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Michelle Jana Chan : I wondered if the pilot sighed with relief as the wedge of land emerged on the horizon. There is only deep Pacific Ocean blue between Santiago, the capital of Chile, and Easter Island, and, after five hours in the air, the cones of three extinct volcanoes rising from the sea are as welcome as they are dramatic. They must have been even more of a surprise for the 18th-century European explorers who stumbled across this craggy outcrop, especially when, on closer inspection, the adventurers spied the forbidding backs of giant stone statues standing sentinel along the coastline. Captain Cook wrote in his journal in March, 1774: "This is the farthest we have come." The real miracle is that the first settlers, the Rapa Nui, believed to have arrived from other Polynesian islands around 400AD - and from whom the island takes its indigenous name - ever made it to these rocky shores. The nearest inhabited land is Pitcairn, nearly 1,250 miles to the west. In the other direction, at almost twice the distance, is Chile, which annexed the island more than 100 years ago.When I stood on Maunga Terevaka, one of the volcanic peaks and the island's highest point, could I really be seeing the curvature of the Earth? That's what the locals told me.Not that Easter Island is that isolated any more. There are scheduled flights from Chile most days, and more than 40,000 tourists visit each year. Visitors are mainly backpackers checking off the world's must-sees, or retirees on a do-before-you-die mission.
Few stay more than a couple of days, holing up in basic guesthouse accommodation and hiring a car or a guide to see the sights. The occasional cruise ship passes, too, shuttling passengers to shore for group tours.advertisementBut last month's opening of the first luxury accommodation will attract a different class of traveller. Santiago-based Explora, a group known for its remote, top hotels in Patagonia and the Atacama Desert, has built a sleek new property on the south coast.
View: Full Article | Source: The Telegraph
Roaming somewhere in the woods around Elma is the unicorn deer. Captured on a motion-sensitive game camera, the adult deer appears to have a long antler sticking out of its head between it’s eyes. “It looks like a unicorn deer,” said Dave Ebeling, the hunter-photographer who caught the deer on camera Oct. 16. “I thought it was some kind of joke, but how can that be?” said the 46-year-old Ebeling, who added the photo was not retouched. “I got it [on camera].” Ebeling, who has been hunting since he was 16, has never seen anything like it. He showed the picture to a select few hunter friends. They suggested that the antler might be a piece of another buck’s antler that became lodged in the deer’s head during a fight. But Ebeling said he didn’t think so, because three weeks after the camera took the first picture, it recorded another image. It appears to be the same deer because the antler is in the same spot as the first photo. “If it was something like [a piece of another deer’s antler], it would have been off or turned sideways, because they fight,” he said. Tim Spierto, senior wildlife biologist with the state Department of Environmental Conservation, said he has never seen a deer quite like the one pictured, but he did have a possible explanation for the antler. “He must have bumped that antler fairly early on in development,” Spierto said, adding that such an injury may have led to the extra antler.
“Bumping it or scraping it could cause it to form another antler right at the injury point,” he said. Spierto said he has seen similar situations. But in those cases, the extra antler formed more in the center of the deer’s head, between its existing antlers. “We’ve seen antler deformations before,” he said, adding that they’re usually accompanied by another characteristic. “When I see things like this, I ask if there’s an injury to the opposite hind leg,” Spierto said.
View: Full Article | Source: Buffalo News
Researchers in a remote Indonesian jungle have discovered a giant rat that is about five times the size of a typical city rat and a tiny possum, scientists said Monday. Unearthing new species of mammals in the 21st century is considered very rare. The discoveries by a team of American and Indonesian scientists are being studied further to confirm their status. The animals were found in the Foja mountains rainforest in eastern Papua province in a June expedition, said U.S.-based Conservation International, which organized the trip in the Southeast Asian nation along with the Indonesian Institute of Science. "The giant rat is about five times the size of a typical city rat," said Kristofer Helgen, a scientist with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. "With no fear of humans, it apparently came into the camp several times during the trip." The possum was described as "one of the world's smallest marsupials." A 2006 expedition to the same stretch of jungle -- dubbed by Conservation International as a "Lost World" because until then humans had rarely visited it -- unearthed scores of exotic new species of palms, butterflies and palms. Papua has some of the world's largest tracts of rainforest, but like elsewhere in Indonesia they are being ravaged by illegal logging.
Scientists said last year that the Foja area was not under immediate threat, largely because it was so remote. "It's comforting to know that there is a place on Earth so isolated that it remains the absolute realm of wild nature," said expedition leader Bruce Beehler. "We were pleased to see that this little piece of Eden remains as pristine and enchanting as it was when we first visited."
View: Full Article | Source: Boston Globe
Animals and insects communicate through an invisible world of scents. By exploiting infrared technology, researchers at Rockefeller University just made that world visible. With the ability to see smells, these scientists now show that when fly larvae detect smells with both olfactory organs they find their way toward a scented target more accurately than when they detect them with one. “Having two eyes allows us to have depth perception and two ears allows us to pinpoint a noise precisely,” says Leslie Vosshall, head of the Laboratory of Neurogenetics and Behavior. “Sensing odors in stereo is equally important.” In research to be published in the December 23 online issue of Nature Neuroscience, Vosshall and her colleagues show that odor information is easier to perceive when it is smelled with both olfactory organs. By genetically manipulating flies to express odorant receptors in one olfactory organ or both, they show that the brains of Drosophila melanogaster larvae not only make use of stereo cues to locate odors but also to navigate toward them — a behavior called chemotaxis. To study this behavior, Vosshall and her colleagues had to figure out which direction the larvae move with respect to the source of the odor. But since odors are invisible, the researchers could neither predict how the flies would move in relation to these scents nor guess whether the odors were concentrated in patches or along a gradient. To complicate matters, odors whisk to and fro at the mercy of the slightest stir, making it impossible to determine their concentrations at particular locations.
“We needed to create an environment in which we knew something about the spatial arrangement of the odors,” says Vosshall. “We needed to see the smells.” In collaboration with colleagues in Thomas P. Sakmar’s Laboratory of Molecular Biology and Biochemistry, the researchers used a novel spectroscopic technique that exploited infrared light to create environments where they could see, control and precisely quantify the distribution of these smells.
View: Full Article | Source: PhysOrg.com
What would a dog say if it could talk? "Stranger", "fight", "walk", "alone", "ball" and "play", according to scientists who have developed a computer programme to translate dog barks. The special programme analysed more than 6,000 barks from 14 Hungarian sheepdogs in six different situations. In a series of tests the team of scientists, from Eötvös Loránd University in Hungary led by Csaba Molnár, discovered that a computer could recognise whether a dog was in a stranger, fight, walk, alone, ball or play scenario. Computer can tell what kind of situation a dog is in by how it barks The barks were tape recorded and then digitized on a computer, which used software to study their differences. The computer correctly identified the different situations 43 per cent of the time. Although it was not a high success rate it was far better than human recognition, the researchers said. The computer was most accurate in identifying the "fight" and "stranger" contexts, and was least effective at matching the "play" bark. The results appear in the journal Animal Cognition, and suggest that dogs have acoustically different barks depending on their emotional state. The researchers also performed a second test, in which the computer identified individual dogs by their bark.
The software correctly identified the dogs 52 per cent of the time, again much better than the human result, suggesting there are individual differences in barks even though humans are not able to recognize them. The team also plans to compare the barks of different breeds to discover what they have in common.
View: Full Article | Source: Daily Mail
It was a sorry end. Cut down in his prime, the cunning thief lay on the slab, his cold body offering pathologist Brett Gartrell no outward sign of how he had met his maker. Once Gartrell had wielded his scalpel, however, the cause became clear: a belly stuffed with sticky brown gunk. Diagnosis? Death by chocolate. Divine - yes. Delicious - absolutely. But deadly? For some it certainly is. The corpse on Gartrell's slab belonged not to a human but to a kea, an endangered New Zealand parrot. Like many animals, keas are acutely sensitive to chemicals in chocolate that are harmless to humans in all but huge doses. Scientists are now studying these chemicals, along with other substances in cocoa, hoping to exploit their toxic effects to control pests or microbes. If you're reading this after scoffing your fifteenth chocolate Santa, don't panic: we humans have been safely enjoying the beans of the cacao plant, Theobroma cacao, for millennia. Theobroma is Greek for "food of the gods", reflecting the Mayan belief that cocoa had divine origins. Every April, they sacrificed a dog with cacao-coloured markings in honour of Ek Chuah, the god of cacao. Knife-wielding priests aside, chocolate is still bad news for many animals. Cocoa beans are naturally rich in caffeine and its chemical relatives theobromine and theophylline, collectively called methylxanthines. To humans these are little more than benign stimulants, but to a number of animals they are highly toxic. Just 240 grams of unsweetened dark chocolate contains enough methylxanthines to kill a 40-kilogram dog, about the size of a German shepherd.
It was methylxanthines that did for the kea too. Gartrell, a wildlife pathologist at Massey University in Palmerston North, New Zealand, is wearily familiar with keas' propensity to poison themselves. Besides being arguably the world's smartest birds, keas are extraordinarily inquisitive foragers, using their beaks to rip open tents and backpacks, open garbage bins and even pry pieces off cars in their quest for food.
View: Full Article | Source: New Scientist
An almost complete human skull fossil that could date back 100,000 years was unearthed in Henan last month, Chinese archaeologists announced Tuesday. "It is the greatest discovery in China after the Peking Man and Upper Cave Man skull fossils were found in Beijing early last century, and will shed light on a critical period of human evolution," said Shan Jixiang, director of the State Administration of Cultural Heritage. All the fossils from Beijing were lost during the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression (1937-45). The Henan find was made after two years of excavation at the site in Xuchang. Archaeologists have worked on an area of 260 sq m, merely one-hundredth of the Paleolithic site. "We expect more discoveries of importance," said Li Zhanyang, archaeologist with the Henan cultural relics and archaeology research institute, who leads the excavation. The fossil consisted of 16 pieces of the skull with protruding eyebrows and a small forehead. More astonishing than the completeness of the skull is that it still has a fossilized membrane on the inner side, so scientists can track the nerves of the Paleolithic ancestors, Li said. The pieces were fossilized because they were buried 5 m near the mouth of a spring, whose water had a high content of calcium. Besides the skull, more than 30,000 animal fossils, and stone and bone artifacts were found in the small area in the past two years. The pieces of the human skull showed up just when archaeologists were going home for the Spring Festival.
"It was freezing cold and digging was difficult. We planned to leave the next day when one of us saw something like part of a human skull," said Li. "It was 9 am, and only an hour earlier we joked and said: 'Let's get a skull today'. "And there it was." The Paleolithic site was discovered in 1965, when IVPP scientists found animal fossils and stone artifacts from soil dug for a well.
View: Full Article | Source: China Daily
A leatherback turtle was tracked by satellite traveling 12,774 miles (20,558 kilometers) from Indonesia to Oregon, one of the longest recorded migrations of any vertebrate animal, scientists announced in a new report on sea turtle conservation. Leatherback sea turtles (Dermochelys coriacea) are the largest of all living turtles and are widely distributed throughout the world's oceans. They have been seen in the waters off Argentina, Tasmania, Alaska and Nova Scotia. Adult leatherbacks periodically migrate from their temperate foraging grounds to breeding grounds in the tropics. Scientists at the National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) tracked one female nester, who was tagged on Jamursba-Medi beach in Papua, Indonesia, on her journey back to her foraging grounds off the coast of Oregon. She was tracked for 647 days covering a distance about equal to two round trips between New York and Los Angeles. The turtle's trip set a new record for sea turtles, and is among the longest documented migrations for any marine vertebrate. The longest measured annual migration for any animal is the 40,000-mile (64,000-kilometer) journey between New Zealand and the North Pacific of the sooty shearwater (Puffinus griseus), a medium-sized seabird. The leatherback tracked by the NMFS belongs to one of two distinct breeding populations in the Pacific, the western group. Other research has shown that nesters from this population migrate through areas in the Philippines, South China Sea, Japan, and the waters around many other countries, spurring conservationists to call for an international effort to protect the species, which is listed as Critically Endangered on the World Conservation Union's Red List.
The turtle's journey is featured in an article in the third annual volume of the State of the Worlds' Turtles Report, written by NMFS scientists Peter Dutton and Scott Benson and Creusa Hitipeuw of WWF-Indonesia.
View: Full Article | Source: Live Science
People with blue eyes have a single, common ancestor, according to new research. A team of scientists has tracked down a genetic mutation that leads to blue eyes. The mutation occurred between 6,000 and 10,000 years ago. Before then, there were no blue eyes. "Originally, we all had brown eyes," said Hans Eiberg from the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of Copenhagen. The mutation affected the so-called OCA2 gene, which is involved in the production of melanin, the pigment that gives color to our hair, eyes and skin. "A genetic mutation affecting the OCA2 gene in our chromosomes resulted in the creation of a 'switch,' which literally 'turned off' the ability to produce brown eyes," Eiberg said. The genetic switch is located in the gene adjacent to OCA2 and rather than completely turning off the gene, the switch limits its action, which reduces the production of melanin in the iris. In effect, the turned-down switch diluted brown eyes to blue. If the OCA2 gene had been completely shut down, our hair, eyes and skin would be melanin-less, a condition known as albinism. "It's exactly what I sort of expected to see from what we know about selection around this area," said John Hawks of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, referring to the study results regarding the OCA2 gene. Hawks was not involved in the current study. Baby blues: Eiberg and his team examined DNA from mitochondria, the cells' energy-making structures, of blue-eyed individuals in countries including Jordan, Denmark and Turkey.
This genetic material comes from females, so it can trace maternal lineages. They specifically looked at sequences of DNA on the OCA2 gene and the genetic mutation associated with turning down melanin production. Over the course of several generations, segments of ancestral DNA get shuffled so that individuals have varying sequences. Some of these segments, however, that haven't been reshuffled are called haplotypes.
View: Full Article | Source: Live Science
