Excuse you. Researchers have found that immense herbivorous dinosaurs may have produced enough methane gas - essentially burps and flatulence - to substantially boost global temperatures. The group of dinosaurs known as sauropods - plant eaters famed for their long necks and gargantuan size, such as those shown in an artist's reconstruction above - were common members of many ancient ecosystems. Previous research hints that each square kilometer of well-vegetated area may have supported between 11 and 15 sauropods, which together could have weighed about 200 metric tons. Using methane-production data for modern gut bacteria, researchers estimate that over the course of a year, sauropods worldwide would have produced about 520 million metric tons of the greenhouse gas. That's roughly the amount of methane entering the atmosphere each year from all of today's sources combined - including agriculture, beef and dairy production, wetlands, and forest fires - and about three times the amount of annual preindustrial emissions, the team estimates in the 8 May issue of Current Biology. Because methane has about 25 times the planet-warming power of carbon dioxide, the gas generated by sauropods alone could have warmed the planet almost as effectively as all of the carbon dioxide in today's atmosphere, data from other studies suggest.

Click your way through the infinite nature.

This observation highlights Martian terrain that looks like an elephant. Actually, this image covers the margin of a lava flow in Elysium Planitia, the youngest flood-lava province on Mars. Flood lavas cover extensive areas, and were once thought to be emplaced extremely rapidly, like a flood of water.

When a scientist can't give you an answer, ask a garden gnome. Researchers have long hypothesized that objects weigh less at Earth's equator because the planet's spin and shape lessen gravity's pull here versus at the poles. (Imagine Earth as a spinning disc. A bean sitting in the center would feel nothing, whereas a bean at the edge would fly off.) Satellite accelerometers have confirmed this, but a digital scale manufacturer decided to test things the old-fashioned way. Enter the Kern garden gnome. When placed on a scale at the South Pole (pictured on the right; San Francisco and Mexico city are left and center, respectively), the intrepid ornament weighed 309.82 grams versus 307.86 grams at the equator, a difference of 0.6%. The gnome's next stop will be the CERN laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, according to Kern Precision Scales, the manufacturer of the digital scale and the sponsor of the gnome's travels. CERN is currently conducting a search for the Higgs boson, the particle suspected of endowing quarks and electrons with mass; a particularly apt place to test a theory related to gravity.

Just in time for the holidays, the folks at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, give us a glimpse of a heavenly angel - not literally one of the seraphim, of course, but an astronomical delight nonetheless. The two-lobed star-forming region, dubbed Sharpless 2-106, is located in an isolated part of our Milky Way galaxy nearly 2000 light-years from Earth. The bluish "wings" are lobes of super-hot gas illuminated by a monster star - dozens of times the mass of our sun - forming in the center of the still-expanding nebula. A dark ring of dust and gas circling the star (dark bands, center), material that may one day coalesce into a planetary system, acts like a belt, cinching the nebula into an hourglass shape. Observations of the nebula at purely infrared wavelengths reveal more than 600 brown dwarfs, so-called "failed stars" that each gives off more heat than it receives but lacks enough mass to ignite and produce nuclear fusion on its own.

Happy Holidays!