TV airwaves may go to wireless carriers
WASHINGTON, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- A new U.S. law could result in fewer TV stations on the air in exchange for faster wireless data services for smartphones and tablet computers, officials say.
The law, attached to a payroll tax package signed by President Barack Obama last week, gives the Federal Communications Commission authority to explore such an exchange, CBS News reported Wednesday.
Under rules the FCC will formulate in coming months, broadcast television, which has few viewers, would be squeezed into a smaller slice of the airwaves and the bandwidth freed up would be available for bidding by companies.
Television broadcasters would be given an opportunity to decide whether they want to give up their frequencies, and those that do so could continue to operate as cable-only channels.
Bidding for the freed airwaves would likely not begin until late 2013 or early 2014, officials said, partly to give bidders time to raise funds to pay for any spectrum they might win in the expected bandwidth auction.
T. rex said to have strongest bite ever
LIVERPOOL, England, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- Tyrannosaurus rex had the most powerful bite of any creature that ever walked the Earth, say British scientists who studied the dinosaur's skull structure.
While some scientists had believed the bite of the prehistoric predator was much more modest, close to modern predators such as alligators, the new research revealed its biting pressure was around three tons.
"That's equivalent to a medium-sized elephant sitting on you," researcher Karl Bates from the University of Liverpool told the BBC.
The researchers made a digital scan of a life-sized copy of a T. rex skeleton exhibited at Manchester Museum to create a 3D computer model of the skull.
"Then we could map the muscles onto that skull," Bates said.
The researchers reproduced the full force of a bite by activating the muscles to contract fully and snap the digital jaws shut.
The biting power of an adult T. rex suggests it could have punctured the tough hide of another dinosaur, they said.
The findings have been published in the journal Biology Letters.
Search for E.T. to go live on the Web
LOS ANGELES, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- The search for extraterrestrial life is about to go worldwide with a Web site intended to get the public involved in the hunt, officials said.
Announced at a technology conference in Los Angeles, the site Setilive.org will stream radio frequencies that are transmitted from the Seti (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Allen Telescope Array in Northern California.
Participants in the project, being run by Jillian Tarter of the Seti Institute's Center for Seti Research, will be asked to search for signs of unusual activity in the hope the human brain can find things automated systems might miss.
"There are frequencies that our automated signal detection systems now ignore, because there are too many signals there," Tartar told BBC News.
"Most are created by Earth's communication and entertainment technologies, but buried within this noise there may be a signal from a distant technology."
"I'm hoping that an army of volunteers can help us deal with these crowded frequency bands that confuse our machines," she said. "By doing this in real time, we will have an opportunity to follow up immediately on what our volunteers discover."
Zooniverse, home to many successful Internet citizen science projects, is taking part in the project.
"Over the last few years, we have learned about the incredible desire of hundreds of thousands of people to take part in scientific research as they've used Zooniverse to classify galaxies, explore the Moon and even to discover planets," said Chris Lintott, Zooniverse's principal investigator.
"With Setilive.org, we're very excited to be inviting them on this grandest of adventures."
Did Neanderthals take to the seas first?
PATRAS, Greece, Feb. 29 (UPI) -- Neanderthals may have taken to the seas to become ancient mariners centuries before modern humans managed the same trick, researchers in Greece say.
Archaeological evidence suggests our extinct cousins may have made voyages in the Mediterranean in boats at least 100,000 years ago.
Neanderthals lived around the Mediterranean beginning 300,000 years ago, and now their distinctive "Mousterian" stone tools have been found on both the Greek mainland and, intriguingly, on the Greek islands of Lefkada, Kefalonia and Zakynthos, NewScientist.com reported Wednesday.
That could be explained if the islands weren't islands at the time, but researcher George Ferentinos of the University of Patras in Greece says the islands have been cut off from the mainland for as long as the tools have been on them.
Ferentinos said he believes Neanderthals had a seafaring culture for tens of thousands of years, while modern humans are thought to have taken to the seas just 50,000 years ago.
Even if he is right, other researchers said, Neanderthals were probably not the first hominin seafarers.
One million-year-old stone tools have been found on the Indonesian island of Flores, suggesting something, perhaps primitive Homo erectus, crossed the sea to Flores before Neanderthals even evolved.
