ROUGHLOADED

Supernovas Blasted Prehistoric Earth With Radiation

High-energy cosmic rays could have boosted radiation in our atmosphere, causing problems for Earth life millions of years ago.<br />
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Cancers in animals could have increased slightly after our planet was blanketed with radiation from two prehistoric supernovae, according to new research.</div>
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The star explosions took place between 1.7 million and 8.7 million years ago, irradiating the landscape with high-energy cosmic rays. Cosmic rays hit Earth every day, but the stellar explosions would have increased the radiation striking our planet.</div>
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When the cosmic rays hit molecules in our atmosphere, a cascade of secondary particles such as X-rays, protons and muons are produced. Some muon radiation is normal, but the supernovae would have temporarily tripled the dose for land animals and animals living in shallow waters, said co-author Adrian Melott, a University of Kansas physics researcher, in a statement.</div>
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"I was expecting there to be very little effect at all," he said. "The supernovae were pretty far way — more than 300 light years — that's really not very close."<span id="goog_608414333"></span><span id="goog_608414334"></span><a href="https://draft.blogger.com/"></a></div>
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The radiation would have given animals the equivalent dose of one additional CT scan in radiation per year. CT scans take X-ray images from several angles to let doctors look inside tumors and other objects. The night sky also would have bathed in blue light from the explosions, making it difficult for animals to sleep.</div>
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Some researchers have speculated that there could be a link between increased cosmic rays and a cooler climate on Earth, although that link isn't proven for sure. (Simply put, the theory associates cosmic rays with aerosols, which could produce clouds, which in turn reduces the amount of solar radiation on the surface.) If a connection could be made, Melott said it is possible the supernovae were associated with a known, smaller mass extinction 2.59 million years ago when Earth went through repeated ice ages.</div>
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"There was climate change around this time," Melott said. "Africa dried out, and a lot of the forest turned into savannah. Around this time and afterwards, we started having glaciations — ice ages — over and over again, and it's not clear why that started to happen. It's controversial, but maybe cosmic rays had something to do with it."</div>
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The research is available on preprint website arXiv and has been accepted in Astrophysical Journal Letters. It was led by Brian Thomas, a physicist and astronomer at Washburn University in Kansas.</div>
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Supernovas Blasted Prehistoric Earth With Radiation

High-energy cosmic rays could have boosted radiation in our atmosphere, causing problems for Earth life millions of years ago. Cancers i...

Crazy Canadian Builds Ferrari Enzo Inspired Jet Car

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Sorry, Vaas Montenegro, but this is the true definition of insanity.<br />
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Strapping jet engines to cars isn't anything new. Land speed record cars and drag racers have been fitted with turbine motors of this sort for years now, and the dawn of the jet age in the post-war years gave rise to a whole horde of concept cars that explored the concept of jet-propelled road cars. Despite being around for well over 50 years, though, jet cars still have the capacity to stun and amaze us all, and especially when they have origin stories along the lines of this truly bonkers tale behind this insane project.<br />
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Even the basic tech sheet of this jet car is crazy enough. Quite a few cars of this ilk make do with one turbine engine, but the Canadian man named Ryan McQueen who built this car decided that two Rolls-Royce units were necessary for his car. Unsurprisingly, a lot of time and money went into making this car that's been appropriately christened "Insanity." The total build process took 12 years, with seven of those dedicated to fabricating the chassis and bodywork, and the total build price allegedly totals to somewhere in the region of 90,000 Canadian dollars. It also seems money did get a little bit tight at some point, the only way McQueen could successfully bid for the two Rolls-Royce engines at auction was to sell his Chevrolet Corvette.</div>
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What's perhaps more amazing about the Insanity project is that McQueen had no formal prior technical training. In fact, a lot of the engineering techniques involved with building the Insanity jet car were self-taught as progress on the project was made - at first, he didn't even know how to properly use the welding machine! All things considered, then, what McQueen's created here is nothing short of extraordinary. It's not everyday, after all, that you come across a 400 mph+ jet car that was built in someone's garage, and it's even rarer to find such a venture being brought about by someone on their lonesome with no prior experience in building a car of this scale. We well and truly doff our caps to you, Mr McQueen!</div>
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Crazy Canadian Builds Ferrari Enzo Inspired Jet Car

Sorry, Vaas Montenegro, but this is the true definition of insanity. Strapping jet engines to cars isn't anything new. Land speed r...

Paul Walker's estate settles with man who stole 30 cars

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People suck. Case in point, a Californian named Richard Taylor, who spent time working for the late Paul Walker at his Valencia, CA garage. Less than 24 hours after Walker's death in 2013, Taylor allegedly swiped over 30 cars from the warehouse, hiding them in a bid to extort money from the late actor's family. The Walker clan sued to get the cars or their value back, and now, the two sides have a deal.<br />
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"It was settled amicably and one of the conditions is that we're getting things back," the Walker family's attorney said.<br />
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That doesn't mean every car Taylor allegedly took will return, of course. According to The Drive, while Taylor hid the cars to try and extort Walker's family, the original filing claimed he also sold some possessions to line his own pockets. Walker's collection, which you can see more of in a Smoking Tire video from December 2013, is immense. It includes multiple JDM cars, including Nissan Skylines and Silvias, multiple 1995 BMW M3s, a 2011 Porsche 911 GT3 RS, and a whole heap of others. As The Drive explains it, Walker's estate is getting the cars back, but it doesn't mean they'll hang on to all the vehicles. The family has auctioned off a few different cars since the star's death, so a similar fate could befall the cars Taylor is returning.<br />
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The Walker family's attorney wouldn't reveal any additional terms of the settlement.

Paul Walker's estate settles with man who stole 30 cars

People suck. Case in point, a Californian named Richard Taylor, who spent time working for the late Paul Walker at his Valencia, CA garage...

Australian enthusiast builds Batman garage under mansion

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A wealthy Australian man has built something that is a lot more impressive than your childhood bedroom's Batman posters and model cars. It's a "Bat Garage" replica of Bruce Wayne's parking structure from the Hollywood flick  "The Dark Knight."<br />
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As detailed by Molecule and originally pointed out by Motor1, the garage even includes a secret entrance that looks, to the untrained eye, like a tennis court. Hydraulics lift a portion of the court to expose a sloped driveway that descends into what really should be Wayne's lair. Like in the film, the garage's roof is lined with lights that give it an almost sky-like look that bathes the owner's exotic car collection in an elegant light.<br />
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From above ground, there is no indication of what lurks beneath. The home itself is a red brick affair with white columns that doesn't look much like the Tudor mega-mansion typically depicted as the fictional Wayne Manor in both the comics and any movie, including "The Dark Knight." If anything, that subtlety makes this garage all the more surprising.<br />
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No word on whether there's a real Batcave to accompany the garage, but maybe that's the kind of thing this owner wants to keep secret.<br />
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What isn't much of a shock, however, is that the garage is shown with the kinds of cars Batman would probably drive if he wasn't in his Lamborghini Aventador or, of course, Batmobile. Examples include an Aston Martin, a Maserati, and a Mercedes-Benz SLS AMG.

Australian enthusiast builds Batman garage under mansion

A wealthy Australian man has built something that is a lot more impressive than your childhood bedroom's Batman posters and model cars...

Did Giant Octopus 'Kraken' Kill an Ichthyosaur?

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<b>Fossils suggest a giant octopus took out an enormous marine reptile.</b></div>
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The legendary gigantic sea monster "kraken," or at least something very much like it, might have actually existed, according to a chapter in the recently published book "Dynamic Paleontology" (Springer, 2016).<br />
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Geologist Mark McMenamin of Mount Holyoke College, who authored the chapter, "Deep Bones," believes that such a creature killed the enormous toothy ichthyosaurs of Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park in Nevada.<br />
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Ichthyosaurs were some of the largest marine reptiles of all time, with the species at the park -- from the genus Shonisaurus -- estimated to have measured up to 70 feet long. Ichthyosaurs in general lived from about 250 to 90 million years ago and had a body shape similar to that of today's dolphins.<br />
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He says that the Triassic Kraken hypothesis is supported "by a swarm of evidence" that includes:<br />
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The composition of the reptilian victims<br />
The fact that their remains were moved around shortly after their deaths at different times<br />
The victims' ribs were broken by constriction<br />
The presence of a possible fragment of a giant octopus or squid beak<br />
The presence of fossilized dung (coprolites)<br />
The deep water environment of the site, and more.<br />
All ichthyosaur species are thought to have gone extinct due to climate change and their slow rate of evolution that prevented them from properly adapting to rising temperatures.<br />
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"Could climate change have killed the Shonisaurus ichthyosaurs at Berlin Ichthyosaur State Park?" McMenamin asked. "Very unlikely -- wait, no -- impossible."<br />
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He said that climate change does not explain why ichthyosaurs dominate the fossil assemblage, versus having many different types of prehistoric animal remains there. He said the nature of the assemblage also negates another theory: that toxic algae did in the ichthyosaurs.<br />
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"Also, the constriction-cracked ribs pose a problem here, as does the fact that the ichthyosaurs were emplaced at different times," he added.<br />
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Considering the evidence, McMenamin is convinced that a kraken-like giant cephalopod killed the ichthyosaurs at what is now the site of the Nevada park. He believes that the predator belonged to an extinct lineage with characteristics of both octopuses and squids, especially glass squids, which are so named because of the transparent nature of most glass squid species.<br />
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He speculates that the big cephalopod's usual prey would have been deep water fish known as coelacanths, which Shonisaurus also hunted.<br />
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"Thus, there was an element of territoriality to this ancient interaction," McMenamin said. "The conflict between the two large predators became a meal of opportunity for the cephalopod. The kraken was evidently able to take down deep diving shonisaurs at will."<br />
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The kraken hypothesis has not been warmly embraced by McMenamin's colleagues.<br />
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"The problem with the kraken argument is it does not take into account all the other ways those vertebrae could have been re-arranged," Spencer Lucas, paleontologist and curator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, told DNews in an earlier article.<br />
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"I suppose the kraken argument is a possibility, but one of many, and a highly unusual one."

Did Giant Octopus 'Kraken' Kill an Ichthyosaur?

Fossils suggest a giant octopus took out an enormous marine reptile. The legendary gigantic sea monster "kraken," or at least ...

Juno Sends Back First Orbital Photo of Jupiter

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Having survived being slingshot around Jupiter, NASA's Juno spacecraft turned its camera back on this week and snapped a picture of its new home.<br />
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The space probe ended a five-year flight to the biggest planet in the solar system on July 4 with a do-or-die breaking maneuver so it could shed speed and fall into Jupiter's gravity well.<br />
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Juno will take a couple of months to re-position itself for 37 looping orbits around the planet's poles, coming at closest approach to about 2,600 miles (4,100 kilometers) above Jupiter's cloud tops.<br />
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To avoid as much radiation as possible, Juno will buzz Jupiter only once every 14 days. Even though its instruments are inside a titanium vault, Juno is expected to be nearly electronically fried after 20 months.<br />
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Juno's orbit was designed to maximize the odds of a successful science mission, the primary goal of which is to measure how much water Jupiter contains. That information will serve as a yardstick for calculating how far from the sun the biggest planet formed, setting the stage for everything else in the solar system, including Earth and its fortuitous position conductive to the evolution of life.<br />
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This week, NASA got its first picture from Juno since its camera was turned back on following the probe's July 4 plunge through Jupiter's radioactive welcome mat.<br />
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The image was taken 9:30 a.m. EDT on Sunday when Juno was 2.7 million miles (4.3 million kilometers) from Jupiter on the outbound leg of the first of two planned 53.5-day capture orbits, NASA said.<br />
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The image, released on Tuesday, shows Jupiter's famed Great Red Spot, a gigantic atmospheric storm that astronomers on Earth have been watching for four centuries.<br />
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Juno is designed to collect radio signals beaming out from beneath the churning clouds, information that scientists can use to figure how the anti-cyclonic storm managed to get three times bigger than Earth and why it is so long-lived.<br />
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"This scene from JunoCam indicates it survived its first pass through Jupiter's extreme radiation environment without any degradation," lead scientist Scott Bolton, with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, said in a press release.<br />
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The first high-resolution images of the planet will be taken on Aug. 27 when Juno makes its next close pass to Jupiter, added mission scientist Candice Hansen-Koharcheck, with the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Ariz.

Juno Sends Back First Orbital Photo of Jupiter

Having survived being slingshot around Jupiter, NASA's Juno spacecraft turned its camera back on this week and snapped a picture of it...

Ronaldo Buys Bugatti Veyron Vitesse To Celebrate Portugal's Euro 2016 Win

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An appropriate set of wheels for a man who, last week, became a true football legend.<br />
Professional footballers and soccer players aren't especially renowned for having a tasteful selection of cars at their disposal. Even when the motors themselves get the thumbs up, it's more often the case that they're hideously modified and customised. The jury is still out, for instance, on whether Mario Balotelli's camo wrap for his Bentley Continental Supersports is an appropriate use for his $111,000-per-week AC Milan salary. We do, however, find much to like in the car collection of Portugal and Real Madrid soccer star, Cristiano Ronaldo.<br />
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Even before his latest acquisition, Real Madrid's premier goal scorer already had a tasty selection of cars to his name, with highlights being a Rolls-Royce Phantom, a Ferrari 599 GTO and at least two Bentley Continentals. However, Ronaldo's latest purchase of a Bugatti Veyron Grand Sport is surely now the flagship car in his collection. Not only is it a stunning vehicle in its own right that'll complement Ronaldo's 'standard' Veyron coupe rather well, but the photos we have of the Bugatti suggests that Ronaldo's nabbed himself a very scarce Vitesse version of the already incredibly rare Veyron Grand Sport - the Black Carbon edition that debuted at Geneva 2013. Hopefully Ronaldo doesn't repeat his 599 prang from a few years ago in his Veyron GS!<br />
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Ronaldo Buys Bugatti Veyron Vitesse To Celebrate Portugal's Euro 2016 Win

An appropriate set of wheels for a man who, last week, became a true football legend. Professional footballers and soccer players aren...