June 2009
52 posts
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Dams Are Thwarting Louisiana Marsh Restoration →
Desperate to halt the erosion of Louisiana’s coast, officials there are talking about breaking Mississippi River levees south of New Orleans to restore the nourishing flow of muddy water into the state’s marshes.
But in a new analysis, scientists at Louisiana State University say inland dams trap so much sediment that the river no longer carries enough to halt marsh loss, especially now that...
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Fake receipt printing service →
FalseExpense will mail you an envelope full of fake receipts, suitable for submitting for reimbursement or deducting from your taxes, “FOR NOVELTY USE ONLY”. Bruce Schneier notes, “I’ve heard of sites where you give them a range of dates and a city, and they give you a full set of receipts for a trip to that city: airfare, hotel, meals, everything — but I...
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U.S. Seniors 'Smarter' Than English Seniors →
Researchers from the Peninsula Medical School, the University of Cambridge and the University of Michigan have carried out the first international comparison of cognitive function in nationally representative samples of older adults in the US and England and discovered that US seniors performed significantly better that their English counterparts.
The finding is surprising because older people...
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Reading Pigeons’ Brains as They Fly →
How homing pigeons find their way back to a starting point is not completely known. Studies have shown that the birds variously use the position of the Sun and the Earth’s magnetic field as a compass, and sense of smell and visual cues as navigation aids. But the use of visual cues has been difficult to study, because if a bird flies over a landmark and doesn’t change its course, it’s impossible...
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Scientists see no dietary benefit to replacing... →
While grocery store brands increasingly swap out corn syrup for sugar-and trumpet the fact-little evidence suggests any health benefit for consumers. Corn syrup has been demonized because it’s highly processed and environmentally unfriendly. But sugar ain’t much better… (via BoingBoing)
“Natural sugar versus high-fructose corn syrup” [Chicago Tribune] ...
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Stoned wallabies make crop circles →
Australian wallabies are eating opium poppies and creating crop circles as they hop around “as high as a kite”, a government official has said.
Lara Giddings, the attorney general for the island state of Tasmania, said the kangaroo-like marsupials were getting into poppy fields grown for medicine.
She was reporting to a parliamentary hearing on security for poppy crops.
Australia...
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I'm performing 24 surgeries this week...sorrry for...
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Six years ago today 130 Congress Hotel employees...
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Guppy Study Finds That Evolution Can Occur In Less... →
How fast can evolution take place? In just a few years, according to a new study on guppies led by UC Riverside’s Swanne Gordon, a graduate student in biology.
Gordon and her colleagues studied guppies — small fresh-water fish biologists have studied for long — from the Yarra River, Trinidad. They introduced the guppies into the nearby Damier River, in a section above a barrier waterfall...
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New 'Electronic Glue' Promises Less Expensive... →
Researchers at the University of Chicago and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have developed an “electronic glue” that could accelerate advances in semiconductor-based technologies, including solar cells and thermoelectric devices that convert sun light and waste heat, respectively, into useful electrical energy…. (continues @ ScienceDaily)
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What Really Prompts The Dog's 'Guilty Look' →
What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the “guilty look” in dogs in the recently...
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Hidden Genitalia In Female Water Striders Makes... →
150 years after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, Han and Jablonski used common insects, water striders, to study the intricacies of evolutionary conflict between males and females. The mechanisms for the way Darwinian natural selection, acting separately on males and females, result in different traits in males than in females (for example, different body...
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Dangerous Liaisons: Bacterial 'Sex' Causes... →
Some disease-causing bacteria are becoming resistant to antibiotics because they have peculiar sex lives, say researchers publishing new results in the journal Science. The new study helps scientists understand how bacteria develop resistance to antibiotics, which is a major challenge for those treating infectious diseases, say the authors from Imperial College London.
Today’s research...
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When Two Bat Tribes Go To War →
Greater spear-nosed bats form maternal tribes that go to war with each other. Each tribe comprises up to 25 unrelated females who stick together for years. Not only do these females cooperate to roost and find food, they fly in to rescue each other’s infants from danger. And given the chance, female members of one tribe will try to capture and kill the pups of neighbouring tribes,...
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Hummingbirds Are Faster Than Jets →
Male hummingbirds, swooping in an effort to impress females, achieve speeds “faster than fighter jets”, according to a study. A US researcher has captured the birds’ dives with super-fast cameras. He lured them into their impressive displays using stuffed models of female birds. The feathered acrobats reached speeds of almost 400 body lengths per second….
When measured...
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Tiny Chance of Planet Collision →
Astronomers calculate there is a tiny chance that Mars or Venus could collide with Earth - though it would not happen for at least a billion years. The finding comes from simulations to show how orbits of planets might evolve billions of years into the future. But the calculated chances of such events occurring are tiny….
Astronomers had thought that the orbits of the planets were...
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Study On Papua New Guinea's Long-beaked Echidna... →
A Wildlife Conservation Society research intern working in the wilds of Papua New Guinea has successfully completed what many other field biologists considered “mission impossible”—the first study of a rare egg-laying mammal called the long-beaked echidna…. (continues @ ScienceDaily)
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Snakes Use Friction And Redistribution Of Their... →
Snakes use both friction generated by their scales and redistribution of their weight to slither along flat surfaces, researchers at New York University and the Georgia Institute of Technology have found. Their findings, which appear in the latest issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, run counter to previous studies that have shown snakes move by pushing laterally...
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New Orleans mayor quarantined in China for... →
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Over 60 Percent Of All US Bankruptcies... →
In 2007, before the current economic downturn, an American family filed for bankruptcy in the aftermath of illness every 90 seconds; three-quarters of them were insured. Over 60% of all bankruptcies in the United States in 2007 were driven by medical incidents. In an article published in the August 2009 issue of the American Journal of Medicine, the results of the first-ever national random-sample...
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Tickled Apes Yield Laughter Clue →
I suggest watching the videos associated with this story…
New research has given credence to the idea that laughter evolved in a common ancestor of the great apes and humans.
Researchers tickled 22 young apes and three humans and acoustically analysed the laughing sounds that resulted. Though the vocalisations varied, the team found that the patterns of changes fit with evolutionary...
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'Gay Penguins' Rear Adopted Chick →
Two “gay” male penguins have hatched a chick and are now rearing it as its adoptive parents, says a German zoo. The zoo, in Bremerhaven, northern Germany, says the adult males - Z and Vielpunkt - were given an egg which was rejected by its biological parents. It says the couple are now happily rearing the chick, said to have reached four weeks old.
The zoo made headlines in 2005...
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Birds in Cities Sing Louder →
Great tits are tweaking their tweets to be heard in noisy urban areas, but for their country cousins it is like they are speaking a different language.
Scientists at Aberystwyth University found male great tits in 20 UK towns and cities sang at a higher pitch to be heard above the man-made noise.
Rural birds were confused by urban bird song while city birds “didn’t understand the...
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Droppings Put Penguins On The Map →
Scientists have located 38 emperor penguin colonies in Antarctica by using satellites to look for stains from the animals’ droppings.
It is impossible to track the penguins themselves using standard satellite imaging because they are too small.
However, penguins cluster for up to eight months on sea ice; as their guano builds up it leaves a reddish-brown mark on sea ice that is easier...
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Mosquito Threat To Giant Tortoise →
The famous Galapagos giant tortoises could be at serious risk from mosquitoes that have developed a taste for reptile blood, experts have warned.
Scientists say increased tourism means there is now a greater risk of a disease-carrying insect being transported to the islands. Local mosquitoes that have evolved to feed on reptiles could then pick up the diseases and pass them on. Galapagos...