>CNN News of the Absurd – Ghosts in a bottle + other stories

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>Flying reptiles ate dinosaurs for lunch

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A group of flying reptiles called Quetzalcoatlus may have strolled along a fern prairie eating baby dinosaurs for lunch. With a name like T. rex, you’d expect to be safe from even the fiercest paleo-bullies. Turns out, ancient flying reptiles could have snacked on Tyrannosaurus rex babies and other landlubbing runts of the dinosaur world.

A new study reveals that a group of flying reptiles from the Age of Dinosaurs, 230 million to 65 million years ago, did not catch prey in flight, but rather stalked them on land.

Until now, paleontologists pictured the so-called “winged lizards” or pterosaurs as skim-feeders. In this vision, the creatures would have flown over lakes and oceans grabbing fish from the water’s surface, much as gulls do today. The new findings, detailed this week online in the journal PLoS ONE, don’t ground the animals totally.

“In our hypothesis, flight is primarily a locomotive method,” said co-researcher Mark Witton of the University of Portsmouth in England. “They’re just using it to get from point A to point B. We think the majority of their lives, when they’re feeding and reproducing, that’s all being done on the ground rather than in the air.”

To uncover these feeding habits, Witton and Portsmouth colleague Darren Naish analyzed fossils of a group of toothless pterosaurs called azhdarchids, which are much larger on average than other pterosaurs. For example, one of the largest azhdarchids, Quetzalcoatlus, weighed about 550 pounds (250 kilograms) with a wingspan of more than 30 feet (10 meters) and a height comparable to a giraffe.

Witton and Naish learned that more than 50 percent of the azhdarchid fossils had been found inland. Other skeletal features, including long hind limbs and a stiff neck, also didn’t fit the profile of a mud-prober or skim-feeder.

“All the details of their anatomy, and the environment their fossils are found in, show that they made their living by walking around, reaching down to grab and pick up animals and other prey,” Naish said.

A skim-feeder, such as a gull, trawls its lower jaw through the water, eventually smacking into a fish or shrimp and pulling it from the water. “Regardless of what they hit, the impact force drives the head and neck underneath the body and into the water, thus requiring a hugely flexible neck,” Witton said. This is the case with gulls and pelicans (which are considered plunge divers), but an azhdarchid’s neck, despite potentially reaching nearly 10 feet (3 meters) in length, was super stiff. “Whatever these animals were doing, it had to involve minimal neck action,” Witton said.

Their tiny feet also ruled out wading in the water or probing the soft mud for food. “Some of these animals are absolutely enormous,” Witton told LiveScience. “If you go wading out into this soft mud, and you weigh a quarter of a ton, and you’ve got these dinky little feet, you’re going to just sink in.”

The reptile’s head also was pretty lengthy, up to 10 feet (3 meters). So Witton said an azhdarchid would only have to dip its head part way to the ground, enough for the tip of its jaws to touch down, to hunt and feed on terrestrial prey. Back before they went extinct 65 million years ago during the event that also killed off non-avian dinosaurs, these pterosaurs could lunch on animals ranging from small birdlike Velicoraptors to T. rex babies to amphibians.

>Stonehenge may have been royal cemetery

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Stonehenge may have been a burial ground for an ancient royal family, British researchers said on Thursday.

New radiocarbon dates of human remains excavated from the ancient stone monument in southwest England suggest it was used as a cemetery from its inception just after 3000 BC until well after the larger circle of stones went up around 2500 BC.

Previously, archaeologists had believed people were buried at Stonehenge between 2700 and 2600 B.C.

“The hypothesis we are working on is that Stonehenge represents a place of the dead,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield, who is leading an excavation of the site. “That seems to be very clear.”

“A further twist is that the people buried at Stonehenge may have been the elite of their society, an ancient royal British dynasty, perhaps.”

Built between 3000 and 1600 BC as a temple, burial ground, astronomical calendar or all three, the stone circle is sometimes called “Britain’s pyramids.”

Tourists are drawn to Stonehenge throughout the year and on the summer solstice — the longest day of the year in the northern hemisphere — up to 30,000 revelers and druids converge on the stones for a night of celebration.

“DOMAIN OF THE DEAD”

Who built Stonehenge and why is debated among scientists, although growing evidence points to the monument’s use as a burial place, Parker Pearson told reporters.

Last year the same researchers found evidence of a large settlement of houses nearby. They said the latest findings reinforced their belief that the settlement and Stonehenge form part of a larger ancient ceremonial complex along the nearby River Avon.

“What we suspect is that the river is the conduit between the two realms of the living and the dead,” Parker Pearson said. “It was the prehistoric version of the river Styx.”

The team estimates that between 150 to 240 men, women and children were buried at Stonehenge over a 600-year period, making it likely that the relatively low figure over such a long points to a single elite family.

A clue is the few burials in Stonehenge’s earliest phase, a number that grows larger in following centuries as offspring would have multiplied, said Andrew Chamberlain, a specialist in ancient demography at the University of Sheffield.

Placement of the graves and artifacts such as a small stone mace are evidence the site was reserved as a “domain of the dead” for the elite, Parker Pearson added.

“I don’t think it was the common people getting buried at Stonehenge — it was clearly a special place at the time,” he said. “One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials.” – y

>Isolated tribe spotted in Brazil

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One of South America’s few remaining uncontacted indigenous tribes has been spotted and photographed on the border between Brazil and Peru.

The Brazilian government says it took the images to prove the tribe exists and help protect its land.

The pictures, taken from an aeroplane, show red-painted tribe members brandishing bows and arrows.

More than half the world’s 100 uncontacted tribes live in Brazil or Peru, Survival International says.

Stephen Corry, the director of the group – which supports tribal people around the world – said such tribes would “soon be made extinct” if their land was not protected.

‘Monumental crime’

Survival International says that although this particular group is increasing in number, others in the area are at risk from illegal logging.

The photos were taken during several flights over one of the most remote parts of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil’s Acre region.

They show tribe members outside thatched huts, surrounded by the dense jungle, pointing bows and arrows up at the camera.

“We did the overflight to show their houses, to show they are there, to show they exist,” the group quoted Jose Carlos dos Reis Meirelles Junior, an official in the Brazilian government’s Indian affairs department, as saying.

“This is very important because there are some who doubt their existence.”

He described the threats to such tribes and their land as “a monumental crime against the natural world” and “further testimony to the complete irrationality with which we, the ‘civilised’ ones, treat the world”.

“These images are all from a later pass by the plane. The men, painted red, brandished weapons and fired off some arrows at the aircraft. The person in black may be a woman.”

Disease is also a risk, as members of tribal groups that have been contacted in the past have died of illnesses that they have no defence against, ranging from chicken pox to the common cold. – bbc

>Iceland shaken by magnitude 6.2 earthquake

>I wonder what else the Earth is going to hit us with in the next few months. First nearly 70,000 die from a quake in China, now this…

A strong earthquake shook southern Iceland on Thursday, injuring at least 15 people as it rocked buildings in the capital, touched off landslides and forced evacuations in outlying towns, officials and local media said.

Government officials reported that 15 to 30 people were injured, none of the seriously, when the quake hit near Selfoss, 30 miles southeast of the capital of Reykjavik. They were taken to a local health center for treatment.

The U.S. Geological Survey said the quake had a magnitude of 6.2 and hit at 3:46 p.m.

Sharp aftershocks were feared over the next few hours in the southwest of the country, and police traveled around the nearby town of Hveragerdi, 28 miles east of Reykjavik, with a bullhorn, advising residents to stay outdoors.

An Associated Press Television News cameraman in Hveragerdi reported at least two aftershocks, and said residents were beginning to pitch tents outside because they were not allowed to return home.

“It was a horrific experience. Everything inside my house is ruined,” Sveinn Ingvason, a 51-year-old construction worker, told Iceland’s Channel 2 from the town.

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>I hate unreadable Captchas.

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The term “CAPTCHA” was coined in 2000 by Luis von Ahn, Manuel Blum, Nicholas J. Hopper (all of Carnegie Mellon University), and John Langford (then of IBM). It is a contrived acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University.

A CAPTCHA is sometimes described as a reverse Turing test, because it is administered by a machine and targeted to a human, in contrast to the standard Turing test that is typically administered by a human and targeted to a machine.

Lately on web sites were I have to validate I’m getting captchas like this:

Sometimes I get three or four in a row which are unreadable. Would it just be better to hire a few network police and have public humiliation for anyone caught defrauding a web site with spam? These things are really just another way spammers abuse us.

>This is what i see now

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This i what i see now, originally uploaded by xeno735.

>You have new Picture Mail!

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You have new Picture Mail!, originally uploaded by xeno735.