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A tutorial from Master Cartoonist™ The Oatmeal

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lhsi writes:

Analysis of an allosaur skeleton (Abstract) shows that it died of a deep wound in the lower pubis - the shape and size of which matches a stegosaurus tail spike (informally, the Thagomizer). As the vertical strike came from below the allosaur, it shows that stegosaurus had great dexterity when using its tail as a defensive weapon.

Stegosaurs might be portrayed as lumbering plant eaters, but they were lethal fighters when necessary, according to paleontologists who have uncovered new evidence of a casualty of stegosaurian combat. The evidence is a fatal stab wound in the pubis bone of a predatory allosaur. The wound – in the conical shape of a stegosaur tail spike – would have required great dexterity to inflict and shows clear signs of having cut short the allosaur's life.

“A massive infection ate away a baseball-sized sector of the bone,” reports Houston Museum of Natural Science paleontologist Robert Bakker and his colleagues, who present a poster on the discovery on Tuesday at the meeting of the Geological Society of America in Vancouver, B.C. “Probably this infection spread upwards into the soft tissue attached here, the thigh muscles and adjacent intestines and reproductive organs.” The lack of any signs of healing strongly suggests the allosaur died from the infection.

In order to deliver the mortal wound to the allosaur, a stegosaur would have had to sweep its tail under the allosaur and twist the tail tip, because normally the spikes point outward and backward. That would have been well within the ability of a stegosaur, Bakker said.

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Your Daily Horoscope

Here’s some more excellent parenting.

c0lo writes:

Citing a Pew Research survey as well as other sources, Priceonomics reports – with nice charts – that the younger an American is, the more likely is to not have or feel a religious affiliation.

81% of all Americans aged 30 and older, and 88% of American septugenarians (aged 70 and older), identify as Christian. Young Americans, on the other hand, are pretty singularly secular in comparison. Only 68% of adults under 30 identified as Christian. 25% of adults under 30 didn’t affiliate with any religion whatsoever.

Is this just because people tend to get more religious as they get older, or is religion actually on the decline with younger people? According to Pew, today’s young adults reject organized religion at a significantly higher rate than generations before them at their age: In the late 1970s, 13% of Baby Boomers had no religious affiliation; by the late 1990s, 20% of Generation X-ers had no religious affiliation.

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I’ve had enough of your sarcasm.

Simulating everyday objects and animals is at an all-time high. Bossa Studios, developer of Surgeon Simulator, is well aware of this and they’ve got a new game to prove it.

I Am Bread is the next game form Surgeon Simulator developer Bossa Studios. The game has a trailer available below and you can see how it’s trying to simulate what being a slice of bread entails. You know, things like skateboarding, riding on ceiling fans, jumping inside of a washing machine, etc… No release date or platforms were announced.

“Harder than Surgeon Simulator? YOU DECIDE!” read the game’s description.

WHO lauds "spectacular success story" as Nigeria declared free from Ebola after 42 days without new cases.

Frozach Submitted

First time accepted submitter flopwich writes Google used a camel-mounted camera to get a 'street view' of a stretch of desert in the United Arab Emirates. PETA's director Ingrid E. Newkirk is upset about it, saying they should have used jeeps. "These days, jeeps are in common use in the desert, as are light planes and even dune buggies, and satellite images could also easily have been taken instead," she said. "(Google) should leave camels out of its activites altogether."

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Norway's new banknotes are quite literally works of art. After inviting submissions from a number of design houses, the country's Norges Bank has chosen just two. While the front of the new notes will display traditional imagery, the rear will feature conceptual designs that transform Norway's costal landscapes into pixels. The artworks, created by Oslo-based Snøhetta, become progressively more abstract as the value of the notes increase, with the 50 kroner note depicting an idyllic scene and the 1000 kroner note a windswept sea of purple. The new designs will go into circulation in 2017, and you can squint at the rest of them after the break.

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Via: It's Nice That

Source: Snøhetta

The Magic Circle is the first game from Question, LLC, the new studio from Jordan Thomas, he of Thief 3′s The Cradle, BioShock 2, BioShock: Infinite and many more. It’s a systems-driven first-person exploration adventure about a years-in-development game of uncommon ambition, and it’s about rewriting its rules from the inside while trying not to attract the attention of its developers. I’ve played a couple of hours of an early build.

“Attack them, my spider-army!” A horde of chittering polygonal arachnids skitters surges towards a pack of flamers at my command, while I hang back to let them do my dirty work for me. Every single one of them burns to death. Oh, right. Forgot to set the ‘Fireproof’ attribute. I summon their ‘leader’ – in fact an arbitrary member given the Groupthink attribute, which duly shares its traits with all similar entities – and edit its properties. Let’s try this again. “Attack them, my flame retardant spider-army!”
… [visit site to read more]

An anonymous reader writes "Free software programmer Lennart Poettering has been part of his fair share of controversy in the open source community, and his latest essay may raise the most eyebrows yet. Poettering takes on the idea that the community is one big happy family and has some harsh words for the loudest and most obnoxious members. He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple 'petitions' on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a 'song' on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more."

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mcgrew writes:

A team at MIT are developing a wearable HVAC unit that will supposedly keep you at a comfortable temperature. From Wired:

Wristify, as they call their device, is a thermoelectric bracelet that regulates the temperature of the person wearing it by subjecting their skin to alternating pulses of hot or cold, depending on what’s needed. The prototype recently won first place at this year’s MADMEC, an annual competition put on by the school’s Materials Science and Engineering program, netting the group a $10,000 prize, which they’ll use to continue its development. It’s a promising start to a clever approach that could help alleviate a serious energy crisis. But as Sam Shames, the MIT senior who helped invent the technology, explains, the team was motivated by a more prosaic problem: keeping everyone happy in a room where no one can agree where to set the thermostat.

After freezing in the dentist's office this morning, I want one!

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Unsurprisingly, there's one group that's not at all excited to hear Netflix and IMAX are arranging for the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel to hit theaters and streaming at the same time: movie theater owners. According to the LA Times, Regal, AMC, Carmike and Cinemark have all stated they don't plan to screen Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: The Green Legend on their IMAX screens when it arrives next year, while Variety notes Canada's Cineplex and Europe's Cineworld are also staying away from the flick. The studios blocked a planned experiment to sell Tower Heist viewing for $60 a pop (honestly, they saved everyone there) back in 2011, but it seems doubtful they'll be able to intimidate Netflix into backing down.

Previous day-and-date home/theatrical releases, from Steven Soderbergh's Bubble in 2006 to recent flicks like Snowpiercer and Arbitrage, have usually been very limited. When Kickstarter-backed Veronica Mars debuted earlier this year, Warner Bros. had to buy every ticket in the theater in advance just to set up the screenings. IMAX seems content to screen the movie mostly in China, where Variety says it will have over 200 locations by the time this movie is out (and where Netflix does not yet offer service).

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Variety, LA Times, Washington Post, Reuters

astroengine writes Next time you're swimming in the ocean, consider this: part of the water is older than the sun. So concludes a team of scientists who ran computer models comparing the ratios of hydrogen isotopes over time. Taking into account new insights that the solar nebula had less ionizing radiation than previously thought, the models show that at least some of the water found in the ocean, as well as in comets, meteorites and on the moon, predate the sun's birth.

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gewg_ writes:

The Center for American Progress reports:

A new study finds that scientists are seen as highly competent, and climate scientists in particular have the trust of Americans.

Unfortunately, that isn't seen as a very clickworthy finding—at least in our modern cynical age—so the authors of the study and the news release chose to spin the results as "Scientists Seen as Competent But Not Trusted by Americans." If you search that headline, you'll find thousands of results for articles on and links to this Princeton study.

You'd never guess from the headline or the news release, that when the researchers surveyed "public attitudes toward climate scientists" on a "seven-item scale of distrust," they found "distrust is low."

Frankly, the communication of the actual results of this entire study are abysmal, which is especially ironic since the title of the study is "Gaining trust as well as respect in communicating to motivated audiences about science topics." I'm afraid Princeton has gained neither here.

Related: Scientists Seen as Competent but Not Trusted by Americans

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You can't make me apologize for this joke!!! I shan't!!! *swings out window on chandelier* 

AnonTechie writes:

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt today said it was a “mistake” to support the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a group that has said human-created climate change could be “beneficial” and opposes environmental regulations. Schmidt said groups trying to cast doubt on climate change science are "just literally lying."

Google’s membership in ALEC has been criticized because of the group’s stance on climate change and its opposition to network neutrality rules and municipal broadband. Earlier this month, Google refused to comment after 50 advocacy groups called on the company to end its affiliation with ALEC.

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The boycotting of systemd has led to the creation of uselessd, a new init daemon based off systemd that tries to strip out the "unnecessary" features...