Feral monkey spotted in Florida business park

… A small critter resembling a capuchin monkey was caught on surveillance video early Monday morning.

Employees at the business park are now trying to come up with a name for the little guy, who they say is their new mascot.

“You can clearly see he’s a monkey. He’s up there, he’s got the movements of a monkey. He’s got the tail, the legs, he’s a capuchin.” Linda Lamp, the property manager at Lakewood Business Park on 32nd Street West, got her first glimpse of the little guy when she was looking at surveillance video of the property’s dumpster. “I said dude…is that a monkey? I’ve had a lot of weird things happen here. I have never considered we would have a monkey on the property.”

News of the monkey sighting spread quickly to the business owners.

“I couldn’t believe it. It was like we were in a different country,” says Linda Craig with Manasota Operation Troop Support. She sends care packages with food to troops overseas. When the food she has expires, she throws it out in the dumpster where the monkey was spotted. “We are pleased to have him here. We would love for him to hang around.”

Capuchins are native to South and Central America, but many people in the states own them as pets.

According to Kay Rosaire at the Big Cat Habitat and Gulf Coast Sanctuary, it’s likely this one escaped or was abandoned by its owner. “They are a wonderful animal, but they have to be in the right hands.”

For the time being, this one is on its own. But the mysterious monkey is bringing plenty of smiles to the employees at the business park.

Florida Fish and Wildlife is aware of the situation and may have an official come out to the area sometime soon.

via Feral monkey spotted in Bradenton business park – WWSB ABC 7 MySuncoast Florida.

Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany

… A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.

Last year, the Oberpfalz cultural curator Erika Eichenseer published a selection of fairytales from Von Schönwerth’s collection, calling the book Prinz Roßzwifl. This is local dialect for “scarab beetle”. The scarab, also known as the “dung beetle”, buries its most valuable possession, its eggs, in dung, which it then rolls into a ball using its back legs. Eichenseer sees this as symbolic for fairytales, which she says hold the most valuable treasure known to man: ancient knowledge and wisdom to do with human development, testing our limits and salvation.

Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, labourers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.

Von Schönwerth compiled his research into a book called Aus der Oberpfalz – Sitten und Sagen, which came out in three volumes in 1857, 1858 and 1859. The book never gained prominence and faded into obscurity.

While sifting through Von Schönwerth’s work, Eichenseer found 500 fairytales, many of which do not appear in other European fairytale collections. For example, there is the tale of a maiden who escapes a witch by transforming herself into a pond. The witch then lies on her stomach and drinks all the water, swallowing the young girl, who uses a knife to cut her way out of the witch. However, the collection also includes local versions of the tales children all over the world have grown up with including Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin, and which appear in many different versions across Europe.

Von Schönwerth was a historian and recorded what he heard faithfully, making no attempt to put a literary gloss on it, which is where he differs from the Grimm brothers. However, says Eichenseer, this factual recording adds to the charm and authenticity of the material. What delights her most about the tales is that they are unpolished. “There is no romanticising or attempt by Schönwerth to interpret or develop his own style,” she says.

Eichenseer says the fairytales are not for children alone. “Their main purpose was to help young adults on their path to adulthood, showing them that dangers and challenges can be overcome through virtue, prudence and courage.” …

via Five hundred new fairytales discovered in Germany | Books | guardian.co.uk.

Fluorescent Millipedes Discovered on Alcatraz

Millipedes that glow under black lights have been discovered for the first time on Alcatraz.

“There are other millipedes out there that are bioluminescent — they give off their own light,” said Bob Kimsey, an entomology professor at the University of California, Davis, who is investigating whether the fluorescent millipedes are a newly discovered subspecies of Xystocheir dissecta, a species found in the Bay Area and elsewhere. “But this is a fundamentally different thing here. If you shine the black light on them, then some property of their exoskeleton takes that light and converts it into a bluish-green light and then emits it back.”

In an odd twist, the creatures were discovered during a nighttime rat census. Scientists were using black lights to look for fluorescent dye that had been placed in rat bait. Instead of glowing rat droppings, they found the millipedes, Thibault Worth of KQED’s “Quest” reports.

Fun fact: “California is known for being the only place in the world with bioluminescent millipedes,” Worth writes. …

via Fluorescent Millipedes Discovered on Alcatraz – Pulse of the Bay – The Bay Citizen.

Mercury poles give up hints of water ice

A Nasa spacecraft has found further tantalising evidence for the existence of water ice at Mercury’s poles.

Though surface temperatures can soar above 400C, some craters at Mercury’s poles are permanently in shadow, turning them into so-called cold traps.

Previous work has revealed patches near Mercury’s poles that strongly reflect radar – a characteristic of ice.

Now, the Messenger probe has shown that these “radar-bright” patches line up precisely with the shadowed craters.

Messenger is only the second spacecraft – after Mariner 10 in the 1970s – to have visited the innermost planet. Until Messenger arrived, large swathes of Mercury’s surface had never been mapped.

The bright patches were detected by ground-based radio telescopes in the 1990s, but as co-author Dr Nancy Chabot explained, “we’ve never had the imagery available before to see the surface where these radar-bright features are located.”

The researchers superimposed observations of radar bright patches by the Arecibo Observatory on the latest photos of Mercury’s poles taken by the MDIS imaging instrument aboard Messenger.

“MDIS images show that all the radar-bright features near Mercury’s south pole are located in areas of permanent shadow,” said Dr Chabot, from Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHUAPL).

“Near Mercury’s north pole such deposits are also seen only in shadowed regions, results consistent with the water-ice hypothesis.”

However, she cautions, this does not constitute proof, and for many craters, icy deposits would need to be covered by a thin layer (10-20cm) of insulating debris in order to remain stable.

Maria Zuber, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), who is a co-investigator on the Messenger mission, told BBC News: “The most interesting interpretation of [the radar observations] is that they were due to water ice.

“Sulphur had been proposed, there had also been some suggestion it was roughness – though there was no reason craters at the poles should be rougher than those at low latitudes.”

“The new data from Messenger… is strengthening the evidence that there is some sort of volatile there, and water-ice seems quite likely.”

She said information from several instruments on Messenger was currently being analysed in order to answer the ice conundrum: “I think this is a question that we can come to a definitive answer on, as opposed to ‘we think it may be this’,” the MIT researcher explained.

On Wednesday, scientists from the Messenger mission published findings that Mercury had been geologically active for a long period in its history.

Data from the probe shows that impact craters on the planet’s surface were distorted by some geological process after they formed.

The findings, reported in Science magazine, challenge long-held views about the closest world to the Sun.

Scientists also presented a new model of Mercury’s internal structure, which suggests the planet’s huge inner core is encased in a shell of iron sulphide – a situation not seen on any other planet….

via BBC News – Mercury poles give up hints of water ice.

Museum discovers ‘new’ Van Gogh painting

A painting dismissed for years as the work of an unknown artist has been identified as a piece by Vincent Van Gogh, after x-rays revealed an image of two wrestlers fighting underneath the floral still life.

“Still Life with Meadow Flowers and Roses” has hung in the Kroeller-Mueller Museum in the town of Otterlo, in the eastern Netherlands, since 1974, but doubts over its authorship have dogged the painting for decades.

Experts argued that the large format, the location of the signature, and the huge number of flowers in the composition all suggested the painting was the creation of an unidentified artist, rather than the famed Dutch painter, and the work was officially “dismissed” from his catalogue in 2003.

“There were so many questions around this painting,” explained Teio Meedendorp, researcher at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. “There were a lot of things about it that were strange — it couldn’t quite be trusted [as a piece by Van Gogh].”

But the latest high-tech x-ray imaging has allowed scholars to re-examine an underpainting, featuring two wrestlers fighting, first glimpsed in the 1990s, and confirm that the picture is indeed by Van Gogh. …

via Museum discovers ‘new’ Van Gogh painting – CNN.com.