions and his criticisms of Romney's.

Despite Obama's reputation as a gifted speaker, his 2008 debate performances were uneven.

He stumbled in several multicandidate forums during the early days of the 2008 campaign, with his most prominent low point coming when Obama said, with a touch of sarcasm, that rival Hillary Rodham Clinton was "likable enough." But the debates that fall against Republican John McCain helped Obama fend off suggestions that he was too inexperienced for the White House and show that he had what it took to be president.

Obama aides have been reviewing Romney's debates, both in the 2008 and 2012 Republican primaries and from his statewide races in Massachusetts. They've also been studying recordings of prior presidential debates for signs of what pitfalls could face an incumbent.

Aides say they've noticed Romney often launches a fresh critique against his opponent early in the debates, something that hasn't been part of the campaign discussion thus far. During a primary debate earlier this year, Romney caught rival Newt Gingrich off-guard by bringing up investments he held in mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Aides also are prepping the president for a moment they say Romney has already telegraphed: Accusing the president of lying about the Republicans' positions.

"This is a guy who will not back off delivering the negative and that's not the easiest thing to do," said Tad Devine, a Democratic strategist who is not working with Obama's team but advised the late Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in his 1994 Senate campaign against Romney.

Obama and Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, who is playing Romney, have held several lengthy debate preparation sessions at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, a short drive away from the White House. Former White House aides Anita Dunn and Ron Klain have been brought in to help run the sessions.

Obama's preparations here in Nevada are expected to mirror his approach from 2008, when he got ready for the first debate against McCain at a hotel in Palm Beach, Fla. Obama's campaign held daylong preparation sessions that included mock debates starting at 9 p.m., the same time as the actual debate. The practice debates were held on a replica of the debate stage "practically right down to the carpeting," White House adviser David Plouffe wrote in his 2009 book, "The Audacity to Win."

The president's team picked Nevada for this year's debate camp in part because it's one of the eight or so battleground states that will determine the election. Obama held a campaign rally in Las Vegas Sunday night and plans to make a few stops around the area during his stay, all aimed at driving local media coverage.

Others leading Obama's debate prep include senior campaign adviser David Axelrod, White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer and top economic adviser Gene Sperling. Obama's chief of staff Jack Lew, campaign pollster Joel Benenson and speechwriter Jon Favreau are also assisting the president.

___

Thomas reported from Washington.

___

Follow Ken Thomas at http://twitter.com/AP_Ken_Thomas and Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/3d281c11a96b4ad082fe88aa0db04305/Article_2012-10-01-Obama-Debate%20Preview/id-0b95face39b247acaea62abf4b487b17

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Intel Pushes For Tablet Processor Dominance Through Clover Trail

Intel is one of the leading manufacturers of processors for computers worldwide. A computer that sports that latest processor from Intel will certainly boast for their faster processing speed. Processors such as iCore series has become the benchmark for powerful computing devices especially laptops and desktop computers today.

But even though Intel is easily making its case as the best processor manufacturer in the notebook and desktop computers, Intel is having a hard time breaking through the tablet market. ARM is currently leading the way as the preferred processor among tablet manufacturers. The processor is well known for its ability to provide capable processing power in smart phones even before tablets. The revolution of tablets has cemented the capability of ARM as the preferred processor for tablets and other mobile devices.

Intel is not just in the sideline observing the success of ARM. The processor manufacturing giant is also pushing its processor called ?Clover Trail?. Also known as Atom Z2760, the processor will be used primarily on tablets that feature Windows 8 as its operating system. Before the revolution of tablets, the Atom processor by Intel is the choice processor of netbook manufacturers. Atom processors are known for their improved capability for netbooks without sacrificing battery life. Intel has practically ported Atom in order to make it more viable to the increasingly competitive tablet market. The Atom Z2760, according to Intel will have the ability to support Windows 8 tablets in viewing HD videos while improving battery life.

Even though Atom Z2760 processor will be featured in Windows 8 tablets, it doesn?t mean tablets that use ARM will never be able to the operating system. Microsoft has also developed a form of Windows 8 for tablets that run on ARM. Called ?Windows RT?, the operating system is nearly identical to a Windows 8 tablet. However, its main limitation is the fact that it can only install applications from Microsoft?s online store. Windows 8 tablets that run on Atom Z2760 will have the full capability of the operating system including compatibility to Windows 7 software and tools. Windows 8 tablets will also have the capability of installing drivers for additional peripherals such as printers.

Intel?s success on Clover Trail is on the consumers? preference on tablet version. If customers will prefer to use the full Windows 8 version, Intel?s Clover Trail will be a big hit. On the other hand, Clover Trail will be in a stiff competition when customers prefer to use Windows RT on their tablets.

Intel Clover Tail

Image: Intel

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