Science & Technology - Briefs

zoology Undersea myths The mystery behind the underwater display of natural glow, seen by sailors time and again, has been solved. It is the bioluminescent marine fireworm that secretes a mucous which gives out a green glow to attract mates and ward off predators. Reported in the March issue of

Science & Technology - Briefs

technology Mediaeval books dated by DNA testing

Fossil statement

The rich and famous frequently change the medium they use to make a statement. If today it is a collection of Impressionist masters, tomorrow it can be a large family of adopted children collected from different cultures. Displaying a definite taste for the bizarre, moneyed collectors are now flocking fossil auctions like never before. In April, a 65-million-year-old Triceratops skeleton went under the hammer in Paris, and sold for a hard-to-imagine

First dino tracks found in Arabian Peninsula

For the first time, scientists have discovered dinosaur footprints made some 150 million years ago on the bedrock of the Arabian Peninsula.

Giant frog links South America, Madagascar

In Short

>> Researchers have unearthed the mummy of a 67-million-year-old hadrosaur from South Dakota in the US. A high-resolution CT scan of the 10-tonne fossil shows that the well-preserved body has much of its tissue intact inside an envelope of skin. The scanning shows the hadrosaur's tail vertebrae are spaced farther apart than previous fossil finds, which means that hadrosaurs probably had much longer tails.

Yet another clue to evolution

Remains of Venice plague

This is one of 1,500 skeletons of bubonic plague victims, whose mass grave was recently discovered on the island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, in Italy's Venetian Lagoon. When the disease struck Venice in the 15th and 16th centuries, anthropologists say, everyone sick or showing symptoms of plague were quarantined on the island until they recovered or died. Thousands of skeletons still remain buried beneath the island's meadows.

It is time ASI stood up to demands of protecting relics

When the French naturalist, Henri Mouhot rediscovered the sprawling Khmer temple complex in Cambodia's rainforest in 1861, he exclaimed, "Grander than anything left to us by Greece or Rome." I too was awestruck on seeing the Angkor temples early this year and realised that Mouhot was not exaggerating. The layout of the temples is based on Hindu mythological cosmos with towers representing mountains in the centre, and a surrounding moat representing the sea. Cambodia's Khmer Empire was founded in ninth

Interview with Diganta Narzary

Diganta Narzary, a scientist at the National Botanical Research Institute, Lucknow, discovered a dinosaur egg fossil at Assam's Manas National Park in October 2006. amarjyoti borah talks to him about the importance of the discovery in terms of the geology of north-eastern India The discovery