Understanding the human body is a team effort. That's where the Yachtel group comes in.

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.j.p. That's Y-A-K-U-L-T.C-O.J-P. When it comes to a guide for your gut, count on Yacult.

This is Scientific Americans' 60-second science. I'm Waite Gibbs. Got a minute?

It seems the first resident of Earth to break the sound barrier wasn't Chuck Yeager after all.

He was about 100 million years, too late.

A patosaurus was a cousin of Brontosaurus, but even bigger, with a 40-foot tail more than 3 feet thick at the butt end, but no wider than your pinky at the tip. That dainty end made the tail too fragile for clubbing attackers. So what was it

for? Maybe this. The idea that a patosaurus might have used its tail like a bullwhip to scare off

predators, communicate, or even show off for potential mates, gained traction about 20 years ago.

That's when paleontologist Philip Curry of the University of Alberta teamed with Nathan

Mirvald to create a computer simulation that showed the whip-cracking tale was plausible.

Mirvald is the founder and CEO of Intellectual Ventures, an invention firm in the Seattle

suburbs, where I'm an executive editor.

This week at a meeting of the Society for Vertebrate paleontology,

Mirvald, Curry, and Aleep Savam, also of intellectual ventures, unveiled a quarter-scale

physical model of an apatosaurus tail, made from aluminum vertebrae and steel tendons.

Give the big end of the model a strong push and pull, and it does this.

Our analysis of high-speed video of the tail in action found that the tip moves at more than

800 miles an hour, fast enough to break the sound barrier and create a small sonic boom. A full-size

of Patasaur whipping its tail in this way could probably have produced a sound

...