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Photo courtesy: anoldent/CC BY-SA 2.0
Researchers and programmers have come up with modeling software for all kinds of complex systems, including modeling how the earth's systems may alter with climate change. But what has yet to be modeled is a deeply complex natural ecosystem from soil microbes and fungi all the way up to apex predators and giant trees. Just wrapping one's head around the scope of such a task is exhausting, and yet the knowledge that could be gained by creating such modeling software would be invaluable, and would help make smart policy changes regarding conservation. Which is why Microsoft is giving it a go. In fact, climate change models have been so successful, it's no wonder researchers are interested in using the same sort of system for biodiversity.
Drew Purves, head of Microsoft’s Computational Ecology and Environmental Science Group (CEES) and his colleagues at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, United Kingdom, are working with the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Center (UNEP-WCMC) to create software that will accurately model a natural ecosystem -- or as they put it, a general ecosystem model (GEM).
Microsoft's Green Blog states, "Building a GEM is challenging — but not impossible. Microsoft Research and the UNEP-WCMC have spent the past two years developing a prototype GEM for terrestrial and marine ecosystems. The prototype is dubbed the Madingley Model, and is built on top of another hugely ambitious project that the group just finished, modeling the global carbon cycle. With this as starting point, they set out to model all animal life too: herbivores, omnivores, and carnivores, of all sizes, on land in the sea."
The major challenge facing the project is, obviously, the need for as much data as possible. To make a GEM work, large-scale global collection of ecological data is needed. After all, how are we to model an ecosystem if we don't know much about how the ecosystem functions or even what organisms exist within it. The challenge needs to be met with the collaboration of all the governments around the world. If enough data can be collected and software devised to use the data for accurate modeling, then scientists would have an incredibly powerful new tool for illustrating how policy choices would affect ecosystems.
When it comes to camouflage, ground-nesting Japanese quail are experts. Mother quail know the patterning of their own eggs and choose laying spots to hide them best. Photo courtesy: Lovell et al., Current Biology via ouramazingplanet.com
Quail eggs are like fingerprints, a new study suggests.
The creamy blue-and-brown speckled eggs, splashed like a toddler's art project, vary among birds but are consistently patterned for individuals.
What's more, in a laboratory experiment, quail camouflaged their eggs according to their personal pattern, picking lighter sand for less-speckled eggs and darker sand for eggs with more brown splotches. What surprised researchers was the discovery that quail changed their approach to camouflage as their eggs got darker.
"It's as if they knew the characteristics of their own eggs and chose the best substrate with which to lay them," said George Lovell, lead study author and an expert on animal camouflage at Abertay University and the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Sitting at the bottom of the food chain, with a spot on just about every predator's dinner menu, quail and their eggs need good hiding places.
In the experiment, quail could lay clutches in sand with white, yellow, red or black hues. Researchers photographed each spot where the quail laid eggs and each location they ignored. The images revealed whether quail moms picked the sand color that offered the most camouflage. "They did really, really well," Lovell told OurAmazingPlanet.
Japanese quail choose between two camouflage strategies to hide their eggs. Photo courtesy: Lovell et al., Current Biology via ouramazingplanet.com
More than 50 percent of the time, quail chose the sand color offering the best or second-best protection for their own egg pattern, the study found. The findings appear in the journal Current Biology.
"The amazing thing is this change in strategy for the different eggs," Lovell said.
Quail with the creamiest egg colors picked white or yellow sand. This strategy, called background matching, aims to hide the eggs by blending into a similarly-colored background.
Quail with darker, more splotchy eggs conceal their eggs not by matching a background color, but by trying to break up the egg's outline through its color pattern, an approach called disruptive coloration. The same strategy the military uses in its camouflage patterning, the egg splotches disrupt its own outline with the colors and patterns on its shell, Lovell explained.
"What the spots seem to be doing it making a predator think an egg is different from an egg shape," he said.
Quail egg camouflaged with dark splotches. Photo courtesy: Lovell et al., Current Biology via ouramazingplanet.com
Cream-colored camouflaged quail egg. Photo courtesy: Lovell et al., Current Biology via ouramazingplanet.com
The quail were raised in captivity at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and had seen their eggs before the experiment started.
"It's possible that they learn the patterning through seeing eggs that they've laid," Lovell said. "In the wild, there is some evidence that birds are often less successful with their first clutch of eggs. It may be that at that point in time, they're not able to select the best place to lay their eggs."
Scientists think birds use patterning on eggs for camouflage, but the darker colors may also help strengthen weak spots or regulate temperature, Lovell said.
The shell color comes from two pigments: blue-green biliverdin and red-brown protoporphyrin, which are both breakdown products of hemoglobin (the oxygen-carrying protein found in the red blood cells of all vertebrates).
This is not Bob. Photo courtesy: Yahoo!News
A Verizon case study recently revealed that some people will go to great lengths in order to be able to watch cat videos all day.
We first heard about it on TNW.
The study documents the scam of a developer, who is referred to as Bob. He worked at a "critical infrastructure" company in the U.S. and started outsourcing his work to China underneath his company's nose, and would only pay those people less than one fifth of his six-figure salary.
Here's how it was possible.
Bob's company had started letting employees work remotely from home on certain days, so it set up a VPN concentrator to facilitate that. The company implemented two-factor authentication for the connection, with the second factor being a physical, rotating token RSA key fob. So all Bob had to do was send the key over to China via FedEx.
The company eventually noticed strange activity in its VPN logs, so it asked Verizon for some help understanding what was going on. The logs showed that Bob was logged in from Shenyang, China, even though he was sitting at his desk.
The company initially thought there was some kind of malware routing traffic from an internal connection in China, and then back to the U.S.
But Verizon investigators quickly noticed a major red flag. The VPN connection wasn't new and had been active for at least six months.
So they zeroed in on Bob himself, and took a forensic image of Bob's computer to recover as many files as possible and check for signs of malware.
What they ended up finding were hundreds of PDF invoices from a third-party contractor in Shenyang, China.
A look at his browsing history revealed what his typical work day consisted of:
• 9:00 a.m. – Arrive and surf Reddit for a couple of hours. Watch cat videos.
• 11:30 a.m. – Take lunch.
• 1:00 p.m. – Ebay time.
• 2:00 – ish p.m. Facebook updates – LinkedIn.
• 4:30 p.m. – End of day update e-mail to management.
• 5:00 p.m. – Go home.
So while workers in China were doing Bob's job for him, Bob was sitting back, relaxing, watching cat videos, and earning "several hundred thousand dollars" a year.
BTW, for those who think this was a good idea - Bob is now looking for other career opportunities.
This is a specimen of the new species, Morafka's Desert Tortoise (Gopherus morafkai), from Tiburon Island, Sonora, Mexico. Photo courtesy: Taylor Edwards via OurAmazingPlanet.com
Desert tortoises, as their name suggests, don't encounter many large bodies of water. But surprisingly, all turtles, even desert tortoises, can hear better underwater, recent research finds.
"If a desert tortoise decided to stick its head underwater, it could hear better," said Katie Willis, a University of Maryland doctoral student and co-author of a study published online this week in the journal PLoS ONE.
The findings shed light on the evolution of turtles, suggesting they all share an aquatic ancestor, the researchers said.
Willis and her co-authors took MRI and CT scans of the inner ears of many different species of turtles. They calculated that in every case these relatively large, air-filled sacks inside the skull resonated, or vibrated, more powerfully underwater, where sound waves travel more quickly than in air.
This process of hearing starts when sound waves vibrate the ear drum, which in turtles is flush with the outside of the head, Willis told OurAmazingPlanet. When the sound waves are at the right frequency, or pitch, they cause the inner ear to resonate and vibrate, aiding hearing, she said. This allows animals to better hear fainter sounds.
After taking measurements of the turtles' inner ears, the team found that all of them closely resembled those of aquatic turtles; the ratio between the size of the skull and the size of the inner ear remained about the same, she said.
This observation, along with the team's resonance calculations, suggests that all turtles evolved from a common ancestor that lived in the water, she said.
"This strongly points to an aquatic origin for all turtles," Willis said. This has been a controversial topic, with some fossil evidence suggesting turtles have terrestrial origins.
She said the study should help better understand how hearing works in turtles and other animals, and where to place turtles in the evolutionary tree. It supports the hypothesis that turtles are more closely related to crocodiles and birds than to all other reptiles, contrary to previous theories.
Land turtles hear via sound vibrating their ear drums. Apparently it works well enough that evolution hasn't selected for a more specialized inner ear cavity, she said, a case of so-called neutral selection. Willis summed it up: "If it ain't broke, don’t fix it."
CBC/CBC - On the right side of the new $20 bill is what some experts say is a Norway maple leaf, not a Canadian maple leaf via Yahoo!News
Some botanists are shaking their heads at the new polymer bills because they say the money features a maple leaf from Norway, and not Canada, although that's not how the Bank of Canada sees it.
The Norway maple came to North America in the 18th century, imported by a Philadelphia merchant and peddled as a garden adornment. But lately it has been turning up in all kinds of places, including the official logos of Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ont., and the FIFA under-20 World Cup of Soccer.
The Canadian Television Fund and the Alliance of Natural History Museums of Canada have also made maple leaf errors, according to botanists.
Sean Blaney, senior botanist of the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre, said he never expected to see the Norway maple leaf on a $20 bill.
"It's a species that's invasive in Eastern Canada and is displacing some of our native species, and it's probably not an appropriate species to be putting on our native currency," Blaney told CBC News.
The Bank of Canada, which makes the banknotes, denied the bills include a Norway maple leaf. A spokesperson said the leaf is a stylized blend of different Canadian maple species.
But Blaney argued it looks nothing like any of the 10 maples native to Canada.
"It seems a bit like an after-the-fact explanation to me. The bottom line is that, the image on the bill looks exactly like a Norway maple, however it was derived," he said.
University of Ottawa Prof. Julian Starr, also a research scientist at the Canadian Museum of Nature, specializes in plant identification and classification.
He has been consulted by the Royal Canadian Mint about the botanical accuracy of its coins, but he was not shown this maple leaf.
"This could not be confused with a native species of Canada," said Starr. "It basically looks like a Norway maple."
There are 400 million bank notes already in circulation, including $20, $50 and $100 bills. There are plans to print another 1.2 billion more bank notes, including $5 and $10 bills.
Beach at Cancun, Mexico. Photo courtesy: Cancun beach photo via Shutterstock
Whether they're playgrounds for the rich and famous or havens for retirees, the world's best beach resorts may disappear despite efforts to protect them against sea level rise.
That's the prediction of coastal expert Andrew Cooper, a professor at the University of Ulster in Ireland, who said that the usual way of replenishing a beach, by adding sand to it, will not keep up with the sea's rapid rise.
"A key attractor in most of the world's examples of coastal resort cities has been the presence of an adjacent beach," Cooper said in a statement. "Some well-known examples are Benidorm, Torremolinos (Spain); Cannes (France); West Palm Beach, Fla.; Atlantic City, N.J, Myrtle Beach, S.C., Virginia Beach, Va.; Cancun (Mexico); and the most rapidly developed of all coastal resort cities, Dubai (United Arab Emirates). In all of these resorts the challenge is to preserve the real estate behind the beach and still save the beaches, which are being pushed landwards by rising sea level."
Erosion at Palm Beach on Australia's Gold Coast. Photo courtesy: University of Ulster
Cooper said most resorts combat ongoing sea level rise with beach nourishment — adding sand to replace that eroded by the encroaching ocean. But holding the world's best beaches stationary during an expected 3-foot (1 meter) sea level rise in the next 100 years would require massive inputs of sand, Cooper said.
"Beach resort cities are mostly artificial creations on the shoreline that rely on beach nourishment to sustain them and on their reputation for a clean and safe environment. To maintain this during rapid sea level rise will be near impossible," he said.
Erecting protective concrete walls won't give the beaches room to move inland and will ultimately lead to beaches getting squeezed out as sea level rises, he said. When the rising water reaches a protective wall between the beach and the developed land behind it, the beach is drowned.
"There are a lot of issues with beach nourishment — not least the cost — but beach nourishment would not be needed if developments were properly planned in the first place, to give beaches room to move," Cooper said.
Based on a recent study of Australia's Gold Coast, the problem involves a lack of planning and poor short-term fixes, Cooper said. Uncertainty regarding how high the sea will rise compounds the problem, as do climate change skeptics and the lack of political will to plan for future climate scenarios, he said.
The study appears in the August 2012 issue of the journal Ocean & Coastal Management.
About 4,000 years ago, Australia was no longer connected to the mainland as it had been during the ice age. The immigrants thus crossed the ocean, arriving by boat and possibly carrying dingoes to the island continent.
Photo courtesy: Gunter Senft/MPI for Psycholinguistics via LiveScience.com
Indians migrating to Australia more than 4,000 years ago may have introduced dingoes to the island continent, along with novel stone tools and new ways to remove toxins from edible plants, researchers say.
Australia was thought to have remained largely isolated from the rest of the world between its initial colonization about 40,000 years ago by the ancestors of aboriginal Australians and the arrival of Europeans in the late 1800s.
"Outside Africa, aboriginal Australians are the oldest continuous population in the world," said researcher Irina Pugach, a molecular anthropologist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany.
Still,researchers had not really explored the genetic history of Australians in great enough detail to address this question.
"The extent of isolation of aboriginal Australia has been debated for a long time," Pugach told LiveScience. "The Australian archaeological record documents some changes that occur in Australia around 4,000 years ago, which could have been potentially, but not necessarily, brought in from the outside."
To find out more, the researchers analyzed DNA from 344 people, including aboriginal Australians, highlanders of Papua New Guinea, Southeast Asian islanders, Indians, Nigerians, individuals of European descent living in Utah and Han Chinese from Beijing.
The scientists found a common origin for populations from Australia, New Guinea and the Mamanwa, a group from the Philippines. The researchers estimate these groups split from one another about 36,000 years ago. This supports ideas that the groups descended from an ancient southwards migration out of Africa.
The researchers also detected substantial gene flow from Indian populations into Australia about 4,230 years ago. Scientists estimate this Indian genetic influence appears in about 10 percent of the aboriginal Australian populations they analyzed.
At about the same time, the dingo first appears in the Australian fossil record, an animal that most closely resembles Indian dogs.
In addition, at about that time, "archaeologists describe a sudden shift in stone tool technologies, with new implements known as the Small Tool Tradition appearing for the first time" in Australia, Pugach said. These represented stone tools that were smaller and more finely worked than before, she explained.
A female dingo, Queensland, Australia. Research shows that although dingos are no longer domesticated, they still retain the ability to read human gestures. Photo courtesy: Bradley Smith via LiveScience.com
Moreover, at about that time, new techniques for altering dangerous plants to make them edible also appeared in Australia. For instance, while plants known as cycads can be toxic, soaking or fermenting their kernels can remove the poisons.
"Aboriginal Australians use the fruits of these plants as an important food source despite them being highly toxic," Pugach said.
The researchers caution the migration "may not have actually been from India, but from some population somewhere else that subsequently no longer exists, but whose closest living relative — at least, among populations we examined — are Dravidian-speakers from southern India," Pugach said.
The researchers also emphasized they are not claiming some Indian group members are the ancestors of aboriginal Australians. "The migration happened about 4,000 years ago. By that time, people [had] lived in Australia for more than 40,000 years," Pugach said.
It remains uncertain why this migration might have taken place more than 4,000 years ago. Environmental changes might be one cause, "although I don't know of any significant environmental changes then," Pugach said. Then again, it could "simply be wanderlust. Humans have always liked to migrate, and don't seem to need a reason to want to do so."
Future research can analyze additional Australian populations to see how widespread this Indian influence might actually be.
The scientists detailed their findings online Jan. 14 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Those liquid soap dispenser pump bottles are great in the laundry room. If you aren't going to refill with some more hand soap, fill it with liquid laundry detergent instead. Keep it in the laundry area for spraying an extra bit of detergent on any stains you have. Just put one pump's worth on the stain, rub it in with your fingers; and, wash as usual.
Use an old toothbrush to pretreat those deep-down, stubborn grass stains or any other stubborn stain. Place a small amount of liquid detergent on the stain and work in with the toothbrush.
Toothbrushes make excellent scubbers for those hard-to-clean areas such as where the sink meets the counter.
Going away for awhile? Here's a great idea. Leave all your important information - where you'll be, emergency telephone numbers and the like - in that old picture frame you have kicking about. Hang it in a place the pet/house sitter can be sure to see it - above the telephone, for example.
Got an old plastic milk crate? Boy, are they great! They have so many uses. Here's just one. Keep the stuff you store in your car's trunk - motor oil, windshield wiper fluid, ice scrapers, whathaveyou - together, organized and easy to find.
A small dab of vodka or gin on an insect bite will stop the itch dead in its tracks.
A trait that distinguishes sea horses from other creatures is that the males are impregnated instead of the females. The female lays her eggs in the male's "birthing pouch", where they gestate, then hatch about 21 days later.
If someone says they looked in every nook and cranny, they are using old words with origins in Scotland. Nook meant a corner while cranny was another word for crevice.
The song, "Edelweiss" is one of the famous songs from the 1965 movie, "The Sound of Music". This was the last song ever written by lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II.
A Komatik is a traditional Inuit sled used for transporting heavy supplies for short distances over the snowy terrain of the far north. Traditionally pulled by a dog team, today it is usually pulled by a snowmobile.
Like the Inuit of northern Canada and the Maori of New Zealand, there is an indigenous group of people of northern Sweden, Norway, Finland and parts of northwest Russia. They are called the Sami.
The sea between Los Roques and Venezuela is becoming as infamous as the Bermuda Triangle. Photo courtesy: Carloscastilla | Dreamstime via LiveScience.com
The disappearance last week of the airplane carrying Italian fashion mogul Vittorio Missoni and five others across the Caribbean Sea has been blamed on everything from mechanical failure to kidnapping by drug smugglers.
Now, a new theory has emerged: The airplane and its passengers fell victim to the "Los Roques Curse," a phenomenon that some have likened to the Bermuda Triangle, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.
The plane was traveling the 87 miles (140 kilometers) from the island resort of Los Roques (an archipelago consisting of hundreds of islands) to Caracas, Venezuela, on Friday when it disappeared over the open sea, according to ABC News. Since the 1990s, at least 15 other aircraft have reported emergencies, crashed or disappeared in the same area, according to The Guardian.
In 2008, 14 people died when a plane making the same journey from Los Roques disappeared. No wreckage was ever found, and only one body was recovered, according to VolarenVenezuela, a website on civil aviation in Venezuela.
Some have claimed that disappearances like these result from massive releases of methane gas from the seafloor. Others have suggested, with no evidence, the cause may be aliens from outer space living beneath the waves, or souls from the lost underwater civilization of Atlantis.
But like the Bermuda Triangle — the stretch of open ocean between Bermuda, South Florida and Puerto Rico infamous for mysterious disappearances of ships and planes — people with less superstitious minds believe there's a rational explanation.
The Bermuda Triangle is heavily traveled, and, proportionally, sees no more disappearances than any other area. The region also produces unpredictable tropical storms, and the Gulf Stream is particularly fast and turbulent in that area.
"There's always some explanation for these things, even if it takes many years to uncover the answer," Nick Wall, editor of Pilot, told the Guardian. "Pilots prefer to concentrate on the things that genuinely will help them live longer, such as fuel gauges, weather reports and engine inspections … it is too early to know for sure what caused this latest incident."
Other mysterious water worlds linked with doom are the so-called Michigan Triangle in Lake Michigan and the Sargasso Sea. Several ships have been found drifting sans any crew through the calm Sargasso Sea. And, legend has it that in 1840, after sailing through the Sargasso Sea, the French merchant ship "Rosalie" was discovered with its sails set but without any crew members on board. The Michigan Triangle has been blamed for the mysterious disappearances of ship crews and entire aircraft. Another, the Devil's Sea (also called the Pacific Bermuda Triangle) sits in the Pacific around Miyake Island, south of Tokyo. Ancient legends have it dragons lived off the coast of Japan there, also giving the area the "Dragon's Triangle" moniker.
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