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201 million year old dinosaur named as Dracoraptor hanigani

Loosely translated, the Dracoraptor part means "dragon thief" hanigani honours Rob and Nick Hanigan - the two fossil-hunting brothers who found it. In a new analysis, scientists say the specimen is possibly the oldest known Jurassic dinosaur from the UK. It also marks a key moment in dinosaur evolution, they tell PLoS One journal. Dr Dave Martill from Portsmouth University and colleagues say some 40% of the animal was preserved, including its skull, claws, teeth and foot bones. Forty percent is a lot in fossil terms and has allowed most of the animal to be reconstructed because of the symmetry that exists in the body. The team says very precise dating was made possible in this case because the remains were sandwiched between well-documented fossils of ammonites (extinct molluscs) and conodonts (a tiny eel-like creature). This age - of 201.3 million years (plus or minus 200,000 years) - puts Dracoraptor hanigani right at the base of the Jurassic P...

Being miserable or stressed will not increase risk of dying, according to the UK's Million Women Study

It had been thought that being unhappy was bad for health - particularly for the heart. But the decade-long analysis, published in the Lancet, said previous studies had just confused cause and effect. However, experts argued that unhappiness in childhood may still have a lasting impact. A series of studies had shown that how happy people are, strongly predicts how long they are going to live. Ideas included detrimental changes in stress hormones or the immune system resulting in a higher risk of death. But the research team in the UK and Australia said those studies failed to deal with reverse causality - namely, that people who are ill are not very happy.Participants in the Million Women Study were asked to regularly rate their health, happiness and levels of stress. The results showed that whether people were "never", "usually" or "mostly" happy had no impact on their odds of dying during the duration of the study once other factors such as ...

The total amount of groundwater on the planet is estimated to be 23 million cubic km

If this volume is hard to visualise, imagine the Earth's entire land surface covered in a layer some 180m deep. The new calculation comes from a Canadian-led team and is published in the journal Nature Geoscience. Significantly, little of this water - just 6% - is the kind of bankable resource that is most useful to people. That small fraction is referred to as "modern" groundwater: it is extractable because it is near the surface, and can be used to supplement above-ground resources in rivers and lakes. It's the groundwater that is the most quickly renewed - on the scale of human lifetimes," explained study leader Tom Gleeson from the University of Victoria. And yet this modern groundwater is also the most sensitive to climate change and to human contamination. So, it's a vital resource that we need to manage better."To quantify just how much water is stored in the top 2km of the Earth's surface, Dr Gleeson's team had to combine larg...

Everyone surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, by scientists at the University of Oregon in the US

Everyone is surrounded by a unique "cloud" of millions of their own bacteria, according to scientists at the University of Oregon in the US. Walk through someone else's cloud, and it will "rain" bacteria on your skin and be breathed into your lungs. The study on 11 people, published in the journal PeerJ, showed it was possible to identify people from their microbial miasma. One microbiologist said the findings were simply "gross". Studies have already shown that our microbiome - the collection of bacteria, viruses and fungi that live on our skin and in our bodies - outnumbers our own cells 10-to-one. These can be spread through direct contact, airborne emissions and shed skin cells in dust.People were kept in a sealed chamber for four hours with air pumped in through a filter to prevent contamination. Dishes and filters inside the chamber collected samples from the emanating cloud. One of the researchers, Dr James Meadow, said: "We...