A theory suggests that human-built reservoirs and dams can cause earthquakes. What do you think? http://youtu.be/drg6W8hddlA

Scientists say the long-necked dinosaurs were probably the gassiest of all the dinosaurs. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer)

Potty humor just got prehistoric. A new study suggests that dinosaurs may have helped keep an already overheated world warmer with their farts and burps 200 million years ago.

The research published  in Current Biology says that large dinosaurs made a significant contribution to the greenhouse effect back then. Study author David Wilkinson estimated that about 570 million tons of methane came from dinosaurs. That’s similar to total atmospheric levels of methane today produced by livestock, farming and industry. Cows alone now produce nearly 100 tons a year of methane.

The study looks at the biggest—and presumably gassiest—dinosaurs, called sauropods. These were the long-necked plant eaters that munched on the top of trees. They were large animals that had food fermenting in their guts for long periods of time because of their giant size, said University of Maryland paleontologist Thomas Holtz, who wasn’t part of the study.

Hotter: Wilkinson said dinosaur gas was just one factor at a time when the world was quite tropical, about 18 degrees warmer than now. But he said some in the media and blogosphere have misinterpreted his study to say it was the main cause of ancient warming. In a phone interview, Wilkinson said it was only one of the causes, but dinosaur gas “is big enough to be a measurable effect.”

What caused the ancient pre-human world to be so hot — just the way the dinosaurs needed it — was a variety of factors. Volcanoes spewed much more greenhouse gases than now, Holtz said. Swamps, water currents, shallow seas and plentiful plankton combined to raise greenhouse gas levels far higher than today, he said.

Outside climate experts say the study makes some sense, but that the warming from dinosaur farts back then is dwarfed by man-made carbon dioxide today from industry.

NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt quickly ran some calculations based on Wilkinson’s figures. Dinosaur methane would have hiked temperatures about half a degree, which is a fraction of what’s been caused by the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil in the 20th Century, he said.

Farted to death? It’s also wrong to suggest the study blames dinosaur flatulence for their extinction, Holtz said. He noted that the sauropods started showing up—and getting gassy—around 200 million years ago and didn’t die off until 65 million years ago.

University of Victoria climate scientist Andrew Weaver said: “Frankly, methane emissions from dinosaur burps is probably not the No. 1 thing we should be concerned about in modern society.”

———

Online:

Current Biology: http://bit.ly/ID1BAt

———

Reported by Seth Borenstein of the Associated Press from WASHINGTON, D.C. He can be followed at http://twitter.com/borenbears

Artist Maurice Sendak signs his individual prints from "The Mother Goose Collection," in New York. Sendak, author of the popular children's book "Where the Wild Things Are," died, Tuesday, May 8, 2012 at Danbury Hospital in Danbury, Conn. He was 83. (AP Photo/Susan Ragan, file)

Maurice Sendak didn’t think of himself as a children’s author, but as an author who told the truth about childhood.

“I like interesting people and kids are really interesting people,” he explained last fall. “And if you didn’t paint them in little blue, pink and yellow, it’s even more interesting.”

Sendak, who died Tuesday in Danbury, Conn., at age 83, four days after suffering a stroke, revolutionized children’s books and how we think about childhood simply by leaving in what so many writers before had excluded. Dick and Jane were no match for his naughty Max. His kids misbehaved and didn’t regret it, and in their dreams and nightmares fled to the most unimaginable places. Monstrous creatures were devised from his studio, but none more frightening than the grownups in his stories.

“From their earliest years children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions — fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives, they continually cope with frustrations as best they can,” he said upon receiving the Caldecott Medal in 1964 for “Where the Wild Things Are,” his signature book.

Communities attempted to ban him, but his books sold millions of copies and his curmudgeonly persona became as much a part of his legend as “Where the Wild Things Are,” adapted into a hit movie in 2009. He seemed to act out everyone’s fantasy of a nasty old man with a hidden and generous heart. No one granted the privilege could forget his snarly smile, his raspy, unprintable and adorable dismissals of such modern piffle as e-books and publicity tours, his misleading insistence that his life didn’t matter.

Sendak’s other books, standard volumes in so many children’s bedrooms, included “Chicken Soup With Rice,” ”One was Johnny,” ”Pierre,” ”Outside Over There” and “Brundibar,” a folk tale about two children who need to earn enough money to buy milk for their sick mother.

“This is the closest thing to a perfect child I’ve ever had,” he told the AP.

Besides illustrating his own work, he also provided drawings — sometimes sweet, sometimes nasty — for Else Holmelund Minarik’s series “Little Bear,” George MacDonald’s “The Light Princess” and adaptations of E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Nutcracker” and the Brothers Grimm’s “King Grisly-Beard.” His most recent book that he wrote and illustrated was “Bumble-Ardy,” a naughty pig party which came out in 2011, based on an old animated skit he worked up for “Sesame Street.”

In recent months, he had said he was working on a project about noses and he endorsed — against his best judgment — Stephen Colbert’s “I am a Pole (And So Can You!)”, a children’s story calculated to offend the master. Colbert’s book was published Tuesday.

"Where the Wild Things Are" is Sendak's most famous book.

“His art gave us a fantastical but unromanticized reminder of what childhood truly felt like,” Colbert said in a statement. “We are all honored to have been briefly invited into his world.”

Somebody up there has a sense of humor: As of Tuesday evening, “I Am a Pole” was No. 14 on Amazon.com’s best-seller list, outranking “Where the Wild Things Are” at No. 19.

Sendak also created costumes for ballets and staged operas. He designed sets for several productions at New York City Opera and he wrote for the opera adaptation of “Where the Wild Things Are.”

“He drew children in a realistic way, as opposed to an idealized way,” children’s books historian Leonard S. Marcus said. “His children weren’t perfect-looking. They didn’t resemble the people seen on advertising or in sitcoms. They looked more like immigrant children. It was a big change for American children’s books, which tended to take the melting pot approach and present children who were generic Americans.”

Revenge helped inspire “Where the Wild Things Are,” his  tale of the boy Max’s mind in flight in a forest of monsters, who just happen to look like some of Sendak’s relatives from childhood. “In The Night Kitchen,” released in 1971, was a forbidden dance of Laurel and Hardy in aprons and the flash of a boy’s privates, leading to calls for the book to be removed from library shelves.

His stories were less about the kids he knew — never had them, he was happy to say — than the kid he used to be. The son of Polish immigrants, he was born in 1928 in a Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn. The family didn’t have a lot of money and he didn’t have a lot of friends besides his brother and sister. He was an outsider at birth, as Christians nearby would remind him, throwing dirt and rocks as he left Hebrew school.

Sendak didn’t go to college and worked a variety of odd jobs until he was hired by the famous toy store FAO Schwarz as a window dresser in 1948. But illustration was his dream and his break came in 1951 when he was commissioned to do the art for “Wonderful Farm” by Marcel Ayme. By 1957 he was writing his own books and fame came shortly after that.

__

Reported by HILLEL ITALIE of the Associated Press from NEW YORK, N.Y. Associated Press writers Dave Collins in Hartford and Samantha Critchell in New York contributed to this report.

YouTuber Matt is known for his ability to get the most out of claw machines in arcades. Here he takes on a Stacker game.

Learn how to win at — or lose at — a game of Stacker, an arcade game that gives out prizes for stacking blocks of light on a grid. http://youtu.be/_MpXv4SW56Y

Here’s a magic trick that lets you turn a $1 bill into a $100 dollar bill. The hard part is convincing your parents to let you borrow a $100 bill. http://youtu.be/CxNMMDpvXiY

Jordyn, left, and Lexi were the top winners in the "Little White Fox" coloring contest.

A few months ago, Junior Dispatch hosted a coloring contest in conjunction with our Iditarod coverage and our “Little White Fox” reading project.

A few weeks ago, we announced the winnners and just last week we were able to get all of our huskies in a row to hand out the prizes — two stuffed animals!

We got more than 60 entries in the contest, but both the winners submitted through the York Jewish Community Center’s after school program.

The winners are Jordyn, left, and Lexi, right. If you look close, you will see that accompanying them in the picture is Arizona, one of the JCC’s pet snakes! See their winning coloring pages here.

Check out all of our JD-exclusive coloring pages here.

And start preparing your entries for our next big event: A creative writing contest! Read all the details here.

Today’s Kid Scoop studies the amazing Polyface farm in Virginia, which does its best to use “solar power” to keep its operation going. Notice that we put “solar power” in quotes because we’re not talking about the modern, solar-panel version of solar power. You’ll have to check out this video to learn more about how Polyface’s version of solar power works: http://youtu.be/KxTfQpv8xGA

You and your parents can use solar power in a similar way with a chicken tractor. Take a tour of the structure: http://youtu.be/2DJjEIPqF7M

See a cattle roundup on a Wyoming farm. Even the kids help out. http://youtu.be/RNWQQPvNJBs

What is Kid Scoop? It’s a special page that appears every Monday in The York Dispatch and other local newspapers. Aside from its main feature and the Writing Corner, it includes games, puzzles and jokes.

Get your copy of Kid Scoop in today’s edition of The York Dispatch, and be sure to assemble your own Write On! entry and submit it to NIE@ync.com. We’ll run every entry here!

Of course, you can submit those entries, and anything else you want, for publication here on the Junior Dispatch. Send your JD items to juniordispatch@yorkdispatch.com. Learn about what you can submit here.

Do you have what it takes to join up with the Jedi Academy? http://youtu.be/2jW0joAtnsU

Superman fans the world over have spent countless hours wishing for x-ray vision, but a not-so-mad scientist says he’s close to making the superpower a reality.

X-ray goggles have been on sale at novelty shops and in the back pages of comic books for decades, but KTLA 5′s Dave Malkoff recently met Dr. Ken O — an engineer from the University of Texas — who says he’s building the real thing in a lab.

An x-ray of a human hand shows all the bones inside of it. Cellphones equipped with a terrahertz camera might be able to provide a similar image, one scientist. (Photo by PlanetC1 via Flickr.com)

In the near future, Dr. O wants to enable cellphones with x-ray vision using something called Terrahertz waves.

“Of course, what this does is allows you to see through things,” Dr. O said.
Terrahertz waves are a kind of radiation, but they’re not exactly x-rays.

The waves operate on a lower frequency than x-rays, Dr. O said.

Their frequency is lower than tanning beds and lower than your remote control.

“Sending something out is like the flash bulb you have in the camera,” he said.

And flashing those waves at objects may allow cellphone users to see through and into them.
Dr. O said X-ray vision could be used to detect counterfeit cash for cracks in artwork or even scanning skin for signs of cancer.

But trying to use the technology to sneak a peek beneath someone’s clothes, Dr. O said doing so might put the user in danger.

“If you’re trying to do something like (that), you have to be within what I call the slapping distance,” he said.

When asked what inspired him to try and create real-life x-ray vision, Dr. O said it was children’s imaginations that gave him the idea.

– Reported by KTLA-TV from LOS ANGELES, Calif.

Rocketboom discusses the complexity of time travel. http://youtu.be/uyOwFpfqpsk