Author Archives: curiouscat

1,000 Species Discovered in Greater Mekong in Last Decade

Photograph of Gumprechts Green Pitviper courtesy Greater Mekong Programme/WWF International

While most species were discovered in the largely unexplored jungles and wetlands, some were first found in the most surprising places. The Laotian rock rat, for example, thought to be extinct 11 million years ago, was first encountered by scientists in a local food market, while the Siamese Peninsula pitviper was found slithering through the rafters of a restaurant in Khao Yai National Park in Thailand.

“This region is like what I read about as a child in the stories of Charles Darwin,” said Dr Thomas Ziegler, Curator at the Cologne Zoo. “It is a great feeling being in an unexplored area and to document its biodiversity for the first time… both enigmatic and beautiful,” he said.

The findings, highlighted in this report, include 519 plants, 279 fish, 88 frogs, 88 spiders, 46 lizards, 22 snakes, 15 mammals, 4 birds, 4 turtles, 2 salamanders and a toad. The region comprises the six countries through which the Mekong River flows including Cambodia, Lao PDR, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam and the southern Chinese province of Yunnan. It is estimated thousands of new invertebrate species were also discovered during this period, further highlighting the region’s immense biodiversity.

“It doesn’t get any better than this,” said Stuart Chapman, Director of WWF’s Greater Mekong Programme. “We thought discoveries of this scale were confined to the history books. This reaffirms the Greater Mekong’s place on the world map of conservation priorities.”

The report stresses economic development and environmental protection must go hand-in-hand to provide for livelihoods and alleviate poverty, and ensure the survival of the Greater Mekong’s astonishing array of species and natural habitats.

Full press release. I am a World Wildlife Fund member.

Educating Future Scientists and Engineers

Texas in danger of losing global race

American demand for scientists and engineers is expected to grow four times faster than all other professions over the next decade, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Yet today, only 5 percent of U.S. college undergraduates earn degrees in science and engineering, whereas in China, 42 percent of students do.
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Not only are highly qualified Texas science and math teachers in short supply today, but we’re losing literally thousands each year. In 2007 alone, approximately 4,000 math and science teachers left Texas classrooms, costing our state an estimated $27 million to replace them.

Fortunately, there are programs already proven successful in preventing the loss of highly qualified math and science teachers, such as UTeach, a teacher training and support program launched at The University of Texas at Austin in 1997.
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The Academy of Medicine, Engineering and Science of Texas — made up of Texas’ Nobel Laureates and National Academies members — has proposed four practical, actionable recommendations for state leaders to adopt, putting Texas on the path to world-class math and science education for our children, and a prosperous future for our state.

Undersea Cables Cut Again – Reducing India’s Capacity by 65%

Once again a severed underwater cable has disrupted web access

Internet and phone communications between Europe, the Middle East, and Asia have been seriously disrupted after submarine cables were severed. It is thought the FLAG FEA, SMW4, and SMW3 lines, near the Alexandria cable station in Egypt, have all been cut.

A fault was also reported on the GO submarine cable 130km off Sicily. Experts warned that it may be days before the fault is fixed and said the knock on effect could have serious repercussions on regional economies.
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It is thought that 65% of traffic to India was down, while services to Singapore, Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Taiwan and Pakistan have also been severely affected.

Earlier this year, the same line was damaged in the same area – off the Egyptian coast – although only two lines were snapped then. “We’ve lost three out of four lines. If the fourth cable breaks, we’re looking at a total blackout in the Middle East,” said Mr Wright.

“These three circuits account for 90% of the traffic and we’re going to see more international phone calls dropping and a huge degradation in the quality of local internet,” he added.

“Normally you would expect to see one major break per cable per year. With four you should have an insurance policy. For this to happen twice in one year, on the same cable, is a serious cause for concern.”

Friday Fun with Goats

Video removed.

The tree climbing goats of Morocco. Also see the fainting goats.

Fund Teacher’s Science Projects

With donorschoose.org teachers submit project proposals for materials or experiences their students need to learn. These ideas become classroom reality when concerned individuals, whom we call Citizen Philanthropists, choose projects to fund.

Such as: Budding Scientists Need Basics!!! – “My students need 9 hands-on science equipment such as graduated cylinders, magnifying glasses, and vivid photographic books about weather and life cycles so they can experience science first-hand. The cost of this proposal is $386”

Hands On Science! – “My students need a human body model, a skeleton model, a skull model, 2 microscopes, beakers and graduated cylinders. The cost of this proposal is $1,060”

Eyes On Observation! – “My students need 4 Brock Magiscopes. The cost of this proposal is $688”

Let’s Rock the Rocks – “My students needs 2 complete sets of classroom Rock, Fossil & Mineral Collections and a Rock & Soil Activity Tub for science. The cost of this proposal is $351”

You can target high poverty schools, if you wish. If you want to help make a difference in the science literacy of the USA go ahead and find a project you want to help fund and make a donation. Or if you are a teacher, add a project for others to fund.

RoboCup: Robot Football (Soccer)

RoboCup aims to, by 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can win against the human world champion team in football. As the video shows the teams have a ways to go. But this seems like a great process.

Bacteria Offer Line of Attack on Cystic Fibrosis

MIT researchers have found that the pigments responsible for the blue-green stain of the mucus that clogs the lungs of cystic fibrosis (CF) patients are primarily signaling molecules that allow large clusters of the opportunistic infection agent, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, to organize themselves into structured communities.
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P. aeruginosa appears as a classic opportunistic infection, easily shrugged off by healthy people but a grave threat to those with CF, which chokes the lungs of its victims with sticky mucus.

“We have a long way to go before being able to test this idea, but the hope is that if survival in the lung is influenced by phenazine — or some other electron-shuttling molecule or molecules — tampering with phenazine trafficking might be a potential way to make antibiotics more effective,” said Newman, whose lab investigates how ancestral bacteria on the early Earth evolved the ability to metabolize minerals.

BCS Title Game, Live in 3D

BCS title game to be available live in 3-D

Thanks to an impressive — though not glitch-free — test broadcast of an NFL game two weeks ago, Burbank, Calif.-based 3Ality Digital said Tuesday it had won the contract to shoot the Jan. 8 BCS National Championship game in 3-D.

The game between Florida and Oklahoma will be broadcast live in 3-D to 80 to 100 movie theaters in about 30 U.S. cities, said 3Ality Chairman David Modell. Tickets are expected to cost $18 to $22, said Cinedigm Digital Cinema Corp., which is working with 3Ality to deliver the broadcasts to theaters.

“The live broadcast to the Paris Hotel and to movie theaters across the nation is the latest example of how we can deliver our programming to audiences in new and exciting ways,” said Jerry Steinberg, senior vice president of field operations and engineering for FOX Sports. “3D technology holds unlimited potential for the future of both sports broadcasting and live event production.”

Cool, though not quite the holographic TV I am still waiting for.

Before the Big Bang

Did our cosmos exist before the big bang?

The theory that the recycled universe was based on, called loop quantum cosmology (LQC), had managed to illuminate the very birth of the universe – something even Einstein’s general theory of relativity fails to do.
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LQC is in fact the first tangible application of another theory called loop quantum gravity, which cunningly combines Einstein’s theory of gravity with quantum mechanics. We need theories like this to work out what happens when microscopic volumes experience an extreme gravitational force, as happened near the big bang, for example.
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If LQC turns out to be right, our universe emerged from a pre-existing universe that had been expanding before contracting due to gravity. As all the matter squeezed into a microscopic volume, this universe approached the so-called Planck density, 5.1 Ã— 1096 kilograms per cubic metre. At this stage, it stopped contracting and rebounded, giving us our universe.

In classical cosmology, a phenomenon called inflation caused the universe to expand at incredible speed in the first fractions of a second after the big bang. This inflationary phase is needed to explain why the temperature of faraway regions of the universe is almost identical, even though heat should not have had time to spread that far – the so-called horizon problem. It also explains why the universe is so finely balanced between expanding forever and contracting eventually under gravity – the flatness problem. Cosmologists invoke a particle called the inflaton to make inflation happen, but precious little is known about it.

Perceptions v. Objective Reality

User Interface Matters by Colleen Dick:

the earliest Hewlett Packard programmable calculators in the early 80’s. When engaging in lengthy number crunching, the calculator would print “crunching” (or processing, or something) on the display, and every few seconds it would add a dot, so the user would know something was happening.
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HP engineers discovered that if they completely decoupled the display while serious crunching was going on, they could make the computations run 30-40% faster. Naturally they assumed the users would appreciate such a significant speed increase, so on their next revision, they just shut the screen down on lengthy computations.

Users complained about the slowdown! These are HP early adopters, mind you, mostly “rational” scientists and engineers. Remember, when objectively measured, the computations were measurably and significantly faster when the screen was decoupled!
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In subjective time, the computations seemed slower without the feedback, even though in objective time we know they were faster.

There are times when objective improvement is most important, but there are also plenty of times when subjective improvement is more important. Often this difference is ignored.