Giant "Sea Monster" Fossil Discovered in Arctic

James Owen
for National Geographic News

February 26, 2008

A massive prehistoric sea reptile that was longer than a humpback whaleand had teeth the size of cucumbers has been found by fossil hunters on a remote Arctic island.

Measuring some 50 feet (15 meters) in length, the bone-crunching predator represents one of the largest marine reptiles ever known, according to a team led by Jørn Hurum of the Natural History Museum in Oslo, Norway.

Hacker vs Cracker

The word “hacker” gets used in a pejorative sense by journalists an awful lot. Some people think this is perfectly reasonable; others find it offensive, and recommend an alternative term for that meaning. 

In mainstream press, the word “hacker” is often used to refer to a malicious security cracker. There is a classic definition of the term “hacker”, arising from its first documented uses related to information technologies at MIT, that is at odds with the way the term is usually used by journalists. The inheritors of the technical tradition of the word “hacker” as it was used at MIT sometimes take offense at the sloppy use of the term by journalists and others who are influenced by journalistic inaccuracy.

Neutrino "The Ghost particle"

 

Scientists have made their most accurate measurement yet of the mass of a mysterious neutrino particle.

Neutrinos are sometimes known as "ghost particles" because they interact so weakly with other forms of matter.
Previous experiments had shown that neutrinos have a mass, but it was so tiny that it was very hard to measure.
Using data from the largest ever survey of galaxies, researchers put the mass of a neutrino at no greater than 0.28 electron volts.
This is less than a billionth of the mass of a single hydrogen atom, the scientists say.
Their nickname is fitting: a neutrino is capable of passing through a light-year (about six trillion miles) of lead without hitting a single atom.