UChicago scientists discover semi-aquatic Jurassic-era otter that could chew and swallow - CTV News

New research reveals that during the Late Jurassic period—when feathered dinosaurs were first taking to the skies—some early birds chose a different path, surviving on the ground. The discovery is being hailed as key evidence that the dinosaur-to-bird evolutionary transition was not a single linear pathway but branched into multiple directions depending on habitat. A research team led by Professor Wang Min of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced in the international journal Nature that a 149-million-year-old fossil excavated in China's Fujian Province has been confirmed as a new ground-dwelling bird species. The team assigned the primitive bird the scientific name Yuezhuornis yangyuanensis.

An early bird with many dinosaur-like features discovered in China seems to have been a fast-running, land-based carnivore with killer claws.

ScienceAdviser: What did a Jurassic forest sound like? |

Mud from a fjord shows an Atlantic air pattern brought wetter, colder spells to southern Greenland, a clue to how its ice may fare. Greenland’s ice is shrinking as the planet warms. But in the island’s southwest, rainfall and snowfall have been influenced by the same North Atlantic air-pressure pattern for at least 5,000 years. When that pattern tipped one way, the region turned wetter and colder. The record comes from mud on the floor of a Greenland fjord, and it suggests snowfall, not only temperature, shaped how the area’s ice grew and shrank. It doesn’t yet show how glaciers there will respond to the warming ahead. Johan Faust, a researcher at MARUM, the Center for Marine Environmental Sciences at the University of Bremen in Germany, led the work with colleagues in Germany, Norway, Denmark and Canada. A seesaw in the airThe pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It’s the difference in air pressure between a low that sits near Iceland and a high near the Azores, and it’s strongest in winter. When that difference is large, the pattern is in its positive phase. Northwestern Europe and southwestern Greenland both get more rain and snow.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory researcher Isaiah Santistevan led the development of three-dimensional simulations exploring how a nuclear device could deflect or disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth. Credit: Blaise Douros/LLNL Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) researchers are developing three-dimensional simulations to examine how a nuclear device could be used to deflect or potentially disrupt an asteroid threatening Earth.