Christmas Island sits about as close to the middle of the Pacific as you can get. The main island of Kiribati, a small island nation, is 3,300 miles from San Francisco, 3,800 miles from Brisbane and just 140 miles north of the equator. Its closest neighbor of note is Hawaii, which is still 1,250 miles away. Some might say it’s as close to the middle of nowhere as you can get....
Since dogs were first trained to hunt birds, relations haven’t been especially rosy between the two. Dog walkers and bird watchers have a prickly relationship too, often clashing over the use of recreation areas. And now a new study threatens to inflame tempers even more, suggesting that bird sanctuaries be off limits to even those pooches on short leashes. Currently, dogs roam triumphant in many places, although the Audubon Society lists bird habitats (in Alaska, California, Oregon, Florida, South Carolina and New Jersey) where it considers dog walking to be a threat....
Tobolsk, Siberia June 6, 1761 The cloud bank to the east glowed red. Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche had been living at his mountaintop observatory, avoiding contact with the superstitious townsfolk and instead looking to the skies. His lot, he’d surmised, was not to make inroads with the locals but rather, as a fellow French philosophe put it, to make “a communication of flying bridges, as it were, that reunite one continent with another and pursue all the tracks of the Sun....
From Nature magazine Palaeontologists working in Tanzania have discovered the oldest known fossils from two major primate groups — Old World monkeys, which include baboons and macaques, and apes, which include humans and chimpanzees. The study, published online today in Nature, reveals new information about primate evolution. A team led by Nancy Stevens, a palaeontologist at Ohio University in Athens, recovered a lone tooth and a jaw fragment with three teeth from a site in the Rukwa Rift Basin in southwestern Tanzania....
Chickens are loquacious creatures, and Kevin Mitchell would know. He oversees the care of about a million of them on Wilcox Farms properties in Washington State and Oregon. Mitchell says the birds have “patterns of speech” that reveal a lot about their well-being. They are usually noisiest in the morning—a robust concert of clucks, chortles and caws. “When I hear that, I know they are pretty healthy and happy,” Mitchell says....
By Matt Kaplan A genetic analysis of modern hunter-gatherer populations in Africa suggests that humans evolved in the south of the continent, rather than the east, as has been thought. The work presents a major challenge to evidence from anthropology, as the earliest anatomically modern human skulls have all been found in eastern Africa; and to genetics, as humans in the rest of the world all carry a subset of genes found specifically in eastern Africa....
Of late, the enormous glaciers that flow down to the sea from the interior of Greenland have been picking up speed. In the last few years, enough ice has come off the northern landmass to sustain the average flow of the Colorado River for six years or fill Lake Mead three times over or cover the state of Maryland in 10 feet of water, assuming it were perfectly flat. And whether it is the glaciers’ weight, speed or volume that is measured, a quickening of the their movement can be detected....
Pathological technologies are typically put forward, promoted, and developed despite the presence of substantial drawbacks or risks that, when considered at all, are commonly dismissed, downplayed, or passed over in silence by proponents. In the case of interstellar travel, the possible payoffs were substantially offset by a roster of downsides, dangers, and existential threats. One category of risk arose from factors or forces external to the spacecraft—for example, collisions with objects in the interstellar medium....
Most experts consider allergies to be misdirected immune reactions to innocuous substances such as pollen or peanuts. A handful of researchers, however, now propose a fundamentally different theory of allergies: that runny noses, coughs and itchy rashes may have evolved to protect us from toxic chemicals, like snake venom, in our environment and in the food we eat. Immunologists have long thought that allergy sufferers are the victims of a misdirected type 2 response, which is believed to have evolved to protect against parasites....
(Reuters) - An estimated 50,000 gallons of crude oil spilled over a half-mile area due to a break in an above-ground pipeline in Los Angeles on Thursday, the fire department said on Thursday. No injuries were reported, the Los Angeles Fire Department said in a statement. The pipeline was shut off remotely, and the incident shut down a section of the Atwater Village area of the city, a local NBC affiliate reported....
Half a year into the coronavirus pandemic, many of its enormous public health, economic and political ramifications are still poorly understood. The virus itself has turned out to be maddeningly complex. It manifests itself in different populations in diverse and confusing ways, depending on age, environmental and social conditions, blood type, form of exposure, and other interacting factors. Doctors, epidemiologists, geneticists and other scientists are struggling to understand the virus and its effects so that policymakers can develop clear guidance for the public on how to balance protecting public health with the need to protect economies and communities....
Blue Origin’s spacecraft sports a biconic shape, with its design refined by more than 180 wind tunnel tests and extensive computational fluid dynamics analysis. To help validate the spacecraft’s shape and body flap configuration, tests were recently carried out over several weeks at Lockheed Martin’s High Speed Wind Tunnel Facility in Dallas. The testing was conducted as part of Blue Origin’s partnership with NASA, under the agency’s Commercial Crew Development (CCDev) program, which awarded the company $22 million in 2011 to develop the vehicle....
Early birds, save your creative challenges for just before bed. Your least productive time of day may be the perfect opportunity for a moment of insight, according to a study from a recent issue of Thinking & Reasoning. Mareike Wieth, an assistant professor of psychological science at Albion College, and her colleagues divided study participants into morning types and evening types based on their answers on the Morningness Eveningness Questionnaire (those who scored in the neutral range—about half of initial respondents—were excluded)....
It took Olivia Hallisey, now 17, just one year to develop a possible solution to an intractable issue facing public health workers: the lack of a rapid, portable, early diagnostic test for the Ebola virus. The effort did not go unnoticed: she won the grand prize at September’s Google Science Fair. (Scientific American co-sponsors the awards.) Hallisey, currently a high school junior (right), lives in Greenwich, Conn.—far removed from the West African communities hit hardest by the most recent Ebola outbreak....
By Valerie Volcovici WASHINGTON, June 2 (Reuters) - The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency plans as soon as Friday to determine whether carbon dioxide from aircraft endangers public health, a first step to regulating emissions from the aviation sector, sources familiar with the rulemaking process said. The EPA has yet to issue its “endangerment finding,” despite pressure from environmental groups who first sued the agency to start the rulemaking process in 2010....
PARIS (Reuters) - More money needs to be spent on detecting disease in domestic and wild animals, an intergovernmental group said on Wednesday, following a series of bird flu outbreaks and previous mutations of animal viruses into ones that can be passed between humans. The World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE) said governments had cut funding after previous health crises had abated, and needed to reconsider that decision in that light of recent outbreaks....
Proteins help the immune system recognize bad cells and neutralize them. Immune cells produce such proteins, or antibodies, in a variety of types and structures, only some of which target a specific disease producer, whether it is virus, bacteria, cancer or something else entirely. By isolating the immune cells that produce a specific antibody, scientists can create monoclonal antibodies–a concentrated dose of a specific disease targeting protein. Thus far, researchers have relied on the cells of other animals, such as Chinese hamsters, to produce these powerful medicines....
Great-ape habitat in Africa has shrunk precipitously in the past two decades, according to the first continent-wide survey of the state of environmental conditions suitable for the animals. Gorilla habitat has been hit particularly hard, researchers have concluded. Since 1995, Cross River gorillas have lost 59% of their habitat; eastern gorillas have lost 52%; and western gorillas have faced a 31% loss. Bonobos have suffered a 29% loss in their habitat; central chimpanzees have experienced a 17% shrinkage, and western chimpanzees, 11%....
Touchdown on the gravel runway at Cherskii in remote northeastern Siberia sent the steel toe of a rubber boot into my buttocks. The shoe had sprung free from gear stuffed between me and my three colleagues packed into a tiny prop plane. This was the last leg of my research team’s five-day journey from the University of Alaska Fairbanks across Russia to the Northeast Science Station in the land of a million lakes, which we were revisiting as part of our ongoing efforts to monitor a stirring giant that could greatly speed up global warming....
Listening to the music of the Austin, Tex.–band Shearwater, you get the sense that it has a bird fetish. In general, the group’s lyrics are distinctly naturalist—painting pictures of wildlife and untouched ecosystems—but birds tend to appear in these narratives more often than other animals. In fact, the majority of the group’s album covers are avian-themed, and the band’s name itself refers to a seabird with especially long wings. Almost all of this bird business is the work of the group’s singer/songwriter, Jonathan Meiburg....
