Newly discovered dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus, takes title of largest terrestrial animal

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The first four of ten papers are out about the discovery of an almost complete dinosaur skeleton in southern Patagonia. This critter had a 37-foot (11.3m) neck; a 30-foot (9m) tail, which was far more muscled than that of any other known species, so it would have been a giant weapon; and weighed 65 tons.

And it wasn’t full-grown.

Based on what we know about related species, Dreadnoughtus schrani probably lived in nesting colonies, where hundreds or even thousands of females would live together and raise young. They would likely have needed to eat almost continuously, which gives you some idea of just how lush their world would have had to be.

3D scans of the bones have been made public, and upcoming papers will also look at things like their locomotion. 

You can read the main paper here: http://www.nature.com/srep/2014/140904/srep06196/full/srep06196.html . That also has links to the data files, if you want to build your own dinosaur.

Newly discovered dinosaur, Dreadnoughtus, takes title of largest terrestrial animal

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Adding the first n cubes, in an animation

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Adding the first n cubes, in an animation

If you add up the first n numbers and square the result, this produces the same answer as adding the first n cubes. This animation by Hydrodium on tumblr gives a stunningly good illustration of this identity.

The graphic shows the case n=5. In this case, the sum of the first 5 natural numbers is 1+2+3+4+5=15, which squares to 15×15=225. On the other hand, the sum of the first n cubes is (1x1x1)+(2x2x2)+(3x3x3)+(4x4x4)+(5x5x5)=1+8+27+64+125, which also adds up to 225. There is nothing special about the number 5 here: an analogous identity holds for any other positive integer, and it can be illustrated by a similar animation.

At this point, the moderators of the arXiv preprint server would rightly accuse me of “substantial text overlap” with an earlier post. Yes, I’ve posted about this before (https://plus.google.com/101584889282878921052/posts/WqimoVTZWL3) but this animation does an even better job of showing how everything fits together.

The animation comes from Hydrodium’s Graphical MathLand at http://hyrodium.tumblr.com/post/94237657514/inspired-by-this-twocubes-post-and-asked-to-make
I found it via the blog Visualizing Math (http://visualizingmath.tumblr.com/) which in turn I found via +W Younes. There are a lot of very interesting posts on Visualizing Math. However, I might be a bit biased in saying that, because I found two of my own recent posts reshared there (with attribution).

#mathematics

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