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Might be a little bit of speculation, but they could do a bit of comparative studies. They could potentially know the size of infants (from nearly hatched egg fossils) and adults. Depending iftyou consider them warm or cold blooded you can roughly estimate their growth rate based on contemporary animals (say gators, birds and mammals) and extrapolate from there.

Also, some bones and teeth exhibit growth rings, like those of trees. Maybe this type of dino had bone growth rings that are clearly visible.

From what I've read, these moons are much older than Saturn's other satellites. Instead of forming from the planet's accretion disk they were yanked into orbit after Saturn was pretty well formed. Pretty interesting-they could be leftovers from the solar system's origins.

While it's possible that they're older than Saturn's other satellites, I doubt they're that much older. Most of Saturn's other satellites probably did form from the accretion disk, while the outer satellites in irregular orbits (these four plus Phoebe) were captured (a rather gentler process than "yanked") later. However, they're far enough out that their orbits probably aren't stable over the lifetime of the Solar System: perturbations from the other outer planets (Jupiter, most importantly) can "de-orbit" them in much the same way they were originally captured. This has apparently been observed with a moon of Jupiter's, BTW.

This may be somewhat less true for satellites captured into retrograde orbits, since those orbits tend to become smaller with time, as the moons exchange angular momentum with the primary body through tides; moons orbiting in the "normal" direction, of course, tend to slowly spiral outward -- and if these new moons are in normal ("prograde") orbits, it increases the chance that they'll be lost. Phoebe is indeed in a retrograde orbit, opposite the planetary rotation, and capture into a retrograde orbit is apparently much easier than capture into a prograde orbit. The new moons don't have orbital parameters determined yet, as far as I can tell; my money says they're retrograde (most of 'em, anyway). As far out as they are, tidal influences are pretty weak, anyway.

So they may be old, but Saturn itself (plus its regular moons) is pretty old: current thinking is that the outer ("gas giant") planets may have condensed from the protosolar nebula in the first 10 million years or so, while the inner ("terrestrial") planets may have taken ten times that long. I suspect that these new satellites were captured much more recently, on the general timescale of the Solar System.

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As the HGP and Celera finish up the first draft of the human genome, I thought I'd mention a second interesting mapping project that's just starting up now.

All life as we know it uses the same four bases in its genetic code, A, T, C, and G. However, there is a chemical modification known as methylation, which changes the structure and behavior of the base C, cytosine. Methylated cytosine is considered by some to be a "fifth" base. (Note--Adenosine can also be methylated, but mostly in prokaryotes only, I think). In mammals, about 2-5% of cytosine have this modification.

The thing about methylation is that it doesn't affect base pairing, so G's will bind with either normal or methylated C's. The pattern of methylation can be preserved as DNA replicates, though, by the action of enzymes can methylate and de-methylate cytosines. The pattern isn't static, though. In some places it varies at different times, and sometimes may be altered in different kinds of tissues. So you get a changes which sometimes can be inherited, and sometimes not, all depending on how the patterns shift.

Just recently, a European consortium known as the Human Epigenome Consortium (HEC) was announced to identify these methylation patterns. It's a task which is on the same scale as the HGP, but it's not as well known so I don't know if they'll be able to attract as much funding. Here's a link to an article on the HEC.

Itt'd actually be the same, assuming that base 4749935 implied that the whole of 4749934 occupied the units place (4749935^0) and was one symbol (sheesh, all the letters of all the human alphabets over time might give us enough :>). It would be much larger if each digit were a "symbol", i.e. if 4 were the units digit, 3 the 4749935's digit, the first 9 the 4749935^2's digit, etc.

It makes no difference what base we consider if we call the whole thing in the units place--I was asleep at the switch and gave that yahoo an IQ off the scale! Fortunately, IQ's defined as the ratio of mental age to chronological age. Thus, I'll assume that the person's about a billion years old :>.

The Earth is not heated by nuclear fission. It is heated by the natural radioactive decay of various radioisotopes that are part of the mantle (and maybe the core) material. The main elements are U, Th, and K.

Nifty bit of trivia: It's worth noting that there is evidence of an ancient, natural fission reactor that fired up spontaneously in the Oklo area of west Africa. This happened some 3 billion year ago, thanks to a rich bed of Uranium ore and the right combination of ground soil and water. In fact there are some 14 known reactor sites. Here's a link about the last one being mined:
http://www.apnet.com/inscight/05131997/graphb.htm
General info about Oklo: http://www.nuc.umr.edu/~ans/oklo.html
The natural reactors depleted the amount of U235 present in the ore and left behind long lived fission products.

Interestingly, neither the fission products nor the plutonium bred from the ore's U238 had migrated from the original reactor sites, despite having had billions of years in which to travel, plus plenty of ground water during a good part of that time.

Anyway, while the Oklo area would have been slightly hotter locally, it could not have put out enough power to alter the global heat balance to any great extent.