I hope you had a chance to catch the Perseid Meteor Shower earlier this week, away from light pollution, in a comfortable place without too many mosquitoes around. I did. I was staying for a couple days at a lodge in the middle of a lake, in the middle of the woods, lying on the grass with my kids for an hour just watching one shooting star after another. The only light around was from the campfire 50 feet away and only when the smoke wasn’t enough to keep away the skeeters did we go back inside. Magic.
But, as cool as they were, they were nothing compared to what families saw in Liberty Lake, Washington:
(KXLY) LIBERTY LAKE, WA - Several families are looking for answers after they saw strange lights in the night sky Wednesday night they swear were signs of a UFO.
Amateur video shot from the scene shows strange lights in the night time sky moving erratically, changing in both color and size. And it wasn't just one or two people who saw the lights. Up to a dozen members of several families say they saw the same thing and now they're trying to figure out what exactly they saw.
These are normal people from a normal neighborhood who say what they saw last night in the skies southeast of Liberty Lake was anything but normal. It started about 8:45 Wednesday evening when they saw two lights far above the horizon, one white and one green, and they weren't moving in concert with each other.
One person described their movement, "was left to right, up and down, hide behind the cloud, then come out."
After about an hour the green light "eventually took off slowly, then fast" and then the "white light started acting up after the green light left ... bigger and smaller."
An hour after the green light vanished from view the white light, "moved across the sky and went north and it stayed stationary, then it changed all kinds of different colors ... like red blue, green" and then disappeared over the horizon.
What has been confirmed is that Fairchild Air Force Base reports they had no aircraft of any kind in the area Wednesday night.
From white lights to white spiders:
By Rossella Lorenzi
An enormous system of caves, chambers and tunnels lies hidden beneath the Pyramids of Giza, according to a British explorer who claims to have found the lost underworld of the pharaohs.
Populated by bats and venomous spiders, the underground complex was found in the limestone bedrock beneath the pyramid field at Giza.
"There is untouched archaeology down there, as well as a delicate ecosystem that includes colonies of bats and a species of spider which we have tentatively identified as the white widow," British explorer Andrew Collins said.
And by white widow, I don’t mean Scarlett Johansson in “Iron Man 2.” Oh, wait, I guess she’s “Black Widow,” the mysterious new Stark Industries employee with that famed “widow’s bite.” Never mind. I was just trying to find a way to work in a plug for the movie which I’m going to have to wait to May 7, 2010 for.
If you’re bitten by a white widow, maybe some white tea will help:
Next time you’re making a nice cup of tea, new research shows it might be wise to opt for a white tea if you want to reduce your risk of cancer, rheumatoid arthritis or even just age-associated wrinkles.
The researchers were blown away by exactly how well the white tea had performed. “We were testing very small amounts far less than you would find in a drink,” said a scientist involved in the study, “The early indicators are that white tea reduces the risk of inflammation which is characteristic of rheumatoid arthritis and some cancers as well as wrinkles.” (Physorg.com)
Which is great news if you’re not only old but you’re old and wrinkly.
From the mystery of white lights, white widows, white tea to red salmon:
Millions of sockeye salmon have disappeared mysteriously from a river on Canada's Pacific Coast that was once known as the world's most fertile spawning ground for sockeye.
Up to 10.6 million bright-red sockeye salmon were expected to return to spawn this summer on the Fraser River, which empties into the Pacific ocean near Vancouver, British Columbia. The latest estimates say fewer than one million have returned.
The Canadian Government has closed the river to commercial and recreational sockeye fishing for the third straight year, hitting the livelihood of nearby Indian reserves.
"It's quite the shocking drop," said Stan Proboszcz, fisheries biologist at the Watershed Watch Salmon Society. "No one's exactly sure what happened to these fish."
Several theories have been put forward to try to explain the sockeye's disappearance, including that climate change may have reduced food supply for salmon in the ocean, or that they may have been infected with sea lice en route to the Fraser River.
Another theory is that the rising temperature of the river may have weakened the fish. (Reuters)
Here’s a photo of another suspect in the disappearance of all that salmon:
My friend Joey, whose bear-encircled Wisconsin cabin was the one I stayed in a few months ago, decided he liked shooting photos of bears so much that he went to Alaska to find grizzlies. Dude’s my hero for getting that close to such a perfect human eating machine. Not only is Joey a notoriously bad runner but he was covered in heavy camera equipment. That’s bravery:
In an endurance race between grizzlies and the participants of the Badwater Ultramarathon, my money’s on the runners. Did you see this CNN story?
(CNN) The Adventurecorps Badwater Ultramarathon is infamous in endurance sports circles. It is the running equivalent of summiting Everest, the ultimate test of mental fortitude, a hippy communion with the desert of epic highs and lows (literally -- the race starts at 280 feet below sea level, the lowest point in the Western Hemisphere, covers three mountain ranges for descents and ascents totaling 9,000 feet and ends halfway up Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States).
For all the nonsweaters out there -- consider how long it takes to drive from Baltimore to New York. Now imagine running that distance...without sleep...with 10,000 blow dryers pointed at you the entire time. Watch what it takes to battle Badwater »
"To talk about the buckle is to miss the point," said Marshall Ulrich, a58-year-old endurance sensei who has done Badwater more than a dozen times and has summited Everest. Notorious for having his toenails surgically removed -- toenails fall off anyway when you're an endurance runner -- Marshall is, contrary to what most people assume, not a machine.
He started running when he was 28, after his doctor told him to get off his butt and lower his blood pressure or expect an early grave.
"You run Badwater because there's something in you that wants to get out there, in the middle of nowhere, and think about something.”
No, dude, that’s why YOU run Badwater. If I want to think about something, I go to a coffee shop. If I’m out in the middle of nowhere and I want to think about something, I make some coffee and listen to the radio.
OK, let me first start by clearing up something from my last blog. I shared the story in this space about a Los Angeles man who was on vacation in Ocean City, NJ, who stopped for a little, friendly Tarot card reading on the Boardwalk. As the story goes:
A born-again Christian card reader June Mitchell's dire prediction about her client's hereafter led to a public dust-up, a police investigation and a petition drive, the Press of Atlantic City reports.
Mitchell told client Jamie Cohen, 22, who is gay, that he was going to hell. Cohen stormed out without paying her $20 fee, and that's when things got really ugly.
According to the news account, Cohen returned to retrieve his cell phone, which he had left under his chair. He says Mitchell ordered him out of the store and, in front of a crowd, used an anti-gay slur.
Mitchell says she had not meant to offend him.
"I wanted to make him happy," she says.
As a born-again Christian, Mitchell admits her religious doctrine opposes ****sexuality. (ANNE-MARIE COTTONE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM)
After that I said, “The only thing better than the born-again Christian tarot card reader surprised that this gay client was not happy with being told he was going to hell is that the man has to go back and get his phone after stiffing her the $20. Awkward.”
And then, just to be clear, I made the point: “The Bible never says that gay people are going to hell any more or less than straight people will--not once, not anywhere. Her church might claim it but they’re making it up.
“Meanwhile, the born-again Christian tarot card reader apparently hasn’t read Leviticus 20:27:
“A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them.
“Or Exodus 22:18
“You shall not permit a sorceress to live.”
And then I made a comment to the effect that I wasn’t calling the woman a witch and I wasn’t hoping that any harm be done to her but I thought she might want to keep the whole “I’m a fortune teller” thing on the QT just in case other people in her church aren’t reading the Bible all that closely either.
Which got me this letter from Angie who said, in part, “I’m wiccan and I surely hope I didn’t hear you say it was OK to kill this fortune teller if she had been a real witch.”
To which I replied, that she was right, I surely didn’t say that and wouldn’t ever mean to imply that but I’m glad I have the opportunity to amplify that.
Personally, I don’t spend any time with any of the lists in the Bible of the people that it says it’s OK to kill or marginalize. I’m not making any apologies for the Bible on that, it says what it says, but it doesn’t say what I say and it doesn’t say things that I wish it would say now but that’s all I have to say about that.
I think when we go down the road of thinking about whom we have a right to kill--any of us--we all end up like that nutbar shooting up that fitness center just because his life isn’t going the way he thinks it ought to.
I told you about a couple of intriguing UFO stories last night, one from England, one from Florida. Whether or not it’s true that that family in Florida is being visited by grays, reptilians and even dragons, there is videotape proof of this story (see link below):
A Wesley Chapel, Florida, triangle UFO sighting has been termed a "true unknown" by Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Field Investigator Morgan Beall.
The July 17, 2009, sighting has multiple witnesses and the event was videotaped. The object had three points of light. Two of the lights were white, and a third light was blue.
The object hovered in the sky, but tilted back and forth, throughout the multi-hour sighting.
The object returned to that same location again on July 25, 2009, and was also videotaped by the witnesses.
I think this should serve as reminder for all of us at least to have a cell phone camera always at the ready. Whether it’s still images or video, we ought to practice getting out our cell phones and trying to do****ent the amazing things we come across. And those cell phone cameras are getting better and better as science marches on . . .
(PhysOrg.com) -- Currently, most nuclear fusion power plants are large, expensive projects that will take decades to benefit from. But a startup company in Vancouver, Canada, called General Fusion is taking the fast track to fusion, with a plan to build a working prototype fusion power plant within the next decade at a cost of less than a billion dollars.
General Fusion has recently raised enough financial support - $13.5 million - from public and private investors to start the project.
The reactor consists of a metal sphere with a diameter of three meters. Inside the sphere, a liquid mixture of lithium and lead spins to create a vortex with a vertical cavity in the center. Then, the researchers inject two donut-shaped plasma rings called spheromaks into the top and bottom of the vertical cavity - like "blowing smoke rings at each other," explains Doug Richardson, chief executive of General Fusion. (physorg.com)
I hope when it’s time to get this product out to the market, the owners have the good sense to name this amazing little machine, “Mr. Fusion,” just like in Back to the Future. I was watching that movie with my kids the other day and I laughed when I saw the professor using his “Mr. Fusion” machine and my kids didn’t get it because there aren’t any commercials for “Mr. Coffee” on TV anymore! Speaking of my kids--including my four-legged one:
You may have thought that a dog has little on its mind other than eating and walkies.
However, it turns out they are also capable of pondering a spot of basic maths or the meaning of certain words.
In fact, some dogs are as bright as a child, say scientists. They can understand up to 250 words and gestures, count up to five and perform simple arithmetic, putting them on a par with a two-year-old.
But it seems not all dogs are equal. Border collies, whose cunning has long been appreciated by shepherds, are at the top of the class. The dunces include bassett hounds and the British bulldog.
Ouch--I love bulldogs. The one I had was delightful--except for her gas. You’ll hear that a lot from bulldog lovers. Mine was so lethargic that I just don’t see how anybody could say she wasn’t bright. She would eat, lie down, stink up the room while we were watching TV while we ran around opening up windows and trying to breath. I mean, who were the stupid ones?
Finally from Wired Magazine:
You can’t hear it, but the Earth is constantly humming. And some parts of the world sing louder than others.
After discovering the mysterious low-frequency buzz in 1998, scientists figured out that the Earth’s hum is caused not by earthquakes or atmospheric turbulence, but by this radio show! That’s right, the buzz that this radio show creates can actually be measured by scientists.
(Oh, or the global buzz might also be caused by ocean waves colliding with the sea floor, primarily from the Pacific coast of North America. That’s the current back-up theory from scientists in case this radio show ever goes off the air and the buzz continues . . . I’ll keep you toasted . . . )
No written piece could do justice to the high strangeness of the UFO video being armchair analyzed all throughout Britain. You’ve got to see the link (below). Here’s the story:
A UFO mystery has been sparked after a flashing light was spotted on BBC breakfast television.
Viewers watched in amazement as the white probe-like object appeared on the Look North morning show.
The UFO was captured on a webcam on Tuesday as it passed over the Gateshead Millennium Bridge on the River Tyne.
Viewers spotted the object when pictures from the weather camera were used as a backdrop on the breakfast show behind presenter Colin Briggs.
Former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope said: "At first I thought it was a bird, but the slowed down footage seems to rule this out. It's an intriguing film and a genuine mystery."
There’s a little of that going around these days! Four thousand, four hundred miles away, there are some other signs. NBC-2 TV, Fort Myers reports:
Family members are scared to go outside at night because of what they say is lurking in the woods. They claim more than five alien encounters in the last four months have taken place. Now, an international UFO organization wants to crack the real-life X-file.
Michael Rowley and his son Shane moved to their North Port home in April.
"Well, I'm retired and I thought this was where you're supposed to go," Michael said. "The only bad part is the aliens around here."
Shane, 16, says he's had several extra-terrestrial encounters - most of which have been through his bedroom window.
"They kind of show up when they want. You get used to them, but it is weird to see them walking around the woods with those big eyes," he said.
"I haven't seen the wings but we know he flies," added Michael.
The Rowleys' twilight story has the attention of MUFON - Mutual UFO Network. The group is investigating and wants to setup surveillance. But Michael believes they won't show up if cameras are around.
He says the plaster cast of a foot-print is his key evidence. While it may be hard to see, Michael believes the creature has a cloven hoof.
"[It's] about this big with pure deep red eyes. It just looked at me for a second," Michael said.
Michael admits to rarely going out at night. But he says he believes they come in peace and that they're here for a reason.
"I'm a combat Vietnam vet and I don't wake up until something good is going on," he said. "This is something big and good going on."
The family expects another alien encounter during the next full moon.
You can expect an update in a month. Not all mysteries are that sexy, however. New Scientist had an interesting article this week about why the human tendency to blush or laugh or to pick one’s nose remains ultimately unexplained.
I don’t know about the biological purpose of blushing or laughing but I think these scientists are missing the obvious explanation about nose-picking. I mean, what else are you supposed to do at a red light?
One of the more persistent and deadly cryptozoological mysteries might get some new data soon:
ARMED with explosives, two men are heading to Mongolia's Gobi Desert to find the fabled acid-spitting and lightning-throwing Mongolian death worm. The worm has never been do****ented but some Mongolians are convinced it exists. They call it Allghoi Khorkhoi, or "intestine worm" because it resembles a cow's intestine and is about 1.5m long (about five feet).
The worm apparently jumps out of the sand and kills people by spitting concentrated acid or shooting lightning from its rectum over long distances, NZPA reports. (Seriously.)
New Zealand TV entertainment journalist David Farrier, who is organising the expedition, and cameraman Christie Douglas, leave this week to spend two weeks in the Gobi, trying to verify the worm's existence and making a do****entary about it.
"If a Mongolian says they have seen a big worm-like creature out in the desert they haven't really got any reason to lie," Farrier said.
"I think it won't be a worm, obviously a worm can't survive in a desert. I'd say it would be some sort of snake that's not meant to be there. It's very out of place and a bit new."
There been several unsuccessful expeditions searching for the worm, the last two in 2003 and 2005, which had used night vision goggles to look for the worm.
However, the New Zealand team planned to bring the worm to the surface with explosives, as it is said to be attracted to tremors.
“Tremors”--funny that was just the word I was thinking of while I reading this story. The expedition ought to call Kevin Bacon and see if he’s available. I know he’s taken on a lot of new projects after he lost all his money to Bernie Madoff--speaking of five foot worms.
Scary work. Of course, just like the movie “King Kong,” even getting where the monsters are can be pretty scary. These photographs from the bridge of a commercial ship caught in a typhoon should make you grateful that you aren’t out on the high seas tonight trying to get to “Skull Island.”
I swear these look painted but I have been promised by our friend Captain Kelly Sweeney that his colleague Chief Engineer Larry B. Larry sent these to him from right in the middle of a typhoon with no time for photoshop!
I don’t know about you, but I see those pictures and I know that there is a power higher than us in the universe.
And so does a story like this:
A Los Angeles man on vacation in Ocean City stopped for a Tarot card reading on the Boardwalk. But born-again Christian card reader June Mitchell's dire prediction about her client's hereafter led to a public dust-up, a police investigation and a petition drive, the Press of Atlantic City reports.
Mitchell told client Jamie Cohen, 22, who is gay, that he was going to hell. Cohen stormed out without paying her $20 fee, and that's when things got really ugly.
According to the news account, Cohen returned to retrieve his cell phone, which he had left under his chair. He says Mitchell ordered him out of the store and, in front of a crowd, used an anti-gay slur.
Mitchell says she had not meant to offend him.
"I wanted to make him happy," she says.
As a born-again Christian, Mitchell admits her religious doctrine opposes ****sexuality.(taken from ANNE-MARIE COTTONE, NEWJERSEYNEWSROOM.COM)
You’ve got to love that. The only thing better than the born-again Christian tarot card reader surprised that this gay client was not happy with being told he was going to hell is that the man has to go back and get his phone after stiffing her the $20. Awkward.
But that’s not the best part. The Bible never says that gay people are going to hell any more or less than straight people will--not once, not anywhere! Her church might claim it but they’re making it up.
Meanwhile, the born-again Christian tarot card reader apparently hasn’t read Leviticus 20:27:
“A man or a woman who is a medium or a necromancer shall surely be put to death. They shall be stoned with stones; their blood shall be upon them.”
Or Exodus 22:18
“You shall not permit a sorceress to live.”
Of course, I'm not saying she's a witch and I'm absolutely not suggesting that any harm should come to her, I'm just saying that if the rest of her congregation reads the Bible as carefully as she does, she might want to consider moving from her glass house.
Is it really true that these new, high-tech swimsuits can keep a brick afloat in a pool? Sounds crazy--and maybe it's just the belief that these suits will make a difference--but the swimsuit tech wars continue. Score one for Michael Phleps:
ROME (AP) - Michael Phelps beat Milorad Cavic again. No doubt about it. With a defiant performance in a supposedly inferior suit, Phelps stayed close over the outward lap and rallied on the return to become the first swimmer to break 50 seconds in the 100-meter butterfly, beating the Serbian with a time of 49.82.
This suit controversy has gotten over-hyped a bit but the fabric technology is amazing. My son is a competitive high school swimmer--in fact he had his best time ever tonight in the 200m Butterfly at 2:14 and change coming in just a fraction of a second behind his friend, Brian and another kid--and he swears there is a difference in the suits.
As I heard the story, the kid who won the race by a knuckle was overheard laughing saying as he got out of the pool, “Man, that was the suit.”
Won’t matter soon, the high suit tech controversy will all be over when the ban goes into effect later this year but it’s been fun to watch.
Remember last week when we reported on the dark spot on Jupiter? Well . . .
A strange spot emerged on Venus last week, and astronomers are not sure what caused it. They hope future observations will reveal whether volcanic activity, turbulence in the planet's atmosphere, or charged particles from the sun are to blame.
Amateur astronomer Frank Melillo of Holtsville, New York, first spotted the new feature, which is brighter than its surroundings at ultraviolet wavelengths, on the planet's southern hemisphere on 19 July. (newscientist.com)
An explosion on Mars? Now all we need is an explosion on Mars like in the beginning of War of the Worlds. Look out, Grover’s Mill, anything is possible.
To prove that point:
(July 30) -- Scientists have discovered a rare new bird species with a bald head.
The creature, dubbed the bare-faced bulbul, was found in Laos, and is the only known bald songbird in mainland Asia.
It's also the first time in over 100 years that a new Asian species of bulbul bird has been uncovered.
The chrome-domed songbird was discovered by Wildlife Conservation Society scientists Will Duckworth and Rob Timmins and Iain Woxvold of the University of Melbourne as part of a project funded by a mining company, Minerals and Metals Group, that operates in the region.
The bare-faced bulbul lives in the sparse trees and sun-bleached karst limestone of the Laos lowlands.
The researchers describe the bird's call as a "series of whistled, dry bubbling notes."
The official name is Pycnonotus hualon.
(Live Science)
Let’s think that through a little better. The crooning bird has a bald head and sings dry bubbling notes. I think Bingus Crosbius would have been more appropriate.
Want to see a totally cool performance? Are you one of the million people who have clicked on to YouTube to watch this jazz choir from Europe do their version of a rainstorm using snaps for raindrops, handclaps for the downpour and stomping on the risers to simulate thunder? Just beautiful. I plan on having that on my ipod the next time I get a real storm over my house.
And only because some people ask for pictures of my dog, Jack, from time to time, here he is the other morning when it was storming out and the big, fat, fraidy cat climbed under my covers and wouldn’t leave when I left for work:
The blanket is the same chocolate brown color as the dog so he almost disappears completely into the covers.
Not exactly the Amelia Earhart mystery. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were finally solved:
It has been 72 years since famed aviator Amelia Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan disappeared while attempting to fly around the world. But the mystery remains unsolved: Nobody knows exactly what happened to Earhart or her plane.
During May and June of next year, Tighar will launch a new $500,000 expedition, continuing the archaeological work it has been doing on the island since 2001.
"We think we will be able to come back with DNA," said Tighar's Executive Director Ric Gillespie, who is working with two DNA labs in Ontario, Canada, Genesis Genomics and Molecular World. "We were out there in 2007 under the impression that in order to extract DNA we would need to find a piece of a human, and we didn't find anything like that. But we did find what's best described as personal effects of the castaway that died there."
Earlier this year a woman directly related to Earhart, who wishes to remain anonymous, agreed to provide Gillespie's group with a reference sample of mitochondrial DNA. This type of genetic material differs from nuclear DNA in many ways, primarily because it's passed down the female line. (ABCnews)
Now, here’s the kicker. The “female line” of the Earhart family would almost have to come from the family of Amelia’s little sister with whom she was very close. The two sisters were close because they moved around a lot due to the financial instability of their family and their father’s difficulty in keeping a railroad in the economic times of their day. For several years, the family lived in St. Paul, MN, not far from me, and attended the local public high school until another job came up.
Anyway, Amelia Earhart wasn’t said to be particularly religious but her sister was and she attended St. Clement’s Episcopal Church and sang in the choir regularly.
And, according to a local church historian with whom I spoke, on special occasions, Amelia herself would join her sister in that choir.
The same choir that still stands on the altar of the church to which I have been assigned in my “other job.”
So, here’s the link to my new church, St. Clement’s in St. Paul. Take a look through those old photos and imagine Amelia Earhart’s sister there, a young girl who might be the key to solving the mystery today.
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?
