Butterflies and moths mimic snakes and foxes to fool predators, claims researcher

Richard Gray – … The dazzling colours and patterns on their wings make butterflies and moths some of the most eye catching creatures in the animal kingdom, but a new book suggests these dramatic designs also help turn the insects into master illusionists capable of fooling potential predators.

Professor Philip Howse, a retired entomologist from Southampton University, claims that many species of butterfly and moth are capable of using their wing patterns to trick predators into thinking they are much larger and even more dangerous animals.

One species of butterfly has patterns on its wings that when viewed from the right angle take on the appearance of a snake’s head. When disturbed, it falls to the ground and writhes around to complete the illusion.

Another species uses its wing patterns to take on the appearance of a small rodent peaking out from foliage, while another looks like the face of a fox. …

via Butterflies and moths mimic snakes and foxes to fool predators, claims researcher – Telegraph.

Human hearts with couples’ photos pinned to them found in Colma cemetery

Joshua Melvin – A maintenance worker’s macabre discovery has sparked a police investigation into the identities of two couples whose photos were found pinned to human hearts and buried at a cemetery.

The worker was in an isolated part of the Holy Cross Catholic Cemetery at 1500 Mission Road on Oct. 12 when he spotted the tops of two jars sticking out of the ground and knelt down to take a closer look, Colma police Cmdr. Jon Read said.

When he pulled one of the jars from the dirt and saw what was in it, he called Colma police, who patrol a city of about 1,600 residents. The town is also home to 16 cemeteries and 1.5 million “souls,” according to the city’s website.

Police opened up one jar and found a human heart with the photo of a young man and woman pinned to it. Nearby was a second jar with the same contents, but bearing a photo of a different young man and woman. Officers also found partially burned cigars and candles, Read said.

The San Mateo County coroner’s preliminary investigation of the hearts revealed that they contained embalming fluid and must have come from dead bodies. There have been no reports of graves being dug up at the cemeteries in Colma or elsewhere in San Mateo County. Read said officers are working with other police agencies to track down the source of the organs. …

“I would be totally shocked if it was related to Santeria or Voodoo,” said Miguel De La Torre, a professor at Iliff Divinity School in Denver who has written a book about Santeria. “If it is connected to Santeria, it would be by people who don’t know what they are doing.”

While the hearts may have been placed in the cemetery by someone operating on a misguided notion of religions like Santeria or people playing a prank, police don’t think it’s funny. …

via Human hearts with couples’ photos pinned to them found in Colma cemetery – San Jose Mercury News.

Meet the World’s Smelliest Animal

Larry Knowles… Known as the lesser anteater, the tamandua is a slender, long-snouted animal native to Central and South America notorious for the foul scent it emits from its anal gland when it feels threatened.

“I would describe the smell as a pungent, slightly sweet skunky smell that you can smell before you even see or know there is an animal near you,” Lucy Hale, educations program manager at the Dallas Zoo, said via e-mail. “Lots of people have an adverse reaction to the smell. Personally, I don’t mind it.”

Rick Schwartz, a handler at the San Diego Zoo, says the tamandua scent is so strong that people can smell it from 50 meters away.

“There’s a reason it’s known as the ‘stinker of the rain forest,’ ” he said in a phone interview. “People think there must have been a skunk in the area.”

According to Schwartz, the tamandua scent is four to seven times stronger than that of a skunk, an effective deterrent to one of the predators that roams its territory — the jaguar. …

via The Rankest of the Rank: Meet the World’s Smelliest Animals.

Tamanduas are sometimes used by Amazonian Indians to rid their homes of ants and termites.

via Wiki

 

U.S. Must Be Ready to Meet Asteroid Threat, White House Science Adviser Says

Jeremy Hsu – National emergency plans for natural disasters can also work in the unlikely scenario of an asteroid strike on the U.S., according to a letter to Congress by the White House’s top science adviser, SPACE.com has learned.

The 10-page letter by John Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, adds that the U.S. has a responsibility to the world as the country most capable of detecting space rocks that threaten Earth. The Oct. 15 letter obtained by SPACE.com is addressed to the leaders of the House Committee on Science and Technology.

Holdren states that NASA must continue leading efforts to close the gap in detecting and perhaps deflecting near-Earth objects (NEO). The U.S. space agency already has the duty of alerting the rest of the government about any threatening space objects.

Holdren’s letter also laid out the duties of other federal agencies in handling emergency communications and response. It called for a “senior-level interagency simulation exercise” to test impact-response plans before the United States is confronted with an actual asteroid impact.

“My immediate reaction is that it represents the most detailed consideration of the U.S. government’s response to the NEO threat to date, more clearly delineating communication links and responsibilities than had previously been the case,” said Clark Chapman, space scientist at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo. …

According to Holdren’s letter, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, under the Department of Homeland Security, has the main responsibility on the ground in the U.S. FEMA can rely in part upon the National Warning System, which was designed to alert U.S. citizens to a Cold War nuclear attack.

The Department of Defense would work with NASA on possible mitigation or deflection scenarios that involved military resources.

Meanwhile, the Department of State would help coordinate any international warnings or responses in a deep-impact scenario that affects more than just the U.S. It has experience notifying other countries about re-entering human-made space objects, including the defunct USA-193 spy satellite that was ultimately destroyed by a U.S. Navy missile.

“The United States is currently the world leader in NEO detection activities and will have a vital role to play in such communications, irrespective of whether the direct risk to the United States or its territories is considered low,” Holdren said. …

via U.S. Must Be Ready to Meet Asteroid Threat, White House Science Adviser Says – Yahoo! News.

World’s largest, most complex marine virus is major player in ocean ecosystems

Curtis Suttle – UBC researchers have identified the world’s largest marine virus–an unusually complex ‘mimi-like virus’ that infects an ecologically important and widespread planktonic predator.

Cafeteria roenbergensis virus has a genome larger than those found in some cellular organisms, and boasts genetic complexity that blurs the distinction between “non-living” and “living” entities.

“Virus are classically thought of small, simple organisms in terms of the number of genes they carry,” says UBC professor Curtis Suttle, an expert in marine microbiology and environmental virology and lead author of the study.

“Much of the genetic machinery we found in this virus you would only expect to find in living, cellular organisms, including many genes required to produce DNA, RNA, proteins and sugars.”

The findings are reported in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Viruses cannot replicate outside of living host cells and they depend on proteins provided by the cell, a boundary that is often used to delineate “non-living” from “living” organisms. Giant viruses challenge this definition, as they still need a cell to replicate, but encode in their own genome most of the proteins required for replication.

Discovered in Texas coastal waters in the early 1990s, Curtis and his team where able to determine that the pathogen’s genome contains approximately 730,000 base pairs. That makes Cafeteria roenbergensis virus the largest known marine virus, and the second largest known virus, after the fresh water-borne Acanthamoeba polyphaga mimivirus, which weighs in at 1.2 million base pairs.

via World’s largest, most complex marine virus is major player in ocean ecosystems: UBC research.

Daily vibration may help aging bones stay healthy

Toni Baker – Medical College of Georgia

A daily dose of whole body vibration may help reduce the usual bone density loss that occurs with age, Medical College of Georgia researchers report.

Twelve weeks of daily, 30-minute sessions in 18-month old male mice – which equate to 55- to 65-year-old humans – appear to forestall the expected annual loss that can result in fractures, disability and death. Dr. Karl H. Wenger, biomedical engineer in the MCG Schools of Graduate Studies and Medicine, reported the findings with his colleagues in the journal Bone.

Researchers found vibration improved density around the hip joint with a shift toward higher density in the femur, the long bone of the leg, as well. Hip fractures are a major cause of disability and death among the elderly.

They also found a reduction in a biomarker that indicates bone breakdown and an increase in the surface area involved in bone formation in the vibrating group.

The findings provide more scientific evidence that the technique, which dates back to the 1800s and is now showing up in homes, gyms and rehabilitation clinics, has bone benefit, particularly as a low-risk option for injured individuals with limited mobility, Wenger said.

The scientists theorize that the rhythmic movement, which produces a sensation similar to that of a vibrating cell phone but on a larger scale, exercises cells so they work better. Vibration prompts movement of the cell nucleus, which is suspended by numerous threadlike fibers called filaments. “The filaments get all deformed like springs and then they spring back,” Wenger said.

All the movement releases transcription factors that spur new osteoblasts, the cells that make bone. With age, the balance of bone production and destruction – by osteoclasts – tips to the loss side.

In the case of an injury, vibration acts on stem cells, the master controllers of the healing process. “We think that in fracture healing, you get a more dramatic response. We don’t know exactly why it affects the biology differently but it’s likely because of the extent to which stem cells invade the injured area,” Wenger said. They have found that vibration slows stem cell proliferation, which may sound counterintuitive, but likely means more stem cells differentiate into bone cells rather than continuing to just make more generic stem cells. With age, stem cells have difficulty differentiating.

To see if their findings translate to the trauma clinic, they are evaluating vibration tolerance in patients with lower-limb fractures and finding, surprisingly, that even two weeks after injury the subtle vibration is soothing, rather than painful, to most. …

via Daily vibration may help aging bones stay healthy.

Researchers find a stable way to store the sun’s heat

Jen Hirsch – Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Researchers at MIT have revealed exactly how a molecule called fulvalene diruthenium, which was discovered in 1996, works to store and release heat on demand. This understanding, reported in a paper published on Oct. 20 in the journal Angewandte Chemie, should make it possible to find similar chemicals based on more abundant, less expensive materials than ruthenium, and this could form the basis of a rechargeable battery to store heat rather than electricity.

The molecule undergoes a structural transformation when it absorbs sunlight, putting it into a higher-energy state where it can remain stable indefinitely. Then, triggered by a small addition of heat or a catalyst, it snaps back to its original shape, releasing heat in the process. But the team found that the process is a bit more complicated than that.

“It turns out there’s an intermediate step that plays a major role,” said Jeffrey Grossman, the Carl Richard Soderberg Associate Professor of Power Engineering in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering. In this intermediate step, the molecule forms a semi-stable configuration partway between the two previously known states. “That was unexpected,” he said. The two-step process helps explain why the molecule is so stable, why the process is easily reversible and also why substituting other elements for ruthenium has not worked so far.

In effect, explained Grossman, this process makes it possible to produce a “rechargeable heat battery” that can repeatedly store and release heat gathered from sunlight or other sources. In principle, Grossman said, a fuel made from fulvalene diruthenium, when its stored heat is released, “can get as hot as 200 degrees C, plenty hot enough to heat your home, or even to run an engine to produce electricity.” …

via Researchers find a stable way to store the sun’s heat.

Foreclosuregate is Scary as Hell

… Ellen Hodgson Brown, J.D. author of The Web of Debt asks in her article Homeowners’ Rebellion: Could 62 Million Homes Be Foreclosure-Proof? if it’s possible people won’t need to pay off their mortgages after all. To put it simply, the banks have recently been disclosed to have technically lost the chain to millions of titles to properties on its ledgers. In other words, banks have lost rights to the promissory notes due to selling the mortgages to third parties bundled as securities. The third parties repackaged the mortgages and sold them again as derivatives on the market. This amounts to the chain of title being broken that millions of people don’t technically owe the banks!

via Cheryl Meril’s Candid Blog- Nob Hill Notary: No Trick or Treat! Foreclosuregate is Scary as Hell.

 

What a mess. If my Countrywide loan was granted due to fraud on the part of the lender, getting out via a short sale should not reflect poorly on my credit. Give first time buyers who acted in good faith but were swindled into purchasing ARMs they couldn’t afford their good credit back.

Baby dies as family jump to ‘escape devil’

A baby was killed and several more people seriously injured when a family of 11 threw themselves from a third-floor flat to flee a man they mistook for the devil, French investigators said.

The bizarre tragedy came to light on Saturday when firefighters were called to the village of La Verriere on the outskirts of Paris following reports that several people had jumped from a balcony in a welfare housing block.

Among the injured they found an entirely naked man of African origin with a knife wound in his hand and two children, a baby and a two-year-old girl. The baby died later after receiving hospital treatment in Paris.

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The assistant prosecutor from Versailles, Odile Faivre, told reporters the incident began in the early hours when a group of 13 people were watching television in an apartment and the naked man heard the baby cry.

“The man got up to prepare a bottle for the baby when his wife, seeing him, screamed ‘It’s the devil, it’s the devil’,” Faivre explained.

In the confusion following this apparent case of mistaken identity, the naked man’s sister-in-law stabbed him in the hand and he was ejected through the front door of the flat. When he attempted to get back in, panic erupted. …

via Baby dies as family jump to ‘escape devil’.

To Boldly Go to New Worlds, NASA Announces ’100-Year Starship’

Lee Speigel – It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a NASA official says that “within a few years” scientists will unveil a prototype for a spaceship capable of taking earthlings to other worlds.

Speaking at a Long Now Foundation conference in San Francisco over the weekend, Simon Worden, center director at NASA’s Ames Research Center in California, said a project is under way called the “Hundred Year Starship.”

As reported by news.com.au, the project is, so far, a joint venture between NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, and looks to utilize new ship propulsion modes.

“Anybody that watches the ["Star Trek"] Enterprise, you know you don’t see huge plumes of fire,” Worden, a retired Air Force brigadier general, said at the conference.

“Within a few years, we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds.”

Worden added that NASA is “now really aimed at settling other worlds. Twenty years ago, you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.”

So far, the starship project has received $1 million from DARPA and $100,000 from NASA. That’s certainly not enough to make this enterprise (if you will) a reality, and Worden said he’s hoping to entice some billionaires to help fund it. …

via To Boldly Go to New Worlds, NASA Announces ’100-Year Starship’.