ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 535
March 18, 2016
Watch The Latest Crew Launch To The International Space Station
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From left to right: Williams, Ovchinin, and Skripochka. NASA/Aubrey Gemignani
What were you doing when the International Space Station (ISS) was first being assembled in the year 2000? Maybe you were at school. Perhaps you had just started a new job. But one astronaut, Jeffrey Williams, was there in space at the beginning – and he’s about to go back again.
Sperm Join Forces To Swim Together In Stretchy, Gloopy Fluids
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Weeee! Now where's that egg? Sebastian Kaulitzki/Shutterstock
Sometimes you have to go it alone, but when the going gets tough, you should probably stick together. That’s certainly what sperm seem to do, at least; when swimming in particularly thick, elastic liquids, they bunch up into little squadrons, but they make a break for it on their own if the fluid becomes less elastic.
The “Teddy Bear” Is No Longer Threatened
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Two Louisiana black bear cubs. US Department Of Agriculture/Flickr. (CC BY-ND 2.0)
Thanks to a conservation effort pushed by local landowners and farmers, the population of real-life "teddy bears" is bouncing back, reports the U.S. Department of the Interior.
The U.K.’s Highest Mountain Just Got A Little Bit Taller
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Ben Nevis is now officially a meter taller than before. John A Cameron/Shutterstock
The tallest mountain in the U.K. has just been re-measured for the first time since 1949 using modern GPS technology, revealing that it is in fact marginally higher than previously thought.
An Acidic Ocean Will Also Be a Silent One
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These giant claws make some of the loudest sounds in the ocean, but fall silent as carbon dioxide concentrations rise. Tullio Rossi
Snapping shrimp, the creatures that make coral reefs noisy places, go quiet when living in water just a little less alkaline than the current ocean. Since many other species rely on the sounds shrimps make to find their way home, this is a disturbing and unanticipated discovery in a world where carbon dioxide is affecting the chemistry of the oceans.
Many coral reef fish disperse widely as larvae. Once transformed into juveniles they find their way to a reef through a combination of smell and sound, particularly the sound of snapping shrimp.
African Park Comeback Offers Ecological Optimism
“Gorongosa, which was a jewel of Southern Africa…had great populations of lions, elephants, hippos, buffalo, etc. Absolutely decimated. So if you went there in the early part of the last decade, in the early 2000s, you might drive for five or six hours and see one warthog, one baboon, maybe.”
Biologist Sean B. Carroll, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He spoke March 15th in the Great Hall of the Cooper Union here in New York City about his latest book The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discovery How Life Works and Why It Matters. Gorongosa National Park was ravaged during the Mozambique war for independence from Portugal and then the civil war that followed.
“And a philanthropist, Greg Carr…was looking for a project to really sink his teeth into and to work on human development, became also really interested in conservation, learned about Mozambique…and in 2004 committed a sizeable fortune to helping to restore Gorongosa in partnership with the Mozambique government. And in 2004 surveys showed there were fewer than one thousand large animals in the entire park, and this is a massive place. So that’s all antelope and elephants, all combined, fewer than a thousand of all types combined.
“And I was there last summer as the new survey came in. A decade later: 72,000 large animals. Dramatic change. I’m looking at elephant herds with lots of youngsters. I’m looking at hippos, groups of hippos….
“So the point is this: the habitat was all there. The large animals had been shot, poached, used for food, whatever, but the habitat was still there and still productive. And once these very small remnant populations had that pressure taken off them, they’ve just been booming. And so a place that, I think it’s the one place on earth I know that’s been the most decimated and has seen the greatest recovery…
“So there’s a lot of stories of good management and of recovery, and recovery on that really rapid time frame. And I think that’s where I find hope. And when I said that Greg Carr committed a sizeable amount of money, I’m just gonna tell you exactly what that is, he spent about the same amount of money inside the park as outside the park, on human development, health care, education, etc., for Mozambicans, economic development. But in the park it’s about a $3 million a year budget. Three million bucks a year to bring back a vast African wilderness. In the time of my explanation alone, how much did we just blow on like the worst ideas that possibly came out of Washington?
“My optimism is that it can be cheaper than you think, it’s faster than you think. And it’s not a luxury, I’m not just talking about making pretty places prettier. It’s making everything functional. And this I think is why I took certain examples in the book about from agriculture and fisheries and things like that, because we need our systems to be productive. There’s 7.4 billion of us and if we’re not managing them in a productive way that’s gonna show up in some pretty horrible ways.”
—Steve Mirsky
(The above text is a transcript of this podcast)
Fossil Friday
Oh, the inexhaustible charms of the Ediacaran! The first person correctly to identify the specimen here in the comments below will find his or her name forever enshrined in the annals of Answer Monday. The first person to ask, “What are fronds for?” or to comment, “With fronds like these …” will find himself or herself to have been pre-empted. Also, they’re not fronds anyhow.
March 17, 2016
Modern Melanesians Are Related To A Mysterious Extinct Species Of Human
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Most of what we know about Denisovan DNA comes from this partial finger bone. Thilo Parg via Wikipedia Commons CC-by-SA3.0
The extinct Denisovans live on, if somewhat tenuously, in our genes. Analysis of the DNA of Melanesians has revealed that their genome retains traces of the Denisovans to an extent similar to the presence of Neanderthal genes in people of European or Asian descent.
Pluto Is Losing Less Atmosphere Than We Thought
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Plutonian landscapes in twilight, under a hazy sky. NASA/JHU APL/SwRI
In less than a year, Pluto has gone from a minor object far away from the Sun to a key piece in our understanding of how the Solar System formed, as evidence by the publication of five new papers in the journal Science this week.
Here, we take a look at two of those papers, examining Pluto’s atmosphere and the space environment surrounding the dwarf planet, respectively. You can check out our other story for the other three papers.
Amazingly Preserved Remains Of 12,400-Year-Old Puppy Found In Siberia
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The puppy was found with its brain 70 to 80 percent intact. YouTube/Siberian Times
Frozen in permafrost on the banks of a Siberian river, the remains of a 12,400-year-old puppy has been discovered, giving scientists an opportunity to examine a well-preserved Pleistocene canid for the first time. The dog is thought to be a sibling of another that was unearthed in 2011, and is presumed to have been killed in a landslide before becoming mummified.
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