How the news of the circumstances of Savita Halappanavar’s death in an Irish hospital spread across the globe was unprecedented in its speed and volume. Online and off, coverage of her story was relentless, as international outlets wrote reports and social media disseminated information. Within hours, news of Savita Halappanavar’s death went global.

It began when front pages of The Irish Times and Irish Independent were shown on Tonight With Vincent Browne. Twitter perked up as Irish users burst into conversation, a conversation united in shock. Images of the front pages were tweeted and re-tweeted and the news spread rapidly.

Overnight the conversation continued as the Guardian published a story online, “Scandal in Ireland as woman dies in Galway ‘after being denied abortion’.” Prominent UK media figures including Caitlin Moran and India Knight began tweeting the news to tens of thousands of followers. In the US, online media coverage began with Jezebel.composting “Woman denied abortion dies in agony at hospital” prompting a barrage of comments. The BBC published a story online.

Early on Wednesday, as the gravity of the story became clear, news outlets across the world rushed to cover it, and the issue almost monopolised Irish Twitter traffic and conversations on Facebook.

Simultaneously, the ferocious velocity of the dissemination of information created momentum for offline events. In just a few hours protests were organised in Dublin, Limerick, Cork, Galway, Belfast and at the Irish Embassy in London. Time magazine wrote “Death of a pregnant woman prompts soul-searching”. Euronews posted video from the protest in Dublin. CNN, the New York Times, ABC, the LA Times, the Washington Post all covered it.Fox News carried a strong opinion piece. The Hindu and the Hindustan Times carried the story with quotes from Ms Halappanavar’s parents.

The initial story published on Wednesday by Kitty Holland and Paul Cullen titled “Woman ‘denied a termination’ dies in hospital” now has over 700,000 impression.

In a new study, researchers from two disparate fields have discovered the teeth of 65-million-year-old dinosaurs

With the help of University of Florida mechanical engineering professor  and UF postdoctoral researcher Brandon Krick, Florida State University paleobiologist Gregory Erickson determined the teeth of hadrosaurs — n herbivore from the late Cretaceous period — had six tissues in their teeth instead of two.

“When something has been in the ground 65 million years, by and large they pick it up and  look at it and say what has been preserved.’ But they don’t mechanically interrogate fossils to see if there is other information.

“When they started to mechanically interrogate these teeth, what we found was all of these properties were preserved, and one other thing: these teeth were a lot more complicated than we thought.

For years, Erickson, who has a background in biomechanical engineering and studies bone biomechanics as a paleobiologist, had thought so. So he turned to the UF Tribology Laboratory, which researches the science of friction and surface wear.

Engineers don’t often see the interesting paleontological questions. One look at the surface of the dinosaur teeth piqued his interest, however, because he is intrigued by how wear occurs across surfaces with different materials.

The shape of the tooth made him think it was much more complex than previously thought.
From an engineering perspective, Sawyer  his lab often works with composites that contain different material properties that wear differently, so the question was whether just two materials — enamel and dentine — would wear the way the hadrosaur teeth did. Sawyer and Krick thought not, and turned to nanoindenters and microtribometers.

Just a decade ago, a paleontologist might not have asked engineers for help, and they could not have helped him. In the last 10 years, however, Sawyer said advances in engineering — tribology and nanoscience, in particular — make it possible to test more materials, even those millions of years old.

Reptilian dinosaurs have been dismissed as simplistic creatures in their feeding and dental structure. They were herbivores, their teeth composed of enamel and dentine. The fossil record did little to contradict that.
Testing with nanoindenters and microtribometers, however, proved the conventional wisdom wrong.
“Hadrosaurs’ teeth were incredibly complicated, among the most complex of any animal.

“These dinosaurs had developed a lot of tricks.

The duck-billed hadrosaur was a toothy creature with up to 1,400 teeth. The teeth migrated across the chewing surface, with sharp, enamel-edged front teeth moving sideways to become grinding teeth as the teeth matured.

The adaptation allowed hadrosaurs to bite off chunks of bark and stems and chew them to a digestible mush, leading Erickson to describe them as “walking pulp mills.”

The teeth wore down at the rate of 1 millimeter per day, cycling through the jaw like a conveyor belt, before falling out or being swallowed. The dinosaurs lost about 1,800 teeth a year, leaving behind plenty of fossils for testing.

When the fossils emerged from batteries of tests, the researchers found six tissues in the tooth structure, not two.
“Modern tools told us there were different materials in there,”