Science News Archive - November 30, 2008

A dinosaur skeleton that vanished from Mongolia likely was sold on the black market, says a fossil hunter from the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The broken skeleton, found in the Gobi desert, was to be reassembled as a centerpiece for the Museum, said Michael Ryan, the Museum's head of vertebrate paleontology. It would have been the most significant chunk of Tarbosaurus in North America.

Searching the Internet exercises the brains of older people by activating their neural circuitry, says UCLA's Memory & Aging Research Center. Internet searches activate regions in the brain that control complex reasoning and decision making, the Center found in a nine-month study of 24 neurologically

Botanists say they're puzzled about why oak trees from Virginia to Kansas and north to Nova Scotia failed to produce acorns this year. It's a zero year. There's zero production.

Australian authorities reported on Sunday that at least 150 whales have died after being stranded on Tasmania's west coast.

After years of gathering dead carcasses of Pacific Coast trumpeter swans, and examining their lead-poisoned livers, wildlife biologist Mike Smith became convinced the only way to save the birds was by hazing them.