Autopia Planes, Trains, Automobiles and the Future of Transportation Little X-Plane Pushes Bottom Edge of the Envelope

By Jason Paur

Flight test programs at Edwards Air Force Base and NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center usually are off-limits to outsiders, but we got a peek at one of its coolest programs, the X-48B, when the Air Force recently threw open the gates for an open house.

The X-48B is the latest in a long line of experimental X-planes, and the joint venture between NASA and Boeing’s Phantom Works is unlike most that came before. The blended wing-body aircraft isn’t some sort of sierra hotel fighter jet, it doesn’t have a pilot on board and it’s not even full-size. Despite being an unmanned scale model, the test pilots who fly it say all the challenges of experimental flight are still there.

“We try to fly very precise data points,” Boeing’s Dan Wells, one of three test pilots flying the X-48B, told Wired.com. “It still requires precision flying; you just don’t have those motion cues. You still feel like you worked hard when you fly it.”

The X-48B comes in for a landing. Photo: NASA

 

Sitting in a cockpit on the ground, Wells says flying the X-48B isn’t much different than flying a real airplane. The 8.5 percent scale plane has a camera in the nose, and the veteran Army test pilot has the same stick, rudder pedals and throttle controls he would use in a normal airplane.

“It’s just that visually all I have is a TV picture,” he said.

The airplane has a 21-foot wingspan and is powered by three 55-pound-thrust gas turbine engines. Wells and his flight-test engineer perform exacting maneuvers with the 500-pound airplane, often making adjustments of less than a degree to the pitch, roll or yaw.

Blended wing-body aircraft combine the efficiency of a flying wing, where the entire fuselage of the aircraft creates lift with small wings to aid stability and control. The result is a bulbous, triangular fuselage — with plenty of room to seat passengers or carry cargo — instead of the tube fuselage design of traditional aircraft.

Pilots and engineers often describe an airplane’s capabilities by referring to the edges of its performance plotted on a graph. These boundaries on the graph define the flight envelope. With the entire aircraft adding to the lift side of the equation, the blended wing-body design provides greater efficiency at high-altitude cruise speeds. But the challenge according to Wells are the airplane’s flying characteristics at the other end of the flight envelope.

“It’s great that it’s more fuel efficient at 35,000 feet,” he said. “But can you land it?”

Airplanes tend to be most challenging to fly at the lower speeds encountered during takeoff and landing. Here an airplane is at risk of stalling, a condition where the smooth flowing air over the lifting surface no longer flows so smoothly. The result is a loss of lift. In order to be safe to fly, an airplane should have good, or at least manageable, stall characteristics allowing a pilot to recover and maintain control. Wells says flying wings typically don’t have good stall characteristics, so the challenge is creating an airplane that will be safe and controllable at low speeds.

To examine the low-speed characteristics, the team is examining the X-48B’s behavior at a high angle of attack similar to how it might fly during takeoff or landing. With more than 70 flights completed so far, the X-48B has demonstrated the design can overcome some of the challenges that have plagued similarly unusual aircraft.

“This platform and our flight control system allow us to go to a much, much higher angle of attack,” Wells says (an alpha of 23 degrees for you aerodynamics geeks). “So far we’ve shown that we have very good low-speed handling qualities and that’s the whole purpose of this program — to show that this design of an airplane will fly in the low-speed environment.”

Next up for the X-48 team is the transition to the X-48C model. The newer design will have two engines that are more efficient, allowing the crew to conduct longer test flights. But don’t hold your breath waiting to see anything bigger. So far there are no plans for a full-size test vehicle. Aviation analysts say before a company like Boeing would be willing to invest the money required for a full-scale version, oil prices would climb into triple digits to assure a sufficient demand for the fuel-efficient airplane.

Until that happens, Boeing and NASA can continue to push the edge of the envelope with a modest investment in the little X-48B.

First and second photos of the X-48B: NASA. All others: Jason Paur/Wired.com.

http://www.wired.com/autopia/2009/10/x-plane/

The Long-Lost Siblings of the Sun

The sun was born in a family of stars. What became of them?

By Simon F. Portegies Zwart

Key Concepts

• The sun is a solitary star, and astronomers have traditionally assumed it formed as such. Yet most stars are born in clusters, and scraps of evidence from meteorites and from the arrangement of comets suggest that our sun was no exception.
• Its birth cluster could have contained 1,500 to 3,500 stars within a diameter of 10 light-years—a big, unhappy family whose larger members bullied the small fry and which broke up not long after our solar system came into being.
• Although the sun’s siblings have long since dispersed across the galaxy, observatories such as the European GAIA satellite will be able to look for them. Their properties might fill in the gaps of the solar system’s deep history.

People have often sought solitude in the starry night sky, and it is an appropriate place for that. The night is dark because, in cosmic terms, our sun and its family of planets are very lonely. Neighboring stars are so far away that they look like mere specks of light, and more distant stars blur together into a feeble glow. Our fastest space probes will take tens of thousands of years to cross the distance to the nearest star. Space isolates us like an ocean around a tiny island.

Yet not all stars are so secluded. About one in 10 belongs to a cluster, a swarm of hundreds to tens of thousands of stars with a diameter of a few light-years. In fact, most stars are born in such groups, which generally disperse over billions of years, their stars blending in with the rest of the galaxy. What about our sun? Might it, too, have come into existence in a star cluster? If so, our location in the galaxy was not always so desolate. It only became so as the cluster dispersed in due time.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=the-long-lost-siblings-of-the-sun

Joining the Energy Underground: Residential Geothermal Power Systems

The federal Investment Tax Credit was expanded and extended (through 2016) this year, allowing for 30 percent of the cost of a home renewable energy system to be deducted from your federal tax bill. Pictured: A home rooftop solar installation in progress.
ATIS547, courtesy Flickr.

Homeowners looking to go green and lower their utility bills can install a residential geothermal system

Dear EarthTalk: I’d like to know the relative electricity cost of utility-scale solar and wind plants versus rooftop residential solar. In other words, how can I know whether to subsidize my utility’s alternative-energy plant or renovate my own home?
—Randy Wilson, Flagstaff, AZ

Making such a determination is complex, but you could start with “In My Backyard,” a new online tool by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL). You first need to know your electricity usage and what size solar photovoltaic (PV) system or wind turbine you could install. Then, using Google Earth maps and data on the amounts of sunshine and wind at your location, the tool will estimate the electricity you could get from a certain size wind turbine or PV array installed on your property.

The costs to install renewable energy systems vary greatly by location, warn researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, which is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). And kilowatt hour (kWh) costs vary by utility, as do state and local financial incentives. One piece of good news: The federal Investment Tax Credit was expanded and extended this year. It allows for 30 percent of the cost of your system to be deducted from your federal tax bill, and is good through 2016.

Comparing the cost of going it alone to that of simply buying green power through your utility is not a simple equation, either. You can support your utility’s renewable power infrastructure by paying a premium on your electric bill, or you can buy renewable energy certificates—also known as green tags—even if your utility does not offer green power (green tags inject renewable energies into the grid even if they don’t come back to you via your own utility). To decide which equation is better for you, compare the costs of those programs over the same time period with the cost of building and maintaining your own system (minus any installation credits and/or revenues from selling your excess electricity back to the utility). That would give you the relative costs and return-on-investment.

But that’s still not the whole picture: Another question is whether your home system can continue to produce energy more cost-effectively than your utility, as it brings more and more green energy sources into its mix. Lawrence Berkeley says no, essentially. A February 2009 report summarizing the costs of PV from 1998 to 2007 concluded that larger systems averaged a 25 percent lower cost than the smallest ones.

The same is true for wind power, says the American Wind Energy Association. The group’s February 2005 report calculates that a large wind farm can deliver electricity at a nearly 40 percent lower cost than a small one. It also can take advantage of economies of scale in lower operational and maintenance costs.

The bottom line is this: Decades ago, when widespread use of alternative energy was still only a dream, building one’s own private source of home power was the only way to get off the carbon-intense grid and ensure that your own energy needs left little footprint. But today, with considerably more renewable energy sources coming online or about to do so in quantum leap measures—and at much greater efficiencies than can be achieved privately—the best bet may well be to forego the go-it alone path and support your utility’s efforts to generate green power not just for your own household but for everyone.

CONTACTS: NREL’s “In My Backyard” Tool, www.nrel.gov/eis/imby; DOE Green Power Network, http://apps3.eere.energy.gov/greenpower.

EarthTalk is produced by E/The Environmental Magazine. SEND YOUR ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTIONS TO: EarthTalk, P.O. Box 5098, Westport, CT 06881; earthtalk@emagazine.com. Read past columns at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalk/archives.php. EarthTalk is now a book! Details and order information at: www.emagazine.com/earthtalkbook.

Article Continues – http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=earth-talks-residential-geothermal-power

Next-generation Microcapsules Deliver ‘Chemicals On Demand’

A new generation of microcapsules, shown above, promise to deliver “chemicals on demand” for a wide range of uses, including medicine and personal care.

Scientists in California are reporting development of a new generation of the microcapsules used in carbon-free copy paper, in which capsules burst and release ink with pressure from a pen. The new microcapsules burst when exposed to light, releasing their contents in ways that could have wide-ranging commercial uses from home and personal care to medicine.

ean Fréchet, Alex Zettl and colleagues note that liquid-filled microcapsules have many other uses, including self-healing plastics. Those plastics contain one group of microscapsules filled with monomer and another with a catalyst. When scratches rip open the capsules, the contents flow, mix, and form a seal. Microcapsules that burst open when exposed to light would have great advantages, the scientists say. Light could be focused to a pinpoint to kill cancer cells, for instance, or shined over an large area to print a pattern.

The new microcapsules consist of nylon spheres about the size of a grain of sand. They enclose a liquid chemical sprinkled with carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes convert laser light to heat that bursts the nylon capsule, releasing the chemical. Using such a system, doctors, for example, might inject microcapsules containing anti-cancer drugs to specific cells and make the capsules burst upon exposure to laser light, delivering their contents precisely where and when they are needed in the body.

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Journal reference:

1. Pastine et al. Chemicals On Demand with Phototriggerable Microcapsules. Journal of the American Chemical Society, 2009; 131 (38): 13586 DOI: 10.1021/ja905378v

Adapted from materials provided by American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028114027.htm

Venomous Shrew And Lizard: Harmless Digestive Enzyme Evolved Twice Into Dangerous Toxin In Two Unrelated Species

A harmless digestive enzyme can be turned into a toxin in two unrelated species — a shrew (pictured) and a lizard — thereby giving each a venomous bite. (Credit: iStockphoto)

Biologists have shown that independent but similar molecular changes turned a harmless digestive enzyme into a toxin in two unrelated species — a shrew and a lizard — giving each a venomous bite.

The work, described this week in the journal Current Biology by researchers at Harvard University, suggests that protein adaptation may be a highly predictable process, one that could eventually help discover other toxins across a wide array of species.

“Similar changes have occurred independently in a shrew and a lizard, causing both to be toxic,” says senior author Hopi E. Hoekstra, John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Natural Sciences in Harvard’s Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. “It’s remarkable that the same types of changes have independently promoted the same toxic end product.”

Lead author Yael T. Aminetzach, a postdoctoral researcher in the same department, suggests that the work has important implications for our understanding of how novel protein function evolves by studying the relationship between an ancestral and harmless protein and its new toxic activity.

“The venom is essentially an overactivation of the original digestive enzyme, amplifying its effects,” she says. “What had been a mild anticoagulant in the salivary glands of both species has become a much more extreme compound that causes paralysis and death in prey that is bitten.”

In the first part of the study, Aminetzach and her colleagues compared a toxin found in the salivary glands of the insectivorous North American shrew Blarina brevicauda to its closely related digestive enzyme kallikrein. Enzymes are proteins that catalyze, or increase the rates of, chemical reactions; this rate enhancement occurs at a specific region on an enzyme called the active site.

Aminetzach found that the specific molecular differences between kallikrein and its toxic descendent are highly localized around the enzyme’s active site.

“Catalysis is fostered by three specific changes that increase enzyme activity,” Aminetzach says. “The active site is physically opened up, and the loops surrounding it become more flexible. The area around the active site also becomes positively charged, serving to better guide the substrate directly into the active site.”

To further demonstrate that these molecular changes to kallikrein are related to the evolution of toxicity, Aminetzach explored the evolution of another kallikrein-like toxin in the Mexican beaded lizard (Helodermata horridum). She found that this toxin, while distinct from the analogous toxin in the shrew, nonetheless exhibits the same catalytic enhancement relative to the original kallikrein enzyme.

Equally important, she found that this functional change in the lizard toxin is accomplished through similar molecular modifications of kallikrein, and through identical mechanisms of structural alteration of the active site, as in the shrew toxin.

This insight — namely, that toxins could arise by increasing the catalytic activity of enzymes through a conserved and predictable mechanism — could be used both to identify other kallikrein-derived toxic proteins and as a method to evolve new protein function in general.

Aminetzach’s and Hoekstra’s co-authors on the Current Biology paper are John Srouji of Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology and Chung Yin Kong of Massachusetts General Hospital. Their work was funded by the Federico Foundation and Harvard University.

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Adapted from materials provided by Harvard University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS. Original article written by Samuel Bjork, Harvard Staff Writer.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029125532.htm

Newly Discovered Ankylosaur Dinosaur Is ‘Biological Version Of An Army Tank’

A husband and wife team of American paleontologists has discovered a new species of dinosaur that lived 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous of central Montana, Tatankacephalus cooneyorum. (Credit: Illustration by William Parsons)

A husband and wife team of American paleontologists has discovered a new species of dinosaur that lived 112 million years ago during the early Cretaceous of central Montana.

The new dinosaur, a species of ankylosaur, is documented in the October issue of the Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences. Ankylosaurs are the biological version of an army tank. They are protected by a plate-like armour with two sets of sharp spikes on each side of the head, and a skull so thick that even ‘raptors’ such as Deinonychus could leave barely more than a scratch.

Bill and Kris Parsons, Research associates of the Buffalo Museum of Science, found much of the skull of the newly described Tatankacephalus cooneyorum resting on the surface of a hillside in 1997. Because the skull was 90% complete, it was possible to justify this fossil as a new species.

“This is the first member of Ankylosauridae to be found within the Early Cretaceous Cloverly Geologic Formation,” said Bill Parsons, who characterized the fossil as a transitional evolutionary form between the earlier Jurassic ankylosaurs and the better known Late Cretaceous ankylosaurs.

The skull is heavily protected by two sets of lateral horns, two thick domes at the back, and smaller thickenings around the nasal region. “Heavy ornamentation and horn-like plates would have covered most of the dorsal surface of this dinosaur” said Bill Parsons.

“For years, Bill and Kris have been collecting fossils from a critical time in Earth’s history, and their hard work has paid off,” said Lawrence Witmer, professor of paleontology at Ohio University who was not involved with this study. “This is a really important find and gives us a clearer view of the evolution of armored dinosaurs. But this is just the first; I’m sure, of what will be a series of important discoveries from this team.”

Parsons also illustrated the dermal armour of this new species based on the theory by Museum of the Rockies paleontologist John R. Horner that there was an outer keratinous sheathing on it as found in modern turtle shells and bird beaks. In his new reconstruction, Parsons suggests that Tatankacephalus exhibited complex and colorful patterns rather than the dull appearance suggested in earlier ankylosaur portraits. “According to Horner’s theory, many other dinosaurs also had this kind of sheathing and also may have been diversely colored,” said Parsons.

As to its name, the broad, short horns on the back of its skull resemble the horns found on a modern buffalo skull and Tatankacephalus loosely translates as ‘Buffalo head.’ Parsons also noted, “of course any further allusions to the city of Buffalo are completely intentional as well.”

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Adapted from materials provided by Buffalo Museum of Science.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091030125046.htm

Japanese fishing trawler sunk by giant jellyfish

Nomura’s jellyfish: The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler

A 10-ton fishing boat has been sunk by gigantic jellyfish off eastern Japan.

By Julian Ryall in Tokyo

The trawler, the Diasan Shinsho-maru, capsized off Chiba`as its three-man crew was trying to haul in a net containing dozens of huge Nomura’s jellyfish.

Each of the jellyfish can weigh up to 200 kg and waters around Japan have been inundated with the creatures this year. Experts believe weather and water conditions in the breeding grounds, off the coast of China, have been ideal for the jellyfish in recent months.

The crew of the fishing boat was thrown into the sea when the vessel capsized, but the three men were rescued by another trawler, according to the Mainichi newspaper. The local Coast Guard office reported that the weather was clear and the sea was calm at the time of the accident.

One of the largest jellyfish in the world, the species can grow up to 2 meters in diameter. The last time Japan was invaded on a similar scale, in the summer of 2005, the jellyfish damaged nets, rendered fish inedible with their toxic stings and even caused injuries to fishermen.

Relatively little is known about Nomura’s jellyfish, such as why some years see thousands of the creatures floating across the Sea of Japan on the Tsushima Current, but last year there were virtually no sightings. In 2007, there were 15,500 reports of damage to fishing equipment caused by the creatures.

Experts believe that one contributing factor to the jellyfish becoming more frequent visitors to Japanese waters may be a decline in the number of predators, which include sea turtles and certain species of fish.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/6483758/Japanese-fishing-trawler-sunk-by-giant-jellyfish.html

New Analyses Of Dinosaur Growth May Wipe Out One-third Of Species

Dracorex (upper left) and Stygimoloch (upper right) are not distinct dome-headed dinosaurs, but young and nearly sexually mature, respectively, members of the species Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, according to a new study by paleontologists from UC Berkeley and the Museum of the Rockies. (Credit: Holly Woodward/Montana State University)

Paleontologists from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Museum of the Rockies have wiped out two species of dome-headed dinosaur, one of them named three years ago — with great fanfare — after Hogwarts, the school attended by Harry Potter.

Their demise comes after a three-horned dinosaur, Torosaurus, was assigned to the dustbin of history last month at the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in the United Kingdom, the loss in recent years of quite a few duck-billed hadrosaurs and the probable disappearance of Nanotyrannus, a supposedly miniature Tyrannosaurus rex.

These dinosaurs were not separate species, as some paleontologists claim, but different growth stages of previously named dinosaurs, according to a new study. The confusion is traced to their bizarre head ornaments, ranging from shields and domes to horns and spikes, which changed dramatically with age and sexual maturity, making the heads of youngsters look very different from those of adults.

“Juveniles and adults of these dinosaurs look very, very different from adults, and literally may resemble a different species,” said dinosaur expert Mark B. Goodwin, assistant director of UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology. “But some scientists are confusing morphological differences at different growth stages with characteristics that are taxonomically important. The result is an inflated number of dinosaurs in the late Cretaceous.”

Goodwin and John “Jack” Horner of the Museum of the Rockies at Montana State University in Bozeman, are the authors of a new paper analyzing North American dome-headed dinosaurs that appeared this week in the public access online journal PLoS One.

Unlike the original dinosaur die-off at the end of the Cretaceous period 65 million years ago, this loss of species is the result of a sustained effort by paleontologists to collect a full range of dinosaur fossils — not just the big ones. Their work has provided dinosaur specimens of various ages, allowing computed tomography (CT) scans and tissue study of the growth stages of dinosaurs.

In fact, Horner suggests that one-third of all named dinosaur species may never have existed, but are merely different stages in the growth of other known dinosaurs.

“What we are seeing in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana suggests that we may be overextended by a third,” Horner said, a “wild guess” that may hold true for the various horned dinosaurs recently discovered in Asia from the Cretaceous. “A lot of the dinosaurs that have been named recently fall into that category.”

The new paper, published online Oct. 27, contains a thorough analysis of three of the four named dome-headed dinosaurs from North America, including Pachycephalosaurus wyomingensis, the first “thick-headed” dinosaur discovered. After that dinosaur’s description in 1943, many speculated that male pachycephalosaurs used their bowling ball-like domes to head-butt one another like big-horn sheep, though Goodwin and Horner disproved that notion in 2004 after a thorough study of the tissue structure of the dome.

Many paleontologists now realize that the elaborate head ornaments of dinosaurs, from the huge bony shield and three horns of Triceratops to the coxcomb-like head gear of some hadrosaurs, were not for combat, but served the same purpose as feathers in birds: to distinguish between species and indicate sexual maturity.

“Dinosaurs, like birds and many mammals, retain neoteny, that is, they retain their juvenile characteristics for a long period of growth,” Horner said, “which is a strong indicator that they were very social animals, grouping in flocks or herds with long periods of parental care.”

These head ornaments, which probably had horny coverings of keratin that may have been brightly-colored as they are in many birds, started growing when these dinosaurs reached about half their adult size, and were remodeled as these dinosaurs matured, continuing to change shape even into adulthood and old age, according to the researchers.

In the new paper, Horner and Goodwin compared the bone structures of Pachycephalosaurus with that of a domeheaded dinosaur, Stygimoloch spinifer, discovered in Montana by UC Berkeley paleontologists in 1973, and a dragon-like skull discovered in South Dakota and named in 2006 as a new species, Dracorex hogwartsia.

With the help of CT scans and microscopic analysis of slices through the bones of Pachycephalosaurus and Stygimoloch, the team concluded that Stygimoloch, with its high, narrow dome, growing tissue and unfused skull bones, was probably a pachycephalosaur subadult, in a stage just before sexual maturity.

Dracorex is one of a kind, and thus unavailable for dissection, but morphological analysis indicates it is a juvenile that hasn’t yet formed a dome, although the top of its skull shows thickening suggestive of an emerging dome.

“Dracorex’s flat skull, nodules on the front end and small spikes on back, and thickened but undomed frontoparietal bone all confirm that, ontogenetically, it is a juvenile Pachycephalosaurus,” Goodwin said.

Comparison of these skulls to other fossils in the hands of private collectors confirm the conclusions, they said. In all, they looked at 21 dome-headed dinosaur skulls and cranial elements from North America.

The key to this analysis, Horner said, was years of field work in Montana by his team and Goodwin’s in search of fossils of all sizes.

“We have gone out in the Hell Creek Formation for 11 years doing nothing but collecting absolutely everything we could find, which is the kind of collecting that is required,” he said. “If you think about Triceratops, people had collected for 100 years and still hadn’t found any juveniles. And we went out and spent 11 years collecting everything, and we found all kinds of them.”

“Early paleontologists recognized the distinction between adults and juveniles, but people have lost track of looking at ontogeny — how the individual develops — when they discover a new fossil,” Goodwin said. “Dinosaurs are not mammals, and they don’t grow like mammals.”

In fact, the so-called metaplastic bone on the heads of horned dinosaurs grows and dissolves, or resorbs, throughout life like no other bone, Horner said, and is reminiscent of the growth and loss of horns today in elk and deer. In earlier studies, Horner and Goodwin found dramatic remodeling of metaplastic bone in Triceratops, which led to their subsequent focus on dome-headed dinosaurs.

“Metaplastic bones get long and shorten, as in Triceratops, where the horn orientation is backwards in juveniles and forward in adults,” Horner said. Even in older specimens, such as the fossil previously named Torosaurus, bone in the face shield resorbs to create holes along the margin. John Scannella, Horner’s student at Montana State, presented a paper reclassifying Torosaurus as an old Triceratops at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology meeting in Bristol, U.K., on Sept. 25.

“In order for that huge amount of bone to move, there has to be a lot of deposition and resorption,” Horner said.

Horner and Goodwin continue to search for dinosaur fossils in the Hell Creek Formation, which is rich in Triceratops, dome-headed dinosaurs, hadrosaurs and tyrannosaurs. Analysis of growth stages in these taxa will have implications for other horned dinosaurs that are being uncovered in Asia and elsewhere.

“There are other horned dinosaurs I think may be over split,” that is, split into too many new species rather than being lumped together as one species, Goodwin said.

The work was supported by grants from the UC Museum of Paleontology and the Museum of the Rockies.

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Journal reference:

 

1. John R. Horner, Mark B. Goodwin. Extreme Cranial Ontogeny in the Upper Cretaceous Dinosaur Pachycephalosaurus. PLoS ONE, 2009; DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0007626

Adapted from materials provided by University of California – Berkeley.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091031002314.htm

Long-range Taser raises fears of shock and injury

A new, long-range Taser weapon could be launched from standard 40-millimetre grenade launchers (Image: SGT April L. Johnson/US DoD)

by David Hambling

INCREASING the distance between yourself and a potentially dangerous assailant is always a good idea – even if your ultimate aim is to render them insensible. That appears to be the thinking behind a Pentagon project, now in its final stages, to perfect a projectile capable of delivering an electric shock to incapacitate a person tens of metres away. It will be fired from a standard 40-millimetre grenade launcher.

The projectile, being developed by Taser International under a $2.5 million contract, is known as a Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation or HEMI device. Taser will deliver the first prototypes for testing and evaluation early next year.

Wes Burgei, a project engineer at the US Department of Defense’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD), says the self-contained cartridges should be able to hit targets 60 metres away – more than three times the range of the existing XREP shotgun cartridge (New Scientist, 29 August, p 20).

However, the impact force of the projectile remains a worry. “There is a known risk of severe injury from impact projectiles, either from blunt force at short ranges or from hitting a sensitive part of the body,” says security researcher Neil Davison, who has recently written a book on non-lethal weapons.

Burgei, however, insists the devices are designed to deliver minimal force upon impact. “A major focus of this project is reducing the projectile’s mass and mitigating the impact forces on the target through innovative projectile-nose design,” he says. Various nose designs, which disperse the projectile’s impact force, are now being tested.

The duration of the shock which the HEMI will deliver to its target has also raised concerns. Marksmen will need time to reach the incapacitated target, and because the weapon is designed for long-range use this could be considerable.

A JNLWD reference book from 2008 suggests incapacitation times could be as long as 3 minutes, although the projectile’s range was initially planned to be much higher.

“We should be worried about undesirable effects if people are going to be subjected to bouts of prolonged incapacitation,” says Steve Wright, a specialist in non-lethal weapons at Leeds Metropolitan University in the UK.

We should be worried if people are going to be subjected to bouts of prolonged incapacitation

Burgei says the duration of the shocks emitted by the projectiles has yet to be determined. “When requirements become solidified, the incapacitation time can be adjusted to meet them,” he says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427325.600-longrange-taser-raises-fears-of-shock-and-injury.html

Ford Posts $1B Profit In Third Quarter, Forecasts A “Solidly Profitable” 2011

TOM KRISHER and DEE-ANN DURBIN

DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford, the only Detroit automaker to dodge direct government aid and bankruptcy court, surprised investors with net income of nearly $1 billion in the third quarter and forecast a “solidly profitable” 2011.

The automaker said Monday earnings were fueled by U.S. market share gains, cost cuts and the Cash for Clunkers program, which drew flocks of buyers to showrooms this summer. Ford’s shares rose 68 cents, or 9.8 percent, to $7.68 in morning trading.

The latest results signal that Ford’s turnaround is on more solid ground. The company lost more than $14.6 billion last year and hasn’t posted a full-year profit since 2005. While it made a profit in the second quarter, that was mainly due to debt reductions that cut its interest payments.

Ford, based in Dearborn, Mich., reported third-quarter net income of $997 million, or 29 cents per share. Its profit forecast for 2011 was a step above previous guidance of break-even or better for the year.

Ford’s key North American car and truck division posted a pretax profit of $357 million, the division’s first quarter in the black since early 2005. Ford cited higher pricing, lower material costs and increased market share for the improvement.

Excluding one-time items, Ford earned 26 cents per share, blowing away analysts’ expectations of a loss of 12 cents.

The earnings came despite an $800 million revenue drop. But Ford said it cut costs by $1 billion during the quarter, accomplished through layoffs in North America and Europe, reduced pension and retiree health care costs and improvements in productivity and product development.

Chief financial officer Lewis Booth said the company took in $1.3 billion more than it spent in the quarter, an improvement over its $1 billion cash burn in the second quarter.

“That’s a huge deal,” Booth said.

Ford’s plan to create demand and get better prices for its products, coupled with cost cuts, gave the company confidence that it will make money in 2011, Booth said.

But Ford still faces obstacles in its turnaround. Last week, workers overwhelmingly rejected an agreement with the United Auto Workers that would have brought Ford’s labor costs in line with rivals General Motors Corp. and Chrysler LLC. Workers objected to clauses limiting their right to strike and freezing entry-level wages, and felt the company was healthy enough and didn’t need further concessions.

The rejected deal also would have changed rules so skilled tradesmen such as electricians and pipefitters work in teams and perform more than one task.

Rejection of the deal isn’t likely to place Ford at an immediate cost disadvantage to its crosstown rivals because savings from the concessions are longer-term, said Gary Chaison, a professor of labor relations at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. Neither the company nor the UAW has released any cost savings numbers.

The third-quarter profit makes it extremely unlikely that the company will push to head back to the bargaining table before the current UAW contract expires in the fall of 2011, and union leaders also are unlikely to take another deal to the membership, Chaison said.

“I think the company has no credibility asking for concessions now, and I think the leadership is quite embarrased for making a case for concessions,” he said.

Chaison said Ford could make some noise about moving new vehicle production to Canada, where unionized workers on Sunday approved a package of concessions, but it’s more likely that Ford will live with the current contract until 2011.

The other area where Ford has a cost disadvantage is debt. Ford reported $26.9 billion in debt, up $800 million from the second quarter.

The company avoided the same fate as rivals Chrysler and GM by mortgaging its factories and even the familiar blue oval logo to borrow $23.5 billion before credit markets froze last year.

Ford didn’t quantify the impact of Cash for Clunkers, which offered buyers rebates to trade in their vehicles. The program helped Ford cut costly incentives and raise production.

It also won buyers; the fuel-efficient Ford Focus sedan and Ford Escape, a small SUV, were among the top five sellers under clunkers. Ford sales climbed 17 percent in August thanks to the program.

Ford’s revenue fell $800 million for the quarter, to $30.9 billion, due mainly to its financial services arm, Ford Motor Credit, making fewer loans.

But the division still posted a pretax profit of $677 million, and revenue from auto operations rose slightly to $27.9 billion.

Ford also has benefited from consumer goodwill after it declined government bailout money and didn’t go into bankruptcy over the summer as GM and Chrysler did. Ford grabbed sales from its rivals, posting the largest increase in market share of any automaker in September. Ford expects an overall gain in U.S. market share in 2009, a feat it hasn’t accomplished since 1995.

(This version CORRECTS 5th graf that Ford’s North American car and truck division posted the first pretax profit since the first quarter of 2005 sted company’s first pretax profit since first quarter of 2005)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/ford-posts-1b-profit-in-t_n_342010.html