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Monday, February 27, 2006


Fossil overturns ideas of Jurassic mammals

The discovery of a furry, beaver-like animal that lived at the time of dinosaurs has overturned more than a century of scientific thinking about Jurassic mammals.
The find shows that the ecological role of mammals in the time of dinosaurs was far greater than previously thought, said Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
The animal is the earliest swimming mammal to have been found and was the most primitive mammal to be preserved with fur, which is important to helping keep a constant body temperature, Luo said in a telephone interview. For over a century, the stereotype of mammals living in that era has been of tiny, shrew-like creatures scurrying about in the underbrush trying to avoid the giant creatures that dominated the planet, Luo commented.
Now, a research team that included Luo has found that 164 million years ago, the newly discovered mammal with a flat, scaly tail like a beaver, vertebra like an otter and teeth like a seal was swimming in lakes and eating fish. The team, led by Qiang Ji of the Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences in Beijing, discovered the remains in the Inner Mongolia region of China. They report their findings in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
Matthew Carrano, curator of dinosaurs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, called the find “a big deal.” An important factor is how specialized the creature was, said Carrano, who was not part of the research group. “It gives a hint that early mammals were not just these shadowy creatures at the time of dinosaurs” but were having their own evolution. There have been hints of such animals in the past but nothing equal to the remains found by Luo and colleagues, he said.
Thomas Martin of the Research Institute Senckenberg in Frankfurt, Germany, said the discovery pushes back the mammal conquest of the waters by more than 100 million years. “This exciting fossil is a further jigsaw puzzle piece in a series of recent discoveries,” commented Martin, who was not part of Luo’s team.
It’s the first evidence that some ancient mammals were semi-aquatic, indicating a greater diversification than previously thought, the researchers said. Modern semi-aquatic mammals such as beavers and otters and aquatic mammals like whales did not appear until between 55 million years ago and 25 million years ago, according to the researchers.
The new animal is not related to modern beavers or otters but has features similar to them. Thus the researchers named it Castorocauda lutrasimilis. Castoro from the Latin for beaver, cauda for tail, lutra for river otter and similis meaning similar. ap

He Helped Build the iPod; Now He Has Built a Rival - New York Times



PALO ALTO, Calif., Feb. 23 — When Samsung, the consumer electronics giant, decided to mount a serious challenge to Apple Computer's iPod music player early last year, it turned to a little-known Silicon Valley software start-up with a cluttered one-room office tucked away here in a building above a mortgage title company.

Noah Berger for The New York Times

Paul Mercer, software designer, pictured on the Samsung Z5.

The result of that partnership is Samsung's newest Z5 portable MP3 player, which will appear on store shelves March 5. The software inside the player was forged at Iventor Inc. by a small team of programmers led by Paul Mercer, 38, a veteran Apple Macintosh software designer.

Samsung's decision to hire Mr. Mercer is significant because Apple, in designing the original iPod four years ago, turned to Pixo Inc., the company Mr. Mercer founded after he left Apple in 1994 to create software for hand-held devices.

Apple used Pixo software to create the music player's simple interface, and Pixo's name appeared in the credits of the original iPod MP3 player. Sun Microsystems acquired Pixo in 2003.

For Mr. Mercer, the Samsung project is the culmination of more than two decades of focus on extending personal computer technologies to the realm of portable devices.

"My whole vision has been to take Macintosh-class technology and to move it into new places," he said during an interview in his office, which was filled with more than a dozen smart phones in various stages of disassembly.

Samsung executives said they had engaged Mr. Mercer and Iventor to design a user interface for the Z5 because they were hoping to offer an ease of use that matched that of the iPod, which has a simple screen and a distinctive touch-sensitive scroll wheel for making selections.

"Paul helped us to design and develop a user interface for the Z5 from the beginning," said Phillip Chung, vice president for the digital audiovisual division at Samsung Electronics.

Samsung's choice of Mr. Mercer also shows how much consumer electronics now rely on the powerful computing capabilities that defined personal computers two decades ago. Samsung is betting that it can win a share of the music market dominated by Apple by using new software that mimics what is found in powerful PC's.

The Z5, shaped like a stick of gum, has a 1.8-inch color screen and a 35-hour battery life, and is priced at $199 to $249 to compete with the iPod Nano, which costs $149 to $249. Early reviews have been positive, and Samsung is hoping that the Z5 will work smoothly with the range of subscription music services that support the Microsoft PlaysForSure digital music standard.

But a significant factor in Apple's success in digital music is the seamless connection between its iTunes Music Store software and the iPod players. The rest of the industry, hampered by the division between hardware, software and online music providers, has not come close to offering consumers a music experience as easy as Apple's.

It is not known whether subscription music services, which permit users to choose among hundreds of thousands of songs but require a continual monthly payment, will win broad consumer approval.

What does set the new Samsung device apart from other digital music players and even from Apple's newest iPod Nano is the fluid quality of its software, which includes transparency effects usually found only in powerful PC's and video game machines. This technology gives a more refined and polished appearance to the Z5 software.

Such design flourish is characteristic of Mr. Mercer's approach, said a number of Silicon Valley software designers who have worked with him both at Apple and elsewhere.

"He is an unusually detail-oriented software engineer," said Steve Capps, a former Apple and Microsoft software engineer, who was one of the designers of the original Macintosh interface and the leader of the Newton project, which created a hand-held computer. "He knows how to architect small pieces of software code."

Alliances between small firms and big electronics makers are becoming increasingly common as companies are forced to bring new devices to market practically every season.

"We're seeing the rise of independent specialists who have a deep understanding of things that big companies don't have the ability to do," said Paul Saffo, a Silicon Valley consultant who is chairman of Samsung's science board, an advisory group.

Mr. Mercer is the epitome of a specialist. Growing up as a personal computer hobbyist in upstate New York during the early 1980's, he became enamored first with the Apple Lisa and then with the Macintosh.

As a computer science student at Syracuse University he wrote programs for the Macintosh, which attracted Apple's attention when it was recruiting young programmers.

"The programs were my résumé," he said.

People's Daily Online -- NASA's spacecraft to reach Mars in March

A spacecraft designed to explore Mars in unprecedented detail from low orbit is set to fire its thrusters for Martian orbit in March, U.S. space agency NASA said on Friday.

The mission, Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, is expected to greatly expand the scientific understanding of Mars, pave the way for next robotic missions later this decade, and help prepare for sending humans to Mars, according to Doug McCuistion, director of NASA's Mars Exploration Program.

"Not only will Mars Science Laboratory's landing and research areas be determined by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter," he said in a statement. "But the first boots on Mars will probably get dusty at one of the many potential landing sites this orbiter will inspect all over the planet."

Mission controllers expect a signal shortly after 1:24 p.m. Pacific time on March 10, when the mission-critical engine burn has begun. However, the burn will end during a suspenseful half hour with the spacecraft behind Mars and out of radio contact.

The orbiter carries six instruments for studying every level of Mars from underground layers to the top of the atmosphere. Among them, the most powerful telescopic camera ever sent to a foreign planet will reveal rocks the size of a small desk.

An advanced mineral-mapper will be able to identify water-related deposits in areas as small as a baseball infield. Radar will probe for buried ice and water. A weather camera will monitor the entire planet daily. An infrared sounder will monitor atmospheric temperatures and the movement of water vapor.

The instruments will produce torrents of data, mission scientists expect. The orbiter can pour data to Earth at about 10 times the rate of any previous Mars mission, using a dish antenna 3 meters in diameter and a transmitter powered by 9.5 square meters of solar cells.

"This spacecraft will return more data than all previous Mars missions combined," said Jim Graf, the project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California.

Scientists will analyze the information to gain a better understanding of changes in Mars' atmosphere and the processes that have formed and modified the planet's surface.

"We're especially interested in water, whether it's ice, liquid or vapor," said Richard Zurek, a mission scientist at the JPL.

"Learning more about where the water is today and where it was in the past will also guide future studies about whether Mars has ever supported life."

In addition to its own investigation, a major job for the spacecraft is to relay information from vehicles working on the surface of the red planet, scientists said.

During its planned five-year prime mission, the spacecraft will support the Phoenix Mars Scout, which is being built to land on icy soils near the northern polar ice cap in 2008, and the Mars Science Laboratory, an advanced rover under development for launch in 2009.

However, the spacecraft will spend half a year adjusting its orbit with an adventurous process called aerobraking.

The initial capture by Mars' gravity on March 10 will put the spacecraft into a very elongated, 35-hour orbit. The planned orbit for science observations is a low-altitude, nearly circular, two-hour loop.

Aerobraking will use hundreds of carefully calculated dips into the upper atmosphere, deep enough to slow the spacecraft by atmospheric drag, but not deep enough to overheat the orbiter.

It "is like a high-wire act in open air," Graf said, "the Mars' atmosphere can swell rapidly, so we need to monitor it closely to keep the orbiter at an altitude that is effective but safe."

Well, for starters, I have observed a few things today.
One thing is there.Black ants donot have eyes.So how do they detect em waves?What I'm referring to is obviously light waves.You switch on a light, and whoosh, they disappear as quickly as possible.And to validate this experiment of mine, I even did it with no vibrational disturbances on the ground.

testing 1 2 3!