Burglars could be identified from airborne DNA - The Economist

(NewsNation) — A fossil stored in a London museum for more than a century has been identified as a new species of dinosaur. Researchers say the new dinosaur, Invictibellatrix amberina, was identified from a skull fragment at the Natural History Museum. The fossil was first found by Reginald Walter Tooley, an amateur paleontologist, at the base of a cliff on the Isle of Wight. After Tooley died, the museum acquired the fossil in 1924, along with more than 1,000 other specimens he had collected. "It is a real mystery that this fossil was overlooked for so long, sitting in a drawer for nearly 100 years," said the study's lead author, Dr. Cassius Morrison, in a press release. Researchers used CT scans to make 3D images of the skull and the area where the dinosaur's brain would have been. When they compared these images to other meat-eating dinosaurs, they found some unusual features. These included an oval-shaped opening where the spinal cord met the brain and a ridge shaped like an hourglass. These differences led them to decide it was a new species. Invictibellatrix was part of a group of meat-eating dinosaurs called megaraptorans, which were related to tyrannosaurs.

Open this photo in gallery:An artist's impression of the cool white dwarf star WDJ1330+6435, which has accreted sodium-rich rocky material from its planetary system into its atmosphere. Mark A. Garlick/University of Warwick/via REUTERSAstronomers for the first time have identified a green star, documenting a dense stellar remnant called a white dwarf that became a ghostly shade of chartreuse after ingesting rocky debris from planets that once had orbited it. A star’s colour typically is governed by its temperature, with cooler stars appearing orange, the sun and stars similar to it appearing white, and the hottest ones appearing a pale blue. But the formula is different for a white dwarf, which is the leftover core of a low- to medium-mass star that burned through its nuclear fuel and blew off its outer layers. Most white dwarfs have colours similar to other stars, and their average colour is white. But changes in their chemistry over time can turn some of them into rarer colours. The newly identified green one, named WD J1330+6435, is a white dwarf in the Milky Way galaxy that is located about 280 light-years from Earth in the constellation Draco.

A dinosaur fossil that spent almost a century in the collections of London's Natural History Museum has been identified as a new species. The skull fragment belonged to Invictibellatrix amberina, a previously unknown carnivorous dinosaur that lived around 120 million years ago. It's also the first confirmed evidence of a megaraptoran dinosaur in Europe. The fossil was originally discovered at the foot of a cliff on the southwest coast of the Isle of Wight by amateur fossil hunter Reginald Walter Tooley. After his death in 1924, the Natural History Museum acquired more than 1,000 specimens from his collection, including the fragment. RelatedAlthough scientists knew it belonged to a dinosaur, exactly which one remained a mystery for decades. Now, researchers have taken another look at the fossil using CT scanning technology, allowing them to examine its internal structure and create a 3D model. Their full findings were published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.

If there's one thing the COVID-19 pandemic taught us, it's that the world isn't always as prepared for a crisis as we might think. Now, in a sweeping international assessment published in The Lancet, a team of dozens of scientific experts has cataloged the dangers of 17 major global health threats faced by humanity this century – and preparedness is a key theme of their findings. While it's a sobering review, the key message is that the dangers of global catastrophes can be mitigated and managed, but only if society takes action now. "The striking finding is not only the scale of these threats, but that humanity still has the agency to act," says physician and health economist Christopher JL Murray from the University of Washington, the co-chair of The Lancet Commission on 21st Century Global Threats to Health. "Across all 17 catastrophic threats, the decisions made by leaders today will shape the health and well-being of the next generation. "In their study, the researchers used modeling to estimate how much death and disability could potentially be avoided for each threat between 2025 and 2100, measured in disability-adjusted life-years (DALYs).