Anthropology News, Science News

Australia has adopted a similar environmental approach to Britain offering free insulation to home owners and tenants giving them chance to make a difference to the environment. The Australian Government insulation grant provides Australian people with free loft & ceiling insulation.

In the United Kingdom the government previously offered loft insulation & Cavity wall insulation as part of our environmental initiative. The cavity wall insulation was introduced to houses that were built in the 1920’s, as they were made with the external walls having two layers with a tiny gap ‘cavity’ between them.

The benefits of having this installed in your home were to save energy, which in theory helped reduce the amount of carbon monoxide emissions from the home and in turn keeping the warmth within the home where it is needed most. Carbon monoxide being one of the biggest causes to climate change in the world.

While offering this to the older homes in the country they also provided the free loft insulation grant. This would further reduce the amount of carbon monoxide emissions and would help reduce home owner’s yearly bills. This is the idea that Australia have taken on board.

With the Australian government adopting this program and offering free insulation to the Australian residents, it will help reduce the amount of green house gases that escape our homes. The Australian government are offering a $1200 government insulation rebate for free loft & ceiling insulation to those that are eligible.

Companies like Bradford insulation offer Australians various types of insulation including rock wool, fibre glass batts, eco wool and even a hybrid fibreglass foil insulation.

In the United Kingdom they were insulating the homes to keep the heat in. In Australia the government are providing the insulation grant to achieve the opposite and keep homes cool in the summer and warmer in the winter. With this the residents are saving money on there yearly home gas & electric bills.

It is great to see that the Australian government has adopted the insulation grant as a result they are helping the economy by creating more jobs and reducing carbon monoxide emissions. But after this grant was announced the Australian government did mention an increase in energy bills of up to 40%. If only more countries would adopt this process we would be getting closer to making more of a difference.

I thought that the blog had been taking a very serious edge other the past few months and I wanted to bring it back down to earth a little bit. So here we have it, the top 1- best science hoaxes!

10. The Nacirema Tribe – The Nacirema were supposedly a tribe of people living in North America, as described by Horace Miner in his anthropological paper, published in 1956. It was actually a satire of everyday American life. (”Nacirema” is “American” spelled backward.)

9. The Disappearing Blonde Gene – Every generation or so, an alarm is sounded over the belief that natural blondes will soon go the way of the dodo.

8. “Say No to Cake” – In 1995, British faux news show Brass Eye conducted an “investigative report” on a street drug they invented called “cake,” claiming it affected an area of the brain called “Shatner’s Bassoon.” Members of the media lashed out against cake, and the British government even took the matter to Parliament.

7. Alien Autopsy – English cameraman Ray Santilli claimed to own footage of an alien autopsy performed after the 1947 Roswell Incident. FOX aired a portion of it, but in 2006, Santilli ‘fessed up to the hoax.

6. The Turk – It was nearly impossible to beat this chess-playing automaton of 1770, heralded as the next great venture into technology. It was even toured across Europe. Unfortunately, the Turk was discovered to be a chess whiz in a robotic-type suit.

5. The Fiji Mermaid (aka “Feejee Mermaid”) – This artifact in P.T. Barnum’s museum was advertised as a gorgeous topless siren, but was actually the mummified corpse of an ape sewn to a fish.

4. Rabbit Mother – In 18th-century England, Mary Toft convinced doctors she had given birth to 16 rabbits. A Short Narrative of an Extraordinary Delivery of Rabbets [sic] was written by King George’s surgeon about her case. People stopped serving rabbit stew. Once the hoax was discovered, the medical community suffered great embarrassment.

3. El Chupacabra – This savage chicken-eater was actually a hairless wolf.

2. Archaeoraptor – This creature was the supposed “missing link” between dinosaurs and birds.

1. Piltdown Man – The supposed “missing link” between humans and apes, the Piltdown man proved to be a deliberate attempt at paleontological fraud.

S

I found this while talking to my mate Mark (MSci. Pysics), we were discussing the escape velocity of space shuttles and ended up talking about alternate methods of reachings this speed. Mach 34 is not something that should be taken lightly. 7 miles per second is an incredibly peice of engineering and I never realised that the shuttles needed to reach this speed to escape the Earths atmosphere.

Anyway here is the video, George Dyson spins the story of Project Orion, a massive,
nuclear-powered spacecraft that could have taken us to Saturn in five
years. His insider’s perspective and a secret cache of documents bring
an Atomic Age dream to life.

Canadian researcher launches science version of Google News. 

A
Canadian graduate student dissatisfied with science coverage on online
sites such as Google News and Yahoo News has created a news aggregator
especially for scientists.

Michael Imbeault, an HIV researcher
at the Université Laval in Quebec, launched his fully automated site
called e! Science News (http://esciencenews.com) last month. It has already attracted 300,000 different users, and averages 5,000 visits a day, he says.

News
aggregators display headlines and snippets from other media sources,
but don’t produce their own content. Of the top five online US news
sites, three are aggregators — Google News, AOL News and Yahoo News —
and only two — CNN.com and MSNBC.com — generate original content. Yahoo
and AOL use human editors and source almost all science stories from
wire agencies, such as Reuters. Google News uses computer algorithms to
aggregate headlines from thousands of news sources, ranking them by how
often and on which sites stories appear. Science and technology
coverage on Google News, for example, is notoriously devoid of basic
science.

Imbeault’s site indexes science news sites, clusters similar
articles together on the basis of the frequency of word co-occurrence,
and then uses Bayesian statistics to automatically assign articles to
topics such as astronomy, health and climate. It then ranks them using
factors such as timeliness, and the number of sites reporting the same
news, which indicates the story’s importance. At present, it is limited
to around 40 news sources — including Nature News, The New York Times
science section and institutional news sites such as NASA, which offer
free content for at least a period — but this will be increased, he
says.

Imbeault built the site on top of the Drupal open-source
content management software. He says that his aggregator will also be
improved by moving to semantics-based techniques that better capture
the meaning of a text.

Source

Chimpanzees in Uganda have been seen to eat earth in what is thought to be a method of fighting malaria.

Clay soils ate by chimps
and humans in Kibale National Park (Uganda) contain high concentrations
of the mineral kaolinite, a main ingredient in some anti-diarrheal
medications.

Previously this strange habit was thought to have warded of intestinal ailments or simply to obtain more minerals in there diet. A French team that was observing the chimps found that eat the fine grain clay after consuming leaves from a plant that contains very strong medicinal chemicals, the Trichilia Rubescens. "To only eat this would give now benefit to the chimps at all though", say the Frenchman.

Instead the plant’s malaria medicine is activated when fine soil particles bind with chemicals in the leaves.

Chimps often select dirt that has been exposed on the roots of
newly fallen trees, added study co-author Sabrina Krief, of the Muséum
National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris.

"This may be to avoid worms, bacteria, and stones," she said.

Krief and colleagues described the research online in the January issue of the journal Naturwissenschaften.

Read more …..

A new species of frog that lived 65 – 70 million years ago has been unearthed in Madagascar. The Frog dubbed Beelzbufo or the frog from hell has been identified but some of the best scientist at London Uni and Stony Brook Uni (NY). This discovery has also provoked theories that India, South America and Madagascar where interlinked until late into the age of dinosaurs.

Resembling he current Living Horned toads the Hell Frog had huge heads and jaws and a flat but wide body. A body length (not including the legs) of up to 40cm means this bad boy was fairly big. This would also lend itself to speculation into the eating habits of this Hell Frog. Did this animal eat small or un hatched dinosaurs or was it a big veggie eater.

Professor
Susan Evans of the UCL Department of Cell & Developmental Biology
says: “If it shared the aggressive temperament and ‘sit-and-wait’
ambush tactics of living Horned toads, it would have been a formidable
predator on small animals. Its diet would most likely have consisted of
insects and small vertebrates like lizards, but it’s not impossible
that Beelzebufo might even have munched on hatchling or juvenile
dinosaurs."

Nice Froggy, Down Froggy, AHHHHH

A pair of wild western lowland gorillas in Africa have surprised researchers by engaging in face-to-face mating, the Wildlife Conservation Society announced today.
Though the behavior had been observed before in mountain gorillas, it had never before been seen in the lowland gorilla subspecies—and had never before been photographed in the wild.

Gorillas Mate Face-to-Face in First Photos

Perhaps just as surprising, the female in the photographs—Leah, named after the Star Wars princess—is also the first gorilla seen using a tool in the wild.

Conservation biologist Thomas Breuer took the mating photographs in 2005, but the images are only now being released to the public.

Breuer, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute and the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, never expected to observe such a sight.

"Seeing the similarity between humans and gorillas in this respect is fascinating," he said

Previously Seen in Zoos
Breuer is conducting a long-term study of gorilla social organization and sexual selection at Mbeli Bai in Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in Congo. Most primates mate facing the same direction.

"Bonobos [mate face-to-face] routinely—zoo gorillas and zoo chimps too," said Craig Stanford, an expert in great ape behaviors with the Jane Goodall Research Center at the University of Southern California (USC).

But the behavior—first noted in a spring 2007 edition of the Gorilla Gazette, a Wisconsin-based newsletter for gorilla scientists—had never before been documented among wild western gorillas.

Harem Society

Breuer’s photos might appear to show a couple sharing a special bond—but gorillas mate in a harem society.

Leah is just one of four females currently in the harem of her partner.

Her mating partner in the photos, George, is named for a famous president—Washington, not Bush.

And despite her lowly status, Leah appears to be a rather special gorilla.

In 2005 she made news as the first gorilla ever seen to use tools in the wild when she was observed using a walking stick to cross a swampy forest clearing.

Such tool use was considered surprising for wild gorillas, which some believe are less intelligent than other species of tool-wielding great apes.

"That is why this story is so cool," Max Planck’s Breuer said. "The fact that it’s the same female makes it extremely interesting."

Progressive Gorilla?
USC’s Stanford isn’t sure that the unusual copulation sheds much light on gorilla behavior.

"Unless it’s seen widely, it doesn’t really mean much," he said.

So is Leah a particularly progressive gorilla? Perhaps. But Max Planck’s Breuer also suggests that her behavior might be rare or simply rarely seen.

"What we know about these gorillas is just a tiny bit," he said.

"So I’m kind of hesitant to say she’s particularly special. I think we’re [beginning] to understand the flexibility of their society and natural behavior. In time we may see more."

Diane Doran-Sheehy is anthropology chair at Stony Brook University in New York and a grantee of the National Geograpkhic Society’s Committee for Research and Exploration. (The Society owns National Geographic News.)

She has observed more than 500 gorilla matings in the wild—and none were face-to-face.

"It is an interesting observation and raises questions about why they sometimes engage in it," she said.

There may be practical considerations given the apes’ marshy habitat, for example.

"Perhaps a female doesn’t want to be face down in the swamp," Doran-Sheehy said.

Critical Time
Western lowland gorillas are listed as critically endangered by the World Conservation Union. Their populations have declined as much as 60 percent in recent years because of illegal hunting, habitat loss, and fatal Ebola fever.

Leah and George’s encounter made their plight even more poignant for Breuer.

"It leads me to think about how similar gorillas can be to humans, [and yet] we humans are destroying them," he said.

"I’m thinking about their conservation, because we’re not going to see these things in the future if we continue to threaten [these animals]."

Sourced from National Geographic

A study being performed by UC Irvine ecologists have found that the abundance of nitrogen in tropical forests have boosted the plant growth in certain regions by an average of 20%! This contradicts comments previously made that the forests would not respond to the nitrogen pollution.

Faster plant growth means the tropics will take in more carbon dioxide
than previously thought, though the long-term effects are unclear.
Over the next century, nitrogen pollution in the atmosphere is expected to rise,
with the biggest increases in the developing equatorial regions
such as India, South America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

The use of nitrogen fertilizer to boost crop growth has effected ecosystems further afield. Run off water and evaporation mixed with the burning of forests has put more nitrogen into the air.

Surprisingly, tropical forests that seasonally where dry, located in
mountainous regions or had regrown from slash-and-burn agriculture has also
responded to added nitrogen. Although these tropical
forests that typically come to mind are not the normal forests that come to mind, although, they collectively account for more
than half of the world’s tropical forests.

Scientists believed added nitrogen would have little effect in the
tropics because plants there typically have ample nitrogen. If one necessary plant
nutrient is in short supply – in this case phosphorus, which is normally found in these regions – plant growth
will be poor, even if other nutrients such as nitrogen are abundant.

It is difficult to predict the long-term effects of nitrogen on
global climate change. One element of discussion will be the degree to which humans
change natural ecosystems, for example the process of cutting down or burning the
tropical forests. Climate change may also determine how these
areas grow back, whether as forests, grasslands or
deserts. It also is unknown how nitrogen will affect the fate of carbon
once plants die and begin to decompose.

David LeBauer, graduate student researcher of Earth system science at UCI and lead author of the study, has stated;

“What is clear is that we need to consider how nitrogen pollution
interacts with carbon dioxide pollution, our study is a
step toward understanding the far-reaching effects of nitrogen
pollution and how it may change our climate.”

A new, unknown species of monkey was found during recent
hunting trips in the Amazon, an expert Jean-Phillipe Boubli of the University of Auckland, New Zealand has announced.

The animal was found after following native Yanomamo Indians on their hunts along the
Rio Aracá, a tributary of the Rio Negro in Brazil.

"They told us about this black uakari monkey, which was
different to the one we knew from Pico de Neblina National Park, where
I’d worked earlier," Boubli said.

"I searched for that monkey for at least five years. The reason
I couldn’t find it was because the place where they were was sort of
unexpected."

Uakaris normally live in habitats like flooded river forests, but this one turned up
in a mountainous region on the Brazil-Venezuela border, far from its
nearest relatives, this may be because there are too types of monkey in this region that are physiologically very similar.  There may have been a feud and the two types split a long time ago and since have adapted to there immediate habitats.

Already Vulnerable
Boubli named the new monkey Cacajao ayresii after Brazilian biologist José Márcio Ayres.

As a senior zoologist for the Wildlife Conservation Society,
Ayres—who died in 2003—helped create a protected zone in the heart of
the Amazon.

But the newfound Ayres uakari, Boubli said, appears confined to a very small area outside any preserve and is hunted by locals.

"We’re going to have to create a park or reserve, because [its habitat is] not a protected area," he said.

"The population is quite small, so they are quite vulnerable. I’m a bit concerned."
Little is known about the creature’s habits, but Boubli said it lives
in social groups and is likely a seed-eater, based on his observations
of other uakaris.

Anthony Rylands, a primatologist at Conservation International, said work such as Boubli’s is vital to wildlife protection.

"Many of these tropical forests are being destroyed now, There’s a desperate need to save these animals, but we really need to
know what animals we’re trying to save and where they live."

Rylands also said that today more new primate species are being described because of advances in DNA recognition technology.

"The sophistication of genetic analysis from just about any
material—hair, feces—means we’re able to get a much more precise view
of primate diversity."

"Some of them, especially the nocturnal ones, are really quite
cryptic—you can never recognize the differences simply by looking."

"Now … we’ve suddenly begun to realize that animals we
previously considered to be one species are completely different
creatures."

Looking back at a previous post could this Uakari monkey also be quick to learn and adapt as the Benobo monkeys have ?