T. Rex's Missing 3rd Finger Found

It's bad enough to misplace a finger, much less have it lost for 65 million years. But after decades of searching, paleontologists at Montana's Hell Creek have found the missing third finger of one of Tyrannosaurus rex's undersized "hands."

The finger suggests that T. rex had a powerful wrist and its hands were probably able to hold onto chunks of flesh while the monster's gnarly jaws did all the killing.

The newfound bone is a right metacarpal, equivalent to one of the long bones in the palm of a human hand, explains T. rex investigator Elizibeth Quinlan of Fort Peck Paleontology, Inc., in Fort Peck, Montana. She plans to present the discovery on Oct. 28 at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Denver.

"It's unquestionably the metacarpal," Quinlan told Discovery News. No previous T. rex remains have ever been found with a third metacarpal, despite the fact that the other bones suggested its presence. "There is a notch in the side of the second metacarpal that was just begging to have something fit into it."

The revised anatomy of the hand suggests there was a very strong tendon that attached to second metacarpal, giving the hand a pretty decent grip, she said. Still, the puny limbs were almost certainly not used by T. rex to grapple with prey or kill.

"We were thinking that T. rex did use its upper appendages not so much in hunting but in feeding," said Quinlan. That means ripping off pieces of flesh from corpses and clutching the stuff to keep it from other hungry predators. "We don't think their table manners were very good."

"I would strongly support (the hand) being used for carrying a piece of meat away," said paleontologist Scott Hartman, science director of the Wyoming Dinosaur Center in Thermopolis. "There is a reason that carrying meat away would be useful."

Acoustic Barrel Grows New Materials in Space

What grows in space, is about the size of a baseball and is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars?

Jacques Guigne is waiting to find out.

The research scientist and founder of Guigne International in Newfoundland owns a device, now aboard the International Space Station, that uses beams of sound to suspend materials for processing.

"The beams of sound energy work like invisible fingers that gently push the floating sample into the center of the container so that it doesn't touch the walls," explained Guigne.

Guigne told Discovery News the fingers of sound "are very intelligent in terms of how they are manipulated."

The primary advantage of using sound beams to hold materials in space is so that they can be processed cleanly, without any contamination from a container.

"With no gravity and nothing touching the walls (of a container) you can have a very pure structure. Hence, it's of great value," said Guigne, who pegs the price of a space-formed sample in the range of hundreds of thousands of dollars, depending on the type of material produced.

Those used for semiconductors, for example, would be among the most valuable, he added.

"If you have a steady base of manufacturing then you can see a good return," Guigne said.

Sound-suspended samples can be grown to relatively large sizes in space, about the diameter of a golf ball or baseball, which dwarfs the millimeter-sized materials previously produced in microgravity.

A ball of pure glass, for example, can be sliced and sold for a variety of commercial and manufacturing uses, though Guigne says at this point he considers his proprietary and patented technology to be a test bed.

discovery.com

Andromeda Galaxy a Cosmic Cannibal

Our nearest major galactic neighbor is a cosmic cannibal. And it's heading this way eventually.

Astronomers have long suspected Andromeda of being a space predator, consuming dwarf galaxies that wander too close. Now, cosmic detectives are doing a massive search of the neighborhood and have found proof of Andromeda's sordid past: They've spotted leftovers in Andromeda's wake.

Early results of a massive telescope scan of Andromeda and its surroundings found about half a dozen remnants of Andromeda's galactic appetite. Stars and dwarf galaxies that got too close to Andromeda were ripped from their usual surroundings.

"What we're seeing right now are the signs of cannibalism," said study lead author Alan McConnachie of the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia. "We're finding things that have been destroyed ... partly digested remains."

Their report is published in Thursday's edition of the journal Nature.

Andromeda and our Milky Way are the two big dogs of our galactic neighborhood. Andromeda is the closest major galaxy to us, about 2.5 million light years away. A light year is about 5.9 trillion miles. The massive mapping of Andromeda is looking half a million light years around Andromeda.

discovery.com

Meteorite Proves Mars Had Thicker Atmosphere

A huge iron-nickel meteorite discovered on the surface of Mars by one of NASA's robotic geology stations is giving scientists unexpected insights into the planet's past.

Among the questions scientists are scrambling to answer is how the watermelon-sized metallic rock managed to make it to surface of Mars intact.

Computer models show that the planet's current atmosphere could cushion the descent of a meteorite only about one-tenth the size of the meteorite the rover Opportunity spotted late last month.

Anything larger would have been mostly or totally obliterated on impact, leaving only a crater.

"The fact that this meteorite is still intact tells you that the atmosphere must have been denser to slow it down for the fall," planetary geologist Matt Golombek, with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told Discovery News.

Opportunity has been exploring an equatorial region of the planet known as Meridian Planum since January 2004 looking of signs of past water. It discovered a much smaller metallic meteorite in December 2004 as it was probing part of its discarded heat shield.

Comet Holds Building Block for Life

An amino acid, one of the essential ingredients to life on Earth, has been found in a comet for the first time, NASA announced Monday.

Since amino acids have already been discovered in meteorites, this new development, reported at the American Chemical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., suggests that early Earth had plenty of opportunities to have been seeded for life by extraterrestrial bodies.

Scientists concluded nearly two years of painstaking research on comet samples returned by the Stardust probe to confirm that glycine -- one of 20 known amino acids that form the building blocks for life on Earth -- was in the comet Wild 2, and not the result of terrestrial contamination.

"We're interested in understanding the inventory of materials that were available on early Earth when life got started," lead researcher Jamie Elsila, with NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., told Discovery News.

"It's not a particularly unexpected discovery that glycine is in a comet -- we've found amino acids in meteorites before -- but it does show that comets are another way that amino acids could have come to Earth," she said.

Elsila and colleagues developed a technique to extract and analyze deposits of glycine from bits of aluminum foil that lined the probe's collection plates. They discovered that carbon atoms in the glycine had an extra neutron in its nucleus compared to terrestrial carbon, confirming that the amino acid did not come from Earth.

"This is telling us that the molecular ingredients for life are ubiquitous," Carl Pilcher, who oversees NASA's astrobiology program at the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif., told Discovery News.

NASA Looks to Fly Commercial

NASA will spend $50 million of federal economic stimulus funds to seed development of commercial passenger spaceships; however, a presidential panel reviewing the U.S. space program says that may be just the beginning.

According to the recommendations of the U.S. Human Space Flight Plans committee, which delivered its preliminary findings to the White House on Friday, NASA should set aside $2.4 billion between 2011 and 2014 for rides to the International Space Station on commercial U.S. carriers.

"There are companies that would love to move forward with orbital launch service on their own, using only private funds, but it just wouldn't happen for many, many years," John Gedmark, executive director of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a Washington, D.C.-based industry trade group, told Discovery News. "What the government funding would do is basically allow these companies to accelerate these efforts."

With the government as a base customer, commercial firms would be able to develop an array of new markets for orbital launch services, including tourism and scientific research, Gedmark added.

"When you have multiple companies doing this as part of their core business, you open the doors for all sorts of things that you can do in space," he said.

The agency has $50 million available for firms to flesh out plans to provide astronauts rides to and from space station, which orbits about 225 miles above Earth. Proposals are due by Sept. 22.

Space Shuttle Discovery Arrives at ISS

Space shuttle Discovery pulled up and docked at the International Space Station on Sunday night, delivering a full load of gear and science experiments.

The linkup occurred as the spacecraft zoomed more than 200 miles above the Atlantic and ended a round-the-world chase of nearly two days. The astronauts cheered when the hatches swung open, and the two crews greeted each other with hugs and handshakes.

A thruster failure made the rendezvous all the more challenging for shuttle commander Rick Sturckow.

One of Discovery's small thrusters began leaking shortly after Friday's midnight liftoff and was shut down. None of the little jets was available for the rendezvous and docking, and Sturckow had to use the bigger, more powerful primary thrusters, making for a somewhat bumpier, noisier ride.

Struckow had trained for this backup method -- never before attempted for a space station docking -- well before the flight. Mission Control radioed up congratulations after his stellar performance.

"You'll be happy to know it occurred on the 25th anniversary of the maiden flight of Discovery," Mission Control said.