|
|
|
Weekly Update
One of Earth’s oldest quakes took place in India
NEW DELHI: An international team of scientists has found geological markers in eastern India that show an earthquake took place there more than 1,600 million years ago.
“They are among the earliest records of earthquakes known in the Earth’s history,” the team says in a paper to appear in the next issue of Sedimentary Geology.
The scientists from India, Japan and Poland analyzed sedimentary rocks in eastern India and found unusual formations up to a kilometre deep in sediments deposited between 1,600 and 2,100 million years ago.
“The layers show deformations that have never been described before,” lead author Rajat Mazumder, of the University of Munich said.
“We show that they must be the result of shocks, which can only be explained satisfactorily as triggered by earthquakes,” the team said.
The scientists believe that an earthquake occurred as sediment was being deposited and consolidated, altering the formation of some of the layers. “One of the strongest arguments for earthquakes as triggers of the deformations is the occurrence of strongly deformed layers between unaffected layers”.
The scientists believe the quake was followed by a tsunami, which swept away masses of silt and mud and left behind depressions that were filled later.—AFP
First dinosaur traces found in S. Pacific
SYDNEY: A researcher said on Wednesday that he had found the first proof that land-dwelling dinosaurs lived on remote islands in the south Pacific.
Jeffrey Stilwell, a US-born fellow in palaeontology at Melbourne’s Monash University, said he discovered the fossilized foot, finger and spinal bones of carnivorous dinosaurs on the Chatham Islands, about 850km east of New Zealand.
The discovery confirmed that the Chathams were once connected to New Zealand by a finger-like extension.
“Prior to our discoveries, only a few isolated examples of dinosaur fossils had been found in the northern part of New Zealand,” Stilwell said.
“Now we’ve found dinosaur remains almost 1,000 kilometres east out in the middle of the South Pacific,” he said, adding that his team had already uncovered more dinosaur fossils in the Chathams than had been unearthed in New Zealand over the past 25 years.
While some dinosaur remains had been found along the Antarctic peninsula and in South America, this was the first such discovery in the southwest Pacific and is possibly unique in the southern hemisphere, he said.
Stilwell found the first fossils by accident when he visited the Chatham Islands in 2003 in connection to other studies.
“No one had even hypothesized that there were any fossils out that far,” he said.
—APP
At least a million protest in France
PARIS: More than a million demonstrators took to the streets across France on Tuesday to protest a law that removes job security for young workers, police and interior ministry officials indicated.
Police said more than 892,000 people took part in demonstrations around the country, excluding Paris.
Labour unions estimated that in France 2.68 million people took part in the demonstrations, including 700,000 marching in the capital.
The Communist-dominated General Confederation of Labour posted the highest estimates, claiming that three million people had participated nationwide in Tuesday’s protests against the First Employment Contract.
Despite discrepancies between the figures, this was certainly the biggest protest since demonstrations against the law started early in February.
The law establishing a first job contract is aimed at shaking up the rigid labour code that Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin says makes employers reluctant to take on inexperienced young workers. Labour unions, supported by students and workers, say the law will undermine employment security.—AFP
Jewellery returned to owner
SAN FRANCISCO: A purse containing a million dollars worth of jewellery was on its way back to its owner in Canada on Tuesday after being forgotten on a bench in a town near San Francisco, police said.
Shahla Ghannadian had entrusted her handbag and its precious contents to her husband after they stopped at an ice cream parlour in the city of Sausalito on Sunday.
He left it on a bench near a downtown parking lot, and the oversight was not noticed until the couple was back at their San Francisco hotel, said Sausalito police sergeant Kurtis Skoog.
Local resident John Suhroff walked into the police department the next day with the bag, its contents intact, Skoog said.—AFP
Why all the torque leaves Spider Man unfazed
PARIS: Spider-Man never twists like a helpless mountain climber when he dangles from one of his weblines — and the answer lies in the unique molecular structure of his spider silk, say French scientists.
In addition to be being famously strong, the proteins that make up spider thread have incredible torsional qualities. The thread both damps and resists torsional force, and after it is twisted returns to the same position, like special alloys with so-called shape memory.
A team led by Olivier Emile at the University of Rennes, France, used a small rod to represent the weight of a spider.
They successively tied the rod to a thread of Kevlar, the strongest synthetic polymer; to an ultra-fine soft copper thread; and to dragline silk from the European garden spider. Each thread was then twisted through an arc of 90 degrees, with the rod suspended from the bottom.
Spider silk performed best of all. The suspended rod barely budged after the thread was twisted, and unlike the copper the silk retained its strength.
The silk’s torsional secret could lie in proteins called poly-L-alanine and poly-L-glycine, say the French team, speculating that the coiled double-helix molecule of DNA, the code of life itself, may also have a tiny torque effect.—AFP
CURITIBA (Brazil): Some two thousand kids march along an avenue in Curitiba, in southern Brazil, on March 28, during a Greenpeace demonstration to save the oceans, in the framework of the eighth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 8), being held in the city.—AFP
LOS ANGELES: Members of Destiny’s Child, Beyonce Knowles (right), Kelly Rowland (second from left), and Michelle Williams hold plaques after receiving their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on March 28, in the Hollywood section of Los Angeles.—AP
SCHAGEN: Johan Huibersis building an enormous working replica of Noah’s Ark in Schagen, the Netherlands. It is being constructed with American cedar and Norwegian pine, on top of a seaworthy steel hull, and measures roughly 13.5 metres high, 9.5 metres wide and 70 metre long. The ark holds about a fifth as Noah’s would have.—AP|
|
|
|
