Tag: natural sciences

Ecological study to focus on stream crossings

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Two North Shore road stream crossings, including one in West Newbury, have been selected by the state Department of Fish and Game’s Division of Ecological Restoration for future ecological restoration studies.

The culvert replacement sites – one on River Road in West Newbury and the other on Concord Street in Gloucester – were selected due to their vulnerability to coastal erosion, flooding and future sea-level rise, agency said.

Although the culverts are crossing freshwater streams, the division says they are expected to become tidal as sea levels rise, a transition presenting significant challenges for road infrastructure, DER officials said.

The Division of Ecological Restoration announced it is funding and managing future studies at the sites to help the communities, nearby landowners and partners overcome technical challenges and plan for ecological restoration and climate adaptation.

“Ecological restoration provides innumerable benefits,” Fish and Game Commissioner Tom O’Shea said in a prepared statement. “Projects like this will improve public safety, build resilience to sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and mitigate flooding, and restore water quality and wildlife habitat.

“By supporting municipalities and partners, we can scale our efforts to steward a biodiverse and climate ready future.”

“DER looks forward to helping these two communities evaluate and plan for sea-level rise while building resilient, fish-friendly road stream crossings,” Division of Ecological Restoration Director Beth Lambert said in a prepared statement. “Culvert upgrades and other nature-based solutions can be technically challenging and costly for our municipalities to pursue alone. State-municipal partnerships like this are key to successful implementation of ecological restoration and climate adaptation projects.”

In West Newbury, the River Road culvert is on an unnamed stream of the Merrimack River. The crossing faces challenges due to flooding and erosion, and has the potential to be heavily influenced by increased storms and sea level rise.

Conducting models of the way water moves at the culvert site and investigating potential ecological improvements through restoration would enable a systematic approach to improving infrastructure and natural resource resiliency, the state said.

In Gloucester, the Concord Street culvert is along a tributary of Walker Creek.

The DER indicated the culvert is affected by coastal storms and is at an increased risk for erosion and flooding. The replacement of the culvert with a structure of resilient design would address flood water retention and bank stabilization and sedimentation; improve fish passage and wildlife habitat; and increase climate resilience by preparing for sea level rise, storm surge, and coastal marsh mitigation.

A 2019 technical report called “Great Marsh Barrier Mitigation: A comprehensive program to mitigate aquatic barriers in the Great Marsh Area of Critical Environmental Concern region” by the Ipswich River Watershed Association looked at the single culvert on Concord Street, among many other “priority barriers” in the region.

“The site has been identified as a site that has experienced flooding and ranked as having poor aquatic organism passage in the (North Atlantic Aquatic Connectivity Collaboration) Tidal Crossing Assessment,” the report said. It singled out the culvert as having “no passage due to rock piles/undersized structures.”

Ethan Forman may be contacted at 978-675-2714, or at eforman@northofboston.com.

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By Ethan Forman | Staff Writer

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May 21, 2024
NFT Cockfighting Game Binned, Is Everything Wrong With Silicon Valley

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For the past year a company known as Irreverent Labs have been working on a game called MechaFightClub, which was to be driven by NFT sales and be based on the proud and ancient sport of cockfighting.

These Anime Moms Deserve All The Flowers For Mother’s Day

Not using actual chickens, mind, they were mech ones, but still.

Here is the game in action, which it was hoped would inspire the sale of a ton of mechabots, the NFTs that players were supposed to buy and then use to fight each other with:

MechaFightClub First Glimpse – Fight Scene in the Cockpit

You may be shocked to hear this after seeing such an accomplished demonstration, but it’s now May 2023 and the game—or collection of concept videos built around NFTs, however you want to describe it—has been essentially cancelled, with the developers announcing an “indefinite hibernation”:

While it would be easy to blame the cancellation on the fact it looked like shit and was built on a dead market, the developers have instead decided to blame the SEC’s recent crypto crackdown, saying “We are an American company, and a lack of clarity is making it difficult for blockchain companies to operate here. In the current regulatory confusion, we simply couldn’t create an in-game economy without concern about the regulatory ramifications.”

You may be equally shocked to hear that a bunch of people who were very into the whole NFT and crypto hustle have now, like the rest of Silicon Valley, lurched towards “AI” instead.

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Amazon Basics Overstock Sale

Their Overstock Is Your Savings
Amazon overstocked on a ton of everyday items, and they’re all up to 50% off. Whatever is on your list to grab this week, they probably have a sale.

The game’s official YouTube account, which had stopped posting gameplay videos a long time ago (though its Twitter account had kept hyping the game until earlier this week, using mostly AI-generated images), has recently begun posting AI interviews instead, and Decrypt reports (via Web3IsGoingGreat) the company has now pivoted entirely away from games development and towards using machine learning to create “short-form videos from images” instead.

I’m not posting this here to point and laugh at one bad game that was probably never going to be a game and which you’d likely never heard of. I’m posting this because this company got $40 million in funding to make MechaFightClub, and only a year later can just cancel it, shift their entire focus onto a premise as flimsy and ethereal as crypto was and just carry on like nothing happened.

Linette Lopez’s excellent piece last week argued that “Silicon Valley has entered the Hail Mary phase of its business cycle — a desertic part of a tech-industry downturn where desperation can turn into recklessness”. Irreverent Labs going from “mech chicken fighting game” to “AI-driven video creator” in the space of a year is the perfect example of this desperation, a case study in everything wrong with so many companies working in these tech spaces and, even more damningly, the idiots who keep giving them all this money.

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Luke Plunkett

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May 15, 2023
Meet the titanosaur: Dinosaur giant goes on display in Europe for the first time | CNN

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London
CNN
—

In the venerated halls of London’s Natural History Museum, one of the largest animals ever to walk the Earth is about to make its debut.

Patagotitan mayorum, a dinosaur giant belonging to a group known as titanosaurs, is visiting Europe for the first time since its discovery in Argentina in 2010. Over five meters (16 feet) tall and weighing over two and a half metric tons, its skeleton will give visitors an idea of what this gentle giant, which could have weighed as much as 57 metric tons and stretched over 120 feet, would have looked like when it lived on Earth around 100 million years ago.

A team of technicians is putting the finishing touches to the star exhibit, which arrived in the UK in January and has been reconstructed in a room with a specially reinforced floor, said Sinead Marron, exhibition and interpretation manager at the museum.

Displayed alongside the skeleton, which is a cast, are real fossils, including a 2.4-meter-long (8 feet) femur that weighs around half a metric ton.

“The idea of the exhibition has been in the works for a few years now,” said Marron, explaining that it was disrupted by the Covid pandemic. “We’re so excited to finally introduce Patagotitan to the UK.”

When Patagotitan mayorum was first excavated, it rocked the world of palaeontology. More than nine times heavier than the African elephant and longer than a blue whale, the giant herbivore may have been the largest terrestrial animal of all time.

The first evidence of the Patagotitan emerged in 2010 with the discovery of a single bone, before a more extensive dig in 2013 yielded more than 180 bones from seven partial skeletons. Evidence suggests the dinosaurs were buried in floods.

The fossils were 3-D scanned and used by the Museo Paleontológico Egidio Feruglio (MEF) in Argentina as the basis of a whole skeleton cast comprising nearly 300 bones. The cast comprises a shell of fiberglass and polyester resin, filled with expanding foam, displayed on a steel framework.

“The replica is a composite – it incorporates bones from at least six different individuals found at the site,” explained Marron. “For the bones that weren’t found, the specialist team at MEF have filled in the gaps using what we know from closely related dinosaurs.”

Replicas of Patagotitan mayorum reside in the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, but the dinosaur hadn’t been exhibited in Europe before the Natural History Museum took loan of the MEF’s cast.

A specialist department of freight company IAG Cargo was tasked with transporting the dinosaur from Argentina.

CEO David Shepherd told CNN the department has transported items including terracotta soldiers, Egyptian mummies and Assyrian treasures to the UK, which, due to their value and delicate nature, means staff and customers go through strict screening requirements to ensure items’ safety. “Cargo is stored in state-of-the-art vaults that are constantly monitored using CCTV and active human surveillance,” he said.

The cast and fossils were stored in more than 40 specially designed crates. These were placed in the belly hold of two British Airways Boeing 787 Dreamliners and flown 7,000 miles from Ezeiza Airport, Buenos Aires, to London Heathrow, before they were taken to a special facility ahead of transportation to the museum.

“The fossils are significantly heavier than the replicas which makes storing, moving and displaying them more complicated than for the replicas,” said Marron. “In addition, the original fossils are of immense value to scientific research.”

“For this move, every single bone required a temporary export permit for paleontological heritage,” Shepherd explained. “This is very similar to a passport and includes details such as the name and code of the collection, its weight, size and a photograph, as well as insurance and a visa-like document, giving it permission to be out of the country for a specified time.”

Clearing customs and security checks took four days, he added.

Assembly inside the museum’s Waterhouse Gallery has happened away from the public eye. “There was a lot of measurement-checking to ensure that we could actually get the specimens into our Victorian, grade II listed building,” said Marron.

The official unveiling on Friday March 31 is timed to coincide with the start of UK school holidays, and huge crowds are expected.

“We hope visitors will experience a sense of awe at the sheer scale of the titanosaur. It’s an incredible experience to stand underneath it, to be dwarfed by this immense creature,” said Marron.

But with the new addition, has the museum considered Dippy’s feelings? The beloved diplodocus skeleton, until 2015 a stalwart of the museum and currently on tour in the UK, is not in London to defend its patch.

The two dinosaurs won’t be having a meeting of minds, however “we’re pretty sure Dippy is excited that a big cousin has come to visit,” Marron said.

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March 29, 2023
Unusual dinosaur fossil discovery made in India | CNN

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CNN
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Paleontologists working in central India have made a rare discovery — a fossilized dinosaur hatchery with 92 nests and 256 eggs belonging to colonies of giant plant-eating titanosaurs.

A study of the nests and their bowling ball-size eggs has revealed intimate details about the lives of the colossal, long-necked sauropods that lumbered across what’s now central India more than 66 million years ago.

The eggs, which ranged between 15 centimeters and 17 centimeters (6 inches and 6.7 inches) in diameter, likely belonged to a number of titanosaur species. The number of eggs in each nest ranged from one to 20, said lead study author Guntupalli Prasad, a paleontologist in the department of geology at the University of Delhi. Many of the nests were found close together.

The findings suggested titanosaurs, among the largest dinosaurs to have lived, were not always the most attentive parents, Prasad said.

“Since titanosaurs were huge in size, closely spaced nests would not have allowed them to visit the nests to maneuver and incubate the eggs or feed the hatchlings … as the parents would step on the eggs and trample them.”

Finding a very large number of dinosaur nests is unusual, as preservation conditions have to be “just so” to have turned all the delicate eggs to fossils, said Dr. Darla Zelenitsky, an associate professor of dinosaur paleobiology at the University of Calgary in Canada, who studies dinosaur eggs. Zelenitsky was not involved in the research.

The first dinosaur eggs in the region were discovered in the 1990s, but the latest study focused on a nesting site in Dhar district in the state of Madhya Pradesh, where excavations and fieldwork took place in 2017, 2018 and 2020.

The eggs discovered there were so well preserved that the team was able to detect degraded protein fragments from the eggshells.

Titanosaurs’ nesting behaviors shared characteristics with that of today’s birds and crocodiles, the research suggested.

From the close proximity of the nests, researchers inferred the dinosaurs laid eggs together in colonies or rookeries, as many birds do in the present day.

“Such nesting colonies would have been a sight to see back in the Cretaceous where the landscape would have been dotted by a huge number of large dinosaur nests,” Zelenitsky said.

Prasad said one particular egg — known as an ovum-in-ovo, or egg-in-egg — the team had studied showed birdlike reproductive behavior and indicated that, similar to birds, some dinosaurs may have laid eggs sequentially. Ovum-in-ovo forms happen in birds when an egg becomes embedded in another egg still in the process of forming before they are laid.

“Sequential laying is the release of eggs one by one with some time gap in between two laying events. This is seen in birds. Modern reptiles, for example turtles and crocodiles, on the other hand, lay all eggs together as a clutch,” he said.

The eggs would have been laid in marshy flatlands and buried in shallow pits, akin to the nesting sites of modern-day crocodiles, Prasad said. Similar to crocodile hatcheries, nesting close to water may have been important to prevent the eggs from drying out and offspring dying prior to hatching, Zelenitsky added.

But unlike birds and crocodiles, which both incubate their eggs, Prasad said that, based on the physical characteristics of the nests, titanosaurs likely laid their eggs and then left the baby dinos to fend for themselves — although more data is needed to be sure.

Other dinosaurs were thought to be more attentive parents. A dinosaur was discovered in Mongolia in the 1920s, for example, lying near a nest of eggs thought to belong to a rival. Paleontologists at the time assumed the animal had died while attempting to plunder the nest — and named the creature oviraptor, or “egg thief.”

The so-called dinosaur thief’s reputation wasn’t restored until the 1990s, when another discovery revealed the eggs were, in fact, its own and that the creature likely sat upon them in a neatly arranged nest.

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January 18, 2023
9-year-old Maryland girl discovers ‘once-in-a-lifetime’ megalodon tooth | CNN

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CNN
—

A 9-year-old aspiring paleontologist found the find of a lifetime on Christmas morning: a massive 5-inch tooth from a prehistoric megalodon.

Molly Sampson, a fourth grader from Prince Frederick, Maryland, made the astonishing find on Calvert Beach.

Molly told CNN that she has spent years combing Maryland’s beaches for shark teeth, inspired by her father’s love of fossils.

“They’re just cool because they’re really old,” she said.

Molly’s mother Alicia Sampson added that her daughter has long harbored a love of exploring the outdoors. “She loves treasure hunting,” she explained.

Maryland’s Calvert Cliffs State Park is known as a hotspot for fossil finding, Alicia Sampson added.

For Christmas, Molly asked her parents for cold-water waders so that she could hunt for shark teeth and other fossils in the Chesapeake Bay. Equipped with her new gear, she set out at 9:30 a.m. to search for the remnants of ancient predators.

“I saw something big, and it looked like a shark tooth,” she said. “We were about knee deep in the water.”

She explained that she tried to grab the tooth with a sifting tool, but it was too big. She was “amazed” when she realized just how large the tooth was. “I was so excited and surprised.”

The Sampsons took their exciting find to the Calvert Marine Museum, where paleontology curator Stephen Godfrey confirmed their suspicions: It was indeed the tooth of a megalodon, the massive sharks that lived more than 23 million years ago.

Godfrey told CNN that there are usually only five or six megalodon teeth comparable in size to Molly’s find discovered along Calvert Cliffs each year.

“There are people that can spend a lifetime and not find a tooth the size Molly found,” he said.

“This is like a once-in-a-lifetime kind of find.”

Amateur fossil hunters typically find around 100 megalodon teeth on Calvert Cliffs per year, he added. But most of them are much smaller than Molly’s huge tooth. The largest megalodon teeth ever found have been just over 7 inches.

The size of the tooth indicates that this particular megalodon was between 45 and 50 feet long.

Godfrey explained that millions of years ago, the waters off Calvert Cliffs would have been home to whales and dolphins that would have served as bountiful prey for megalodons looking to eat. Because sharks replace their teeth over the course of their lives and because the teeth are made up of hardy enamel, they are “by far the most abundant vertebrate fossil.”

Megalodons hold a particular fascination for humans because they served as the “apex predator on Earth” for millions of years, he said.

Both Godfrey and Alicia Sampson said they hope Molly’s find helps inspire other children, especially girls, to pursue their scientific interests.

“This will inspire people of all ages, children included, to pursue their natural inclination in nature, art music, there’s so many possibilities that are available to us today,” said Godfrey.

Alicia Sampson said children around the globe have sent letters to Molly sharing their excitement at her discovery. She set up an Instagram page to share her daughters’ outdoor adventures.

“We really want to reach other kids and get them excited about like being outside,” she said.

Molly said she hopes to display the huge tooth in a shadowbox in her room – and one day hopes to become a paleontologist.

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January 15, 2023
This Tech Allows Users To Smell Movies, Video Games, And Anime

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Reader, I hate how quickly I was able to make this image.
Image: Trigger / CD Projekt Red / Netflix / Kotaku / artpartner-images (Getty Images)

It’s official: the ability to smell shows and movies is finally here.

The cutting-edge tech in question, called the Aroma Shooter, was shown off at CES 2023 today by a Japanese-based developer Aromajoin. The Aroma Shooter can “digitalize aromas and create a new communication channel in the same family as text, images, and audio.” If you aren’t in attendance at CES this weekend, fear not, you can check out its demo video below:

Smell-O-Vsion-type products aren’t anything new to the entertainment medium. If you’re a millennial like myself, you may have experienced the 4D gimmick in action for the 2003 theatrical release of Rugrats Go Wild! that featured The Wild Thornberrys. However, instead of scratching a parchment of scented paper while watching a film or movie, Aroma Shooter…well, shoots smells at your face.

Aromajoin

The Aroma Shooter involves the use of two pieces of tech: the shooter itself and the aroma cartridge. Rather than using oils or mist, the aroma cartridge is a solid-state device that can apparently “toggle between scents in 0.1 second and blend scent permutations instantly with no lingering sensations.” When combined with the aroma shooter, a device PCGamer described as a wireless gadget that sucks in air and creates the scent fired toward your nose, you’ve got some sniff-able media.

As the video above demonstrates, users can program the Aroma Shooter’s over 100 scents to blast fragrances at their face holes in sync with a TV show, VR game, or anime like Quintessential Quintuplets or Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. For those curious, the featured scents for QQ are cherry blossoms, grapes, and peaches. The Edgerunners demonstration clip featured smoke, caramel, coffee, and clove bud. Chances are they’re still figuring out what cyberpsychosis smells like. You can also create your own scented viewing experience by linking a YouTube video to the software and marking timecodes when your techo-snoofs occur.

While I think the tech is impressive in passing, I’m not exactly sold on the daily practical use of it. Although the thought of programming the Aroma Shooter to its maximum capacity to smell bomb my apartment with gourmet food from any given Studio Ghibli movie is tempting, I can’t see myself using this ridiculously expensive device. I’m a lazy bitch who has enough of an imagination to carry me through watching anime characters gorge themselves on food that looks better than real life. Should the day ever come where Elon Musk’s Neuralink chips take off and the smells of my childhood memories are paywalled (you know he’s thought about it), then we’ll talk.

Here comes the catch: The Aroma Shooter 2 packaged with six aroma cartridges will run you $998. Should you have enough disposable income to require more individual cartridges, they’re gonna cost you $54 each. Currently, Aromajoin is working on crowdfunding a VR/AR attachment for its smell-o-rific device, as well.

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Isaiah Colbert

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January 6, 2023
Ancient giant sea turtle with never-before-seen features found in Europe, scientists say | CNN

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CNN
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Long ago, gigantic marine turtles swam the Earth’s seas. Until recently, these prehistoric giants, reaching lengths of over 3 meters (10 feet) from head to tail, had been thought to be found only in waters surrounding North America.

Now, scientists have discovered a previously unknown species — the largest European sea turtle ever to be identified.

Initially found by a hiker who stumbled upon the remains in 2016 in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain, the species has been given the name Leviathanochelys aenigmatica. “Leviathan” is the biblical term for a sea monster, an allusion to the creature’s large body size, while “chelys” translates to turtle and “aenigmatica” translates to enigma — in reference to the turtle’s peculiar characteristics, wrote the authors of a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.

The unusual animal’s presence in this part of the prehistoric world revealed that giant turtles were more common than previously thought, according to the study.

Before the discovery, the largest European species measured at just 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length, similar to today’s leatherback sea turtles, which weigh an average of 300 to 500 kilograms (660 to 1,100 pounds) and measure 1 to 2 meters (or between 3 and 6.5 feet), according to the Smithsonian Institute.

The bone fragments of this newly identified species, however, have led scientists to estimate that Leviathanochelys had a 3.7-meter-long body (12.1 feet), almost as big as an average sedan.

“We never thought it was possible to find something like this. After quite a long study of the bone fragments, we realized that there were some features that were totally different, not present in any other fossil of a turtle species discovered so far,” said Albert Sellés, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain.

Originally, researchers believed the bones belonged to a different kind of animal, according to Sellés.

“It is quite common to find bone fragments, a lot of them. But most of them are uninformative,” Sellés said. “It is quite rare to discover something that really tells you a little bit of the life of the past.”

A local museum and Catalonia’s Ministry of Culture had originally collected the bone specimens, but they remained unstudied for nearly five years. When Sellés and the other researchers began their work studying the bones in 2021, they realized they were looking at a species of marine turtle completely new to science, and quickly went back to the Pyrenees site to perform more excavations.

There, more fragments of the specimen, including pieces of the turtle’s pelvis and carapace — the part of the shell that covered the creature’s back — were discovered. With these finds, the scientists observed more features not previously seen in any living or dead turtle species.

“The main differences of this new fossil are related to the pelvic region. More specifically, to a couple of bony bumps present in the anterior part of the pelvis, which we suspect are related to some kind of muscle that controls the movement of the abdominal region of the turtle,” Sellés said.

This feature or muscle most likely impacted the turtles’ breathing capacity, allowing them to hold their breath longer than other turtle species, in order to swim deep in the ocean to find food or escape predators, according to Sellés.

The research team estimated the ancient animal lived during the Campanian Age of the Late Cretaceous Epoch, making it at least 72 million years old.

The largest turtle on record, called Archelon, lived some 70 million years ago and grew to be about 4.5 meters (15 feet) long. Before this recent discovery, all prehistoric giant marine turtle discoveries were part of the same lineage as Archelon.

“We’re proving that turtles could achieve really gigantic proportions in different times, and also in different families,” Sellés said. “For the first time, we found a (giant) turtle that doesn’t belong to this family.”

The researchers hope to return to the fossil site again to look for more bones, as they are not certain that all fragments from this specimen have been discovered, according to Sellés.

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November 29, 2022