The shape and orientation of these cells

A calm James Cameron has broken his own record with the world's deepest solo submarine dive, plunging 5.1 miles (8.2 kilometers) burberry handbags outlet in the Pacific Ocean near Papua New Guinea, the filmmaker said Thursday. But that's nothing. Later this month he says he plans to descend to the deepest place on Earth. Cameron is aiming to plunge to the bottom of Challenger Deep in the Mariana Trench of the Pacific Ocean, 200 miles southwest of Guam. It's 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) deep. Humans have been there only once before when a two-man U.S. Navy team went for just 20 minutes in 1960. The "Avatar" and "Titanic" filmmaker said he wasn't frightened when he dove nearly that far in a practice run Wednesday that lasted 3.5 hours on the bottom. "Certainly not nervous or scared during the dive," Cameron told The Associated Press in a ship-to-shore phone interview. "You tend to be a little apprehensive ahead of the dive about what could go wrong. When you are actually on the dive you have to trust the engineering was done right." Later, he acknowledged that the bone-crushing pressure at five miles and seven miles deep "is in the back of your mind." Cameron is using a one-man, 12-ton lime green sub that he helped design called DEEPSEA CHALLENGER. He is partnering with the burberry beige handbag National Geographic Society, where he is an explorer-in-residence. "The deep trenches are the last unexplored frontier on our planet, with scientific riches enough to fill a hundred years of exploration," Cameron said in an earlier statement. Cameron, who has been an oceanography enthusiast since childhood, has made 72 deep-sea submersible dives, including 33 to the Titanic, the subject of his 1997 blockbuster. A 3-D version of "Titanic" comes out April 4, timed to the 100th anniversary of the ship's sinking. New research by American and Chinese scientists shows that the animal had a predominantly glossy iridescent sheen in hues of black and blue, like a crow. This is the earliest known evidence of iridescent color in feathers. The burberry bags animal also had a striking pair of long, narrow tail feathers, perhaps to call attention to itself in courtship. In the study, published online Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers compared the patterns of pigment-containing cells from a Microraptor fossil with those of modern birds. The shape and orientation of these cells, known as melanosomes, were narrow and arranged in a distinctive pattern, as in the case of living birds with glossy feathers. Only recently has it become possible with scanning electron microscopes to examine well-preserved fossil remains of melanosomes, so tiny that a hundred can fit across a human hair. Such pigment agents in many birds are generally round or cigar-shaped, but these were especially narrow, burberry sunglasses like those of blackbirds. The burberry kids skirts cheap iridescence arises when the melanosomes are organized in stacked layers. Matthew D. Shawkey, a biologist at the University of Akron in Ohio who conducted some of the most telling analysis of the melanosome-iridescence relationship, noted that modern birds use their feathers for many different things, including flight, regulation of body temperature and mate-attracting displays. Hypotheses concerning the function of iridescent colors in birds have centered on their role as visual social signals. “Iridescence is widespread in modern birds, and is frequently used in displays,” Dr. Shawkey said in a statement. “Our evidence that Microraptor was largely iridescent thus suggests that feathers were important for display even relatively early in their evolution.” In the journal article, Quanguo Li of the Beijing Museum of Natural History and his team drew the cautiously worded conclusion that “although we cannot assign a definitive function to iridescence in Microraptors, a role in signaling aligns with data on the plumage” of the specimen discovered in 2003. Eight other specimens were also examined in describing the likely role of their tail feathers in the mating game, like a peacock’s today. A year ago, Canadian paleontologists described some of the first examples of feather coloring in the age of dinosaurs. They were found in 70 million-year-old amber preserving 11 specimens with a wide variety of feather types, some in bright colors. A different pigmentation method produces the brighter-colored features of, say, cardinals. Mark A. Norell, a dinosaur paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, said the findings give “an unprecedented glimpse of what this animal looked like when it was alive.” One result, he added, was to contradict burberry bags outlet previous interpretations that Microraptor was a nocturnal creature; dark glossy plumage is not a trait found in modern nighttime birds. Though its anatomy is similar to that of birds, and some dinosaurs are considered ancestral to living birds, Dr. Norell said, Microraptor is thought to be a non-avian dinosaur in a group called dromaeosaurs that include Velociraptor. The size of a large pigeon, Microraptor had two sets of wings, one on its arms and the other on its legs. Dr. Norell doubted that Microraptor could fly like living birds. Perhaps it could glide between trees or parachute to the ground, but it was more primitive than Archaeopteryx, often considered the early bird, and not capable of true powered flight. Julia A. Clarke, a paleontologist at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the research team, noted that many experts continue to interpret dinosaur feathering in aerodynamic terms, and so it probably was to some extent. You may also interested in: designer burberry outlet Cheap burberry bags white beige 2012 new style sale