Horse milk trots onto the menu

Horse’s milk could soon be available to pour over your cereal, according to a horse farm in Belgium that has started selling it across the world.

The farm milks 60 horses on a regular basis, and says its milk-mad customers can’t get enough of it.

The healthy drink, which is low in fat and high in vitamins, is sold as a tasty alternative to cow’s milk.

The milk, described as sweet, thin and watery, is also made into tablets, shampoo and creams to treat eczema.

The farmer decided to go in to horse milk production when new technology meant he didn’t need his horses to work in the fields anymore.

He’s now been milking horses for more than eight years.

Although trade was slow to begin with, business is now booming and the farm is exporting the tasty treat to lots of different countries.

via CBBC Newsround | Animals | Horse milk trots onto the menu.

Should Mars be treated like a wildlife preserve?

Life has not yet been found on Mars, and no one is sure whether it will be. But some researchers say it is not too early to consider the possibility that humans could do irreversible damage to indigenous Martian life.

A group of international experts will meet as early as this September to discuss whether it is time to revise policies that protect Mars from contamination.

At issue is the ethics of exploring the Red Planet – in particular whether hitchhiking Earth microbes could harm Martian habitats.

Past missions, including NASA’s twin rovers, have already ferried hundreds of thousands of bacterial cells to the Red Planet. Most of the microbes on the exterior of these craft were quickly destroyed by intense ultraviolet radiation, which passes easily through Mars’s thin atmosphere.

Dormant bugs

But dormant microbes might survive for tens of thousands of years on the interior of the crafts. And in the case of the Mars Polar Lander, which crashed into the planet’s south pole in 1999, its interior surfaces may have come in direct contact with soil rich in water ice, which could potentially provide a habitable environment for the hitchhikers.

“The option of not contaminating Mars is an option that’s no longer available to humanity,” says Christopher McKay, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center, who wrote a commentary about the need to protect any Martian life in the current issue of the journal Science. “Mars already has earthlings. We know that for a fact.”

He warns that Earth life could be reawakened if weather conditions on the planet change. This could happen as a result of periodic swings in the planet’s tilt, or if humans purposely alter the Martian environment, which, ironically, they might do to make conditions cosier for any Martian life they might discover. Microbes on subsurface drills in search of liquid water could also contaminate potential Martian habitats.

via Should Mars be treated like a wildlife preserve? – space – 05 February 2009 – New Scientist.

“Ancient” Syriac bible found in Cyprus

Authorities in northern Cyprus believe they have found an ancient version of the Bible written in Syriac, a dialect of the native language of Jesus.

The manuscript was found in a police raid on suspected antiquity smugglers. Turkish Cypriot police testified in a court hearing they believe the manuscript could be about 2,000 years old.

The manuscript carries excerpts of the Bible written in gold lettering on vellum and loosely strung together, photos provided to Reuters showed. One page carries a drawing of a tree, and another eight lines of Syriac script.

Experts were however divided over the provenance of the manuscript, and whether it was an original, which would render it priceless, or a fake.

Experts said the use of gold lettering on the manuscript was likely to date it later than 2,000 years.

“I’d suspect that it is most likely to be less than 1,000 years old,” leading expert Peter Williams, Warden of Tyndale House, University of Cambridge told Reuters.

Turkish Cypriot authorities seized the relic last week and nine individuals are in custody pending further investigations. More individuals are being sought in connection with the find, they said.

Further investigations turned up a prayer statue and a stone carving of Jesus believed to be from a church in the Turkish held north, as well as dynamite.

The police have charged the detainees with smuggling antiquities, illegal excavations and the possession of explosives.

Syriac is a dialect of Aramaic – the native language of Jesus – once spoken across much of the Middle East and Central Asia. It is used wherever there are Syrian Christians and still survives in the Syrian Orthodox Church in India.

Aramaic is still used in religious rituals of Maronite Christians in Cyprus. …

via “Ancient” Syriac bible found in Cyprus – Yahoo! News.

‘Green magic’ protected child mummies

A rare mummified child from the early period of Egyptian history was discovered buried with a bright green amulet stone once believed to hold magical powers, according to a new study.

The finds help to explain why hieroglyphics and historical texts record that Egyptian children wore green eye makeup. It also adds to the growing body of evidence that ancient Egyptians thought color itself held sacred energy that could help or hurt individuals.

Lead author Raffaella Bianucci explained that the first Egyptian colored amulets occurred as early as the predynastic Badarian period, from 4500 to 3800 B.C. The recently analyzed child mummy, containing the remains of a 15- to 18-month-old toddler, dates to 4,700 years ago.

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“Even in limited forms and materials, these earliest amulets give a good indication of the dangerous forces that the early Egyptians felt were present in their world and needed to be harnessed by magical means,” said Bianucci, a scientist in the Department of Animal and Human Biology at Via Accademia Albertina in Turin, Italy.

She and her colleagues first examined the child’s remains, which were wrapped in linen bandages. Immunological evidence determined that the youngster died from an acute malarial infection.

The researchers then turned their attention to a fossilized leather bag tied with linen twine, which was wrapped in the bandages with the mummy. Two stones were found within the bag. The researchers focused on a bright green one, found poking through the fossilized leather.

Powerful X-rays, as well as scanning electron microscope analysis, revealed that the stone was chrysocolla, or hydrated copper silica, according to the paper that will be published in the March issue of the Journal of Archaeological Science. To this day, chrysocolla is valued as an ornamental stone that, in its bluer forms, is sometimes confused with turquoise.

Bianucci said malachite was a more common green mineral in early Egypt, since chrysocolla ores were limited to very few in the Sinai and the Eastern Egyptian Desert. Chrysocolla may have been special for children, as archaeologists previously unearthed a small figure of a child made of the green material in another grave. …

via ‘Green magic’ protected child mummies – Discovery.com- msnbc.com.

Primitive magic? The ancient Egyptians were sometimes quite practical. Their eye make up, for example, kept infections and flies away.

Ants tricked into raising butterflies

Butterflies can seem friendly and harmless. But at least one type has learned to raise its young as parasites, tricking ants into feeding it and giving special treatment.

The pupae of the European butterfly Maculina rebeli exude a scent that mimics the ants and make themselves at home inside the ant nest. Once they become a caterpillar they even beg for food like ant larvae, researchers report in Friday’s edition of the journal Science.

But, not content just to be fed, the butterflies even manage to demand special treatment, Jeremy A. Thomas of Britain’s University of Oxford and colleagues report.

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It turns out that ant queens make subtle sounds that signal their special status to worker ants. The caterpillars have learned to mimic those sounds, the researchers say, earning high enough status to be rescued before others if the nest is disturbed.

In times of food shortage, nurse ants have been known to kill their own larvae and feed them to the caterpillars pretending to be queen ants, they added. …

via Ants tricked into raising butterflies – Science- msnbc.com.

Origin Of Claws Seen In Fossil 390 Million Years Old

A missing link in the evolution of the front claw of living scorpions and horseshoe crabs was identified with the discovery of a 390 million-year-old fossil by researchers at Yale and the University of Bonn, Germany.

The specimen, named Schinderhannes bartelsi, was found fossilized in slate from a quarry near Bundenbach in Germany, a site that yields spectacularly durable pyrite-preserved fossils — findings collectively known as the Hunsrück Slate. The Hunsrück Slate has previously produced some of the most valuable clues to understanding the evolution of arthropods – including early shrimp-like forms, a scorpion and sea spiders as well as the ancient arthropods trilobites.

“With a head like the giant Cambrian aquatic predator Anomalocaris and a body like a modern arthropod, the specimen is the only known example of this unusual creature,” said Derek Briggs, director of Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History and an author of the paper appearing in the journal Science.

Scientists have puzzled over the origins of the paired grasping appendages found on the heads of scorpions and horseshoe crabs. The researchers suggest that Schinderhannes gives a hint. Their appendages may be an equivalent to those found in the ancient predatory ancestor, Anomalocaris — even though creatures with those head structures were thought to have become extinct by the middle of the Cambrian Period, 100 million years before Schinderhannes lived.

The fossil’s head section has large bulbous eyes, a circular mouth opening and a pair of segmented, opposable appendages with spines projecting inward along their length. The trunk section is made up of 12 segments, each with small appendages, and a long tail spine. Between the head and trunk, there is a pair of large triangular wing-like limbs — that likely propelled the creature like a swimming penguin, according to Briggs. Unlike its ancestors from the Cambrian period, which reached three feet in length, Schinderhannes is only about 4 inches long. …

via Origin Of Claws Seen In Fossil 390 Million Years Old.

Collapse Of Antarctic Ice Sheet Would Likely Put Washington, D.C. Largely Underwater

University of Toronto and Oregon State University geophysicists have shown that should the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapse and melt in a warming world – as many scientists are concerned it will – it is the coastlines of North America and of nations in the southern Indian Ocean that will face the greatest threats from rising sea levels.

The catastrophic increase in sea level, already projected to average between 16 and 17 feet around the world, would be almost 21 feet in such places as Washington, D.C., scientists say, putting it largely underwater. Many coastal areas would be devastated. Much of Southern Florida would disappear, according to researchers at Oregon State University.

“There is widespread concern that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may be prone to collapse, resulting in a rise in global sea levels,” says geophysicist Jerry X. Mitrovica, who, along with physics graduate student Natalya Gomez and Oregon State University geoscientist Peter Clark, are the authors of a new study to be published in the February 6 issue of the journal Science. “We’ve been able to calculate that not only will the rise in sea levels at most coastal sites be significantly higher than previously expected, but that the sea-level change will be highly variable around the globe,” adds Gomez.

“Scientists are particularly worried about the ice sheet because it is largely marine-based, which means that the bedrock underneath most of the ice sits under sea level,” says Mitrovica, director of the Earth System Evolution Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. “The West Antarctic is fringed by ice shelves which act to stabilize the ice sheet – these shelves are sensitive to global warming, and if they break up, the ice sheet will have a lot less impediment to collapse.” …

“The typical estimate of the sea-level change is five metres, a value arrived at by taking the total volume of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, converting it to water and spreading it evenly across the oceans,  says Mitrovica.  “However, this estimate is far too simplified because it ignores three significant effects:

• when an ice sheet melts, its gravitational pull on the ocean is reduced and water moves away from it.  The net effect is that the sea level actually falls within 2,000 km of a melting ice sheet, and rises progressively further away from it.  If the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, sea level will fall close to the Antarctic and will rise much more than the expected estimate in the northern hemisphere because of this gravitational effect;
• the depression in the Antarctic bedrock that currently sits under the weight of the ice sheet will become filled with water if the ice sheet collapses.  However, the size of this hole will shrink as the region rebounds after the ice disappears, pushing some of the water out into the ocean, and this effect will further contribute to the sea-level rise;
• the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet will actually cause the Earth’s rotation axis to shift rather dramatically – approximately 500 metres from its present position if the entire ice sheet melts.  This shift will move water from the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans northward toward North America and into the southern Indian Ocean.

“The net effect of all of these processes is that if the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapses, the rise in sea levels around many coastal regions will be as much as 25 per cent more than expected, for a total of between six and seven metres if the whole ice sheet melts,” says Mitrovica.  “That’s a lot of additional water, particularly around such highly populated areas as Washington, D.C., New York City, and the California coastline.”

Digital animation of what various sea-level rise scenarios might look like for up to six metres is at http://www.cresis.ku.edu/research/data/sea_level_rise.

via Collapse Of Antarctic Ice Sheet Would Likely Put Washington, D.C. Largely Underwater.

Grid Analysis – Decision Making Techniques from Mind Tools

In making some complicated decisions where many different kinds of factors are involved, I’ve found a Decition Matrix useful.

Grid Analysis (also known as Decision Matrix Analysis, Pugh Matrix Analysis or MAUT, which stands for Multi-Attribute Utility Theory) is a useful technique to use for making a decision. It is particularly powerful where you have a number of good alternatives to choose from, and many different factors to take into account. This makes it a great technique to use in almost any important decision where there isn’t a clear and obvious preferred option. Being able to use Grid Analysis means that you can take decisions confidently and rationally, at a time when other people might be struggling to make a decision.

How to Use the Tool:

The technique works by getting you to list your options as rows on a table, and the factors you need consider as columns. You then score each option/factor combination, weight this score, and add these scores up to give an overall score for the option. While this sounds complex, in reality the technique is quite easy to use. Here’s a step-by-step guide with an example.

Start by downloading our free worksheet, and then work through these steps:

1. The first step is to list all of your options as the row labels on the table, and list the factors that you need to consider as the column headings.

2. Next, work out the relative importance of the factors in your decision. Show these as numbers from, say, 0 to 5, where 0 means that the factor is absolutely unimportant in the final decision, and 5 means that it is very important. (It’s perfectly acceptable to have factors with the same importance.) We will use these to weight your preferences by the importance of the factor.

These values may be obvious. If they are not, then use a technique such as Paired Comparison Analysis to estimate them.

3. The next step is to work your way down the columns of your table, scoring each option for each of the factors in your decision. Score each option from 0 (poor) to 5 (very good). Note that you do not have to have a different score for each option – if none of them are good for a particular factor in your decision, then all options should score 0.

4. Now multiply each of your scores from step 3 by the values for relative importance you calculated in step 2. This will give you weighted scores for each option/factor combination.

5. Finally, add up these weighted scores for each of your options. The option that scores the highest wins!

… Example Grid Analysis Showing Weighted Assessment of How Each Type of Car Satisfies Each Factor

Factors:	Cost	Board	Storage	Comfort	Fun	Look	Total
Weights:	4	5	1	2	3	4
Sports Car	4	0	0	2	9	12	27
SUV/4×4	0	15	2	4	3	4	28
Family Car	8	10	1	6	0	0	25
Station Wagon	8	15	3	6	0	4	36

This gives an interesting result: Despite its lack of fun, a station wagon may be the best choice.

If the wind-surfer still feels unhappy with the decision, maybe he has underestimated the importance of one of the factors. Perhaps he should give ‘fun’ a weight of 7, and buy an old station wagon to carry his board!

via Grid Analysis – Decision Making Techniques from Mind Tools.

How do you get the different weights for the features? (In the example above, how do you figure out that having room for your surf board is a “5″ compared to comfort being a “3″? You can use another grid for this, comparing each:

Paired Comparison Analysis helps you to set priorities where there are conflicting demands on your resources. It is also an ideal tool for comparing “apples with oranges” – completely different options such as whether to invest in marketing, a new IT system or a new piece of machinery.

In this example, we compare each item to each other item. Cost is “1″ more important than being able to transport the surfboard. It is also “1″ more important than storage, comfort and look.  It is “0″ more important than fun. Being able to transport the surf board is “2″ more important than comfort and fun… and so on.  This is how we get weights when comparing multiple unrelated traits.

Factors:	A Cost	B Board	C Storage	D Comfort	E Fun	F Look	Total Weight
A Cost		1	1	1	0	1	4
B Board			1	2	2	0	5
C Storage				1	0	0	1
D Comfort					1	1	2
E Fun						2	3
F Look							4

Student in legal threat over excrement blunder

A student who spent seven years collecting lizard excrement for a PhD thesis is suing his university after it was thrown away. Daniel Bennett is taking legal action against Leeds University following the blunder which led to 5st 7lb of excrement being incinerated. He had collected the samples from remote areas of the Philippines as part of an investigation into the rare Butaan lizard.

The animal – a close relative of the Komodo dragon – was assumed extinct for more than 100 years and little is known about it. Mr Bennett spent five years investigating their diet, population size and behaviour by sifting through excrement found on the jungle floor. He then won a scholarship at Leeds where he was paid to analyse more samples at the university’s faculty of biological sciences.

But two years into his PhD he returned from fieldwork to find his collection had been “accidentally” thrown away by technicians clearing space in a laboratory. “The Butaan is so reclusive that all attempts to study it using methods that have proved suitable for the Komodo dragon and other large lizards have ended in total failure,” he told Times Higher Education magazine.

“My team and I studied the animals by searching the forest floor for their distinctive faeces and using clues to estimate dietary patterns, population size and structure, and activity areas. By the beginning of the third year of my PhD, I knew more about lizard faeces than I had ever thought possible. “Returning to Leeds from fieldwork, I was surprised to find my desk space occupied by another student and to see that photographs of my daughter, my girlfriend and my favourite lizards had been removed from the wall.

“My personal effects had been carefully stowed in boxes, but there was no sign of my 35kg bag of lizard ****.”

via Student in legal threat over excrement blunder – Telegraph.

DNA Clears Innocent Man Who Died in Prison

The Legislature took on a somber tone Wednesday as lawmakers honored the family of a man who died in prison, only to have DNA testing show years later that he did not commit the rape he was convicted of. Tim Cole and his relatives for years claimed he was innocent in the rape of a Texas Tech University student in 1985. But until DNA from the crime scene was tested last year, no one else believed them. Cole died in prison in 1999 at the age of 38. His family will ask an Austin judge on Today to overturn the conviction. Cole’s family visited the House and Senate as both chambers passed resolutions honoring Cole. A few of them wiped tears from their eyes.

“It is a sad story, a story of a young man with all the hope in the world,” said Sen. Robert Duncan, a Lubbock Republican. “A story of a young man whose life was cut off, literally, by an error in the criminal justice system.”

The resolutions noted that Cole refused to plead guilty in exchange for probation. And once in prison, he refused to say he did it when it could have earned him parole. He also declined to attend his stepfather’s funeral because he didn’t want to attend in shackles. Cole refused to confess to a crime he didn’t commit, said his brother, Cory Session. “He said he’d rather serve his entire 25-year sentence. That’s courage and conviction a lot of people don’t have,” Session said. If the Austin judge rules the conviction should be overturned, it would be first step toward earning a pardon from the governor and having the criminal record expunged, Session said. According to attorneys for the Innocence Project of Texas, Cole’s case would be the first posthumous DNA exoneration in the state.

via Austin Local News.

More on NPR:

NPR’s Tony Cox continues the conversation about Timothy Cole’s case with his mother, Ruby Session, and Michele Mallin, the rape victim whose testimony helped secure Cole’s conviction.