The Daily Drift

Sixteen Days To Go ....

Carolina Naturally is read in 194 countries around the world daily.
 

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Today in History

536		Having captured Naples earlier in the year, Belisarius takes Rome.
1861		The U.S. Senate approves establishment of a committee that would become the Joint Committee on the Conduct of War.
1863		Major General John G. Foster replaces Maj. Gen. Ambrose E. Burnside as Commander of the Department of Ohio.
1867		The capital of Colorado Territory is moved from Golden to Denver.
1872		P.B.S. Pinchback becomes the first African-American governor of Louisiana.
1900		The Russian czar rejects Boer Paul Kruger's pleas for aid in South Africa against the British.
1908		A child labor bill passes in the German Reichstag, forbidding work for children under age 13.
1917		The new Finnish Republic demands the withdrawal of Russian troops.
1940		The British army seizes 1,000 Italians in a sudden thrust in Egypt.
1941		Franklin D. Roosevelt tells Americans to plan for a long war.
1948		The United States abandons a plan to de-concentrate industry in Japan.
1949		The United Nations takes trusteeship over Jerusalem.
1950		President Harry Truman bans U.S. exports to Communist China.
1950		Harry Gold gets 30 years imprisonment for passing atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union during World War II.
1955		Sugar Ray Robinson knocks out Carl Olson to regain the world middleweight boxing title.
1960		The Laos government flees to Cambodia as the capital city of Vientiane is engulfed in war.
1990		Lech Walesa is elected president of Poland.
1992		U.S. Marines land in Somalia to ensure food and medicine reaches the deprived areas of that country.
2008		Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich is arrested on federal charges, including an attempt to sell the US Senate seat being vacated by President-elect Barack Obama.

Non Sequitur

Xmas Countdown Xmas Stories

Yes, Virginia, There is a Santa Claus

  

Eight-year-old Virginia O'Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York's Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history's most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on 
"DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
"Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
"Papa says, 'If you see it in THE SUN it's so.'
"Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?

"VIRGINIA O'HANLON.
"115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET."

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men's or children's, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that's no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You may tear apart the baby's rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank god! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

Something Extra

Actually it was a couple of days ago but ...

Daily Comic Relief

Most Popular Top 10s Of 2013

It's almost the end of the year so we are going to see a lot of Top 10 lists appearing in the next few weeks. Lifehacker gathered the most popular Top 10 lists in 2013.

Did you know ...

That congress has barely passed one law a week this year

Why Jupiter's great red spot has lasted for centuries

About men's rights activists: white hot rage

That France taxes heroin dealer

A Tale of Two Heroes ...

How Nelson Mandela Was Truly the Anti-Reagan

Nelson Mandela was everything that Ronald Reagan wasn't. For wingnuts today, that simply means that Mandela was clearly in the wrong. …

Currently, the entire world is in mourning over the death of a terrorist.
Well, at least a terrorist according to a modern-day repugican hero.
As stories of love and support continue to pour out in the days following Nelson Mandela’s death, the repugican cabal is terribly and utterly confused about how to proceed with their patented “Barack Obama is Always Wrong” narrative.  Already, we’ve seen wingnut mouthpiece Lush Dimbulb claim Obama is making Mandela’s death all about him and that being an oppressed person of color is no big deal.  We’ve seen a South Carolina sheriff Rick Clark of Pickens County refuse to fly the flag at half staff because “Mandela wasn’t an American”.  And, of course, we’ve seen Ted Cruz fanboys get their panties in a wad over the fact that Cruz would dare post a tribute on his Facebook wall to the deceased African leader.
But, remember folks, the tea party is not racist.  At all.
Yet despite all these gaffes, the biggest blow to repugicans so far (and there are bound to be more) has been how wrong Saint Ronald Reagan was in regard to Nelson Mandela’s role on the world stage.
As many of us know, Reagan has done nothing to stand on the pedestal that wingnut America has placed him on.  In fact, it can and has been argued that Reagan did significant damage to the United States both domestically and internationally.  From Iran-Contra to ignoring the plight of AIDS to the failed economic policies of trickle-down economics, Reagan gave us eight years of scandals and poor decisions that would have forced even Darrell Issa to investigate the president.  The vast majority of social and political inequalities today can be traced back to the Reagan junta, which had little to no understanding of how government should help all, not a select few, of its people.

As if this wasn’t bad enough, Reagan was also on the wrong side of history when it came to Nelson Mandela.  In 1986, when South Africa was at the height of apartheid, a bi-partisan bill headed to Congress to impose sanctions on South Africa for its apartheid laws and called upon the country to free its political prisoners, including Mandela.  Despite opposition from repugicans like Wyoming representative Dick Cheney, the bill passed and headed to Reagan’s desk for his signature.  Unfortunately, Reagan, like fellow wingnut world leader Margaret Thatcher, saw the ANC as a terrorist organization and he vetoed the bill.
What followed was unprecedented during the Reagan junta. Congress actually overrode the veto, allowing the legislation to pass.  Here we were, nearly six years into Reagan’s presidency and this was the first time that Congress had gone against him in dealing with an issue of international affairs.  Eventually, due to increased pressure from the international community, Mandela was finally released from prison in 1990, after having served 27 years as a political prisoner.  He became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and his government was responsible for ending the apartheid policies that had plagued the country for nearly fifty years.
And yet, if Ronald Reagan had his way, the terrorist Nelson Mandela would still be in a prison cell rotting away.
Hindsight is always 20/20.  However, what the historical comparison between Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan should tell us is that repugicans cannot have it both ways.  Much like Ayn Rand and jesus christ, repugicans cannot worship both Nelson Mandela and Ronald Reagan.  What they stood for were two completely different things.  Mandela’s life was a testament to patience and endurance and what it took to see the political forest through the trees.  His life lessons taught a generation of children the message of love and hope despite overwhelming odds.  Reagan’s life was one built upon personal ambition.  The actor turned politician never had compassion for the little guy in life.  As governor of California, he campaigned on a slogan of sending “the welfare bums back to work”.  As president, he crushed the air traffic controllers strike of 1981 by firing 11,345 workers who refused to return to work without their conditions being met.  What conditions did Ronald Reagan feel these workers were unworthy of having?  These workers lost their jobs for wanting better pay and a thirty-two hour work week.
It is this Reagan hero worship that gives us people like Lush Dimbulb, Rick Clark, and the Ted Cruz fanboys.  They are people who see the world in absolutes and absolutes only.  In their minds, the word compromise is a dirty word because it implies that one side, their side, wasn’t entirely right.  It is why we have the suicide caucus in Congress that was elected to govern and yet hates government.  It is why we have wingnuts on the news today that refuse to recognize the inequality in this country because that would mean there is some kind of minor flaw in the capitalistic system.  It is why wingnuts refuse to support health care reform because if the system needed improvement that would mean that our current health care system isn’t the best in the world.  It is why wingnuts refuse to acknowledge or praise our president for working to disarm Iran because that would mean that thirty years ago, another sitting president would have dropped the ball for not engaging the country in conversation.  And we all know that the man in the White House in 1982 could do no wrong.
Nelson Mandela was no Ronald Reagan.  And that, without question, is a good thing.

Hate Group Westboro baptist Says They Are Booking Flights to Picket Mandela’s Funeral

The Westboro baptist cult is trying to take their platform of hate and intolerance to a whole new level by planning to picket Nelson Mandela's funeral.  

The Westboro baptist cult is trying to take their platform of hate and intolerance to a whole new level by planning to picket Nelson Mandela’s funeral.
Here is what they tweeted:

Westboro baptist @WbcSays 

THANK god for Nelson Mandela being dropped into hell! Westboro baptist cult booking flight to South Africa (not banned) to picket funeral!

Wbc may not get very far with their picket because free speech is limited in South Africa. According to Article 16 of the South African Bill of Rights,
Section 16 states,
(1) Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, which includes -
(a) freedom of the press and other media;
(b) freedom to receive or impart information or ideas;
(c) freedom of artistic creativity; and
(d) academic freedom and freedom of scientific research.
(2) The right in subsection (1) does not extend to -
(a) propaganda for war;
(b) incitement of imminent violence; or
(c) advocacy of hatred that is based on race, ethnicity, gender or religion, and that constitutes incitement to cause harm.
Judging from their Twitter stream, Westboro baptist cult looks to be in violation of both 2(b) and 2(c). Westboro baptist cult thinks that Mandela is in hell, because he divorced and remarried. Wbc is also promising to picket the late actor Paul Walker’s funeral. In fact, where ever there is a high profile death or natural disaster, Wbc can be counted on to threaten to show up and spread their message of hate and intolerance.
People have stood up and done the right thing to stop Wbc protests in the past. In 2011, 300 bikers foiled a planned Wbc protest after tornadoes devastated Joplin, MO. Earlier this year, Teamsters formed a human shield to block a Wbc picket of Boston Marathon bombing victim’s funeral.
I doubt that the Westboro baptist cult gets entry into South Africa. If they get into the country and are foolish enough to protest Nelson Mandela’s funeral, the potential for violence would be higher than anything that the hate group has ever tried before.
What Wbc is planning proves once again that they are one of the most vile hate groups in the world, and hopefully they will be stopped.

The Truth Be Told

Who lies more?

 

Politifact says repugicans lie three times more often than Democrats. That's just comparing r's and D's. When you compare wingnuts and sane people that number is closer to 20 times. If you don't believe me, go to Politifact's Pants-on-Fire and count them yourself.
http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/rulings/pants-fire/

Of course the wingnuts are going to claim all Fact Checkers are biased and the media is liberal but the facts speak for themselves. Facts are the only thing that have a Liberal bias.

PolitiFact Says repugicans Lie Three Times More Often Than Democrats, According To New Study

http://www.politico.com/blogs/media/2013/05/study-politifact-says-republicans-lie

Just a reminder ...

The repugicans are prepared to watch you die in order to wage war.

Starve The Old, Feed War Fever

War costs money. And spending tax revenue on Defense is what the repugican cabal is all about. Certainly education, jobs, healthcare, immigration, women's right to chose, our infrastructure, science, technology, global warming, clean air, renewable energy can all go to hell in the repugican cabal-run world. It's DEFENSE SPENDING that's the only thing that matters. They'll sacrifice all other things to keep war going and to stop peace at any cost -- even if it means killing seniors if that's what's necessary. Nothing has priority over the DOD. Go Pentagon!

If you don't believe me, The Huffpo reports this:

A pair of House Republicans have a new bill that would spare the military from sequestration by cutting the Social Security benefits of many Americans who already experience painful federal budget cuts.

Jim Bridenstine (r-Okla.) and Doug Lamborn (r-Colo.) are introducing the Provide for the Common Defense Act on Tuesday. The legislation would cancel out the next two years of sequestration cuts for the Pentagon by putting a heavier burden on senior citizens and federal workers

The Truth Hurts

Pillow tied around midriff disguise didn't help store thief

A man spent his 62nd birthday behind bars on Thursday after being accused of robbing employees at a Dollar Tree store in Fort Worth, Texas while armed with a hunting knife and wearing a pillow tied around his midriff.

Employees told police that on Saturday, a man with a thin face and an abnormally large midsection entered the store at about 10:10pm and began walking up and down aisles before asking to speak to the manager. The manager, who was in the office preparing for closing that night, opened the office door and approached the man.
He pulled out a hunting knife, placed it to her back and pushed her back into the office. The man pushed another employee into the office, then demanded the store’s night deposit. After being handed the money, the robber ordered that a third employee be paged to the office. One of the employees hid near the rear of the store and called 911. The robber fled before police arrived. 

Robbery Sgt. Joe Loughman said responding officers arrested James William McGee a short time later. He was hiding behind the store in some trees, changing out of his disguise, which included a brownish or grey wig. “The abnormally large stomach was part of his disguise,” Loughman said. “It was a pillow tied around his midsection.” On Tuesday, prosecutors filed two charges of aggravated robbery against McGee. He is in the Tarrant County Jail with bail set at $70,000.

Purple sock helped police track down suspected tequila thief

Police in Everett, Washington state say a shoplifting suspect wearing one purple sock was identified by a store worker who recognized him from a high school yearbook. A man who reportedly ran out of an Everett grocery store with $61 worth of tequila on Tuesday night was arrested just hours later thanks to a little police work.
The man, 23, and a woman allegedly took off with the liquor from a Safeway store just after 10:30pm. A store employee tried to stop the pair, and a struggle broke out. The man used his 367-pound frame to slam his shoulder into the employee and get away. The suspect was described as shoeless, but wearing mismatched socks, including a purple sock.

Police were reviewing the surveillance video at the store when they got another clue. Another employee said he recognized the shoplifter as a former classmate from Everett High School. The employee couldn't remember the suspect's name. Officers asked the employee to go home and get his yearbooks, and the employee found the man's name and photo inside of one.
By 1am, officers caught up with the man at his Everett home. "One of the telling factors was the purple sock in this case," Everett police spokesman Aaron Snell said. "He changed everything but his socks." The man declined to speak with officers and was booked into the Snohomish County Jail for investigation of second-degree robbery. Police still are seeking the woman believed to be involved. The man's socks were impounded as evidence.

Sri Lankan ghost train traveled 12 km without driver

An "out of control" train engine in Sri Lanka moved a distance of about 12km (7.4 miles) through the capital, Colombo, without a driver, railway officials have said. No-one was hurt despite several road crossings in its path.  It was only stopped when a technician jumped on board, a Sri Lanka Railways (SLR) official said. An inquiry has been launched and two staff alleged to be responsible are reported to have been suspended.

Engine drivers have responded by going on strike. "Yes, it's true," Lalith Wickremaratne, SLR's Chief Engineer said, confirming reports of the phantom journey which happened between midnight and 02:00 local time. The shunting engine was stationed at a hydraulic locomotive shed in Dematagoda, north-east of central Colombo. "[It] moved from its shed without any person or operator and proceeded up to Ratmalana [in the southern suburbs]," Mr Wickremaratne said.

It appeared someone had failed to switch off the clutch or had tried to start it, but it moved without a driver until someone at its yard reported its absence. An engineer then contacted other yards to find out whether a stray locomotive had been sighted and it was found near the city center. Engineers then adjusted points to divert it towards an engine workshop at Ratmalana. To speed up the process, technicians were also sent by ambulance to intercept it.
As it was traveling at about 5 km/h (3.1 mph) by then, one managed to get on board and stop it near the points. No-one was hurt but "it could have been dangerous", Mr Wickremaratne said, not least because of the many road and rail level crossings in the capital. Alongside the inquiry, precautionary measures - including "further education of our staff" - are being taken to prevent a recurrence, he said.

A Little Distraction ...

Remy Lacroix Hula Hooping

Human ancestor was less chimp-like than thought

An analysis of the femur of one of the oldest human ancestors reveals the six-million-year-old "Millenium Man" was bipedal but lived in the trees. The research, led by Stony Brook University researchers and their team of international paleoanthropologists, could provide additional insight to the origins of human bipedalism and is published in Nature Communications.

Composite: Orrorin (at left) and other fossil hominins
[Credit:John Gurche/Brian Richmond]

In the research paper, titled "The femur of Orrorin tugenensis exhibits morphometric affinities with both Micoene apes and later hominins," Lead Investigator Sergio Almécija, PhD, a Research Instructor from the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, and co-authors clarify and contextualize Orrorin tugenensis, or Millenium Man's place in human and ape evolution.

The team completed 3D geometric morphometric analyses on the shape and characteristics of the femur of Orrorin, which revealed its morphology to be an "intermediate" between fossil apes and later human ancestors (hominins). The findings opens a new avenue in bipedal evolution research as they illustrate that hominins and living apes evolved in different directions from fossil apes from the Miocene (23 to 5 million years ago).

Millenium Man is fossil from East Africa and considered to be one of the best candidate species for what may be called the earliest hominins. However, its hominin status has been questioned by some scientists. Miocene apes are fossil relatives of the ape-human lineage with body shapes somewhere in between living monkeys and apes. Most Miocene apes walked on their fours in the trees instead of suspending themselves below branches.

According to Dr. Almécija, their study for the first time compared the six-million-year-old Millenium Man femur (called BAR 1002'00) using state-of-the-art morphometric techniques to not only other available hominin fossils but also great apes, hylobatids (ie, gibbons and siamangs), and most importantly to fossil apes that lived in the Miocene. The analysis included more than 400 specimens.

"We discovered that Orrorin's femur is surprisingly 'intermediate' in both age and anatomy between quadrupedal Miocene apes and bipedal early human ancestors," said Dr. Almécija. "Our paper provides quantitative results of the Orrorin femur as a unique mosaic and stresses the need to incorporate fossil apes into future analyses and discussions dealing with the evolution of human bipedalism, an investigation that should stop considering chimpanzees as default living 'starting point' models."

A similar take-home message was derived from the extensive analyses of the postcranial skeleton of the 4.4 million-year-old Ardipithecus ramidus from Ethiopia.

Dr. Almécija explained that because chimpanzees are our closest living relatives in terms of molecular data, a majority of paleoanthropologists presume that the last common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans looked exactly like a chimpanzee. For that reason, Miocene apes have been largely ignored in the human origins scientific literature. Although chimpanzees and other great apes can still represent good ancestral models for other anatomical regions, this new study proves that it is not the case of the proximal femur.

Based on the 3D geometric morphometric analyses, the Orrorin femur is most similar overall to Miocene ape Proconsul nyanzae but also closely linked to Australopithecus afarensis (ie, "Lucy).

Regarding their technique and the overall findings, the authors wrote: "Although the nature of our morphometric approaches differs from previous analyses, our results match and reinforce many of the conclusions from most previous analyses by showing subtle differences between australopiths and fossil Homo in terms of proximal femoral shape. Our results also agree that Orrorin shows an external femoral anatomy more similar to that of early hominins than that of modern humans. However, by virtue of adding earlier Miocene apes, our results expand previous conclusions reached on Orrorin by indicating the six-million-year-old BAR 1002'00 femur is not modern human-like or intermediate between extant great apes and humans, but rather intermediate between more plesiomorphic fossil ape and Plio-Pleistocene hominins."

Co-author William Jungers, PhD, Distinguished Teaching Professsor, and Chair of the Department of Anatomical Sciences at Stony Brook University School of Medicine, emphasized that the team's reconstruction and findings also reveal that some Miocene apes may represent a more appropriate model for the ancestral morphology from which hominins evolved than do existing great apes and particularly the chimpanzee.

"Living apes have long and independent evolutionary histories of their own, and their modern anatomies should not be assumed to represent the ancestral condition for our human lineage," explained Dr. Jungers. "But we need a better understanding of the paleobiology of Miocene apes in order to properly inform us as to how and when walking on two legs became part of our heritage."

The First Scientific Paper Published in Elfish and Dwarfish

Dan Lunt is a climate scientist at Bristol University in Bristol, UK. He created a computer model of the climate of Middle-earth from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. Writing under the name Radagast the Brown, Dr. Lunt published an article about it. In order to make the article accessible readers in Middle-earth who don’t know English, he published it Elflish and Dwarfish as well as English. Science magazine reports:

Using supercomputers and a model originally developed by the U.K. Met Office, his study compares Middle-earth’s climate with those of our (modern) and the dinosaur’s (Late Cretaceous) worlds. The Middle-earth model (pictured, showing predicted ground coverage: with grass in light green, trees in darker green, desert in yellow, and ice in white) reveals that the Shire—home to the Hobbits—would enjoy weather much like England’s East Midlands, with an average temperature of 7°C and about 61 cm of rainfall each year. An epic journey to Mount Doom, however, would see a shift in climate, with the subtropical Mordor region being more like Los Angeles or western Texas. The study—released today on the University of Bristol’s website and available in English, Elvish, and Dwarvish—also shows that the elves probably sailed from the Grey Havens because of that region’s prevailing easterly winds, while the dry climate east of the Misty Mountains is formed by a rain shadow.

It’s a fun idea for publishing and a sure way to get public attention. But Radagast’s work is also a serious attempt at understanding climate modeling. A press release from Bristol University explained:

Among other findings, he explains why the elves set sail from the Grey Havens (the prevailing winds were favourable for their journey to the West), and the existence of a dry climate east of the Misty Mountains (the mountains cast a rain-shadow over the region). Radagast also discusses the strengths and weaknesses of contemporary climate models, and shows how they can be used to understand and predict future climate. […]
Dr Dan Lunt added: “This work is a bit of fun, but it does have a serious side. A core part of our work here in Bristol involves using state-of-the-art climate models to simulate and understand the past climate of our Earth. By comparing our results to evidence of past climate change, for example from tree rings, ice cores, and ancient fossils of plants and animals, we can validate the climate models, and gain confidence in the accuracy of their predictions of future climate.”

Why icicles have "ripples"

Distilled water produced an unrippled, carrot-shaped icicle. When the scientists added a pinch of sodium chloride, or table salt, regularly spaced ripples formed. When they added more, the ripples became wildly irregular.

The researchers have not been able to find a theory to explain why salt is crucial to ripple formation. Fortunately, nature doesn’t need a theory; the team found that water running off Toronto roofs had enough dissolved ions to make ripples on its own.

From a study published in the New Journal of Physics,

What’s This Grid Pattern on the Ocean?

Sometimes in large bodies of water, wave systems cross each other. When they hit each other, these systems will form crests twice as high and troughs twice as deep. It can be difficult to sail in such waters. In the above case at the Île de Ré, an island off the Atlantic coast of France, the wave systems appear to meet at a right angle.

Earth News

Vast Undersea Freshwater Reserves Discovered

Australian researchers said Thursday they had established the existence of vast freshwater reserves trapped beneath the ocean floor.

Rain of Rocks Help Build Earth's Mystery Moho

A dense crystalline 'rain' falling into Earth's mantle could explain how a mysterious seismic boundary forms beneath the crust.

'Noisy' Icebergs Could Mask Whale Calls

The sound of icebergs breaking apart in the ocean could make the seas a noisier place.

Bizarre Microbes Discovered in Desert Cave

The microorganisms can survive underground despite the extreme dearth of light and nutrients.

Giant Planet Discovered in Most Distant Orbit Ever Seen

An enormous alien planet — one that is 11 times more massive than Jupiter — was discovered in the most distant orbit yet found around a single parent star.

The newfound exoplanet, dubbed HD 106906 b, dwarfs any planetary body in the solar system, and circles its star at a distance that is 650 times the average distance between the Earth and the sun. The existence of such a massive and distantly orbiting planet raises new questions about how these bizarre worlds are formed, the researchers said.

"This system is especially fascinating because no model of either planet or star formation fully explains what we see," study lead researcher Vanessa Bailey, a fifth-year graduate student in the University of Arizona's department of astronomy, said in a statement. [The Strangest Alien Planets (Gallery)]

In the most commonly accepted theories of planet formation, it is thought that planets that orbit close to their parent star, such as Earth, began as small, asteroid-type bodies that clumped together in the primordial disk of gas and dust around the burgeoning star. Yet, this process operates too slowly to explain how giant planets form far away from their star, the researcher said.

Alternative hypotheses have suggested that distant giant planets may form in ways similar to mini binary star systems, Bailey said.
"A binary star system can be formed when two adjacent clumps of gas collapse more or less independently to form stars, and these stars are close enough to each other to exert a mutual gravitation attraction and bind them together in an orbit," she explained.

In the HD 106906 system, the star and planet may have collapsed independently, but the materials that clumped together to form the planet were insufficient for it to grow large enough to ignite into a new star, Bailey said.

But, there are still problems with this scenario. For one, difference between the masses of two stars in a binary system is typically no more than a ratio of 10 to 1.

"In our case, the mass ratio is more than 100-to-1," Bailey said. "This extreme mass ratio is not predicted from binary star formation theories — just like planet formation theory predicts that we cannot form planets so far from the host star."

Researchers are also keen to study the new planet, because leftover material from when the planet and star formed can still be detected.
"Systems like this one, where we have additional information about the environment in which the planet resides, have the potential to help us disentangle the various formation models," Bailey said. "Future observations of the planet's orbital motion and the primary star's debris disk may help answer that question."
The planet HD 106906 b is only 13 million years old, and is still glowing from the residual heat from its formation," the researchers said. By comparison, Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago, which makes it roughly 350 times older than the newfound exoplanet.
The planet was found using a thermal infrared camera mounted on the Magellan telescope in the Atacama Desert in Chile. The researchers used data from the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm their discovery.
The study, which has been accepted for publication in a future issue of The Astrophysical Journal Letters, could lead to a better understanding of distantly orbiting exoplanets.
"Every new directly detected planet pushes our understanding of how and where planets can form," study co-investigator Tiffany Meshkat, a graduate student at Leiden Observatory in the Netherlands, said in a statement. "Discoveries like HD 106906 b provide us with a deeper understanding of the diversity of other planetary systems."

Ziggy

Dinosaur news

Dino-Era Crocs Had Killer Jaws

A newly discovered 'killer jaw' crocodile adds to the growing list of toothy marine crocodiles that flourished during the Age of Dinosaurs.

'Ugly Duckling' Pteranodons Floated, But Poorly

Computer modeling of dino-era flying reptiles reveals they did not float happily on the water.

Muggers use sticks as tools

Mugger crocodiles, that is:

As described by Dinets et al. (2013), Mugger crocodiles Crocodylus palustris in India and American alligators Alligator mississippiensis in the USA have both been observed to lie, partially submerged, beneath egret and heron colonies with sticks balanced across their snouts. Birds approach to collect the sticks for use in nest building and…

The occurrence of sticks on the crocodylians is not random: stick-displaying behaviour was most frequently observed both in those crocodylians living at rookeries and was exclusively observed during the egret and heron nesting season, being most frequent in late March and April (when the egrets and herons are working hard to find sticks) (Dinets et al. 2013).

The possibility that stick-displaying behaviour results from a random association between rookery-frequenting crocodylians and floating sticks was deemed unlikely by the authors, since floating sticks are extremely rare in the pools concerned, especially at the time of year concerned (partly this is because the local trees – baldcypresses and water tupelos – don’t shed twigs, but also because the nesting birds rapidly remove floating sticks for nest-building). Therefore, deliberate collection and employment of sticks by the crocodylians seems most likely.

More details at the Tetrapod Zoology blog of Scientific American.

TIL:  "Crocodylians" is an acceptible alternate spelling of "crocodilians."

Also:  They aren't called "mugger" crocodiles because they ambush their prey.  It's the opposite -

The name "mugger" is a borrowing of Hindi magar. This is in turn derived from Sanskrit makara "crocodile; mythical water monster; sign of the zodiac".

So the human malefactors are named after the crocs.  You learn something every day.

Domestication of dogs may have elaborated on pre-existing capacity of wolves to learn from humans

Wolves can learn from observing humans and pack members where food is hidden and recognize when humans only pretend to hide food, reports a study for the first time in the open-access journal Frontiers in Psychology. These findings imply that when our ancestors started to domesticate dogs, they could have built on a pre-existing ability of wolves to learn from others, not necessarily pack members.

The researchers conclude that the ability to learn from other species, including humans, is not unique to dogs but was already present in their wolf ancestors. Prehistoric humans and the ancestors of dogs could build on this ability to better coordinate their actions [Credit: Wolf Science Center]

A paper published recently in the journal Science suggested that humans domesticated dogs about 18 thousand years ago, possibly from a European population of grey wolves that is now extinct. But it remains unknown how much the ability of dogs to communicate with people derives from pre-existing social skills of their wolf ancestors, rather than from novel traits that arose during domestication.

In a recent study, Friederike Range and Zsófia Virányi from the Messerli Research Institute at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna investigated if wolves and dogs can observe a familiar "demonstrator" -- a human or a specially trained dog -- to learn where to look for food within a meadow. The subjects were 11 North American grey wolves and 14 mutts, all between 5 and 7 months old, born in captivity, bottle-fed, and hand-raised in packs at the Wolf Science Center of Game Park Ernstbrunn, Austria.

The wolves and dogs were two to four times more likely to find the snack after watching a human or dog demonstrator hide it, and this implies that they had learnt from the demonstration instead of only relying on their sense of smell. Moreover, they rarely looked for the food when the human demonstrator had only pretended to hide it, and this proves that they had watched very carefully.

The wolves were less likely to follow dog demonstrators to hidden food. This does not necessarily mean that they were not paying attention to dog demonstrators: on the contrary, the wolves may have been perceptive enough to notice that the demonstrator dogs did not find the food reward particularly tasty themselves, and so simply did not bother to look for it.

The researchers conclude that the ability to learn from other species, including humans, is not unique to dogs but was already present in their wolf ancestors. Prehistoric humans and the ancestors of dogs could build on this ability to better coordinate their actions.

Secrets of the legless, leaping land fish

One of the world's strangest animals – a legless, leaping fish that lives on land - uses camouflage to avoid attacks by predators such as birds, lizards and crabs, new research shows.

A male Pacific leaping blenny on the island of Guam
[Credit: Courtney Morgans/UNSW]

UNSW researchers, Dr Terry Ord and Courtney Morgans, of the Evolution and Ecology Research Center, studied the unique fish – Pacific leaping blennies - in their natural habitat on the tropical island of Guam. Their study will be published in the journal Animal Behavior.

"This terrestrial fish spends all of its adult life living on the rocks in the splash zone, hopping around defending its territory, feeding and courting mates. They offer a unique opportunity to discover in a living animal how the transition from water to the land has taken place," says Dr Ord, of the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences.

The researchers first measured the color of five different populations of the fish around the island and compared this with the color of the rocks they lived on. "They were virtually identical in each case. The fish's body color is camouflaged to match the rocks, presumably so they aren't obvious to predators," says Dr Ord.

To see if background matching reduced predation, the researchers created realistic-looking models of blennies out of plasticine. "We put lots of these model blennies on the rocks where the fish live, as well as on an adjacent beach where their body color against the sand made them much more conspicuous to predators," says Dr Ord.

"After several days we collected the models and recorded how often birds, lizards and crabs had attacked them from the marks in the plasticine. We found the models on the sand were attacked far more frequently than those on the rocks. This means the fish are uniquely camouflaged to their rocky environments and this helps them avoid being eaten by land predators."

The researchers then studied the body color of closely related species of fish, some of which lived in the water and some of which were amphibious, sharing their time between land and sea.

"These species provide an evolutionary snapshot of each stage of the land invasion by fish," says Dr Ord.

The similarities in color between these species and the land-dwelling fish suggest the ancestors of the land-dwelling fish already had a coloration that matched the rocky shoreline before they moved out of the water, which would have made it easier for them to survive in their new habitat.

The Pacific leaping blenny, Alticus arnoldorum, is about four to eight centimeters long and leaps using a tail-twisting behavior. It remains on land all its adult life but has to stay moist to be able to breathe through its gills and skin.

Giant crab ‘miraculously’ survives five days in refrigerator

  And finds new home at UK aquarium

'I couldn’t believe it was still alive,' expert says; family did not have the heart to cook hardy crustacean, now named 'Santa Claws'

by Pete Thomas

‘Santa Claws’

A giant crab hauled from its home waters off Dartmouth, England, has been named “Santa Claws” because its survival story is regarded as somewhat of a Christmas season miracle.
The colossal crustacean, with hand-sized claws and a 9-inch shell, was captured by a fisherman who decided to deliver the delectable critter to a sick friend, as a get-well present.
Edible crabs, also called brown crabs, are a fine gift for any seafood-loving family, but this crab was stored in a refrigerator for the next five days—and somehow survived.
The family, noticing movement, could not bring itself to cook the crab, so it telephoned Bristol Aquarium, which is now the crab’s home.
“Basically, they didn’t have the heart to kill him. Additionally, they decided they did not have a saucepan big enough to cook him in,” said the aquarium’s David Waines.
“When she told me it had been in there for five days I couldn’t believe it was still alive. I told them to wrap it in a wet towel and bring it along to the aquarium as quickly as possible.”
Bristol Aquarium posted a story on its Facebook page, explaining that the crab is “making a miraculous recovery.”
Waines explained: “Although the crab was very weak when it arrived the fact that it was kept refrigerated meant it was in a kind of suspended animation.”
The crab, estimated to be 15 to 20 years old, was placed in a special tank flowing with oxygen-rich water, and immediately began to show signs of recovery.
“Hopefully it will continue to get better and will be able to enjoy an unexpectedly long retirement here at the aquarium,” Waines said.
Bristol Aquarium named the edible crab—England’s largest species of crab—”Santa Claws,” and hopes it can be a popular draw over the holiday period.
Which is better than the fate of most edible crabs pulled from North Sea waters. These crabs, which are trapped in baited pots, are prized largely for the sweet, white meat contained in their enormous claws.
Those claws, the aquarium states, boast a crushing strength of more than 90 pounds per square inch, or nearly four times the crushing strength of a human hand.
As for the ‘Santa Claws’ story, it’s beginning to get some press in Europe, having been picked up by the BBC and the Bristol Post.

Animal Pictures