Fossil Hunters in Romania Find a 2-Clawed Relative of Velociraptor

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORDPublished: August 30,

Fossil Hunters in Romania Find a 2-Clawed Relative of Velociraptor

Nothing quite like it, a dinosaur with two sicklelike claws on each foot, was known to live in the final period of the age of great reptiles. Little wonder fossil hunters in Romania were astonished when they unearthed remains of a distant relative of Velociraptor, the familiar single-claw predator of fierce repute, and saw its unusual stocky limbs and double-clawed feet. The discoverers reported on Monday that the dinosaur, the size of a gigantic turkey, was a meat-eating creature that lived more than 65 million years ago in the Late Cretaceous period. They named it Balaur bondoc, which means stocky dragon.

Romanian scientists and other experts said that Balaur is the first reasonably complete skeleton of a predatory dinosaur from Europe at that time. Of perhaps surpassing importance, they said, the discovery may provide insights into the development of dinosaurs and other animals in a long-ago European ecosystem much different from that of today. Before the end of the Cretaceous, Europe was an archipelago of islands in higher seas. Previous fossil discoveries indicated that life there followed the pattern known as the island effect. Animals in isolation, including plant-eating dinosaurs, often evolved as smaller, more primitive versions of their continental relatives. Balaur both did and did not seem to conform to the pattern. In a report this week in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the discovery team said the unusual species provides support for the aberrant nature of the Late Cretaceous European island-dwelling dinosaurs, but indicates that predators on these islands were not necessarily small, geographically endemic or primitive. Not being geographically endemic, the scientists said, meant that Balaur showed kinship to dinosaurs outside Europe, and so there must have been connections with life in Asia and North America. But it was unclear, they noted, if the island effect was expressed differently, or at all, in these animals.

The lead author of the research paper was Zoltan Csiki, a paleontologist at the University of Bucharest, and one of the co-authors was Matyas Vremir, a geologist at the Transylvanian Museum Society, who excavated the fossils over the last 10 years. Weve been waiting for something like this, and its really, really weird, Mark A. Norell, a dinosaur paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History and a co-author of the paper, said in an interview last week. The researchers said the Balaur skeleton showed at least 20 characteristics in the foot, leg and pelvis not seen in other predatory dinosaurs. The most singular of these is the two sharp claws on each foot, one evolved from the big toe, the other from the second toe. It appeared that the stout lower limbs were used to grasp and disembowel prey.

Stephen L. Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University who analyzed the fossils, said that compared to Velociraptor, Balaur was probably more of a kickboxer than a sprinter, and it might have been able to take down larger animals than itself, as many carnivores do today. It is a new breed of predatory dinosaur, he said, very different from anything we have ever known.

The fossilized hind limb of a Balaur bondoc, a distant relative of the Velociraptor. John Noble Wilford John Noble Wilford, winner of two Pulitzer prizes, earned a B.S. degree from the University of Tennessee in 1955. Wilford won his first Pulitzer in 1984 for his national reporting of the Apollo missions for The Times. In 1987, he shared the prize with other New York Times reporters for their team effort in reporting on the Challenger explosion and its aftermath. Wilford also received an M.A. from Syracuse University. Before joining the New York Times in 1965, Wilford worked for the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. While at the Times, he has served as science correspondent, assistant national news editor, and director of science news.

Before joining The Times in 1965, Wilford worked for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine. He is the author of "We Reach the Moon," "The Mapmakers," "Mars Beckons," "The Mysterious History of Columbus, " and co-author or editor of other books, including "Cosmic Dispatches."Writers Association, the G.M. Loeb Achievement Award from the University of Connecticut, the National Space Club Press Award, the Westinghouse Science Writing Award, and two honorary doctorates. He has been a visiting professor and lecturer at Princeton, Syracuse, Duke, Yale, and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

ACTIVITY 11.Type of text2.News category3.Writing style4. Punctuation rules1.The writing that we chose is a informational text because the author is informing about the discovery of a Velociraptor fossil. He is talking about no fiction information, and the purpose of the author is to inform the event that happened in Romania. 2.The category of the writing we chose is science, the author informs about a scientist discovery.

3.The author use a narrative writing style because he narrates the events that happened in Romania, giving information about the discovery (Velociraptors characteristics , Late Cretaceous period, scientists opinions, etc.)4. We discovered that the punctuation is of a narrative style writing, the author frequently quotes to express scientists opinions and ideas.

http://www.lib.utk.edu/outreach/about/hall_fame/wilford.htmlhttp://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/w/john_noble_wilford/index.html?inline=nyt-perhttp://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/31/science/31dino.html?ref=john_noble_wilford

Researchers Create Nanostructures, and Whip Up a Recipe, Too

By KENNETH CHANGPublished: September 6, 2010In the latest step in sciences never-ending quest for tinyness, researchers at Northwestern University have made edible nanostructures.It tastes like starch, said Ronald A. Smaldone, a postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern, speaking of the material, made with a sugar, a salt and 190-proof grain alcohol. Kind of like a saltine cracker, I guess, without the salt. The creations belong to a class of structures known as metal-organic frameworks MOFs, for short that are rigid and porous. Individually, they are vanishingly small, but they stack together into cube-shape crystals several millimeters in size, large enough to see. Other molecules could be placed in the hollow spaces, and potential applications include storing hydrogen in future fuel-cell cars, delivering drugs inside the body or using the pores as test tubes. These are materials where you can do legitimate chemistry inside of, and thats where our research program is heading right now, said Jeremiah J. Gassensmith, a member of the research team. Well be able to do nanoscale reactions inside of the crystal. Because they are made from widely available compounds used in the food industry, the Northwestern nanostructures are cheaper and easier to make than previous metal-organic frameworks, which are generally synthesized out of petroleum products. And they are edible, which could appeal to people who like very small portions, or to experimenting chefs like Wylie Dufresne, who is the owner of the restaurant WD-50 in Manhattan. When told about the edible nanostructures, Mr. Dufresne, known for high-tech culinary creations with unusual textures, said he was intrigued by the possibility of inserting stronger flavors in the hollow pores. Crunchy bursts of flavor sounds interesting, he said. Metal-organic frameworks may not sound appetizing, but a metal, as defined by chemists, is simply an element that can easily become a positive ion. In this case, the metal was potassium, a nutrient that people need anyway. The abstract for the scientific paper, to be published in November in the journal Angewandte Chemie, says, Take a spoonful of sugar (gamma-cyclodextrin to be precise), a pinch of salt (most alkali metal salts will suffice), and a swig of alcohol (Everclear fits the bill), and you have a robust, renewable, nanoporous (Langmuir surface area 1,320 square meters per gram) metal-organic framework for breakfast. Gamma-cyclodextrin is a ring-shape sugar typically made from corn starch. The alkali metal salts included potassium chloride, a salt substitute, and potassium benzoate, a preservative. The Langmuir surface area is a measure of how much can be stored inside, which is a lot. The hollow pores make up more than half of the volume. The cyclodextrin and salt were dissolved in water. As the alcohol slowly evaporated into the solution, the colorless cubic crystals started to grow. The nanostructures were discovered by accident. Working in the laboratory of J. Fraser Stoddart, a chemistry professor who specializes in molecules that interlock with one another like the rings in the Olympic logo, Dr. Smaldone and Ross S. Forgan, also a postdoctoral researcher, grew the crystals as part of troubleshooting on a molecule they were trying to make. We looked it up on the Internet, Dr. Smaldone said, and we found that cyclodextrin, one of the materials, was actually available food-grade, so we got some donated by the company Wacker Chemical, and I grew it in my kitchen, at home. He added, Since all the materials that we got from the store or bought were certified food-grade, we could just scoop them out of the vial and eat them. Its not normally how we do things in a chemistry lab. Mr. Dufresne bounced around ideas for cooking. Could I put it into bread? he asked. Could it be treated as a flavoring salt? He imagined having diners sprinkle crystals into a soup to impart a new flavor. He speculated about making crunchy vinegar or soy sauce. The researchers said crunchy soy sauce was more likely; the crystals do not readily form in acidic solutions. Mr. Dufresne already has most of the ingredients in his kitchen. Im going to go down to the drug store, he said, and see if I can get some gamma-cyclodextrin and cook up a batch. Researchers in Asian Countries Raise Their Scientific Profiles Worldwide

By LIZ GOOCHPublished: September 12, 2010While researchers at universities and institutes in many Western countries fret about budget pressures, scientists in many Asian nations are translating huge investments in research and development into impressive gains in research output.The Asia-Pacific region increased its global share of published science articles from 13 percent in the early 1980s to just over 30 percent in 2009, according to the Thomson Reuters National Science Indicators, an annual database that records the number of articles published in about 12,000 internationally recognized journals. Meanwhile, the proportion of articles from the United States dropped to 28 percent in 2009, down from 40 percent in the early 1980s. China is leading the way, having increased its share of articles to 11 percent in 2009 from just 0.4 percent in the early 1980s. Japan is next, accounting for 6.7 percent, followed by India with 3.4 percent. While its overall percentage remains small, Singapore with a population of just under five million has increased its number of indexed articles from 200 in 1981 to 8,500 in 2009. Singapore, which currently devotes 3 percent of gross domestic product to research and development, has plans to further bolster its research standing, with the governments Economic Strategy Committee setting the target of reaching 3.5 percent of gross domestic product by 2015. The increase in research output, particularly in East Asian countries, reflects a phenomenal increase in funding, said Simon Marginson, a professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne. Mr. Marginson said the increase in research output was driven by governments that were committed to building knowledge-intensive economies. Its very much not simply about knowledge itself its about its usefulness throughout the economy, he said. I think that that economic vision is really the principal driver. Academics also say that the increasing influence of world rankings has spurred competition among Asian universities. Some of the most widely recognized rankings use the number of published journal articles and highly cited researchers as indicators, including the recently released rankings by the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. U.S. universities continue to dominate the Jiao Tong rankings, but the number of Chinese universities in the top 500 increased to 34 this year from 16 in 2004. Gerard Postiglione, director of the Center of Research on Education in China at the University of Hong Kong, is investigating the factors that lift research productivity in 25 countries. He has found that one of the major forces behind the increase in Asias research productivity has been the extent to which universities collaborate with other institutions, both domestically and internationally. Morshidi Sirat, director of the National Higher Education Research Institute at the Science University of Malaysia, said in the past that many Asian universities did not provide funding to help academics have articles translated into English. Most universities now realize that they have to publish in English-language journals that are based in Western countries and they have to allocate money to allow their researchers to do so, he said. Despite the increase in the number of articles from the Asia-Pacific region, as a whole it still trails the United States in terms of how often its research papers are cited by others. Output and world share are one thing, said David Pendlebury, a Thomson Reuters citation analyst. Another thing is influence and impact. That generally lags behind an increase in output. Some Asia-Pacific countries, like Singapore, have already exceeded the world average in terms of the number of citations per paper, but the region as a whole remains 20 percent below the world average. Researchers say that ensuring academics have the freedom to conduct independent research is crucial if the region is to continue to improve its standing. Rising productivity can happen without academic freedom, Mr. Postiglione said. However, groundbreaking research most often occurs in open intellectual climates where academic freedom is the bedrock of scholarship.