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13 Dangerously Endangered Species

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 07:38:31 GMT

clipped by: hitchhiker08
clipper's remarks: Let's all try and do our bit...

13 Dangerously Endangered Species

These endangered species are near extinction, but researchers and scientists have helped these rare animals reproduce in captivity.

a collection of 13 endanger species, all with babies born in captivity

Rare Red Pandas

On May 26th, 2008, the Edmonton Valley Zoo welcomed two rare red pandas, who were named Tai and Pip. The cubs have double their birth weight, and increase their survival rate.

Vancouver Island Marmot

only 25 marmots in the wild

Pygmy Rabbit

Scarlet Macaws

live to 80 years and begin to reproduce at 7 years old

White-Backed Vulture

Through the effort of breeding, one white-backed chick had hatched in captivity, in India.

Black-Footed Ferrets

Golden Langur

Black Jaguar

Siberian Tigers

Angel Shark

White Rhinos

The white rhinos are close to extinction, and the first white rhino born in captivity was at Pretoria on June 8, 1967.

Rare Chinese Snub-Nosed Monkey

Black and White Ruffed Lemurs

Tags: endangered, birds, animals, fish, captivity, zoo, sanctuary, national park

Van Gogh Quotes

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 18:36:02 GMT

clipped by: willhelm

Clip Source: equotes.wetpaint.com

"Do not quench your inspiration and your imagination; do not become the slave of your model."

"Happiness... it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort."

"I experience a period of frightening clarity in those moments when nature is so beautiful. I am no longer sure of myself, and the paintings appear as in a dream."

"I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day."

"I put my heart and my soul into my work, and have lost my mind in the process."

"Love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is done well."

"One must work and dare if one really wants to live."

"Painting is a faith, and it imposes the duty to disregard public opinion."

"What would life be if we had no courage to attempt anything?"

There's water in dem dar clouds!

Mon, 04 Aug 2008 10:14:55 GMT

clipped by: wildcat

Clip Source: www.cleantechblog.com

With seawater covering seventy-one per cent of the Earth’s surface, at an average depth of four kilometers, and another 1,000,000,000,000,000 liters of water in the first kilometer alone of the earth' atmosphere, water could hardly be described as a rare element. Its more a case of 'water water everywhere and not a drop to drink'. I'm going to highlight a few different ways in which renewable energy can be used to produce drinking water.

One of the readers last week commented that use of wind turbines or wave energy to power desalination would be a great idea. Well in Perth Australia they are doing exactly that. Perth Australia has now established one of the largest desalination plants outside of the Middle East and set up a wind farm to power it.

Speaking of windmills, another Australian, Max Whisson, an energetic septuagenarian inventor, believes he can solve the current water crisis with his Water Windmill invention

Tags: water, clean tech, wind power

"Impossible Fractals"

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 21:45:11 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: www.cameronius.com

The tri-bar, the Koch snowflake and the Sierpinski gasket

Two iterations of an impossible snowflake (with acute and obtuse generators shown)

An alternative snowflake design that emphasizes the perceptual effect (with generator shown

Impossible gaskets are more troublesome

The Devil's fork and the Cantor set

The Devil's gatling gun (two levels), timber offcuts (two levels) and comb (three levels

Four-bar designs (with sharp and truncated generators) applied to the square Sierpinski curve

An impossible multibar cube and the Menger sponge after one and three iterations

Subcube designs and Buch's "Cube in blue

Ernst's "Nest of impossible cubes" and two variations

An impossible multibar Peano-Gosper curve.

Reutersvärd's "Meander" and a Hilbert meander

45° Pythagorean tree, balanced 30° Pythagorean tree and extended tri-bar

An impossible mushroom (45° Pythagorean tree

An impossible fern (balanced 30° Pythagorean tree)

A spiral tri-bar and hexagonally bound isometric spirals

Satirical Maps of the First World War

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:29:04 GMT

clipped by: JohnWaterman

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

Hark! hark! the dogs do bark!
The beggars are coming to town
Some in rags and some in jags
And one in a velvet gown [Trad.]¹^,²^,³

European Revue - Kill That Eagle
(by J. Amschewitz; London, Pub. by "Geographica", 1914)

Humoristische Karte von Europa im Jahre 1914

Het Gekkenhuis (Oud Liedje, Nieuwe Wijs)
{approx: The Insane Asylum (Old Song, Newly Wise (or 'new tune'?)}
(by Louis Raemaekers; Amsterdam, Senefelder [pub.] 1915)

Karte von Europa im Jahre 1914

England hides its fleet under the skirt of home, the dog Ireland is at its back.
King Oskar of Sweden looks “intently” at Russia.
France bravely retreats, while Spain devotes itself to sweet “idleness.”

Belgium – already has!

All the above maps were spliced together from screencaps. They were obtained from the University of Amsterdam website where you can zoom in to high magnification. [via Briefe an Konrad]

Clip Source: dpc.uba.uva.nl

Clip Source: bibliodyssey.blogspot.com

World's smallest snake found in Barbados

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:45:06 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver

Clip Source: www.physorg.com

The world's smallest species of snake, with adults averaging just under four inches in length, has been identified on the Caribbean island of Barbados.

The species -- which is as thin as a spaghetti noodle and small enough to rest comfortably on a U.S. quarter --was discovered by Blair Hedges, an evolutionary biologist at Penn State. Hedges and his colleagues also are the discoverers of the world's smallest frog and lizard species, which too were found on Caribbean islands.

Hedges determined that the Barbados species is new to science on the basis of its genetic differences from other snake species and its unique color pattern and scales.

Hedges determined that this species, which he named Leptotyphlops carlae, is the smallest of the more than 3,100 known snake species.

Hedges thinks the Barbados snake may be at or near the minimum possible size for snakes, though he cannot say for sure that no smaller species exists -- several other snake species are nearly as small.

Tags: animal life, biology, snakes

Coming Soon To A War Near You: Mini Dragonfly Robots

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:50:33 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Soon they will be equipped with a deadly sting or something...

Clip Source: www.gearfuse.com

Dutch scientists have unveiled the DelFly Micro, an insect-like robot that’s the world’s smallest camera-carrying aircraft. Despite being less than four inches long and weighing only 0.1 oz., the Del Fly is able to stream live broadcast-quality images and to reach speeds of up to 10mph. Features of the DelFly include ultra-light thermoplastic polymers, carbon fibre, a super small lithium polymer battery, and micro-circuitry. It’s Achilles heel is it’s short three-minute flight time.

Robotic camera drones are in high demand for military applications, but the DelFly micro isn’t battlefield-ready just yet.

US Army personnel are looking for robots that have artificial intelligence and flight times of at least twenty minutes.

There are many improvements being planned for the DelFly Micro, the next generation of DelFly’s will be half the size of the current model and the Dutch researchers have that “In the long term, we’re dreaming of an aircraft the size of a fruit fly.

Tags: micro mechanics, surveillance

Parenthood is not a synonym to blood connection!

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 10:46:28 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: I think it is an important research, genetic similarity does not yield a priori an advantage in the quality of parenthood and education. It is rather the human involved. i think it holds to mothers as well.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Biological Fathers Not Necessarily The Best, Social Dads Parent Well Too

A large number of U.S. children live or will live with a “social father,” a man who is married to or cohabiting with the child’s mother, but is not the biological father.

Researchers found that married social fathers exhibited equivalent or higher quality parenting behaviors than married and cohabiting biological fathers.

Married social fathers were more engaged with children, took on more shared responsibility in parenting, and were more trusted by mothers to take care of children.

Analyses and regression results from interviews with mothers revealed that they perceived married social fathers to be engaged in relatively high quality parenting practices with the five-year-old children. Most notably, social fathers exhibited significantly higher levels of cooperation in parenting than biological fathers.

Tags: sociology, family

Bloomberg calls for a new New Deal

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 15:59:35 GMT

clipped by: egoldstein
clipper's remarks: A great piece by Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. I think this man is one of the country's greatest assets - i sure hope we find a way to empower him. He has, in my opinion, been a great mayor for new york city.

Clip Source: www.nydailynews.com

Remember, the New Deal didn't just help get us through the Depression. It created the foundation for a generation of economic growth. That foundation is now cracking because Congress has been funding projects based purely on pork barrel politics, not merit.

It's time for a new New Deal - one that invests more money, more wisely. It is as impossible to imagine America without FDR's New Deal as it is to imagine the country without Eisenhower's interstate highway system. Those massive public investments epitomized both the vision and courage that are desperately lacking in today's Washington.

China, India, Europe - they're all investing far more in vital infrastructure than we are. If that keeps up, America's best days will be over.

Tags: politics, bloomberg, economics, new deal

Conceptual Thinking versus Metaphor

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 09:07:58 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: I too think that, useful as it is, syntax-locked rational discourse is but a pale ghostly existence contrasted with the vital richness of metaphor and image-ination.

Clip Source: www.literaryreview.co.uk

In Shakespeare what is apparently a small matter is actually often a big deal made seemingly small only because it is happening at pace. The moment of a decision in Macbeth, of a death in Lear: they are no sooner there than gone, with hardly time for the thing to sink in. Says poor Phebe in As You Like It, at the sight of what she takes to be an angry but beautiful young man: 'Faster than his tongue/Did make offence his eye did heal it up.' 'Faster': that's why such things strike with disproportionate emotional violence - they are big matters contained within a small space, more than one thing happening fast at a single instant. The conceptualisation comes along afterwards, like the old nurse reporting to an impatient young Juliet: slow, belated and heavy.

in general, our thinking about what goes on so invisibly, so microscopically in the mind, is cumbersome and restrictive. The enemy is paraphrase, the loss of original experience within a second-hand normalising language

Tags: catachresis

Is our universe fine-tuned for life?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:06:08 GMT

clipped by: Mohir
clipper's remarks: Claims of fine-tuning have generally been based on what happens when you vary a single characteristic of the universe, say the strength of gravity, while holding all others constant. That, says Adams, is too artificial a scenario to tell you anything about whether there are other universes that can support life. "The right way to do the problem is to start from scratch," he says. "You have to turn all the knobs and find out what happens."

Clip Source: space.newscientist.com

DON'T take our starry skies for granted. If you were unlucky enough to be living in some other universe, you might have nothing to stare at but black holes.

At least, that's the view of a new study that examines the nature of other universes that might support life and suggests that our cosmic habitat is nothing special after all - wondrously starry skies apart.

The idea that certain aspects of our universe make it uniquely suited to life has never been properly tested, says Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. "You hear people say our universe is fine-tuned for life, that stars are rare and couldn't form if certain things were different," he says. "The truth is, no one has done the calculations." Adams has now rectified that situation and found that it is not unusual for stars to form that can support life.

Tags: life, universe

Soviet dissident writer Solzhenitsyn dies at 89

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 23:18:27 GMT

clipped by: Mohir

Clip Source: www.reuters.com

lexander Solzhenitsyn, the Soviet dissident writer and Nobel literature prize winner, has died aged 89,

He died of a stroke, the agency said, quoting literary sources in Moscow.

Solzhenitsyn served with the Red Army in World War Two but became one of the most prominent dissidents of the Soviet era, enduring labor camps, cancer and persecution by Soviet officialdom.

His experience in the network of labor camps was vividly described in his "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich."

His major works, including "The First Circle" and "Cancer Ward" brought him world admiration and the 1970 Nobel Literature Prize.

Stripped of his citizenship and sent into exile in 1974 after the publication of "The Gulag Archipelago", his monumental history of the Soviet police state, the writer settled in the United States, returning to post-Soviet Russia as a hero in 1994.

Tags: obituary

The White House is Briefed: Phoenix About to Announce "Potential For Life" on Mars

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 19:58:30 GMT

clipped by: Silkweaver
clipper's remarks: Is this another media spin or the real thing ?
Next, JPL scientists are going to be challenged with finding life on earth....

Clip Source: www.universetoday.com

It would appear that the US President has been briefed by Phoenix scientists about the discovery of something more "provocative" than the discovery of water existing on the Martian surface.

This news comes just as the Thermal and Evolved Gas Analyzer (TEGA) confirmed experimental evidence for the existence of water in the Mars regolith on Thursday.

Whilst NASA scientists are not claiming that life once existed on the Red Planet's surface, new data appears to indicate the "potential for life" more conclusively than the TEGA water results.

Apparently these new results are being kept under wraps until further, more detailed analysis can be carried out, but we are assured that this announcement will be huge…

n fact, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory science team

were kept out of the July 31st news conference (confirming water) so additional analysis could be carried out, avoiding any questions that may have revealed their preliminary results.

Tags: space, mars, nasa, jpl, life on mars, lgm

Where Is Human Evolution Heading?

Sun, 03 Aug 2008 11:21:07 GMT

clipped by: wildcat
clipper's remarks: The race's DNA is changing faster than ever; what it means for our descendants

Clip Source: www.usnews.com

If you judge the progress of humanity by Homer Simpson, Paris Hilton, and Girls Gone Wild videos, you might conclude that our evolution has stalled—or even shifted into reverse. Not so, scientists say. Humans are evolving faster than ever before, picking up new genetic traits and talents that may help us survive a turbulent future.

Much remodeling has gone on since the dawn of agriculture about 10 millenniums ago. "People who lived 10,000 years ago were much more like Neanderthals than we are like those people," says John Hawks, a professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. "We've changed."

Hawks is among a growing number of scientists who are using whole-genome sequencing and other modern technologies to zero in on just how we've changed. Their research is helping illuminate not only how humans became what we are but also where we might be headed

Humans will continue to change to cope with new diseases, if history is any guide

Tags: dna, mutations, evolution

Night belongs to the young...

Sat, 02 Aug 2008 21:09:05 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: "This study's findings could inspire the development and testing of pharmacological agents designed to enhance memory replay phenomena," Hasselmo said.

And i say, why wait for old age? maybe we should begin taking it (once it is out) much before...

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Aging Impairs The 'Replay' Of Memories During Sleep

During sleep, the hippocampus, a brain region important in learning and memory, repeatedly "replays" brain activity from recent awake experiences.

This replay process is believed to be important for memory consolidation.

In the young animals, the sequence of neural activity recorded while the animals navigated the mazes was repeated when they slept. However, in most of the old animals, the sequence of neural activity recorded during sleep did not reflect the sequence of brain activity recorded in the maze.

"These findings suggest that some of the memory impairment experienced during aging could involve a reduction in the automatic process of experience replay," said Michael Hasselmo

Animals with more faithful sleep replay also performed better on memory tests.

Tags: aging, dreams, sleep