The scar on Jupiter

The dead zone on Earth and the lion is not sleeping tonight!

by Ian Punnett

There’s a blemish on the surface of Jupiter:

(July 25) -- In an unusual step, NASA scientists interrupted testing of the refurbished Hubble Space Telescope to aim the orbiter's camera at Jupiter and capture an image of the planet's mysterious new scar.

The resulting picture, taken Thursday, is the sharpest visible-light photo of the dark spot and Hubble's first science observation since astronauts repaired and upgraded it in May, NASA said.

Earth-based telescopes have been trained on Jupiter since an amateur astronomer in Australia noticed the new mark, probably created when a small comet or asteroid.

This week's event marks only the second time scientists have recorded debris colliding with Jupiter, the fifth planet from the sun and the largest in our solar system. The appearance of the impact spot is changing day to day in the planet's cloud tops, making it a priority for scientists to do****ent it quickly.  (aol.com/news)

What’s the only thing worse than a scar on Jupiter?

A cut on Ur--, oh, never mind. 

While scientists here are seeing this new mark on Jupiter, I wonder whether Jupiterian scientists can zee the “dead zone” on Earth?

   

(AP) -- The Gulf of Mexico's "dead zone" - where there is too little oxygen in the water for anything to live - is less than half the size predicted earlier this year but also unusually severe, a scientist said Friday.

The hypoxic area forms every year in the Gulf, caused by bacteria feeding on algae blooms from the flow of farming runoff and other nutrients from the Mississippi River and others.

This year's area covers 3,000 square miles, but is also unusually thick, stretching from the bottom nearly to the surface, according to Nancy Rabalais, a researcher who specializes in the problem for the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium.

The 3,000 square miles is one of the smallest measurements of the zone since measurements began in 1985, according to a graph in a news release sent from a research vessel in the Gulf.   (physorg.com)

If scientists can’t figure it out, maybe they should ask their uncles--or maybe their ants . . . 

In a study released online on July 22 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society: Biological Sciences, researchers at Arizona State University and Princeton University show that ants can accomplish a task more rationally than our - multimodal, egg-headed, tool-using, bipedal, opposing-thumbed - selves.

This is not the case of humans being "stupider" than ants. Humans and animals simply often make irrational choices when faced with very challenging decisions, note the study's architects Stephen Pratt and Susan Edwards.

"This paradoxical outcome is based on apparent constraint: most individual ants know of only a single option, and the colony's collective choice self-organizes from interactions among many poorly-informed ants," says Pratt, an assistant professor in the School of Life Sciences in ASU's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

What the authors found is that in collective decision-making in ants, the lack of individual options translated into more accurate outcomes by minimizing the chances for individuals to make mistakes. A "wisdom of crowds" approach emerges, Pratt believes.

“A wisdom of crowds” approach sounds awfully close to mob rule!  Mobs of humans are never known for making the best decisions.  

Also in eco-news:

A team of biologists located rare mountain yellow-legged frogs, Rana muscosa, in the San Bernardino National Forest.  Two groups of scientists recently spotted the frogs at two separate locations less than three miles apart in the Tahquitz and Willow Creek.

Mountain yellow-legged frogs are about 1.5 to 3 inches in length and are a mixture of brown and yellow in color.  The underside of the hind legs and belly are yellow or orange in color.  When handled, the frogs smell like garlic.  ecoworldly.com

They already smell like garlic.  That will definitely save a step on the stove top, won’t it?

Be careful where you go when you go to the words to get some: 

(Namibia) – Unknown creatures that reportedly devour and suck blood from livestock are haunting villagers in Namibia.

Over 20 goats have been killed at Onheleiwa and Oidiva villages and an unknown number at Oikango, where the situation is said to be worse.

Villagers are convinced that the creatures have something to do with witchcraft. They are now accusing an elderly man who has a house at Onheleiwa village and his sister who has a house at Oikango village of being the owners of these strange, blood-sucking beasts.

Oshana Police spokesperson, Christina Fonsech, said the police were called at Onheleiwa last week where they followed the creatures’ footprints. 

According to her, the creatures’ footprints are bigger than a dog’s footprints, and police could not identify the creatures.

“We followed them but they walked until a spot where they just vanished. It’s difficult to explain what happened to those footprints because they looked as if they climbed onto something but it was in an open space, so we don’t know what happened,” she said.

So, the footprints just disappear and the logical conclusion of the police is that it must be the witchcraft of some of old guy and his sister in the woods.

“Nice police work, Lou.”

Why isn’t it just as logical to assume that the disappearance of the footprints means that the bloodsucking was done by flying beasts who are so engorged with blood that they now need a running start to take flight?

Or how about lions with jetpacks?

Don’t laugh.  Apparently African lions are getting desperate:

Lions in Cameroon are having their kills stolen from under their noses by hungry villagers.

Incidences of such kleptoparasitism, the stealing of food from another, usually occur between top predators such as lion, hyena and cheetah.

But people are increasingly getting in on the act, conservationists say.

They suspect the practice may be much more common than thought, and are concerned that it could threaten the dwindling numbers of lions in Cameroon.

On the morning of the 28 March 2006, biologist Marjolein Schoe of Leiden University in The Netherlands and colleagues were tracking a male lion fitted with a radio collar in Benoue National Park, in the Northern Province of Cameroon.

They found him and a collared female lion both feeding on a newly killed Western hartebeest antelope.

As Schoe's vehicle approached, both lions fled into nearby thicket where they remained hidden until the researchers left.

Around 5pm that afternoon, the researchers returned to the site of the kill.

As they arrived, they encountered several local villagers, who also ran away and hid in the bush.

All the remaining meat on the hartebeest carcass had been stripped away by knife, leaving only the head, feet and a few remains. Leaves also littered the carcass, suggesting that the whoever had cut away the meat had used leaves to package it.

Running out of the bush to compete with lions to get the meat off an antelope?

Now that’s what I call . . . 

Are you ready?

(I’m sorry in advance)

Fast food.