Crocodiles are world-class chompers
TALLAHASSEE, Fla., March 16 (UPI) -- When it comes to biting, crocodiles are the heavyweight chomp champions of the animal world, Florida researchers say.
Greg Erickson of Florida State University said he and his colleagues had wondered just how hard alligators and crocodiles can bite.
The answer? A bite force value of 3,700 pounds for a 17-foot saltwater crocodile, the highest bite force ever recorded, Florida State reported Thursday.
But it's nothing compared with the largest extinct crocodilians, Erickson said, 35- to 40-foot animals that bit at forces as great as 23,100 pounds.
Measuring bite force in a living crocodile or alligator is dangerous work, he said.
"I have to admit, the first time I placed our meter into the maw of an adult crocodile, I was nervous. It was all over in the blink of an eye.
"When it struck, it nearly wrested my grip from the handle. The noise of the jaws coming together was like a gunshot. The power of the animal was astounding, and the violence of the event frightening."
Gators and crocs have similar maximal bite-force capacity pound for pound, he said, because they basically all have the same musculoskeletal design, just different snouts and teeth.
"It is analogous to putting different attachments on a weed eater -- grass cutter, brush cutter, tree trimmer, they all have the same type of engine," Erickson said. "There are bigger and smaller engines, with higher and lower horsepower, but they have the same attachments."
If there's one lesson to be taken from his research, he said, it's to keep a good distance between yourself and the nearest crocodile.
"If you can bench-press a pickup truck, then you can escape a croc's jaws," Erickson warned. "It is a one-way street between the teeth and stomach of a large croc."
Study tracks births, deaths of words
LUCCA, Italy, March 16 (UPI) -- Words are dying from languages at a faster rate and new words are coming in less often, possibly because of digital spell checking, Italian researchers say.
Researchers conducted an analysis of more than 10 million words in English, Spanish and Hebrew texts from 1800 to 2008 that had been digitized by Google.
"We are now able to analyze language comprising not only the common words, but also the extremely rare words, and not just for yesterday but for yesteryear, and not just for yesteryear, but back to a time before most people can track their family lineage," researcher Alexander Petersen of the Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy told LiveScience.com.
The study focused on fluctuations of how often words were used and how often they "died," or fell out of common use.
"Words don't actually die -- they only disappear in a statistical sense," Petersen said. "Unlike animal species, which undergo irreversible extinction, words can come in and out of use."
While words have died at a faster rate in the past 10 to 20 years than in all the time measured before, languages are also seeing fewer entirely new words emerge, researchers said.
Automatic spell-checkers may be partly responsible for that, they said, killing misspelled or unusual counterparts of accepted words before they see print.
After about 40 years, new words either see enough use to get accepted into a language or largely are abandoned, the study found.
Smartphone owners want bigger screens
BOSTON, March 16 (UPI) -- A survey of U.S. and British smartphone users shows they want their next phone to have a bigger screen but be thinner, a research organization says.
Strategy Analytics showed American and British survey participants several prototype phones with small and large screen sizes and different thicknesses and found a 90 percent preferred phones with bigger screen sizes than their current smartphones, venturebeat.com reported Thursday.
The Samsung Galaxy Note and the LG Optimus 4X HD and Optimus Vue are among the phones pushing this trend, with screen sizes around five inches.
While a screen size of between 4 inches and 4-1/2 inches was the most popular choice in the survey, size isn't all that matters, the survey found; people also want large phones that are thin.
Motorola hit that target when it released the Droid RAZR last fall, a smartphone measuring just 0.28 inches thick with a 4.3-inch screen.
The desire for larger screen sizes is driven mostly by cellphone users who want to easily browse the Internet and watch video, Strategy Analytics said.
British grave said to be early Christian
CAMBRIDGE, England, March 16 (UPI) -- An Anglo-Saxon grave uncovered near Cambridge in Britain could be one of the earliest examples of Christianity replacing paganism, archaeologists said.
The skeleton of a teenage girl was found buried on a wooden bed with a gold and garnet cross, a symbol of Christianity, on her chest in a grave thought to date from the mid-seventh century, when Christianity was beginning to be introduced to the pagan Anglo-Saxon kings.
The grave of the teenager, believed to be about 16 years old, was one of a cluster of four uncovered at a site south of Cambridge, the BBC reported Friday.
The three other graves were more typical Anglo-Saxon burials with no indications of Christianity, archaeologists said.
In the teenager's grave, the method of burial -- on a bed -- and the quality of the jewelry, including the cross, could indicate the girl was from a noble or royal family, researchers said.
"Christian conversion began at the top and percolated down," Sam Lucy, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon burial from Newnham College in Cambridge, said.
A bag of precious and semiprecious stones and a small knife were found with the body but the idea of burying a body with "grave goods" for the afterlife was "counter to the Christian belief of soul and not body continuing after death," Lucy said.
The merging of burial rites, Lucy said, showed the grave was "right on the cusp of the shift from pagan to Christian."
