Note: This was written in 2007. I like to keep my old predictions around. It tends to keep me humble.You may notice mentions of Gather. Gather was an early competitor for Facebook that catered to writers. Unfortunately, it went belly up years ago, tearing big holes in my website when it went offline.

1. Dinosaurs after the Impact: An article in the latest Discover magazine says that there is reasonably credible evidence that a species of Hadrosaurs(Duckbill dinosaurs) survived in NewMexico for about a million years after the end of Cretaceous Asteroid impact that supposedly killed off the dinosaurs. If that's correct it's very interesting.

I've long had my doubts about the scenario of a flourishing ecology of dinosaurs getting wiped out by an asteroid. I don't doubt that the asteroid hit and had a devastating impact on the ecology. I've just never considered it proven that the dinos were flourishing up to the end of the Cretaceous and extinct afterwards.

One of the problems is that by definition a fossil bed with a set of reasonably complete dinosaur fossils is considered Cretaceous, while one with a lot of mammals and no dinosaurs is considered to be from after the Cretaceous. As of a few years ago, the only place where there was a good fossil record right up to the KT (Cretaceous/Tertiary) boundary was western North America. You could count the places where there were good fossil beds right after the KT boundary on one hand. Both of those things might have changed since the last time I checked, but if so I haven't heard about it.

Given that situation, I could see a scenario where dinosaurs gradually got displaced by a combination of mammals and birds over most of the world over a period of five or ten million years prior to the end of the Cretaceous, with dinosaurs in western North America as the last of the breed, sort of like Tapirs and a lot of other relict creatures that are now holding out in southeast Asia. The KT impact hits that refuge hard, but a few species survive it, only to continue their decline and die out somewhat later.

I don't know if that's what actually happened, but it fits the available evidence as well as the scenario of dinosaurs flourishing up to the KT boundary. Another thought: the western US is probably the best studied area in the world for late Cretaceous dinosaursand early Paleocene mammals. If this kind of discovery can be made there, then it is quite possible that dinosaurs survived even longer elsewhere.

Antarctica and Australia are good candidates for dinosaur survival because they were hit relatively lightly by the nastiness of the KT impact and because they have no fossil record for land animals for atleast 10 million years after the KT impact, and possibly as long as 20 to 25 million. In the absence of a fossil record, any statement about when the dinosaurs died off there is simply a guess.

2. A dot.solarcell boom? I've mentioned the rapid expansion of the solar cell industry several times lately. Things are moving very fast in that industry as venture capitalists throw money at it, and companies with promising technology take their companies public, raising hundreds of millions of dollars at a pop.

When I first started looking at the solar cell industry seriously again a yearor two ago, the biggest solar cell manufacturer was Sharp, with annual production capacity of 300 megawatts. Sharp was being challenged by US startup Nanosolar, which raised $100 million to build a plant with 430 Megawatts of production capacity. Now Sharp is at something like 700 megawatts of annual capacity, and they are building a new complex capable of producing a gigawatt of solar power annually. A lot of other people in the industry are talking about gigawatt solar cell plants as kind of the optimum in economy of scale. Companies are expanding to at least 300 megawatts capacity. Anything much less than that will leave them minor players by about 2010.

On the technology front solar cells are advancing at both the high end and the low end. A consortium recently got to just short of 43% efficiency (a new record) by concentrating the sun’s rays by 20X, then splitting the rays so that they went to a part of the solar cell most efficient at turning that part of the bandwidth into electricity. The cells appear to have room to grow in terms of efficiency, and they appear to be mass producible. On the low end, plastic solar cells have reached around 5.5% efficiency, which is getting close to the point where they can be printed on just about anything electronic to recharge the batteries.

Just as I was getting ready to print this, a press release came out from one of the major universities claiming that they had figured out a way to put a nanotech coating on silicon solar cells so that the cells would produce up to10% more power in the visible range and 67% more in the ultraviolet range. I'm not sure what that means in terms of overall efficiency, but apparently it would sharply boost the cell's production on cloudy days because a lot of ultraviolet goes through the clouds. There are still a lot of questions to be answered about this, including how expensive it would be to do on an industrial scale, but it sounds promising.

3. Taz going extinct from contagious cancer? I think I mentioned this in a seperate article, but the real-life Tasmanian Devil is in danger of extinction from a cancer that spreads from animal to animal during their frequent fights over food. Normally cancers can't spread from one animal to another because the next animal's immune system recognizes it as foreign tissue and attacks it. Unfortunately,Taz Devil immune systems can't seem to do that with this cancer. The Tasmanian Devil population apparently went through a severe bottleneck near the end of the last ice age--probably down to 500 or so animals. The population expanded to over 20,000, but the animals are so closely related that their immune systems can't tell the difference between tissue from one animal and another.

That's apparently a problem with other animals too. Cheetahs had a similar bottleneck and expansion, and similar reaction from their immune systems. Fortunately Cheetahs haven't run into a cancer like this as far as we know. This could have wide implications in terms of endangered species. Keeping a few hundred animals alive may not be enough to keep a species viable in the long run. If genetic diversity gets low enough a species will be vulnerable to this kind of thing, as well as to other diseases. If one animal is vulnerable to a disease, they all will be.

4. Out of Africa or Not? There is a huge and fundamental debate going on in the community of people studying human origins. One group (the Out-Of-Africa school) claims that all modern humans come from a branch of humanity that developed in Africa and spread from there throughout the rest of the world, replacing previous forms of humanity like the Neanderthals with effectively no gene flow between the newcomers and previous residents. Opposed to that group are people who argue that here was some degree of gene flow between the various groups of humanity,and in the case of archaic Asian humans that modern humans developed in place in East Asia (the Regional-Continuity school).

These guys have been hammering each other for well over a decade, with studies of bones and genetic studies. Mitochondrial DNA and some other types of DNA seem to say that modern humans are all descended from a group of humans that developed in Africa and spread to the rest of the world approximately 60,000-70,000 years ago,eventually replacing all other types of humans with effectively no gene flow between the groups. That's quite a claim. It kind of points to our species doing a very thorough job of genocide early on. A lot of people in the human origins field don't buy that at all.

The two groups are still hammering away, and recently a spate of article has appeared on both sides. Among the claims: (1) A high percentage of human remains from the period when modern humans were replacing Neanderthals in Europe show a mixture of characteristics from the two groups. (2) Looking at one type of genes seems to indicate a very complicated picture of human origins, with humans and chimps branching off from one another and remaining separate for 600,000 to 700,000 years, then going through a period of interbreeding before separating for good. There appears to have been mixing between modern humans and a very different type of African human somewhere in the mix, and the most logical origin of one specific gene that is now in 70% of humans would be that it spread from Neanderthals to humans and then was strongly selected for. It may havesomething to do with brain function, which would be a kick in the teeth.

Of course the Out-of-Africa crowd accept none of this, and have responded with their own studies. As an interested layman I have no clue who is right. 5. Who is descended from whom? The old idea that humans descended from apes has always had a problem. A lot of people visualize the process as humans branching away from something much like existing apes,with humans changing, while apes remained static--sort of living fossils of the way both species looked and acted 6 to 7 million years ago. To state that idea is to realize that it can't be true. Apes have probably changed considerably over those years. How? We don't know because there are essentially no recognized chimp or gorilla fossils other than a few recently discovered chimp fossils from the last couple hundred thousand years,and few recently discovered possible gorilla teeth. We don't know what chimps or gorillas looked like or acted like early on.

One recent study indicates that ancestral apes were actually better adapted to walking upright than the current ones are, and that ironically they were adapted to upright posture because they spent more time in trees than current African apes do. That means that knuckle-walking developed after the split as apes spent less time in the trees.That has interesting implications. If you find bones of some ape-like creature that is somewhat more adapted for walking upright than current apes, are you looking at something that was on its way to becoming more human or on its way to becoming more like modern-day chimps?

________________________________________ Comments: 8 John S. (arizona) Jan 16, 2008, 12:00pm EST A lot of interesting thoughts. It would seem plausible to me that populations in some areas would have continued on for some time. They seem to be learning more everyday about the fossil record. The more excavations they do the better; it's all terribly interesting to me. Thanks for your thoughts.

Pat S. Jan 16, 2008, 1:06pm EST Dale, your mind wanders in the most mysterious and wonderful of ways! I always learn something new from you.

Beaker (just Beaker) Jan 16, 2008, 1:15pm EST Great article! I've been interested in the "origins" debate since learning about the Piltdown hoax in college. I hope they can figure out a fix for the Taz disease. They are a unique kind of creature, and yet vaguely wombat-like in some ways.

Pat Bertram Jan 16, 2008, 1:38pm EST I never thought the dinosaurs completely died out -- there were too many legends of dragons and rocs and thunderbirds to make that scenario believable. As far as I can see, the only thing that died out sixty-five million years ago was dinosaur-fossil-making. As for humans evolving from apes, I have read that there is just as much evidence that they evolved from humans. Makes a person wonder, as does your article.

G. M. Lupo Jan 16, 2008, 1:39pm EST Very interesting topics, Dale. I always like reading accounts of early humans, even if the experts don't agree on everything.

Alison Pearce Jan 16, 2008, 4:57pm EST Great article Dale!

Debra N. Feb 13, 2008, 4:37am EST Great article! This is where I begin to question the methods used to teach science. Where is the harmin offering one's best guess based on the evidence available to work with. Science should not be taught as theory disguised as science. Various scientific theories can be put forth as those being the most scientifically based. However, these theories should not be taught as science unless proven.

Beverly T. Apr 3, 2008, 6:29pm EDT Great variety of topics. This is interesting reading.