Dressed to kill: A feathered tyrannosaur is discovered in China

A team of paleontologists has dubbed their find Yutyrannus huali ? beautiful feathered tyrant. At 1.5 tons, this 'fuzz ball ... with a mouth full of killer teeth' is the largest feathered dinosaur by far.

It's not often you see a dinosaur with a girth and toothy grimace reminiscent of Tyrannosaurus rex yet covered in a downy winter coat worthy of L.L. Bean.

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But that's what a team of paleontologists in China reports. They've dubbed their find Yutyrannus huali (beautiful feathered tyrant), a creature that stretched 30 feet from tail-tip to snout and weighed 1.5 tons.

It's the largest dinosaur yet to host feather-like features all over its body ? features well preserved on three nearly complete, mostly intact fossil skeletons the team found.

?It's very intriguing to think of this very large fuzz ball running around with a mouth full of killer teeth,? quips Hans-Dieter Sues, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Smithsonian Institution's Museum of Natural History in Washington.

But, he adds, the discovery addresses a serious question researchers have asked since the first fossils of feathered dinosaurs were uncovered in the 1990s: How widely do they appear among the various types of dinosaurs?

Meat-eating dinosaurs hosting feathers makes sense, Dr. Sues says, because they are the ancestors of modern birds. But if the covering extends to the vegetarians as well, it would imply that feathers of some sort came from a common primitive dinosaur ancestor to both the carnivores and vegetarians, Sues suggests. That in turn raises the question: Would feathers have helped the earliest dinosaurs gain an evolutionary advantage over their rivals, many of which had dinosaur-like features in their skeletons, but became dead-end branches on the so-called Tree of Life. Meanwhile, the dinosaurs survived, ruling the planet for nearly 200 million years.

Until now, the most heavily feathered fossils tended to be smaller creatures ? Yutyrannus huali might have considered many of them tasty hors d'oeuvres. They were small enough to need some form of insulation to help them retain body heat, Sues explains.

Using modern large animals such as elephants as models, however, many researchers suspected that larger animals would have evolved to shed feathers as they grew in size in order to get rid of body heat from their own exertion as they lumbered along in a tropical or semi-tropical climate.

Yet in Y. huali, researchers have uncovered a dinosaur of substantial stature fully feathered. It weighs some 40 times as much as the previous feathered record-holder.

?It's an extraordinary find,? says Sues, who was not a member of the team making the discovery.

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The group Conditioning The us Several Considerations You Need ...

Through the skiing device for the abs roller, we have seen home fitness equipment enter in to stores and speedily abandon and then be replaced from the latest as well as newest fad throughout crucial exercise routine equipment. Since buyers we?ve the duty associated with browsing through all of the brand names, types and types regarding exercise equipment while decoding the things that work and just what doesn?t for individuals particularly. Most whilst keeping value along with safe-keeping at heart.

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A couple of. Weight load (Investment May differ) ? For those of us which might be straight into firming and also getting muscle tissue, an excellent pair of stop weight load is a great expense, yet skip the extra weight benches and also menu crammed models running inside into the 1000s of dollars. The simplest to hold, have and many economical regarding only a little space is the Strength Obstruct Weight. These types of operate regarding $250-$300 for the brand new arranged and can be considered a great expense if you should have weight load, miss the additional bonuses just like a bench, yoga mats or perhaps appears and you?ll maintain your expense lower. Make use of stability soccer ball as the counter to be effective your own key muscles as well as your targeted muscle tissue. Using a group of great weight load it is possible to alter these people on your own while you get the requirement of extra opposition. That can be done all the classic workout routines using 50 percent the space essential and just slip all of them in the spare room or perhaps the actual closet when carried out.

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Having a good lighting is An Important aspect while setting up a home

Lighting is an important aspect to look at when we build a house. Modern houses highlight more on these aspects. We all know Thomas Alva Edison invented the first bulb. Today, there are various kinds of lights and new concepts are being discovered day by day. There are different kinds of lighting facilities whether the lighting comes from sun or bulb. Lightings can be categorized into five aspects. It does not matter whether it?s an electrical contact you hire or whether it is a home improvement project.
There are different kinds of lighting systems that can be designed while building a house.
?Natural Lighting
?Ambient lighting
?Accent lighting
?Aesthetic lighting
Let us look at some of the aspects one by one.
Most of us are aware about natural lighting. There are numerous ways through which we can bring sunlight into our house. Most houses have doors and windows that allow sunlight into houses. The modern day tech support has discovered methods through which we can have lights even with have windows and doors closed. The use of solar tubes has made it efficient. These can be bent in almost every direction to provide natural light anywhere at home. These tubes are made of reflective metals. A disadvantage about natural light is available only during the day time, leaving aside the options that provide light during the night time.

The second kind of lighting system found is the ambient lighting system. These lights travel in all directions. One of the most common forms of ambient lighting system is florescent. Natural lighting is also very similar to ambient light. A bank of raised fixed glass typically found in commercial settings like banks and offices are a form on ambient lighting. Ambient lighting are usually soft and warm.

The next type is the Accent lighting. These are set based on the features of a room. Track light is an example for accent lighting. These can also be fixed in the kitchen, bathroom or bedroom. This lights works well in furniture rooms. It is direct and the room temperature increases when lit. the heat increases within the radius beams.
Last but not the least is the Aesthetic lighting. These lights are quite luxurious, mostly used as a center d?cor. Installing aesthetic lighting is a great choice. Wall sconces, neon signs and post lamps are all versions of aesthetic lighting. Aesthetic lighting can be can also be task, accent and ambient lighting as well. These lights adds elegance and opulence to your home, however, they as expensive as well.

While setting up a lighting system to your house, the lights in the kitchen can be designed differently. I have visited a lot of house that were built recently. An observation that fell into my eyes is that most of the kitchen lights use aesthetic and accent lighting systems. Mini chandeliers and mini pendant lightings work well for remedying overhead lighting sources that need that extra touch of class.

We can use wall sconces to decorate walls. These can be bought in various sizes and styles. It is also easy to install them as well. Monorail lighting adds a curving and wavy light source that can be angled or bent to suit the natural flow of your kitchen. Just like track lighting, monorail lighting has directional light sources that can create task lighting or ambient lighting, making them versatile as well as stylish additions to any kitchen.
Today we find many people setting up bar and dinning in their kitchen. Most of us tend to eat more in the kitchen nowadays and these areas are often built into the side of a kitchen space with an overhanging edge with bar stools for seating. But these areas need to be lit up well to be functional. Be functional and fashionable by installing pendant lighting to create a light source for each seating area and suits your kitchens design elements perfectly.

Stuart is a freelance writer who has written articles on various topics earlier. He likes the idea about using tech support for improving his lighting in his house.

This entry was posted on April 5, 2012 at 7:15 am and is filed under Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Firefighters donate Mega Millions winnings to ailing fellow fireman

Five Albuquerque Station Eight firefighters who won a $10,000 share of the Mega Millions jackpot last week have decided to donate an unspecified part of their winnings to fellow fireman Vince Cordova, who is suffering from a life-threatening tumor.

"We decided to get tickets ten minutes before the sales closed," said Capt. Jed Hyland told local news affiliate KOB. "I ran in shouting that we hit 5 of the 6 numbers."

After convincing their fellow firemen that it wasn't an April Fools' joke, Hyland and his four fellow winners (Steve Keffer, Paul McClure, Clinton Anderson and Si Do) decided to donate part of their winnings to the local firefighters Survival Fund. "Everybody at the station agreed that this would be a good opportunity," Hyland said.

KOAT reports that Cordova, 24, has a rare aggressive tumor that puts pressure on his brain. He'll die if the tumor isn't removed, but life-saving surgery from a specialist in Los Angeles costs several hundred thousand dollars.

While the $10,000 is only a small portion of Cordova's total medical bills, his fellow firemen hope that their donation will help raise awareness and encourage others to donate.

KRQE News 13 reports that Cordova has already undergone two of the three necessary operations, with the final to be performed on Wednesday.

"I'm nervous. I'm scared. I've got these butterflies in my stomach that just won't leave, but I'm hanging in there," Cordova told the station in an interview before his first operation on Saturday. "I can't believe that the fireman bond is so strong."

"I just want to tell everyone thank you for standing by me and staying strong," Cordova said. "Thank you for believing in me, and I promise to see you guys soon!"

Ailing Fireman Vincent Cordova (Photo Image: KOB.com)

The final surgery will be performed by a team of five surgeons and is expected to last at least 10 hours.

"(Cordova) has such a great attitude. He looks at it as another challenge, like he would a structure fire that we face as firemen. He's going to overcome it. He's positive and he's strong?that's the kind of man he is," AFD firefighter Gilbert Baca, who trained Cordova in the academy, told KOAT.

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Robosquirrels versus rattlesnakes

ScienceDaily (Apr. 3, 2012) ? Robot squirrels from the University of California, Davis, are going into rattlesnake country near San Jose, continuing a research project on the interaction between squirrels and rattlesnakes.

In the lab, robot squirrels have shown how squirrels signal to snakes with heat and tail flagging. Through field experiments, researchers from San Diego State University and UC Davis aim to learn more about rattlesnake behavior.

It's not the only use of robots to study animal behavior at UC Davis. Terry Ord, a former postdoctoral researcher now at Harvard University, used robot lizards to study display behavior by anole lizards in the jungles of Puerto Rico. Gail Patricelli, professor of evolution and ecology, has used a camera-equipped robot sage grouse hen to study the mating behavior of these prairie birds.

The collaboration is giving biologists new tools for their work -- and also helping engineers design new and better machines.

The research on the long struggle between California ground squirrels and their main predator, rattlesnakes, began at UC Davis under the leadership of psychology professor Donald Owings, an expert on animal behavior, who died in 2011.

Sanjay Joshi, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UC Davis, built the original "robosquirrels" for Owings, and is now working with Rulon Clark, assistant professor of biology at San Diego State University and an expert on snake behavior.

The research then and now centers on two squirrel behaviors in reaction to rattlesnakes: a tail flagging movement and the warming of the tail. Owings, with Professor Richard Coss and colleagues, observed that when adult squirrels detect a snake, they approach it head-first in an elongated posture, making flagging movements with their tails. Owings and Coss noticed that when confronting a rattlesnake, the squirrels also heated their tails.

Because rattlesnakes can "see" in the infrared, the researchers thought the squirrels might be sending a signal to the snakes. But, with live squirrels, there is no way to separate tail flagging from tail heating.

Enter the robots. Joshi's engineering lab built a squirrel with a heatable tail and a tail flagging mechanism, each controlled separately.

Using the robosquirrel, Aaron Rundus, then a graduate student in Owings' lab and now an assistant professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, showed that the snakes responded to the heat signal from the squirrel.

"It was the first example of infrared communication in the animal world," Joshi said. That work was published in 2008: an article published in IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine in December, 2011, summarized much of the work to date.

Fieldwork is more challenging, he said. Ryan Johnson-Masters, a graduate student in Joshi's lab and now at the Sandia National Laboratory in Livermore, built a new robot with smaller and more robust controls that was easier to transport into the field.

The field season is fairly short, a few weeks in late spring and early summer when squirrel pups are born and rattlesnakes come hunting for them.

Then you need to find rattlesnakes in rough country.

"It's definitely an adventure," Joshi said.

Clark began collaborating with Owings and Joshi in 2007. Together, they wrote a grant proposal to the National Science Foundation to take the robosquirrel into the field. The grant was funded with $390,000 in 2010.

Once the researchers have located a foraging snake, they put down some track, set up the robosquirrel and a video camera to record the scene and retreat behind a blind. The snakes seem to accept the robosquirrel as real, Clark said. One of their videos shows a snake biting the robot's head.

Snakes will rarely strike at a flagging adult squirrel -- and if they do they almost always miss, Clark said.

"Squirrels have a remarkable ability to move out of the way of an oncoming snake strike," he said. Even adult squirrels that do not seem to be aware of a snake will often successfully dodge a strike.

Squirrel pups are much more vulnerable. They have less resistance to snake venom and seem more reckless in their behavior. They show the same displaying behavior as adults, but will get closer to snakes -- sometimes with fatal results.

Although not much is known about the mental abilities of rattlesnakes -- they are not ideal lab animals, after all -- they do behave in the field as if they are making complicated assessments about foraging behavior, Clark said. For example, they react differently to adult squirrels versus pups.

Why do squirrels approach the snakes at all? Clark says that they may be trying to assess the nature of the threat. Sometimes snakes will leave the area after encounters with squirrels.

Before joining the campus in 2001, Joshi worked at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory on robots for space exploration. At UC Davis, Joshi began working with psychology professors including Owings and Jeffrey Schank. With Schank, he built robots that emulated the behavior of young rat pups -- revealing new insights into both rat behavior and robot design.

"The reason I'm so excited is that with robots we can really change how animal behavior studies are done," Joshi said.

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The State of Social Media Marketing | Business 2 Community

Every year, Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner conducts a survey of marketing professional and publishes a report on the State of Social Media Marketing.

Social Media Industry Report

The report is a little dense, but I encourage you to read it and the supporting graphs from a survey of over 3000 marketers who discussed their experiences and plans regarding social media marketing.

Because Social Media Examiner does the report every year, not only is the report interesting by itself, it?s useful to compare results across the last 3-4 years to see what?s happening in social media.

Recommendations

Based on my reading of the report, I have the following recommendations for businesses trying to increase the effectiveness of their social media marketing programs:

Should I Add Social Media Marketing?

Overwhelmingly, businesses agree social media marketing provides benefits, even if translating those benefits into measurable ROI is challenging. Of course, I?ve long argued that directly measuring ROI is nonsense because social media is designed to create brand awareness, positive sentiment, and brand loyalty rather than sales. Now, we know for 80 years of research (conducted by highly skilled academics and peer-reviewed to ensure the results are accurate) supporting the substantial impact of these factors on ROI.

Of course, that doesn?t mean you can?t impute ROI from social media metrics by regressing metrics against sales and prove to yourself the value of social media. This makes evaluating the impact of social media on ROI more accurate than traditional advertising where you simply ask customers where they saw your ad.

Time Commitment for Social Media

The survey IMPLIES that successful social media marketing takes a significant amount of time. The study shows that the longer a firm used social media marketing, the more time they devote to creating engagement on social platforms. Finding a correlation between social media time committment and performance (ie. sales, leads, inquiries, etc) would prove this relationship, but we don?t have that data.

Be aware, based on survey results, doing social media marketing will take a significant amount of time/ week and that committment varies depending on factors such as sales volume, target market, and industry.

Outsourcing

Most firms don?t outsource their social media marketing and this is a potential problem. Think about it. Even a small firm should expect to devote about 10 hours a week to social media marketing ? which is too much to add to the responsibilities of another employee, but not enough to justify hiring an employee. So, outsourcing makes financial sense just like it makes sense to use a CPA firm rather than hiring an accountant.

Plus, social media marketing is a specialized skill requiring specialized knowledge and experience in marketing, graphics, Web 2.0, videography, analytical skills, strategy experience, and possibly other skills, too. You don?t expect an employee to handle your legal affairs, do your books, and design your new product, so why would you expect 1 employee to have all these skills.

At Hausman and Associates, I can only do all these things only because I hire specialized individuals for each task. I couldn?t do all this myself. So, find yourself a great social media agency to help build and implement your social media marketing strategy.

Social Media Tools

Businesses added Pinterest and Google+ to their list of social media tools this year. But, firms are not using blogging enough ? with only 61% using a blog, fewer than are using Facebook (#1), Twitter (#2), and LinkedIn (#3). Now, maybe firms don?t think a blog is necessary, but they?re dead wrong and you can read why is my recent post.

So, add a blog to your website and watch your traffic (and conversions) soar. You see in the survey data, firms with more experience make greater use of blogs.

Also, it doesn?t seem like enough businesses are using YouTube, which is unfortunate. Video is huge for consumers and likely becoming more influential over time, not less. So, work on creating and distributing video content as part of your social media marketing strategy.

Author: Angela Hausman, PhD???? Angela Hausman, PhD on the Web Angela Hausman, PhD on Facebook Angela Hausman, PhD on LinkedIn Angela Hausman, PhD on Google Plus

I?m a marketing professor at Howard University, Associate Editor for the European Journal of Marketing, a guest blogger, and the mother of 3 grown kids, 2 dogs, and 3 cats.? I operate Hausman & Associates, a full-service marketing firm operating at the intersection of marketing and social media?. View?full?profile

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Many US police use cell phones to track: study

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