Making Science More Better For You on 04/14/09

Would that include prehistoric trash and prehistoric peanut butter?

Prehistoric Bears Ate Everything And Anything, Just Like Modern Cousins

ScienceDaily (Apr. 13, 2009) — By comparing the craniodental morphology of modern bear species to that of two extinct species, researchers from the University of Málaga have discovered that the expired plantigrades were not so different from their current counterparts. The cave bear, regarded as the great herbivore of the carnivores, was actually more omnivorous than first thought.

The short-faced bear, a hypercarnivore, also ate plants depending on their availability. The work offers key insights into the evolution of the carnivore niches during the Ice Age.

The team of palaeontologists have reconstructed the trophic ecology, or eating habits, of two extinct bear species that lived during the Pleistocene (between 2.59 million and 12,000 years ago): the short-faced bear (Arctodus simus) of North America and the cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) of Europe. The morphometric analysis carried out on the eight bear species in existence today has confirmed that prehistoric bears were not fussy eaters.

'Knowing what the extinct bears ate is of utmost relevance to finding out about the evolution of carnivore niches in the Pleistocene when climatic conditions were changing', explains Borja Figueirido, lead author of the study and researcher for the Ecology and Geology Department of the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Málaga. Scientists have discovered that, even at that time, bears were 'great opportunists' thanks to their morphological and ecological flexibility.

Trophic ecology and morphological flexibility. Yeah Dude, break me off some of that.

Making Science More Better For You on 04/09/09

Headline of the day

Grandmother dies trying to stop sword fight (MSNBC)
Sadly, when you name one kid Darth and one kid Luke, this is what you get.

Making Science More Better For You on 04/03/09

Dave, do these fiber optics make me look fat? What are you doing Dave?

Robot achieves scientific first

By Clive Cookson, Science Editor

Published: April 2 2009 19:17 | Last updated: April 2 2009 19:17

A laboratory robot called Adam has been hailed as the first machine in history to have discovered new scientific knowledge independently of its human creators.

Adam formed a hypothesis on the genetics of bakers’ yeast and carried out experiments to test its predictions, without intervention from its makers at Aberystwyth University.

The result was a series of “simple but useful” discoveries, confirmed by human scientists, about the gene coding for yeast enzymes. The research is published in the journal Science.

Professor Ross King, the chief creator of Adam, said robots would not supplant human researchers but make their work more productive and interesting.

“Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories,” he said.

Adam is the result of a five-year collaboration between computer scientists and biologists at Aberystwyth and Cambridge universities.

The researchers endowed Adam with a huge database of yeast biology, automated hardware to carry out experiments, supplies of yeast cells and lab chemicals, and powerful artificial intelligence software.

Interesting. A robot achieves limited consciousness and the first thing it does is try to figure out how to make beer.