Month: January 2016

NEW YORK—Today, the American Museum of Natural History dropped the curtain to reveal one of the biggest paleontological finds of recent years. Everything in that sentence is literal—the museum lowered a curtain to reveal a full-sized cast of the Titanosaur, a species that may be the largest dinosaur ever discovered.

The find itself made news when images came out of paleontologist Diego Pol lying on the femur of the skeleton, which is roughly the size of a sofa (though far less comfortable). Since then, the team from the Museo Paleontologico Egidio Feruglio (MPEF) have excavated over 200 bones, representing 70 percent of the skeleton. Four of those bones (each over a meter long) are also on display at the exhibit. The skeleton on display is made of lightweight fiberglass casts, as the actual bones would weigh far too much to support—the femur alone is roughly 500kg. It's the first outside of the MPEF.

The partnership between MPE and the AMNH was a natural one, as Pol got his PhD there. And he was back on hand for the Titanosaur's unveiling.

A few of the hundreds of stone tools that researchers found at the Talepu excavation in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Camera lens cap is included for size comparison. (credit: Erick Setiabudi)

Over 118,000 years ago, on the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia, a group of humans settled down and made a home. The only evidence of their existence is a large collection of stone tools, carefully crafted, preserved in the sediment at the edge of a river. A group of archaeologists recently spent several years excavating in the area and dating what remains they found. Astonishingly, their work suggests that humans may have arrived on this island as early as 195,000 years ago. And it's extremely unlikely they were Homo sapiens.

Sulawesi is part of the Indonesian island chain that forms a gentle curve in the waters between Southeast Asia, the Philippines, and Australia. But at the time these early humans were arriving during the Pleistocene, Australia and New Guinea were one continent, called Sahul, and many of the Indonesian islands were connected by land. Sea levels were often much lower than today due to glaciation, which locks water up into polar ice. Previous research has shown that early human groups crossed over to the islands during this time, before Homo sapiens evolved. Indeed, Sulawesi's neighboring island Flores was home to the recently discovered Homo floresiensis, or Hobbit people, a group of unusually small hominins who arrived on the island roughly 1 million years ago.

Here you can see the region where the tools were found. Exposed land during periods of low sea level (−120 m) during the Pleistocene is lightly shaded. Talepu Area indicated by an arrow. (credit: Nature)

The researchers published their findings this week in Nature, detailing the stone tools they found and explaining how they determined their age. The tools were typical of hominins during the Pleistocene, which is to say they were simple stone slivers called flakes made from banging one rock against another to produce small, sharp-edged pieces that could be used as knives, scrapers, weapons, and more. "There is patterning in the flaking techniques," write the researchers, but "there is little evidence that the stoneworkers were creating tools of specific form." So these were general purpose tools.

(credit: SRU.edu)

Online copyright enforcer Rightscorp has agreed to pay $450,000 to end a lawsuit accusing the company of making illegal calls to cell phones.

Morgan Pietz, an attorney who played a key role in bringing down Prenda Law, sued Rightscorp in 2014, saying that the company's efforts to get settlements from alleged pirates went too far. Rightscorp's illegal "robocalls" violated the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA), a 1991 law that limits how automated calling devices are used. The class-action lawsuit claimed that some Rightscorp targets were receiving one robocall on their cell phone per day. It's generally illegal to have automated devices call cell phones.

Earlier this week, Pietz and his co-counsel filed court papers outlining the settlement. Rightscorp will pay $450,000 into a settlement fund, which will be paid out to the 2,059 identified class members who received the allegedly illegal calls. Each class member who fills out an "affidavit of noninfringement" will receive up to $100. The rest of the fund will pay for costs of notice and claim administration (about $25,000) and attorneys' fees and costs, which cannot exceed $330,000. Rightscorp will also "release any and all alleged claims" against the class members. The company had accused the 2,059 class members of committing 126,409 acts of copyright infringement.

Hurricane Alex as observed by NASA's MODIS satellite at 10:30am ET Thursday. (credit: NASA)

Hurricane Alex formed south of the Azores on Thursday morning far from the United States, becoming the third January hurricane on record in the Atlantic Ocean and the first in 78 years. By early afternoon it had strengthened to a system with sustained winds of 85mph.

"Remarkably, Alex has undergone the transformation into a hurricane," wrote Richard Pasch, a senior forecaster at the National Hurricane Center, in his discussion of the system. "A distinct eye is present, embedded within a fairly symmetric mass of deep convection. Water vapor imagery shows that the upper-level trough is now west of the cyclone, with divergent flow over the center, indicative of a tropical transition."

Notably, sea surface temperatures near where the storm formed, 31.5°N and 28.4°W, are not anomalously warm. They are, in fact, near normal for January in the northern Atlantic Ocean. However temperatures in the upper troposphere, about 10 to 15km above the surface of the Earth, are about -60 degrees Celsius, substantially colder than normal. This stark temperature gradient has increased the upward pull on warmth and moisture at the surface, helping the hurricane to intensify.