Extinction Countdown: Rare Javan rhino killed by poachers

One of the world’s last Javan rhinos (Rhinoceros sondaicus annamiticus) has been shot and killed by poachers in Vietnam, the World Wildlife Fund said Monday. The animal was shot and its horn, valued in traditional Asian medicine, was cut off.

No one knows exactly how many Javan rhinos remain in the world, but estimates for the population range from 40 to 60 animals, with possibly eight existing in Vietnam’s Cat Tien National Park. The critically endangered species is elusive, rarely photographed and almost never observed in the wild. None exist in captivity.

“This is devastating news for rhino conservation and Vietnam,” the WWF’s Dung Huynh Tien said in a prepared statement.

The WWF is now asking the Vietnam government to launch a criminal investigation into the rhino’s death. The species is legally protected in Vietnam, where punishments for killing endangered species can include fines or prison sentences.

Rhino poaching worldwide hit a 15-year high last year as demand for their horns has driven prices up ever higher.

Photo: Rare photo of a Javan rhino, courtesy of WWF.

via Extinction Countdown: Rare Javan rhino killed by poachers.

Neanderthals not the only apes humans bred with. X-woman suspected.

A LONG-awaited rough draft of the Neanderthal genome has revealed that our own DNA contains clear evidence that early humans interbred with Neanderthals.

Such interminglings have been suspected in the past, but there’s more: Neanderthals were probably not the only other Homo species early Homo sapiens mixed with.

These findings call into question the familiar story that modern humans left Africa around 100,000 years ago and swept aside all other Homo species as they made their way around the globe. “It was a very simple story,” says João Zilhão at the University of Bristol, UK. “Its simplicity suggested it would not be true.” A more likely scenario is that as H. sapiens migrated, they met and interbred with other Homo species that have all since died out.

The first definitive evidence of interbreeding comes from Svante Pääbo’s team at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. They reported last week that the genome of humans today is roughly 1 to 4 per cent Neanderthal (Science, vol 328, p 710). This holds true for all non-Africans, suggesting that H. sapiens and Neanderthals interbred sometime between 100,000 and 45,000 years ago, after the first humans left Africa but before they split into regional populations.

Another genetic study confirms this. Jeffrey Long at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque presented results from nearly 100 modern human populations at a meeting of the American Association for Physical Anthropologists in April. His team found evidence that Eurasians acquired genetic diversity from breeding with other Homo species after they left Africa.

They also noticed a spike in genetic diversity in Indo-Pacific peoples, dating to around 40,000 years ago. This time, it’s unlikely the diversity came from H. sapiens getting it on with Neanderthals, who never travelled that far south. That leaves a number of candidates, including Homo erectus and species related to Homo floresiensis, a small species which lived on an Indonesian island until about 13,000 years ago.

Neither Pääbo nor Long were able to show that when humans arrived in Europe they mixed with resident Neanderthals, but archaeological finds tell a different story, says Zilhão. In Portugal, his team discovered the 25,000-year-old bones of a child they are convinced is a human-Neanderthal hybrid. Zilhão says fossils from Romania and the Czech Republic also bear Neanderthal features, though others dispute this.

Moreover, decorative artefacts characteristic of humans have cropped up at Neanderthal sites, dated to around the time of contact with humans in Africa and the Middle East. Further east, 40,000-year-old human bones from a cave near Beijing, China, have features that recall other Homo species, says Erik Trinkaus of Washington University in St Louis, Missouri.

In March, Pääbo’s team reported the discovery of DNA from a hominin that is probably neither human nor Neanderthal that lived 50,000 to 30,000 years ago in a cave in southern Siberia. They dubbed the creature X-woman, and sequencing machines are already decoding its genome, says Pääbo’s colleague Ed Green of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Could X-woman or its kind have bred with humans, too? “Stay tuned,” Green says.

via Neanderthals not the only apes humans bred with – life – 12 May 2010 – New Scientist.

North Korea Claims to Achieve Unprecedented Nuclear Fusion Success

In what the BBC is calling “a claim that is likely to be met with some scepticism,” North Korea has announced that it has made huge strides toward developing thermonuclear power, going so far as to claim that the nation’s scientists have built a “unique thermo-nuclear reaction device.”

We’ve got your skepticism right here.

We don’t mean to be xenophobic here, nor do we wish to diminish the work of North Korea’s nuclear scientists, who have no doubt been hard at work. But a means of controlling a sustained nuclear fusion reaction has eluded the best scientists in the world collaborating across borders and continents for half a century. So the idea that isolationist and economically destitute North Korea has cobbled together the physical means — brainpower notwithstanding — to conquer one of modern science’s greatest challenges is a bit hard to swallow.

Nuclear fusion is, of course, the long-sought golden ticket to inexpensive and clean energy that is, for our purposes, limitless. It’s the process that occurs naturally in stars when nuclei of light gases fuse together under immense pressure, releasing considerable energy that could be harnessed to solve the world’s energy problems. But while laboratory demonstrations have recreated the phenomena, no one has yet been able to create a sustained, controlled reaction that could be used to generate electricity — though many are trying.

Per usual, North Korea’s claim, published in the newspaper Rodong Sinmun, is a bit vague, so it’s conceivable that scientists there demonstrated a small fusion reaction in-lab and North Korea’s state media — notorious for blowing things way out of proportion — turned this announcement into something more than it is.

via North Korea Claims to Achieve Unprecedented Nuclear Fusion Success | Popular Science.

NASA spacecraft ‘hijacked by aliens’

A GERMAN UFO expert has claimed that a NASA spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens – who are now attempting to contact Earth.

Hartwig Hausdorf claims that Voyager 2 – an unmanned interplanetary probe blasted into space 33 years ago – has started transmitting strange, unintelligible signals, Bild newspaper revealed today

NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.

But last month the probe began sending back distorted messages from its location near the edge of the solar system that baffled NASA scientists were unable to decode, Mr Hausdorf says.

“It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe, thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth,” the author of UFOs – They Are Still Flying told Bild.

The signal from Voyager 2 – which takes 13 hours to reach the Earth – broke off fully on April 22.

NASA said engineers were working to solve a data transmission fault.

The space agency has not commented specifically on Mr Hausdorf’s comments, although it says the fault is likely to be a glitch in the probe’s computer memory

Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, were launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Three decades on, they are the most distant human-made objects in outer space.

Voyager 1 is currently more than 8.5 billion miles from Earth. It will soon travel beyond the heliosphere – a bubble the sun creates around the solar system – into interstellar space, scientists say.

he signal from

via NASA spacecraft ‘hijacked by aliens’ | News.com.au.

Bra that grows rice developed in Japan

A Japanese lingerie company has developed a concept bra that doubles as a rice paddy.

Triumph, makers of other gimmick bras including one that comes with a sushi set and another that comes with solar panels, said it came up with the “rice bra” because of the growing popularity of farming among city dwellers in Japan.

Growing concerns over food safety and the environment, and the ideal of a laid-back rural lifestyle, are attracting more urbanites to agriculture, once the mainstay of Japan’s economy. Rice is also the nation’s staple food.

“Over the last year, young Japanese women have taken a tremendous interest in agriculture. We wanted other women to experience farming as well,” Triumph spokeswoman Yoshiko Masuda said.

“Home kits that allow people to grow their own rice are very popular online. We thought that it would be fun if a bra could give people the same experience,” said Mr Masuda.

The bra, made of recyclable plastic, can be tied together to create pots that also double as the cups.

These are then filled with soil, and rice seedlings, that are watered through a hose that also doubles as a belt that goes around the wearer’s waist.

The bra also comes with gardening gloves. However, greenfingered Japanese women will not get the chance to grow their own bra rice, as the concept bra is not for sale.

via Bra that grows rice developed in Japan – Telegraph.

Mass. woman pleads to impersonating FBI supervisor, ‘hiring’ Va. neighbors as assistants

A Massachusetts woman pleaded guilty to impersonating an FBI agent after fooling her former neighbors in northern Virginia into taking jobs as her assistant. Twenty-nine-year-old Brenna Reilly of Holyoke, Mass., was living in Arlington last year and told neighbors she was the FBI’s director of forensics. Two neighbors agreed to work as Reilly’s assistant. She gave them tasks that included writing condolence letters to family members of slain agents. But Reilly was never an FBI agent, the jobs were phony, and the assistants were never paid.

Peter Carr, a spokesman for the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, said it remains unclear why Reilly conducted the hoax.

Following Tuesday’s guilty plea, Reilly faces up to three years in prison.

via Mass. woman pleads to impersonating FBI supervisor, ‘hiring’ Va. neighbors as assistants – latimes.com.

Postman Paul Noga facing jail after stealing 76,000 letters and packages

A postman stashed so much stolen mail in his flat he was forced to move in with his mother because there was no room to live.

Paul Noga, 38, failed to deliver thousands of birthday presents, Christmas cards, bank statements, personal letters and gift packages to residents on his Northumberland route over a two year period.

But when his flat became swamped with the 76,000 items of post, Noga simply abandoned his home.

By the time police searched the flat virtually every surface was covered.

Noga today pleaded guilty at Newcastle Crown Court to stealing or delaying a total of 76,036 items of mail. He also pleaded guilty to one charge of criminal damage and one charge of arson.

The hearing was told that 68,271 postal packets were delayed or opened between September 2007 and September 2009, and a further 7,765 postal packets were stolen between July 2008 and September 2009.

Up to 1,000 of the stolen packages were burned and Noga damaged hundreds more.

Dressed in a crumpled sports top, the defendant spoke only to confirm his name and enter his pleas

Noga’s lawyer Shaun Routledge said his client was of previous good character but had breached the trust placed in him by Royal Mail and their customers.

‘The mail was just lying around in the flat,’ he said. ‘It got to such an extent he had to move to his mother’s flat, where he now lives.

‘He has been living without income for six months since he was suspended from his job.

‘He is of previous good character, but there is a breach of trust.’

via Postman Paul Noga facing jail after stealing 76,000 letters and packages | Mail Online.

Student discovers previously unseen cosmic phenomenon during finals project

A student astronomer may have pinpointed one of the universe’s most dramatic events for the first time – a so-called “supermassive” black hole being hurled out of a galaxy.

In pictures, the object discovered by Marianne Heida, looks like nothing more than a speck of light on the edge of a swirling cloud.

But the unassuming shape is thought to be a giant black hole, more than a billion times the mass of the sun, flying at 670,000 miles per hour through space.

Miss Heida, a student at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, made the discovery as part of a final-year project.

Working with experts at the Dutch space research institute SRON, she was cataloguing thousands of sources of X-rays in space when she noticed one bright spot which appeared to be radically out of place – on the edge of a galaxy rather than the centre.

The object, more than half a billion light years away, was so intense such that scientists believe it is likely to be a black hole.

Her project, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, is thought to be the first time that the phenomenon has been captured.

via Student discovers previously unseen cosmic phenomenon during finals project – Telegraph.

The Antikythera Device: A 2000 year old astronomical computer

It would be extra interesting if it included gears to calulate the planets we can’t see with the naked eye.  (Neptune predicted by math and discovered September 23, 1846, Pluto February 18, 1930 by comparing photos, and Uranus misidentified as a star or comment starting 1690 and not recognized as a planet until about 1783)

Does it?

“Phoenicians cooking on sand discovered glass around 3500 BCE, but it took about 5,000 years more for glass to be shaped into a lens for the first telescope.

A spectacle maker probably assembled the first telescope. Hans Lippershey (c1570-c1619) of Holland is often credited with the invention, but he almost certainly was not the first to make one. Lippershey was, however, the first to make the new device widely known.The telescope was introduced to astronomy in 1609 by the great Italian scientist Galileo Galilei, who became the first man to see the craters of the moon, and who went on to discover sunspots, the four large moons of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn. – about.com