Pelliciari
Number Of Species On Earth Estimated At 8.7 Million
Ever wonder how many species are sharing this Earth? Apparently it’s 8.7 million, give or take a few. This takes into account the few thousand plant or marine species we haven’t discovered yet or documented. Via Physorg:
That is a new, estimated total number of species on Earth — the most precise calculation ever offered — with 6.5 million species found on land and 2.2 million (about 25 percent of the total) dwelling in the ocean depths.
Announced today by Census of Marine Life scientists, the figure is based on an innovative, validated analytical technique that dramatically narrows the range of previous estimates. Until now, the number of species on Earth was said to fall somewhere between 3 million and 100 million.
Furthermore, the study, published today by PLoS Biology, says a staggering 86% of all species on land and 91% of those in the seas have yet to be discovered, described and…
NY Vintner Produces 9/11 Memorial Wines
How will you commemorate September 11 this year? You could buy 9/11 wine for $9.11 or a bottle of 9/11 Memorial wine. Each bottle bought is a donation towards supporting families and organizations still recovering from the 9/11 attacks. Via NY Daily News:
Norway Wants Ship Back 80 Years After Sinking In Canadian Arctic
Photo: Ansgar Walk (CC)
Via Discovery News:
Eighty years after it sank in the Canadian Arctic, explorer Roald Amundsen’s three-mast ship Maud may once again sail across the Atlantic to become the centerpiece of a new museum in Norway.
Canada, however, must still agree to the repatriation plan hatched by Norwegian investors, amid strong opposition from locals in the Canadian territory of Nunavut who want the ship to stay for tourists to admire from shore.
The wreck now sits at the bottom of Cambridge Bay in Nunavut, but its hulk is partly visible above the frigid waters that preserved it for decades.
“The incredibly strong-built oak ship has been helped by the Arctic cold and clean water to be kept in a reasonably good shape,” said Jan Wanggaard, a Norwegian who recently visited the wreck to sort out technical problems with raising the ship as well as to survey the views from locals and officials.
[Continues…
Google Earth Begins Mapping Amazon Rainforest
Photo: Alex Guerrero (CC)
Not sure if ’street view’ is the right term for it, but Google has begun mapping the Amazon much like it does streets in cities and towns. Via The Australian:
Two women washed clothes in the dark water of the Rio Negro as a boat glided past with a camera-laden Google tricycle strapped to the roof, destined to give the world a window into the Amazon rainforest.
A “trike” typically used to capture street scenes for Google’s free online mapping service launched last Thursday from the village of Tumbira in a first-ever project to let web users virtually explore the world’s largest river, its wildlife and its communities.
The project was the brainchild of Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), which two years ago went to Google Earth with a vision of turning “Street View” into a river view in the lush and precious Amazon Basin.
[Continues at The Australian]
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Scientists Seek To Turn Chickens Into Mini-Dinosaurs
Didn’t we learn anything from Jurassic Park? Scientists have created embryo’s with ‘alligator-like snouts’ and are hoping to be able to further ‘undo’ evolution with future trials. The New Zealand Herald reports:
Harvard scientists are hoping to turn chickens into mini-dinosaurs, according to the Daily Mail.
Scientists at the Ivy League university have ‘rewound’ evolution with chicken DNA to create embryos with alligator-like snouts instead of beaks.
By altering the DNA of chicken embryos in the early stage of their development, the team were able to ‘undo’ evolutionary progress and give the creatures snouts which are thought to have been lost in the cretaceous period millions of years ago.
Evolutionary biologist Arkhat Abzhanov developed the chickens with snouts by cutting a square hole in the shell of a chicken egg and dropping in a small gelatinous protein bead, before watching the embryo develop – stifling the development of certain molecules and preventing the birds from growing…
Russian Scientist Photographs The Soul
MosNews reports:
The activity of Konstantin Korotkov, deputy director of the St. Petersburg Research Institute of Physical Culture and world-renowned authority on Kirlian photography, was recently highlighted by Life.ru. Korotkov is the developer of the gas-discharge visualization (GDV) technique in Kirlian photography.
Kirlian photography takes its name from Soviet electrician Semyon Kirlian, who discovered the process in 1939. It was the subject of extensive research in the 1970s in the Soviet Union and the West. It is commonly described as photographing an object’s aura. According to a website associated with Korotkov, he “confirmed earlier observations … that the stimulated electro-photonic glow around human fingertips contained astonishingly coherent and comprehensive information about the human state — both physiological and psychological.”
In other words, the GDV technique, which was developed in the late 1990s, can be used for diagnostic and assessment purposes. It is already used to measure stress and monitor the progress of medical treatments. In…
U.S. Troops To Get Silky Boxers For Safer Combat
Not only are US troops getting new helmets, but ‘ballistic boxers’ are also on the list to protect the privates’ privates. CNN reports:
Next month, the Army is going to start sending the “ballistic boxers” to soldiers in Afghanistan, and the Marines intend for each of their troops there to have four pairs of the “protective undergarments,” as they are formally known, before the end of the year.
The heavy silk boxers, which look like shorts that professional cyclists wear, won’t stop a bullet or shrapnel from an IED. But the silk can stop small projectiles like those kicked up by an explosion.
“It is expected to prevent fine sands and particles that are thrown up by explosives, so that the tissue wounds are cleaner, less ragged and easier to treat,” said Lt. Jamie Larson, a Marines Corps spokesperson. And since the silk is treated with antimicrobial agents, the boxers help protect injured troops from…
Reporters Covering VP Biden In China Are Shoved Out
How do you clear a room full of press in China? Give Joe Biden a chance to speak. Only minutes after Vice President Biden’s speech, Chinese officials were directing journalists toward the exits. Los Angeles Times reports:
Vice President Joe Biden’s famously loquacious style has now become the source of some international tension.
At the senior levels, the American and Chinese delegations actually seem to be getting along quite well. But relations between the press and staff traveling with the vice president and Chinese officials guarding access to the leaders are another story entirely.
Biden’s schedule Thursday, his first full day in China, included two bilateral meetings with Chinese Vice President Xi Jingping. American and Chinese press were to be allowed in to hear the opening remarks at the start of the first, expanded meeting.
At least that was the plan.
Xi spoke first, calling Biden’s visit a “major event” in the U.S.-China relationship and expressing…
Follow The White House On Foursquare
Want to know where Obama is? The White House has joined foursquare. You can now follow the president as he checks in Lower Hannah’s Bend Park, Seed Saver’s Exchange and, most recently, Northeast Iowa Community College. Via Information Week:
The White House has joined the Foursquare location-based social networking service, a move that shows again the Obama administration’s support of a more transparent and tech-savvy federal government.
Users of the service–which allows people to virtually “check in” to various businesses, landmarks, and other locations around the globe–can now use the White House Foursquare page to follow President Obama as he travels and uses the service to let people know where he is, according to a White House blog post.
They also can themselves check in to the White House if they are visiting the presidential home or attending an Obama town hall event. The White House also has elected to use the tips feature,…
Russian Firm Reveals Plan To Build Hotel In Space
Looking for a real getaway? It sounds more sci-fi than real, but outer space may be a future vacation spot. Daily Mail reports:
Russia yesterday announced plans for a hotel in orbit 217 miles up which would house seven guests in four cabins and have huge windows for views of the Earth turning below.
Just getting there will be an adventure in itself – it will take two days aboard a Soyuz rocket – and it won’t exactly be a budget holiday: A five day stay will cost you £100,000, on top of £500,000 for your journey.
The hotel, or the Commercial Space Station to give it its proper name, is due to open by 2016 and, according to those behind it, will be ‘far more comfortable’ than the International Space Station used by astronauts and cosmonauts.
In the weightlessness of space, visitors can choose to have beds that are either vertical or horizontal, while…
Phone Snooping ‘Prevented Riots’
Photo: Riemer Palstra (CC)
To tweet or not tweet where you’re rioting next? One option was to shut down social networks so that rioters couldn’t mass communicate. The other option was to allow them to tweet and text, then read their messages to find out what they’re planning next. The latter was able to prevent attacks on the Olympic site and London’s Oxford Street. BBC reports:
Police say they prevented attacks by rioters on the Olympic site and London’s Oxford Street after picking up intelligence on social networks.
Assistant Met Police Commissioner Lynne Owens told a committee of MPs officers learned of possible trouble via Twitter and Blackberry messenger.
But Acting Commissioner Tim Godwin said he had considered asking authorities to switch off social networks.
He said they provided intelligence but could also be misleading.
A number of politicians, media commentators and members of the police force have suggested that Twitter and Blackberry Messenger (BBM) had a…
U.S. Motor Rally ‘Violates’ Sacred Land
August in South Dakota means The Black Hills Motor Classic motorcycle rally, one of the largest in the world. Close to a half a million bikers attend, helping the local business, but upsetting others. The local Native Americans say this event threatens one of their holiest sites, Bear Butte Mountain, which is also the founding place of religion for several Plains Indian tribes. Al Jazeera reports:
Indigenous Bolivians March Against Amazon Road
Photo: Isiborosecure.com
A large group of representatives from three native groups in Bolivia begin their march through 375 miles of land today in hopes of keeping a highway from being built through their land. Via NACLA (North American Congress on Latin America):
On August 15, representatives of three indigenous groups and their supporters will begin a 375-mile trek from Trinidad in the Bolivian lowlands to the highland capital of La Paz, to protest the government’s plan to build a highway through their ancestral homeland known as the TIPNIS (Isiboro-Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park). The march opens a new chapter in the increasingly conflictive relationship between leftist president Evo Morales and the social movements that brought him to power.
The TIPNIS is both a national park and a self-governing territory, that combines indigenous autonomy (granted under Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution) with environmental protection. Legal title to the land and resources in this 3,860 square mile preserve…
HRW: All Sides In Somalia War Guilty Of Crimes
Mass burial for those killed during Mogadishu infighting. Photo: Abdurrahman Warsameh/International Relations and Security Network (CC)
Where there is conflict there is someone to point the finger. Human Rights Watch have decided that everyone is ‘guilty’. Via AFP:
All the parties to Somalia’s conflict have violated the rules of war and are guilty of causing civilian casualties in the fight for territorial control, Human Rights Watch said Monday.
Somali government forces backed by troops of the African Union Mission in Somalia (AMISOM) have fought bloody battles in the capital Mogadishu with the Al Qaeda-inspired Shebab rebels who want to topple the administration.
“All sides have used artillery in the capital Mogadishu in an unlawful manner that has caused civilian casualties,” the rights group said in a report.
“Al-Shebab has fired mortars indiscriminately from densely populated areas and the TFG (government) and AMISOM forces have often responded in kind with indiscriminate counterattacks.
“As a result, civilians have…
Prehistoric Marine Reptile Fossil Found With Embryo Inside
It’s been a widely accepted fact that reptiles lay eggs. But did they always? New findings in a pleiosaurs’ fossil revealed that this marine reptile gave birth to live young. Via New Scientist:
Think less sea monsters, more doting parents: the long-necked plesiosaurs that roamed the seas during the dinosaur era gave birth to live young. They probably cared for their offspring and may even have lived in large social groups, like modern-day whales.
Plesiosaurs were reptiles, which as a group tend to lay eggs rather than giving birth. Other prehistoric marine reptiles were known to be exceptions to that rule, but until now fossil evidence that plesiosaurs did the same has been frustratingly elusive. “People have looked and looked,” says F. Robin O’Keefe of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia.
Last year O’Keefe was called in to help prepare a fossil plesiosaur for display in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Originally excavated…
Electronic Tattoo Has Medical, Gaming And Spy Uses
Photo: J. Rogers
BBC News reports:
An “electronic tattoo” could herald a revolution in the way patients are monitored and provide a breakthrough in computer gaming, say US scientists.
They used the device, which is thinner than a human hair, to monitor the heart and brain, according to a study in the journal Science.
The sensor attaches to human skin just like a temporary tattoo and can move, wrinkle and stretch without breaking.
Researchers hope it could replace bulky equipment currently used in hospitals.
A mass of cables, wires, gel-coated sticky pads and monitors are currently needed to keep track of a patient’s vital signs.
[Continues at BBC News]
The Trouble With Too Much Democracy
Is America’s bigger problem the economic decline or it’s political decay? Andrew Potter writes in Axis of Logic:
The most telling moment of the recent standoff over talks to raise the American government’s debt ceiling came on July 22, when President Barack Obama called a press conference to announce that House Speaker John Boehner had backed out of the negotiations. “I’ve been left at the altar twice now,” Obama pouted. In case the image of the President as a jilted lover was not clear to everyone watching, he added that he had spent the previous day waiting for Boehner to return his phone calls.
The whole affair has left a lot of Americans in a state of bipartisan disgust, with citizens from all points on the political compass cursing out their elected representatives. Yet it doesn’t seem to have occurred to many people that there is something structurally flawed with a system…
Dog Helps Teenage Rape Victim Testify Sparking Debate Over Use Of Canines In Courtrooms
Should dogs be allowed in courtrooms to comfort the victims? The New York Times reports:
Rosie, the first judicially approved courtroom dog in New York, was in the witness box here nuzzling a 15-year-old girl who was testifying that her father had raped and impregnated her. Rosie sat by the teenager’s feet. At particularly bad moments, she leaned in.
When the trial ended in June with the father’s conviction, the teenager “was most grateful to Rosie above all,” said David A. Crenshaw, a psychologist who works with the teenager.
“She just kept hugging Rosie,” he continued.
Now an appeal planned by the defense lawyers is placing Rosie at the heart of a legal debate that will test whether there will be more Rosies in courtrooms in New York and, possibly, other states.
Rosie is a golden retriever therapy dog who specializes in comforting people when they are under stress. Both prosecutors and defense lawyers have described her…
New Theory Blames KGB For Albert Camus Death
Albert Camus, 1957
Did the Soviet foreign minister have a hand in the death of famed french writer Albert Camus? Via AFP:
Famous French author Albert Camus, who died in a car accident in 1960, may have been the victim of a Soviet plot, new research suggests.
Italian academic Giovanni Catelli, an eastern European specialist, put forward the theory in the pages of the Italian daily Il Corriere della Sera. On Monday it was greeted with scepticism among other experts.
He noted that a passage in a diary written by Czech poet Jan Zabrana, published as a book, was absent from the Italian translation.
According to Catelli the missing paragraph concerns a meeting between Zabrana and and a Russian KGB contact.
“I heard something very strange from a man who knew lots of things and had very informed sources,” Zabrana writes in the unexpurgated version.
“He said the road accident that cost Albert Camus his life in…
Man Refused Medicaid For Breast Cancer Treatment Because Of Gender
Photo: MesserWoland (CC)
If you’re a man you can’t get breast cancer. False. If you’re a man you can’t get medicaid to cover treatment for breast cancer. True. International Business Times reports:
Raymond Johnson, 26, a construction worker who makes $9 an hour, was diagnosed with breast cancer about a month ago, after he checked himself into the emergency room because of a throbbing pain from a lump in his chest.
However, Johnson’s job of laying down tile does not make enough to pay for treatment, amounting in $10,000 worth of medical costs.
“We are again urging [Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services] to reconsider,” the South Carolina Department of Health and Human Services said in a statement. “It’s a very clear example of how overly rigid federal regulations don’t serve the interests of the people we’re supposed to be helping.”
The uninsured 26-year-old was reportedly stunned when doctors delivered his diagnosis – breast cancer –…
