Entries Tagged 'Nature' ↓

Plenty of interesting news in the world today…

1.
Squid Beaks Use Chemical Trick to Keep From Tearing Off

Apparently the jumbo squid’s beak is made of one of the hardest substances known, able to shear through the spine of foes but until now scientists were stumped as to how it was able to do this and yet maintain integrity at the base…why did it not shear right off. Seems there is a changing gradient of stiffness throughout the structure. “Scientists estimate that more than ten million squid live in a 25-square-mile (65-square-kilometer) area in the Gulf of California.”

To read more…..

2.
An electric shock helps people to better discriminate between smells.

And it seems that our beaks function better after -well you see the headline. I do believe I see a marketing opportunity here. Either a portable nose prod to take to dinner to get the full experience, or perhaps packaged with good bottles of wine.

The punchline is that (and maybe a punch in the nose would also have worked then) fear is the motivator.

To read more….

3.

Filipinos warned on crucifixions

In order to cut down on unnecessary infections, when you are planning to have yourself nailed to a cross, make sure to sanitize your nails, and the whips too, if you are into flagellation.

To read more…

4.

Francis Bacon

Just ran across this when I was looking at crucifixion images. Hadn’t seen it before but I like it.

1. From Urban-ism…

2. From DesignSpotter

3. From Australian Consolidated Products:

I wonder if this was a factor in that unfortunate incident this week where the woman wouldn’t come out of the bathroom for two years?

4. Enough sitting around..

5. Now for a few things that really shouldn’t glow but do; the things you can do with jellyfish genes:

or

6. Back to the source (or least a close relation):

The above was arrived at via SciencePunk. What you are looking at is a visualization of the oceans and the atmosphere gathered into drops and displayed against the earth; oceans on the left, atmosphere on the right.

I find this almost but not quite as amazing as the galactic objects comparisons reported on here.

A little closer to home is the large/small dog comparison, and this disparity has scientists arguing over whether they really should be considered the same species. What seems to keep the family together is that all breeds are compatible. (In the case below I think we might try to avoid testing the hypothesis.)

And finally, the largest and smallest fish.

Maybe its just me but isn’t conservation about preserving life?

The following is excerpted from an article in my local paper entitled:
Female hunters shouldn’t settle for hand-me-downs:

Kelly Semple, 42, has been awarded an Order of the Bighorn by the Alberta government. The awards recognize outstanding contributions to fish and wildlife conservation.

She has spent more than 20 years as an advocate for conservation, hunter education and the wise stewardship of Alberta’s natural resources.

Semple’s role in a youth mentor program run by the Hunting for Tomorrow Foundation taught her that women can be easily turned off the activity if they start out improperly equipped.

Often, when women start off in traditionally male activities they don’t show up at the sporting goods store and ask to be fitted with good equipment, Semple said.

Instead, they’ll use hand-me downs from a male influence in their life. So, often the equipment doesn’t fit right or is oversized and “too much bow or too much rifle.”

Now it’s one of the things Semple insists on with the female youth she mentors.

“If you don’t have equipment that fits, you it really takes away from the overall experience and it can turn a lot of people off very, very quickly.”

Another challenge she encounters more each year is the plethora of video games and entertainment tools that desensitize people to the reality of life and death.

“A lot of the video games that the kids play are really quite graphic. The unfortunate part of that is it creates a layer between understanding the life and death cycle and understanding that when you kill something you, and it, are forever changed. It’s not as easy as just flicking a switch and picking up the game again.”

So this award winner for conservation is concerned that potential hunters will be turned off by the experience and may not want to kill more animals. Or that somehow it is a pure experience because it teaches you that death is final.

Kind of go by the philosophy that if I want to show my appreciation of life and death, the most meaningful way is to not kill because I have a pretty good idea that killing leads to death. (And by the way, on the government’s Sustainable Resources website the award is described as being given to champions of fish and wildlife -kind of makes you hope that these people never become your champions).

Somehow ties in with a recent wolf kill being proposed here because elk are threatened (in other words, there are not enough for hunters to meaningfully understand life and death).

How about culling the hunter population instead (and no, I don’t mean killing them, just stopping them). Meanwhile on another coast they are having a big deer hunt because there are too many. Too many for whom? Nature tends to work these things out eventually without bullets or red vests.

Just one of those times when a man’s fancy turns to oh, Candied Bacon Ice Cream (discovered on SeriousEats).

Still hungry, I know I am. How about some fine lamprey?

In Portugal, it appears that a local feastworthy item is this parasite cooked in its own blood. Don’t know about you but I am getting hungry just writing about this.

Here’s a more flattering shot of this Dapper Dan. Kind of like one of those detachable shower heads, or a vacuum cleaner attachment.

Here’s the scary part but I have picked one of the prettier shots out there. These fellows and gals are as good as we are at crashing the fish stocks. And on an unrelated note, they have no bile ducts and die heavily jaundiced. They can also handle about 100 times the iron levels in their blood that we can and are being studied for applications for human hemochromatosis, a fairly common disease in those of European descent.

And now for something completely different, phew, here’ s a cool Blue Seeds video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oev3OY6RoXs]

Read an article a while back about how when well meaning acts meant to preserve endangered species are brought into being they can actually have the opposite effect. Land developers see that the impending act affects some aspect of their land that could harbour that form and they fasttrack the redevelopment of that land so that there is no chance it will become protected and thereby reduce the number of potential habitats. And all because of a law that was meant to protect. Its not the lawmakers fault, its just that they are up against one of the more consistently destructive and forward thinking forces on this planet, land developers. But the point is that the consequences were unintended.

I feel the same way about drivers becoming over solicitous to pedestrians. I have never trusted cars and if they are whizzing by I know exactly where they are and can plan around them. Once they start predicting my behavior and trying to be kind to me, they introduce problems into my life and make the flow more erratic for other drivers. The worst is around schools where half the people drive like paranoid geriatrics worried about their reaction times. OMG there’s a kid a block away and they might cross the street. Sure, I stop for kids, if they are actually crossing the street but otherwise I drive like a human being. Kids are not idiots and if they have any sense will work around me.

The worst pedestrian behavior I’ve seen and unfortunately this is not uncommon is adults stepping off into crosswalks without even checking to see if some two ton monster is bearing down on them or taking into account that the black ice on the road might not be visible to the driver, or the person I saw not long ago crossing in front of a bank of cars who thankfully noticed him because engrossed on his cellphone he didn’t notice that he was crossing against the light.

Yeah bad pedestrians and living in the city with the worst drivers in the country.

Just saw this for the first time today, and it is incredible. The unbelievable octopus camouflage video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCgtYWUybIE&rel=1]

1.

The image above is part of the article at the NYT Dot Earth blog, this one entitled Yellowstone’s Departed: Bison Calves Head to Slaughter, a Long-Lost Hare. but let’s file this one under Who Died and Made Us God.

Its about the resurgence in the Yellowstone bison herds which is then thought to necessitate a cull (let’s just call the cull a kill) to keep some sort of balance and not annoy ranchers in the area who prefer animals with preordained lifespans. I’ve always found it absurd that a species is protected once it goes below a certain figure, then if it is not only successful in rebounding but actually thrives, it needs to be brought back down to a proper level. A proper level? What 1 per every billion people?

2.

Can scientists dance? The answer is mostly NO. The winner of this little contest is endearing but for the most part we have to say Keep your day jobs….please!

3.

Here are the first two paragraphs from a disturbing article entitled The world’s rubbish dump: a garbage tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan

A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean is growing at an alarming rate and now covers an area twice the size of the continental United States, scientists have said.

The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting “soup” stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

And another article on the same for those who feel they are a little too upbeat today.

4.

Let’s finish on an upbeat. This astounding image is by Nick Brandt at the Young Gallery site: go and browse.

5.

And here is a photograph I keep going back to look at at Journey of the Mind’s Eye.

The latest edition of The Edge newsletter is rather remarkable. Each year they have posed a question to leading thinkers, this year 164 of them, (historians, scientists, artists , teachers, and more), and then posted the essays both long and short on their website. Previous questions included: What are you optimistic about (2007), What is your dangerous idea (2006);,and What do you believe is true even if you cannot prove it (2005). Among the contributors this year are: Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Dennett, Kevin Kelly, and Terence Sejnowski.

And the current question is What have you changed your mind about and why. Responses range from things like classicist James O’Donnell writing about why he stopped cheering for the Romans, neuroscientist Joseph Ledoux on how he revised his notion of how memory works, or media analyst Douglas Rushkoff reversing his initial position on the potential of the Internet changing consciousness.

Each entry is worth a day or two of reflection but the first that really caught my attention was archaeologist Timothy Taylor’s one called Relativism. Once in the camp of thinking that you could not judge without taking into the mindset of the ancient culture, he now feels, after studying Andean infant sacrifice, that we are justified in discriminating morally about past practices. His last paragraph reads:

We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behaviour as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as ‘the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.’ By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of ‘the Other’, relativism steps away from logic into coherence.

All the years have been good but this question is particularly interesting to me. To change one’s mind, especially after investing years of inquiry, is a remarkable thing. It is momentous for any of us to actually turn on an issue once we’ve formed our initial position. I remember a comedian, I believe it was Rick Mercer, talking about how brave it was for a politician to change their mind to reflect the facts or changing conditions when the most likely effect would be people saying they were wishy washy.

This was taken near the town I spent the first year or so of my life in, Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Don’t have much else to say about it, and though I am sure many things happened to me during that time, little seems to have stuck. I do have an abiding fondness for big sky prairies and deserts, and maybe this is where that started.

Since there were no facilities there, I was born in the nearby town of Altona which is described as “a quiet town surrounded by many farmers”. Under siege then. It is also known as the Sunflower Capital of Canada and the home of the largest easel (of course bearing Van Gogh’s Sunflowers; I suspect that is a copy of some sort).

Let’s be clear that I had nothing to do with that. Next stop, snakes. Teulon, Manitoba actually.

From the largest easel to the largest gathering of snakes anywhere in the world. Thousands of snakes hibernate in pits near the town and emerge to form large mating balls.

The male red-sided garters emerge first and wait patiently for the females to follow. Each time a female appears, the males surround her. The males look like a mass of “living spaghetti,” said Robert Mason, a zoologist at Oregon State University. The ball of snakes will writhe and sometimes even roll over land, until one male finally mates with the female.

The weirdest part of the spectacle occurs when some male red-sided garters impersonate females and find themselves at the center of a mating ball. These “she-male” snakes fool the males by exuding a female pheromone—a chemical released by one animal that affects another animal. The female pheromone fools male red-siders into thinking the she-male is a female.

Why the she-males act out this charade has long been a mystery. Now Mason and Rick Shine, a biologist from the University of Sydney in Australia, think they’ve found the answer.

All snakes are ectothermic, or cold-blooded. When a garter snake emerges from the cold ground, it is cold and lacking in energy until it’s warmed by the sun. In such a state, the snake is vulnerable to attacks by predators. Previous studies have shown that she-male garters are slower and weaker than male garters and, hence, even more vulnerable.

The she-male’s charade has two purposes, say the scientists. One: It warms the she-male garter like a blanket; and two: It surrounds him-her with a phalanx of bodyguards.

The annual red-garter mating balls are a big tourist attraction in Manitoba—and a source of many tales. One unsuspecting couple built a house on top of an empty snake pit one summer, only to find their property swarmed by thousands of red-sided garters returning to their traditional hibernation den in the fall. The couple quickly relocated their new house.

From She-Male Snakes Need Their Love To Keep Them Warm
Current Science, 2/8/2002, Vol. 87 Issue 12, p12-13

I spoke only German when I lived in Teulon, as did many town folk, and learned English in order to attend school. My memories are of wandering the woods alone behind our house, a large two story surrounded by hollyhocks rather than farmers, and next door to a beekeeper.

After a couple of years there I ended up in Winkler Manitoba for about six years or so. Winkler does not seem to have had the wherewithall to come up with any sort of biggest of, or be odd in any notable manner. I do remember walking to school when the temperature was close to 50 below and the bushes and trees all had a coating of ice. A railway track ran just outside our back yard and I spent hours wandering the tracks (that probably would have been considered unsafe these days). Just on the other side of the tracks was a marsh with bullrushes that legend had it, that if you broke one of them open and looked at it, you would go blind. I was still too far from puberty to have discovered competing sources of blindness so that just had to do.