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Tracking the Origin of the Cat

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:27:47 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: Cats probably started living close to humans when people evolved from nomadic herding to raising livestock and crops and started storing food, which attracted mice and other rodents. Cats found good hunting there, and humans surely appreciated the sly little predators' help protecting their stocks."There was a mutual benefit," Lyons said.

From there, domesticated cats started to radiate out to different parts of the world, often following humans on their migrations. Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia.

But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds.

The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere.

Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.

Clip Source: www.wtnrradio.com

Scientists have begun to pull back the feline veil, using the latest molecular tools to get a peek at the origin of the cat.

In one of the most comprehensive explorations of cats' origins to date, Leslie Lyons from the University of California at Davis, and her colleagues spent about five years collecting feline DNA, poking behind the whiskers of more than 1,100 Persians, Siamese, street cats and household tabbies around the world to swab inside their mouths.

The first thing the group did was confirm a report published last June in the journal Science that the domestication of cats about 10,000 years ago appeared to have occurred in an area known as the Fertile Crescent, which stretches from Turkey to northern Africa and to modern-day Iraq and Iran.

"Our data support the Fertile Crescent, specifically Turkey, as one of the origin sites for cats," said Lyons

"Turkey was part of the Fertile Crescent and hence was one of the earliest areas for agricultural development."

Tags: animals

Cool Red Frog

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:50:44 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: images.usefulzero.com

Love in the octopus' garden

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 09:18:06 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

hey flirt, hold hands and guard their lovers jealously -- yet they don't even have bones.

The love lives of octopuses are far more complex than anyone thought,

"Each day in the water, we learned something new about octopus behavior, probably like what ornithologists must have gone through after the invention of binoculars," said Huffard, now at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute in Moss Bay, California.

"We quickly realized that Abdopus aculeatus broke all the rules, doing the near opposite of every hypothesis we'd formed based on aquarium studies."

They saw male cephalopods guarding the dens of their mates for several days, warding off rivals and even strangling them if they got too close.

Small males would sneak in to mate by swimming low to the ground in feminine fashion and not displaying their "male" brown stripes, the researchers reported in the journal Marine Biology.

Tags: nature, octopus

The Ancient Mechanics and How They Thought

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:12:51 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: He also majored in astronomy as an undergraduate, and about nine years ago, feeling science-deprived, he joined a multinational research endeavor called the Archimedes Project, based at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin.

The Archimedes team studies the history of mechanics, how people thought about simple machines like the lever, the wheel and axle, the balance, the pulley, the wedge and the screw and how they turned their thoughts into theories and principles.

The textual record begins with “Mechanical Problems,” moves to Rome and then through the medieval Islamic world to the Renaissance. It ends, finally, with Newton, who described many of the basic laws of mechanics in the 18th century.

By following the historical record, the Archimedes researchers have discovered that the evolution of physics — or, at least, mechanics — is based on an interplay between practice and theory.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

LAW OF THE LEVER On triremes, the end oarsmen were the most effective.

“Think of the oar as a lever,” Prof. Mark Schiefsky of the Harvard classics department said. “Think of the oarlock as a fulcrum, and think of the sea as the weight.”

The longer the lever arm on the rower’s side of the fulcrum, the easier to move the weight. In the middle of the ship, as the rowers knew, the distance from hands to oarlock was longest.

This explanation is given in Problem 4 of the classical Greek treatise “Mechanical Problems,” from the third century B.C., the first known text on the science of mechanics and the first to explain how a lever works. It preceded, by at least a generation, Archimedes’ “On the Equilibrium of Plane Figures,” which presented the first formal proof of the law of the lever.

EARTHMOVER Archimedes said he could move the Earth if given a place to stand.

Dr. Schiefsky teaches Greek and Latin as his day job and reads Thucydides and Sophocles in ancient Greek for fun.

Tags: physics, ancient mechanics, science, classics, research, archimedes project

Number Spiral

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:31:56 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.numberspiral.com

1. Introduction

Number spirals are very simple. To make one, we just write the non-negative integers on a ribbon and roll it up with zero at the center.

The trick is to arrange the spiral so all the perfect squares (1, 4, 9, 16, etc.) line up in a row on the right side:

If we continue winding for a while and zoom out a bit, the result looks like this:

If we zoom out even further and remove everything except the dots that indicate the locations of integers, we get the next illustration. It shows 2026 dots:

Let's try making the primes darker than the non-primes:

The primes seem to cluster along certain curves. Let's zoom out even further to get a better look. The following number spiral shows all the primes that occur within the first 46,656 non-negative integers. (For clarity, non-primes have been left out.)

On the next few pages of this website, we'll investigate these patterns and try to make sense out of them

Flirting females baffle men

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 07:16:34 GMT

clipped by: dakotayii
clipper's remarks: You mean............

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

The flutter of eyelashes, the smile across the dancefloor and the giggle after a lame joke - every woman knows the time-honoured ways to get a man.

But research suggests that the flirty female is wasting her time. Men, it seems, are blind to the subtle seduction techniques of the opposite sex.

Short of pouncing on the object of her lust, a woman's non-verbal signals of sexual interest often prove sadly lost on the young male brain, according to a study to be published next month in Psychological Science.

Male students scored worse for accuracy than females - and they were particularly confused by amiability and amorousness. The men commonly mistook women's sexual signals as merely friendly and were prone to see friendliness as a blatant advance.

According to the researchers, rather than going through life thinking: "She wants me", men often find themselves trying to navigate a foreign world of social signals without a phrasebook.

Tags: society

Manned Cloud

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 11:21:41 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.dezeen.com

Here’s another designer dirigible: Manned Cloud is a flying hotel proposed by French designer Jean-Marie Massaud.

The whale-shaped airship, developed with French national aerospace research body ONERA, will be able to accommodate 40 guests and have a range of 5,000 km.

Manned Cloud will have a cruising speed of 130 km/h and a top speed of 170 km/h. Two two-deck cabin will contain amenities including a restaurant, a library, a fitness suite and a spa. There will also be a sun deck on top of the double helium-filled envelopes.

More on airships in our earlier stories on the Strato Cruiser “lifestyle Zeppelin” and the Aeroscraft ML866 hybrid aircraft.

Here are the details from Massaud:

classic photos in lego

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:00:49 GMT

clipped by: apple white

Clip Source: shapeandcolour.wordpress.com

mike stimpson: “classics in lego”.

Enter the work of fellow-Lego lover Mike Stimpson. On his Flickr set you can see his toy block genius at work: he takes classic photographs and recreates them with Lego. I appreciate how he doesn’t necessarily take any of the pre-supposed emotional impact of the Lego itself into account when he chooses which photos to recreate. Sure, Lego are always smiling, but that doesn’t mean he only recreates happy photos - like in his reenactment of the iconic “unknown rebel” in Tiannemen Square…

Clip Source: www.flickr.com

Clip Source: img294.imageshack.us

Tags: photography, lego

The Ancients

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 10:34:36 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.ancientweb.org

The Ancient web is an online resource for Students, Teachers, and anyone interested in the cultures of the ancient world. Below is a list of the current ancient sites included in this online portal.

Chile: The Art, Culture and History of Ancient Patagonia

France: The Art, Culture and History of Ancient Gaul

Germany: The Art, Culture, and History of the Ancient Teutonic World

Greece: The Art, Culture, and History of the Ancient Aegean

Ireland: The Art, Culture, and History of the Celtic World

Italy: The Art, Culture, and History of Ancient Rome

Mexico: The Art, Culture, and History of Ancient Mesoamerica

Peru: The Art, Culture, and History of the Ancient Andean World

Romania: The Art, Culture, and History of Ancient Dacia and Thrace.

Spain: The Art, Culture, and History of Ancient Iberia.

Izzy Lane and the Unique Sheep Sanctuary of Scotland

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 21:27:04 GMT

clipped by: urbanlife
clipper's remarks: Isobel Davies loves sheep - she created a Sheep Sanctuary in Scotland after she found that many sheep were sent to slaughter for various reasons from being male to being lame.

She also discovered that farmers were burning the wool sheared from their sheep rather than selling it to manufacturers in other industries. Because 80 percent of the wool used in Britain’s clothing industry was imported, the native farmers couldn’t compete with the low prices—it would actually cost them more to properly shear and sell the wool than it would to just hack it off and burn it.

Davies decided to create an economic model that would preserve the sheep AND support the British clothing industry.

She created Izzy Lane Sheep-Friendly Clothing!

Clip Source: www.izzylane.com

Our flock of Wensleydale and Shetland sheep comprise mainly of animals that would have been sent to slaughter for being male, missing a pregnancy, being a little lame, being too small, being too old

We pay equal and better prices to save them. They are living out happy lives in our Sheep Sanctuary

I combine my passions for great clothes, animals and Britain.

I learned that about 80% of the wool that we use in this country is imported, predominantly from Australia and New Zealand

When I began my research in 2002 and saved my first 4 ‘butcher lambs’, I also discovered that our textile industry was on its knees

Our cloth is woven at an ancient mill in Selkirk using Victorian machinery that has been operating for over a hundred years.

Our knitwear is made with the lustrous, kemp-free fleece of the Wensleydale sheep, an endangered breed, numbering around 1800 in the world

Clip Source: www.greengirlguide.com

Izzy Lane, brainchild of Isobel Davies

Sheep Sanctuary in Scotland

Tags: sheep, lamb, scotland, britain, knit, textile industry, mill