A new study shows that elephants can recognize themselves in mirrors. That’s considered a pretty high-level function — the only other creatures who can idetify with their reflections are great apes, dolphins, and people.
“There seems to be some correlation between an ability to recognize oneself in a mirror and higher forms of social complexity,” said Joshua Plotnik, a graduate student in psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.
To deal with their building water crisis, China is going to start desalinating sea water. Lots of it. 55 billion cubic meters per year by 2010. Weirdly, though, China is also having something of an energy crisis. Desalinating ocean water takes an awful lot of power. I wonder how they’re going to pull that one off.
From Treehugger: the newly launched fivelimes is site devoted to listing “eco-friendly and socially responsible products and services that are making this world a better place.” Basically, you join (for free), and then you post, rate, and review the best green products, and learn about new stuff from other users. If you’re looking for an eco-friendly anything, search and see if there’s one out there; if you’ve got a particular item in mind, you can search and see what people think of it. Awesome.
The Bush administration’s done something right for once.
NOT! (Ha ha, funny, I know…)
What they have done is elect ex-ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond and the National Petroleum Council he chairs to “lead an influential study to develop policy solutions to America’s energy crisis.” This means solutions other than oil and gas (the overuse is what’s led to the crisis in the first place).
But as it says on the National Petroleum Council’s website, “The purpose of the NPC is solely to represent the views of the oil and natural gas industries in advising, informing, and making recommendations to the Secretary of Energy with respect to any matter relating to oil and natural gas….”
And yeah, this is the same guy who’s notorious for funding scientists against the theory of global warming (scientists against the theory of global warming- now that’s funny).
I’ve got an idea! Let’s just elect a president to protect the American people and the standing of the U.S. who’s actually known for doing just the opposite! Oh, wait…
P.S. Go visit Exxpose Exxon for more.
So after reading more about it, it seems that my reaction to the stripper pole/kids’ toy, as well as the reactions of many others, may have been a little premature. The product itself has a picture of a grown woman on it and doesn’t look like something marketed towards little girls, and Tesco promptly removed the product from the kid’s section of their website after receiving complaints.
An accident? Page Rockwell of Salon seems to think so. Or isn’t jumping to conclusions, anyway.
Yeah, let’s go with that one. It’s a lot more pleasant.
Apparently Tesco, Britain’s largest chain retailer, has been advertising kiddie stripper poles on the toys and games section of their website.
The Tesco Direct site advertises the kit with the words, “Unleash the sex kitten inside…simply extend the Peekaboo pole inside the tube, slip on the sexy tunes and away you go!
“Soon you’ll be flaunting it to the world and earning a fortune in Peekaboo Dance Dollars”.
If I had a little more faith in the world I’d think it was a joke.
The £49.97 kit comprises a chrome pole extendible to 8ft 6ins, a ’sexy dance garter’ and a DVD demonstrating suggestive dance moves.
Dr Adrian Rogers, of family campaigning group Family Focus said yesterday that the kit would “destroy children’s lives”.
He said: “Tesco is Britain’s number one chain, this is extremely dangerous. It is an open invitation to turn the youngest children on to sexual behaviour.
“This will be sold to four, five and six-year olds. This is a most dangerous toy that will contribute towards destroying children’s innocence.”
He added: “Children are being encouraged to dance round a pole which is interpreted in the adult world as a phallic symbol.”
Tesco today agreed to remove the product from the Toy section of the site, but said it will remain on sale as a Fitness Accessory, despite the fact that the product description invites users to “unleash the sex kitten inside.”
I don’t totally agree that this kit will “destroy children’s lives,” and if grown people wish to use the kit for excercize, then all the power to them. But targeting an item typically used to evoke sexual longing to “four, five, and six-year-olds”? Grossss. Whose idea was this? ‘Fess up, I’ve got a bone to pick with you.
Researchers in Brazil recently discovered several new species of bioluminescent fungi:
Edit! Photograph by Rodrigo Baleia.
There are a lot of problems that come with full-face transplants:
The patient must remain on immunosuppressive drugs for life. Transplant recipients also have to deal with the bizarre and sometimes disturbing feeling of walking around with a dead person’s face.
“The prima facie evidence is that what we can do reconstructively is very primitive and not very effective,” said Dr. Geoffrey Gurtner, an associate professor at the Stanford School of Medicine. “Especially when you consider we’re talking about taking faces off cadavers and putting them on humans.”
Gurtner and other researchers are hoping to use stem cells to regenerate skin. Basically they want to be able to grow you a new face.
Dr. Roxanne Guy, president of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, believes stem cells and regenerative medicine are likely the future of treating facial injuries, but when treatments might arrive is hard to tell.
“How long will it be before we can do those things successfully? I don’t know the answer,” she said, “but we’re definitely on the threshold of a breakthrough in that sort of science.
Creepy stuff.
DESPITE all the attention given to anthrax and smallpox and potential weapons of mass destruction, pandemic influenza is probably the world’s most serious near-term public health threat. If a strain similar in effect to the 1918 Spanish flu (which killed tens of millions of people worldwide) emerges in the next several years, it is highly likely that an effective vaccine will not be available during the pandemic’s first wave, that we won’t have enough antiviral drugs for large-scale prophylactic use, and that hospitals will be too overwhelmed to treat most cases.
See what else the New York Times has to say about pandemic influenza and what you can do to protect yourself from it.
More and more growers and packers are turning to SmartFresh, a synthetic gas, to keep produce tasting and looking good longer than they’d naturally last before rotting. It’s used on 55-60 percent of apples sold in the U.S., and has just begun to be used effectively on other produce, like cantaloupes and bananas. According to pesticide experts, “…the treatment is most likely harmless to humans.”
Most likely.
The gas blocks the ripening effect of ethylene, a natural plant hormone that makes fruit ripen and eventually decay. A six-month-old Jonagold treated with SmartFresh is as firm as one stored for two months under traditional methods, and a Red Delicious stays crunchy for three weeks after storage, instead of one, according to James Mattheis, a postharvest physiologist for the federal Agriculture Department in Wenatchee, Wash.
Hmm.
So far so good. But SmartFresh also changes apples’ flavor balance. By suppressing ethylene it decreases the esters that give ripe apples their fruity aromas, though it does not affect the aldehydes that impart a fresh greenish fragrance.
I’m really not so into that. I’m much more into seasonal growing and eating. I’m also really into the title of the article I’m referencing. “Puff the Magic Preservative…” Ha, ha.
