the largest frog that ever lived

Known as the devil frog, (Beelzebufo ampinga), these amphibians grow up to 41cm and 4.5kg and are the largest frogs that ever lived on earth.They lived on the island of Madagascar during the Late Cretaceous, about 65 to 70 million years ago. They are believed to have lived around the age of dinosaurs, and are already extinct.

The name Beelzebufo ampinga, taken from Beelzebub, which means devil in Greek and Bufo, meaning frog in Latin. Ampinga means the shield to show a glimpse of his characteristics resemble armor.

These frogs are known to be agressive and ill-tempered, who will not hesitate to snap with fierce at anything that passes by. Devil frogs had very wide mouths with strong jaws and also prey on mammals, lizards, smaller frogs and even baby dinosaurs.

What our brain does when we're sound asleep

Our brain when we're asleep, calculates what to remember and forget, which results in sharper and clearer thinking.

It consolidates all of our memories, so that we can ensure that important information to be remembered will be retrieved later on.

"The sleeping brain isn't stupid—it doesn't just consolidate everything you put into it, but calculates what to remember and what to forget," said study leaderJessica Payne, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Research has shown that people usually remember things that has left the most emotional impact on them. For example, if people were to witness a car accident or banana leaves in the background, they are most likely to remember the car accident.

Rather than preserving scenes in their entirety, the brain apparently restructures scenes to remember only their most emotional and perhaps most important elements while allowing less emotional details to deteriorate.

reference: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/12/101201-sleep-memories-health-brain-science/

Leopards

Leopards are graceful and powerful big cats closely related to lions, tigers, and jaguars. Being part of the cat family, leopards are also the shrewdest. Leopards are very strong climbers, and are capable of killing prey larger than itself. They live in sub-Saharan Africa, northeast Africa, Central Asia, India, and China. However, many of their populations are endangered, especially outside of Africa.

(pic of a northern chinese leopard)


Leopards are usually very comfortable in trees that it often hauls its kill into the branches. What made leopards able to successfully launch their kills are their coats of fur, which helps them to camoflauge in the trees and surroundings.


references: http://www.awf.org/content/wildlife/detail/leopard
http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/leopard/

dinosaurs

Many predicted that dinosaurs became extinct around 65 million years ago. Till today, no one really knows the real reason of the extinction of dinosaurs but since then, there were many theories going around on the possible reasons of what stopped their species. The many theories people think are possible, but not back up with solid proof are due to asteroid, brain functions, catepillars, greenhouse gases, hitting asteroids, ozones, stress and supernova.

However, most scientists believe that it was due to the collision of asteroids sending dust and dirty water to the atmosphere that led to the end of bearing of dinosaurs.




reference: http://dsc.discovery.com/dinosaurs/prehistoric.html

New Planet Discovered: First Spotted Outside Our Galaxy

A painting of an exoplanet (right of center) that, like HIP 13044b, orbits an older sunlike star.

A new planet was discovered orbiting a bloated red star.

Since the mid-1990s astronomers have been adding to the list of known exoplanets. Almost 500 exoplanets found so far all formed in our home galaxy, the Milky Way.

(exoplanets: planets that exist outside our solar system.)

The newfound planet "likely formed when the star was not yet a part of the Milky Way. It's traveled with the star all this time," said study leader Johny Setiawan, an astronomer at the Max-Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany.

Astronomers think stars and their planets are made from the same initial building blocks, so if a star has few metals, the disk of material that surrounded the star when it was young—and from which its planets are born—was also metal-poor.

Even though gas giants are made of mostly hydrogen and helium, astronomers think the planets still require an initial core of heavy elements to attract lighter gases and grow.

Alan Boss, a planet-formation theorist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington, D.C., said HIP 13044b is "big news," because it's such an anomaly in terms of its origins.

"This object ... is unlikely to have formed by the conventional mechanism of first building a massive core of rock and ice and then pulling on enough gas to form a true gas giant planet," said Boss, who was not part of the study team.

Study leader Setiawan agrees: "Now we have this finding, and it suggests maybe there are other mechanisms of planet formation around metal-poor stars that we don't know about."

reference: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/11/101118-science-space-new-planet-discovered-outside-galaxy/

Nitrous Oxide – Nothing to Laugh About

Also known as laughing gas, nitrous oxide seems less funny since scientists branded it as the third most important greenhouse gas emitted through human activities.


A woman sprays fertilizer on her field in Nakornsawan, Thailand. Fertilizers are the single most important source for man-made nitrous oxide emissions (Photo: Reuters)


Contribution to Human-Induced Climate Change: 7 percent

Global Warming Potential (100 years): 298 times stronger than CO2


Like most other greenhouse gases, nitrous oxide is neither toxic nor destructive but a fundamental part of the mechanisms that keep our planet healthy and green. Produced by digesting bacteria, nitrous oxides are part of the nitrogen cycle, one of the most important chemical reactions on Earth.


Nitrogen is the chemical basis for proteins and DNA; plants need it for photosynthesis and growth. While the gas is the most abundant element of our atmosphere, it cannot be used. Higher organisms have to rely on tiny bacteria to turn it into ammonia or nitrates. Once a plant dies, other bacteria feed on the leftovers and turn nitrates back into gases like nitrous oxide or nitrogen.


This benevolent cycle went on for millions of years until chemists and farmers realized that nitrogen fertilizers greatly increase crop yields. Since then, more and more nitrogen has been added to the cycle. Farmers around the globe use more than 70 million tons of nitrogen fertilizers annually. According to a study conducted by Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen in 2007, some 3 to 5 percent of this nitrogen is converted directly into nitrous oxide, twice the amount previously thought.


Fertilizer application will increase with a growing world population. Over the next three decades food production will need to increase by about 60 percent, estimates the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization. In the same period, nitrous oxide emissions could double, especially in developing countries.

Developing more effective ways of adding nitrogen to the soil will be a key challenge. Today, fertilizers are often washed away by rain into lakes and seas where algae feed on them, bloom uncontrollably, and starve the water of oxygen. Every summer, nitrogen-rich river flow from the Mississippi River creates a “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico the size of Massachusetts.


reference: http://knowledge.allianz.com/en/globalissues/climate_change/global_warming_basics/nitrous_oxide_greenhouse_gas_profile.html

Greenhouse Gases: Lifegivers and Lifetakers

Greenhouse gases heat up our planet tremendously for decades. They are part of Earth's atmosphere and trap warmth emitted by the sun, thus heating Earth. It is this process – the greenhouse effect – that makes life on the planet possible.

Natural greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide have always been in the atmosphere. Without them, the world’s average surface temperature would be a chilly -18 degrees Celsius. Thanks to the greenhouse effect, however, we enjoy an average temperature of 14 degrees.

Throughout Earth’s history, temperatures have varied greatly, mostly depending on the concentration of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere. All signs now suggest that a major temperature change is happening again, but this time humanity is the cause. Read our gas profiles and learn more about the causes of climate change and how we can reduce them.