New feathered dino is no Mesozoic ostrich

Another dino fossil, more evidence for feathers. Only this one is unique: it’s a megalosaur. A big non-avian therapod, and now we know it had feathers!

Hindustan Times— Theropods are bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. In recent years, scientists have discovered that many extinct theropods had feathers. But this feathering has only been found in theropods that are classified as coelurosaurs, a diverse group including animals like T. rexand birds.Sciurumimus—identified as a megalosaur,nota coelurosaur— is the first exception to this rule. The new species also sits deep within the evolutionary tree of theropods, much more so than coelurosaurs, meaning that the species that stem from Sciurumimus are likely to have similar characteristics.

“All of the feathered predatory dinosaurs known so far represent close relatives of birds,” said palaeontologist Oliver Rauhut, of the Bayerische Staatssammlung fur Palaontologie und Geologie. Sciurumimus is much more basal within the dinosaur family tree and thus indicates that all predatory dinosaurs had feathers,” Rauhut stated.

Up to now feathered dinos had all been from the raptor family. But Mega is different. This Cretaceous lady was a two-legged meat-eater lacking the more obvious anatomical characteristics associated with feathers and birds. If she had feathers, almost any dinosaur could have had them. Which suggests that dinos evolved feathers long before birds and bird-like dinos diverged from other genera.

The godd*mn particle

Prof. Sean Carroll will be live blogging the “Higgses announcement,” expected early July 4th, US time.  But the news is likely to be … a little more certainty that the elusive mass lending weirdo particle exists and lives at 125 GeV. Whether the findings will go beyond that is unclear. But it’s still a BFD, because the Higgs Boson is almost as elusive as God (As Embertime notes in comments, it’s probably down the back of the soda) and it’s the most important goddamn particle in physics. What is the Higgs you ask? In layman’s terms: [Read more…]

Energy from a can

You’ve heard of spray on solar cells, scientists at Rice University have developed paint on batteries:

BBC — The new work, from Rice University in Texas, US, opens up completely new avenues for putting batteries on nearly any surface in a simple and robust way.

Pulickel Ajayan and his colleagues chemically optimised the recipe for each of their five layers, using blends of chemicals common in lithium-ion batteries as well as novel materials including carbon nanotubes – tiny “straws” of carbon with incredible electronic properties.

But for the process to result in a working battery, all five layers must stick together and work in synchrony, and the tricky step was finding a separator material that kept the whole stack in one piece.

When the team hit on using a chemical called poly-methylmethacrylate, they had a structure that would stick even to curved surfaces.