Close-up Lotus wallpaper, Large Invasive goldfish found in Lake Tahoe

Close-up Lotus wallpaper

Monster Goldfish Found in Lake Tahoe

A new kind of lake monster has been found, in the depths of Lake Tahoe: gigantic goldfish. Researchers trawling the lake for invasive fish species scooped up a goldfish that was nearly 1.5 feet long and 4.2 pounds.

“During these surveys, we’ve found a nice corner where there’s about 15 other goldfish,” environmental scientist Sudeep Chandra of the University of Nevada, Reno, told LiveScience.

Goldfish are a kind of carp so given plenty of food and room to grow, 1.5 ft. is not monstrous. The sad and surprising take-away from this article is that so many invasive aquatic species get in our lakes and rivers by way of people dumping their aquariums into them. Between 20 percent and 69 percent of fish keepers surveyed in Texas admitted to dumping. And that is just one state.

2013 Ford C-Max Energi review

The EPA estimates the C-Max Energi at 44 mpg city, 41 mpg highway, and 100 mpg equivalent, the last number based on it being driven under electric power. After a week of testing, my fuel economy in the C-Max Energi came to 58.2 mpg.

As that reviewer notes real world conditions and driving style can have a huge impact on your actual mileage. It can go both ways, you might get only the average or you could get 58mpg or even 100 mpg, depending on how many miles you run on just electric. It does get 21 miles on a full charge. So if your round trip commute is 18 miles, you might goes weeks on a few gallons of gas.

Bumblebees sense flowers’ electric fields

“We looked at [existing] literature and realised that the bees were being positively charged when they fly around, and that flowers have a negative potential.

“There’s always this electrical bias around. As a sensory biologist, suddenly I thought: can the bees sense that?” Prof Robert said.

Dominic Clarke, one of the lead authors, designed “fake” electric flowers in a laboratory “flying arena” to prove that electric fields are important floral cues.

When the researchers turned off the electric charge the bees just choose flowers at random. So the electric field is not an absolute essential, it just helps give them clues about which flowers have nectar ready.

Two million acres of grassland lost to King Corn, Raven likes playing in truck turbulence

King Corn Mowed Down 2 Million Acres of Grassland in 5 Years Flat

They looked at recent land-use changes in what they call the “western corn belt”—North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Nebraska—between 2006 and 2011. What they found was that grasslands in that region are being sacrificed to the plow at a clip “comparable to deforestation rates in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia.” According to the researchers, you have to go back to the 1920s and 1930s—the “era of rapid mechanization of US agriculture”—to find comparable rates of grassland loss in the region. All told, nearly 2 million acres of grassland—an area nearly the size of Rhode Island and Delaware combined—succumbed to the plow between 2006 and 2011, they found. Just 663,000 acres went from corn/soy to grassland during that period, meaning a net transfer of 1.3 million acres to the realm of King Corn.

The territory going under the plow tends to be “marginal,” the authors write—that is, much better for grazing than for crop agriculture, “characterized by high erosion risk and vulnerability to drought.”
When farmers manage to tease a decent crop out of their marginal land, they’re rewarded. But if the crop fails, they’re guaranteed a decent return.

So why would farmers plow up such risky land? Simple: Federal policy has made it a high-reward, tiny-risk proposition. Prices for corn and soy doubled in real terms between 2006 and 2011, the authors note, driven up by federal corn-ethanol mandates [5] and relentless Wall Street speculation [6]. Then there’s federally subsidized crop insurance, the authors add. When farmers manage to tease a decent crop out of their marginal land, they’re rewarded with high prices for their crop. But if the crop fails, subsidized insurance guarantees a decent return. Essentially, federal farm policy, through the ethanol mandate and the insurance program, is underwriting the expansion of corn and soy agriculture at precisely the time it should be shrinking.

Crop insurance and subsidies can be good things if used sparingly in the right circumstances. It seems that this is one of the not good circumstances. Corn must have some good lobbyists as well, since Washington policy generally moves towards the money, even if it is short term.

A raven who has a favorite trucker. The raven seems to enjoy using air turbulence in front of his truck.

Study finds fog-like condition related to chemotherapy’s effect on new brain cells and rhythms

New research by Rutgers University behavioral neuroscientist Tracey Shors offers new clues for this fog-like condition, medically known as chemotherapy-induced cognitive impairment. In a featured article published in the European Journal of Neuroscience, Shors and her colleagues argue that prolonged chemotherapy decreases the development of new brain cells, a process known as neurogenesis, and disrupts ongoing brain rhythms in the part of the brain responsible for making new memories. Both, she says, are affected by learning and in some cases are necessary for learning to occur.

Most chemo patients recover from this brain ‘fog’, but about 15% suffer long term cognitive issues.

Papilio Butterfly wallpaper

Papilio Butterfly wallpaper. Their common name is “Scarlet Mormon”

 

Study: Seals sleep with half their brain

“Seals do something biologically amazing — they sleep with half their brain at a time,” Toronto researcher John Peever said in a university release Tuesday. “The left side of their brain can sleep while the right side stays awake.

“Seals sleep this way while they’re in water, but they sleep like humans while on land. Our research may explain how this unique biological phenomenon happens,” he said.

Thew neurotransmitter acetylcholine was found to be high on the awake side and low on the sleep side.

What do TV screens, bullet-proof vests and soap all have common? They all work because of liquid crystallinity, a structure in which molecules are aligned without being packed regularly.

Locked and Loaded, How Second Amendment mythologies—and the market—have taken over the gun-violence debate. It seems to a large extent we cannot have a public debate about guns because as soon as someone mentioned gun safety regulation, the very first rejoinder will be the accusation that the person proposing some mild regulation actually wants to ban all guns. That is what is called hysteria. Assault weapons like the Bushmaster .223 semiautomatic rifle were banned for new sales for over a decade and the nation managed not to descend into tyranny.

Physicists propose ‘wireless’ solar cells, Rubber from dandelions

Physicists propose ‘wireless’ solar cells

A new type of solar cell that relies on a surprising property of certain insulators has been proposed by physicists in Austria, the US and Germany. The design relies on the discovery a decade ago that the interface between two insulating oxides can become metallic, which could eliminate the need for metal wires in solar cells. If the cost of producing layered structures of the oxides can be reduced, the research could lead to a new type of highly efficient photovoltaic cell.

In 2004 Harold Hwang and Akira Ohtomo made the remarkable discovery that when a layer of the insulator lanthanum titanate was grown on the insulator strontium titanate, a 2D electron gas forms at the interface causing it to become metallic. The phenomenon is caused by the accumulation of charge at the edge of a polar oxide as it meets a non-polar oxide. It has since been seen in other oxide interfaces and has been investigated by multiple research groups trying to develop new and improved electronic devices.

Now, an independent team of researchers at the Vienna University of Technology, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the University of Würzburg has done calculations that suggest that the effect could be used to create a new type of solar cell – one in which the generated current is extracted via conducting interfaces rather than with metal wires.

This is all still int the theoretical stage, especially since they do not have a working prototype. Though if through experimentation, working out cost efficiencies and producing, what would probably be several generations of prototypes – this could represent quite a breakthrough – some day.

Because rubber there is a kind of fungal disease that poses a world-wide threat to the natural rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis, the quest is on for an alternative ( some rubber-like products can be synthesized from petroleum products, but they are not suitable for many of the products that use natural rubber) – EU-based Production and Exploitation of Alternative Rubber and Latex Sources

The EU-PEARLS Consortium links stakeholders in the EU and elsewhere in the development, exploitation and sustainable use of guayule and Russian dandelion, aiming to establish complete new value creation chains for natural rubber and latex from these plants.

….Our partner Apollo Vredestein has produced tires containing natural rubber from guayule and Russian dandelion.

Waxwing and Spring Blossoms wallpaper

Waxwing and Spring Blossoms wallpaper

 

 Python hunt in Everglades nets just 68: organizers

Hundreds of hunters spent a month combing Florida’s Everglades for Burmese pythons, in the end capturing and killing 68 of the slithery, invasive reptiles, organizers said Saturday.

The longest was 14 feet and three inches, netting the hunter who brought it in a $1,000 prize.

68 may not be a lot in total, but that is hundreds, maybe thousands of snake offspring that will not be decimating small mammals and birds in south Florida.

UBC researchers have found that when the animals at the top of the food chain are removed, freshwater ecosystems emit a lot more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Predators can influence the exchange of carbon dioxide between ecosystems and the atmosphere by altering ecosystem processes such as decomposition and primary production, according to food web theory1, 2. Empirical knowledge of such an effect in freshwater systems is limited, but it has been suggested that predators in odd-numbered food chains suppress freshwater carbon dioxide emissions, and predators in even-numbered food chains enhance emissions2, 3. Here, we report experiments in three-tier food chains in experimental ponds, streams and bromeliads in Canada and Costa Rica in the presence or absence of fish (Gasterosteus aculeatus) and invertebrate (Hesperoperla pacifica and Mecistogaster modesta) predators. We monitored carbon dioxide fluxes along with prey and primary producer biomass. We found substantially reduced carbon dioxide emissions in the presence of predators in all systems, despite differences in predator type, hydrology, climatic region, ecological zone and level of in situ primary production.

This is in keeping with the general concept of the intricacies of the food web. When key components are taken out of the web, it starts to malfunction. In this case one of the consequences is a little more of a contribution to climate change.

Alzheimer’s Disease Cases in America Predicted to Triple By 2050

I study the effects of neurological disorders on language, and I’m simultaneously fascinated and frightened by the syndromes and disorders I see in the patients who participate in my lab’s studies. Without question, Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is the most terrifying. It progressively destroys your memory and ability to communicate, before eventually killing you. While there are some treatments that can slow the progression of symptoms in some people, there still isn’t anything resembling an effective cure. While we’ve identified some genetic markers and protein abnormalities in the brains of people with AD, we still don’t really know what causes it. But, we do know that the number of people with Alzheimer’s in America is going to increase rapidly over the next 40 years, according to a new study published in Neurology.

Researchers at the Rush Institute for Healthy Aging in Chicago collected interview data from more than 10,000 adults over the age of 65, and screened a sample of them for AD. From these data, they figured that there are 5 million Americans with AD today, but that will swell to almost 15 million by 2050, nearly a threefold increase.

One of the reason for the projected increase in Alzheimers is the aging baby Boomer segment of the population. It is simply a case of such a large part of the population being in their senior years.