Science news, Anthropology, Physics, Agriculture - Scicornwall

Scientists get online news aggregator

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

The Frog From Hell

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

New Species of Monkey Been Hiding in the Amazon

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 ?