Titanoboa cerrejonensis is the best snake ever!
Titanoboa cerrejonensis is a gigantic snake of monstrous proportions that SciFi Channel can only dream of having giant snakes in their movies that are as big as. And now I, Dr. Mobusu, am hard at work at bringing them back to life. Because, the world needs giant snakes slithering around, eating people left and right, and being all snake. Snake is the new punk, and controlling giant prehistoric snakes is the new Dr. Mobusu. Because that’s what I do. You can’t stop Dr. Mobusu, you can only pray his monsters eat you last! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!Fossils from northeastern Colombia reveal the biggest snake ever discovered: a behemoth that stretched 42 to 45 feet long, reaching more than 2,500 pounds.
“This thing weighs more than a bison and is longer than a city bus,” enthused snake expert Jack Conrad of the American Museum of Natural History in New York, who was familiar with the find.
“It could easily eat something the size of a cow. A human would just be toast immediately.”
…..
Actually, the beast probably munched on ancient relatives of crocodiles in its rainforest home some 58 million to 60 million years ago, he said.The discoverers of the snake named it Titanoboa cerrejonensis (“ty-TAN-o-BO-ah sare-ah-HONE-en-siss”). That means “titanic boa from Cerrejon,” the region where it was found.
While related to modern boa constrictors, it behaved more like an anaconda and spent almost all its time in the water, Head said. It could slither on land as well as swim.
Conrad, who wasn’t involved in the discovery, called the find “just unbelievable…. It mocks your preconceptions about how big a snake can get.”
Titanoboa breaks the record for snake length by about 11 feet, surpassing a creature that lived about 40 million years ago in Egypt, Head said. Among living snake species, the record holder is an individual python measured at about 30 feet long, which is some 12 to 15 feet shorter than typical Titanoboas, said study co-author Jonathan Bloch.
Categories: Dinosaurs and other extinct, Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags: Dr. Mobusu, Titanoboa cerrejonensis
My cannibal stars prepare to devour entire galaxies!
There is nothing more beautiful than the wonders found in outer space. Well, maybe seeing cities fall beneath your monstrous creations, but that is another story entirely. And now, space can finally get what is coming to it by my brand new stellar cannibals! These mean, hungry stars are colored blue, because they are powered with the souls of Smurfs! Roaming the universe, preparing to eat all that comes before them. Consume galaxies they will. Why do I, Dr. Mobusu, do this? Because I can! Dr. Mobusu does what he wants, when he wants, and the universe will learn not to stand in his way. MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!Oddball ‘Blue Stragglers’ Are Stellar Cannibals
Astronomers have found what they say is the strongest evidence yet that a mysterious class of stars known as “blue stragglers” are the result of stellar cannibalism.Blue stragglers are found throughout the universe in globular clusters — which typically are collections of about 100,000 stars, tightly bound by gravity. Because all the stars in these clusters are thought to have been born at the same time, they should all be the same age, but blue stragglers appear to be younger than their cluster peers.
The origin of these strange, massive stars has been a longstanding mystery, said study leader Christian Knigge of Southampton University in England.
“The only thing that was clear is that at least two stars must be involved in the creation of every single blue straggler, because isolated stars this massive simply should not exist in these clusters,” Knigge added.
Categories: Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags: Dr. Mobusu
Raptor Ranch
Jurassic Park meets Carnosaur meets Brokeback Mountain without any brokebacking. Actually, it is Raptor Island on a ranch. Raptor Ranch! And without seeing one frame of footage I can assure you it is better than Raptor Island and Raptor Island 2 – Raptor Planet. In fact, it looks like it could be pretty fun. Potential is here. Like Raptor Planet, they will use a mix of animaltronic and cgi raptors, except they added color to them, so they don’t look lame. Basically, if it is fun, it will be a good movie. Rumors are it might show up on SciFi Channel sometime this spring.
The film is the brainchild of Dan Bishop, an experience production designer on many projects.
Starring Jana, stand-up comic Rowdy Arroyo, Cody Vaughn, Donny Boaz, and Bo Myers
Animaltronic work of Larry Billings:
CGI work of Michael Napodano:
Official Site
More Info a Undead Backbrain
Thanks to Avery, who I hope avoids any attacking raptors!
Categories: Dinosaurs and other extinct, Kaiju News, Movie News Tags: Avery, kaiju, raptor, Raptor Ranch
Pay no attention to that mystrious roar in deep space!
It is NOT my giant, living planet finally achieving consciousness and preparing to feed on neighboring moons for the first time. I repeat, it is NOT a giant living planet I created named Gorth who will soon devour planets on my command if they do not hand over their secret advanced technology. You have nothing to fear. Go back to watching American Idol. Remember to vote for the worst!PS: Also ignore the Bloop in the ocean. Just don’t go swimming after dark if you hear it.
Mystery Roar from Faraway Space Detected
Andrea Thompson
Senior Writer
SPACE.com andrea Thompson
senior Writer
space.com – Wed Jan 7, 10:31 pm ETLONG BEACH, Calif. — Space is typically thought of as a very quiet place. But one team of astronomers has found a strange cosmic noise that booms six times louder than expected.
The roar is from the distant cosmos. Nobody knows what causes it.
Of course, sound waves can’t travel in a vacuum (which is what most of space is), or at least they can’t very efficiently. But radio waves can.
Radio waves are not sound waves, but they are still electromagnetic waves, situated on the low-frequency end of the light spectrum.
Many objects in the universe, including stars and quasars, emit radio waves. Even our home galaxy, the Milky Way, emits a static hiss (first detected in 1931 by physicist Karl Jansky). Other galaxies also send out a background radio hiss.
But the newly detected signal, described here today at the 213th meeting of the American Astronomical Society, is far louder than astronomers expected.
There is “something new and interesting going on in the universe,” said Alan Kogut of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
A team led by Kogut detected the signal with a balloon-borne instrument named ARCADE (Absolute Radiometer for Cosmology, Astrophysics, and Diffuse Emission).
In July 2006, the instrument was launched from NASA’s Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas, and reached an altitude of about 120,000 feet (36,500 meters), where the atmosphere thins into the vacuum of space.
ARCADE’s mission was to search the sky for faint signs of heat from the first generation of stars, but instead they heard a roar from the distant reaches of the universe.
“The universe really threw us a curve,” Kogut said. “Instead of the faint signal we hoped to find, here was this booming noise six times louder than anyone had predicted.”
Detailed analysis of the signal ruled out primordial stars or any known radio sources, including gas in the outermost halo of our own galaxy.
Other radio galaxies also can’t account for the noise – there just aren’t enough of them.
“You’d have to pack them into the universe like sardines,” said study team member Dale Fixsen of the University of Maryland. “There wouldn’t be any space left between one galaxy and the next.”
The signal is measured to be six times brighter than the combined emission of all known radio sources in the universe.
For now, the origin of the signal remains a mystery.
“We really don’t know what it is,”said team member Michael Seiffert of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.
And not only has it presented astronomers with a new puzzle, it is obscuring the sought-for signal from the earliest stars. But the cosmic static may itself provide important clues to the development of galaxies when the universe was much younger, less than half its present age. Because the radio waves come from far away, traveling at the speed of light, they therefore represent an earlier time in the universe.
“This is what makes science so exciting,” Seiffert said. “You start out on a path to measure something – in this case, the heat from the very first stars – but run into something else entirely, some unexplained.”
Categories: Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags: Astronomy, Gorth, Living Planet, Mobusu
Conjoined Nile Tilapia fish
I will be making some of these, because I am obsessed with crazy freaky animals. Only they will be bigger! MuHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Yahoo Link
Two conjoined Nile Tilapia fish, dubbed “Siamese Twin”, swim in a small aquarium in Bangkok October 3, 2008. They are both eight months old and share part of the skin together. The bigger fish tends to protect the smaller one from harm while the smaller one looks for food at the bottom of the aquarium.
Categories: Biology, Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags:
X-Rays blasting from the tape dispenser!
Who here hasn’t used Scotch Tape to do impromptu X-Rays when creating unholy monsters in the laboratory? This is a simple trick employed by mad scientists across the globe, until one of them blabbed. Now I bet they will change the formula. Good going, blabber! I have to stock up on lots of Scotch Tape, too bad that when it yellows it gets 10% less effective. Don;t they know a recession is on? That even effects my wallet, as my trade in bizarre animal hybrids is down 50%. Thus I create less hyena men, as the current number of hyena men is more than enough than needed at evil lair employment hotspots. Luckily, I am starting a Goon Temp Agency to rent out employees of the crazed hybrid variety for temporary assignment to crazed madmen around the globe. I expect it will be quite popular with evil masterminds looking to cut costs and headcount reports. Then I can buy more Scotch Tape.
Tape measure: X-rays detected from Scotch tape
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer Malcolm Ritter, Ap Science Writer – Wed Oct 22, 7:33 pm ET
NEW YORK – Just two weeks after a Nobel Prize highlighted theoretical work on subatomic particles, physicists are announcing a startling discovery about a much more familiar form of matter: Scotch tape. It turns out that if you peel the popular adhesive tape off its roll in a vacuum chamber, it emits X-rays. The researchers even made an X-ray image of one of their fingers.
Who knew? Actually, more than 50 years ago, some Russian scientists reported evidence of X-rays from peeling sticky tape off glass. But the new work demonstrates that you can get a lot of X-rays, a study co-author says.
….He suggests that with some refinements, the process might be harnessed for making inexpensive X-ray machines for paramedics or for places where electricity is expensive or hard to get. After all, you could peel tape or do something similar in such machines with just human power, like cranking.
….
In the new work, a machine peeled ordinary Scotch tape off a roll in a vacuum chamber at about 1.2 inches per second. Rapid pulses of X-rays, each about a billionth of a second long, emerged from very close to where the tape was coming off the roll.
That’s where electrons jumped from the roll to the sticky underside of the tape that was being pulled away, a journey of about two-thousandths of an inch, Escobar said. When those electrons struck the sticky side they slowed down, and that slowing made them emit X-rays.
Categories: Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags:
Red chlorophyll
Red chlorophyll is like green chlorophyll but it is red. Hey, don’t expect poetry, there isn’t much you can say introducing it that you shouldn’t already know! There is red, green, and blue chlorophyll, but this is a new version that does Red Edge. Which means absorbs the light near the infrared spectrum. That means if you were wearing Infrared goggles, you would just see a big black spot. I am sure you want to know what horrible thing I am using this for…but it is TOP SECRET!!!! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!
Living On ‘The Red Edge’: Rare Form Of Chlorophyll Discovered In Newly Sequenced Bacterium
ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2008) — Researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and Arizona State University have sequenced the genome of a rare bacterium that harvests light energy by making an even rarer form of chlorophyll, chlorophyll d. Chlorophyll d absorbs “red edge,” near infrared, long wave length light, invisible to the naked eye.
In so doing, the cyanobacterium Acaryochloris marina, competes with virtually no other plant or bacterium in the world for sunlight. As a result, its genome is massive for a cyanobacterium, comprising 8.3 million base pairs, and sophisticated. The genome is among the very largest of 55 cyanobacterial strains in the world sequenced thus far, and it is the first chlorophyll d –containing organism to be sequenced .
Robert Blankenship. Ph.D., Lucille P. Markey Distinguished Professor in Arts & Sciences at Washington University, and principal investigator of the project, said with every gene of Acaryochloris marina now sequenced and annotated, the immediate goal is to find the enzyme that causes a chemical structure change in chlorophyll d, making it different from primarily chlorophyll a, and b, but also from about nine other forms of chlorophyll.
“The synthesis of chlorophyll by an organism is complex, involving 17 different steps in all,” Blankenship said. “Some place near the end of this process an enzyme transforms a vinyl group to a formyl group to make chlorophyll d. This transformation of chemical forms is not known in any other chlorophyll molecules.”
Blankenship said he and his collaborators have some candidate genes they will test. They hope to insert these genes into an organism that makes just chlorophyll a. If the organism learns to synthesize chlorophyll d with one of the genes, the mystery of chlorophyll d synthesis will be solved, and then the excitement will begin.
Blankenship and his colleagues from both institutions published a paper on their work in the Feb. 4, online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The work was supported by the National Science Foundation and also involved collaborators from Australia and Japan. Three Washington University undergraduate students and one graduate student participated in the project, as well as other research personnel.
Harvesting solar power through plants or other organisms that would be genetically altered with the chlorophyll d gene could make them solar power factories that generate and store solar energy. Consider a seven-foot tall corn plant genetically tailored with the chlorophyll d gene to be expressed at the very base of the stalk. While the rest of the plant synthesized chlorophyll a, absorbing short wave light, the base is absorbing “red edge” light in the 710 nanometer range. Energy could be stored in the base without competing with any other part of the plant for photosynthesis, as the rest only makes chlorophyll a. Also, the altered corn using the chlorophyll d gene could become a super plant because of its enhanced ability to harness energy from the sun.
That model is similar to how Acaryochloris marina actually operates in the South Pacific, specifically Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. Discovered just 11 years ago, the cyanobacterium lives in a symbiotic relationship with a sponge-like marine animal popularly called a sea squirt . The Acaryochloris marina lives beneath the sea squirt, which is a marine animal that lives attached to rocks just below the surface of the water. The cyanobacterium absorbs “red edge” light through the tissues of its pal the sea squirt.
The genome, said Blankenship, is ” fat and happy. Acaryochloris marina lies down there using that far red light that no one else can use. The organism has never been under very strong selection pressure to be lean and mean like other bacteria are. It’s kind of in a sweet spot. Living in this environment is what allowed it to have such dramatic genome expansion.”
Blankenship said that once the gene that causes the late-step chemical transformation is found and inserted successfully into other plants or organisms, that it could potentially represent a five percent increase in available light for organisms to use.
“We now have genetic information on a unique organism that makes this type of pigment that no other organism does,” Blankenship said. “We don’t know what all the genes do by any means. But we’ve just begun the analysis. When we find the chlorophyll d enzyme and then look into transferring it into other organisms, we’ll be working to extend the range of potentially useful photosynthesis radiation.’
Categories: Biology, Dr. Mobusu, Science Tags:
