Fossil

• The current role of offshore wind electricity in the United States has been understudied, they said.
• The analysis, “ Expanded modeling scenarios to understand the role of offshore wind in decarbonizing the United States ,” appears in the journal Nature Energy.
• Under the study’s core scenario with high load growth and electrification, offshore wind accounts for 133 gigawatts by 2050.
• NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy's primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development.

• This system will utilize Advent’s eMethanol-powered fuel cells (“Serene”) and batteries to provide a reliable and efficient electricity supply for a specially designed Technohull vessel.
• The initial focus is to integrate Advent's Serene systems into a Technohull boat to achieve a significant range, at planing speed, and in open sea conditions.
• Advent’s SereneU solution, a 4th generation eMethanol-powered hydrogen fuel cell that will be used, can be configured to provide power of up to 250kW.
• Our industry along with the rest of the world is striving for more sustainable solutions, and Technohull cannot possibly remain inactive.

• Little is known, however, about the pathways of these migrations.
• Our evidence suggests this valley had a riverine and wetland zone that would have provided ideal passage for hunter-gatherers as they moved out of Africa and deep into the Levant and Arabia.

Wandering out of Africa

• Researchers hypothesise humans migrating out of Africa would have used platforms in the eastern Sahara, the Nile River Valley, or the margins of the western Red Sea.
• From there, these small bands of hunter-gatherers would have passed into the Sinai – a land bridge connecting Africa with the rest of Asia – following migrating animals and hunting a variety of them for sustenance.
• For many of these hunter-gatherers, the next stop on the journey would have been the southern portion of the Jordan Rift Valley.

When Arabia was a verdant land

• Our findings from sedimentary sections ranging 5 to 12 metres in thickness showed ecosystem fluctuations over time, including cycles of dry and humid environments.
• We also found evidence for the presence of ancient rivers and wetlands.
• Luminescence dating showed the sedimentary environments formed between 125,000 and 43,000 years ago, suggesting there had been multiple wet intervals.
• Towards the south, fieldwork in northern Saudi Arabia has also demonstrated a network of rivers and lakes was once present in the region.

Multiple migrations into South-West Asia

• Our findings from the Jordan Rift Valley indicate there were multiple early human migrations from Africa, and into Asia, during favourable conditions.
• Our results also suggest, together with the Levantine and Arabian evidence, that hunter-gatherers used inland river and wetland systems as they crossed South-West Asia.
• Although ancient DNA evidence indicates Homo sapiens interbred with Neanderthals and Denisovans multiple times as they spread into Asia, on-the-ground evidence for these encounters has generally been lacking.

• Despite their public image as torpid, lumbering creatures, many dinosaurs were evidently warm-blooded, highly active animals, capable of prolonged and strenuous aerobic exercise.
• In new research, my colleagues and I determined how much energy minibus-sized dinosaurs called Maiasaura used while growing to adulthood.

How bones heal and grow

• Locomotion and weight-bearing activity cause stresses and strains that result in microfractures in the bones.
• Fortunately, the leg bones of dinosaurs – like those of birds, mammals and varanid lizards such as the Komodo dragon – repair themselves in a process known as bone remodelling.
• The main impediment to this research is the shortage of collections of bones from a single dinosaur species at different stages of growth.

‘Good mother reptile’

• Fossils from this formation have yielded much information about the eggs, hatchlings and early lives of a dinosaur named Maiasaura (meaning “good mother reptile”).
• This herbivorous hadrosaur apparently tended her eggs and raised her offspring for more than a year after hatching.

How to measure blood flow from bones

• A decade ago, I wondered whether the size of the foramen could be an indirect measurement of the rate of blood flow to a bone.
• This turned out to be true, and since then the “foramen technique” has been used on fossils to estimate blood flow rate and hence how much energy and nutrients were used in the bones of adult dinosaurs.

Rapid growth doesn’t come cheap

• Blood flow rates calculated from foramen size were similar in one-year-old dinosaurs weighing between 189kg and 455kg and in six- to 11-year-old adults weighing between 1,680kg and 3,200kg.
• In other words, a one-year-old had about four times as much blood flowing to each gram of its shinbone as a full-grown adult did.
• These differences reveal how much more energy and nutrients it took to build bones in the early rapid growth stages of a Maiasaura’s life than it did to maintain the bones in adulthood.