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Saturday, February 2, 2013
Taco Bell-Flavored Doritos Are Here, As Gyre Widens Beyond Any Possible Hope
Friday, February 1, 2013
Fishing With Dolphins
Dolphins and fishermen work together in Laguna, Brazil, to catch mullet. Photo courtesy of F?bio Daura-Jorge
The road to Laguna is lined with gossamer. Nylon nets hang from wooden posts and eucalyptus trees, weighed down by lead sinkers. The synthetic fabric may be new, but the design is ancient: Hand-cast nets have been found in Egyptian tombs and are mentioned in the New Testament. Such fishing nets were likely introduced to this area of southeastern Brazil by immigrants from the Azores, perhaps in the 16th century.
Laguna is really two cities. The old colonial town fans out on the eponymous lagoon, with brightly colored buildings and blue-and-white azulejo tiles adorning some of the homes. Then there?s the new, rather charmless city that has taken over the ocean side, its glass and steel spines like the shell of a sea urchin. To the south is a sliver of land that points into the Atlantic Ocean, with a small beach called Tesoura. Here, an extraordinary relationship has evolved between fishermen and animals that are often seen as competitors. It was announced by a signpost: Observa??o de Botos (Dolphin Watching).
Early on the morning I showed up, men were arriving on bicycles, red or green milk crates holding their nylon nets. They were deeply tanned, some in shorts, some in waders. Ivan Ferraz de Bem, in a wetsuit stretched over an ample beer belly, took a cast net out of his red dune buggy. A skull-and-crossbones flag tied to his bumper snapped in the stiff wind. Recently retired from a government job in Brasilia, he seemed to enjoy the hours by the shore??and those in the nearby bar to which he retreated when things slowed down even more.
As we watched the turbid green waters flow into the lagoon, a tall dorsal fin broke the surface, followed by a smaller one. A mother dolphin and calf swam in, the youngster staying close to its parent?s side, then headed out for rougher waters. Perhaps they found no fish or were just assessing the situation. These are wild dolphins?untrained, undomesticated?and it was clear that they run the show. When the dolphins aren?t around, one fisherman told me, it?s not worth fishing. Some gave it a try anyway, with an underhand toss into the blue. A few small fish were landed.
Another dorsal fin rose a hundred meters from the shore. ?Escubi,? one man called out, recognizing the white scuff marks on the leading edge of the fin. The men broke off their chatter, dashed into the water. Thigh deep, almost motionless, they stood at the ready, a line of six, as if awaiting Escubi?s orders.
Most of the helpful dolphins have names: ?Escubi? is a variant of Scooby Doo. ?Filipe? is a Brazilian adaptation of Flipper. Dolphins have something like names among themselves, too?each has a signature whistle, and they recognize one another by their unique calls when they meet at sea.
Another blow broke the surface. Escubi lifted his dorsal fin, reversed course. One man splashed his net in the water, to convey where he was standing. Escubi signaled with a slap of his gray tail, then charged straight for the shore.
Dolphins can swim faster and accelerate more quickly than torpedoes, so the nearest fisherman, in an olive green rain jacket and black cap, cast his net quickly as Escubi approached. It spread like a spider web, landed on the surface, and closed below as Escubi veered to the left. As the fisherman retrieved the hand line, a large tainha, the local mullet, thrashed in the mesh.
Escubi headed out to sea. The men cleaned their fish. One tossed an anchovy to a razor-thin heron, feathers lifting like white caps in the wind.
On coastlines around the world, many fishermen see dolphins and other marine mammals as competitors or thieves, often to be shot on sight. Soon after I left Laguna, a bottlenose dolphin was found dead in Louisiana, shot to death just behind its blowhole. It was the sixth killing recorded in the area this year. A dolphin in Alabama had been stabbed in the head with a screwdriver. One had its tail cut off and somehow survived. Many Hawaiian dolphins have bullet wounds in their dorsal fins, and entire groups are shy around people, even avoiding research boats, apparently having learned to fear that the people might be armed.
Here in Laguna, things are different. Cooperative fishing has been going on for at least 120 years?there?s reference to it in a 19th century letter?but no one knows how it started. Did a few dolphins curiously approach a couple of fishermen one day, flashing their dorsal fins or slapping their crescent-moon-shaped tails, and discover a new way to outsmart the speedy tainha? Since dolphins are considered net thieves in much of the world, did men try to chase them off at first? How did the dolphins convince the humans that they could be of service? Who trained whom, and when? One archeologist is looking among the sambaquis, or native middens, for evidence that the relationship between dolphins and humans may have existed even before the Azoreans arrived.
What?s in it for the dolphin? No one can say for sure. Paulo Sim?es-Lopes, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina who has been studying this population for more than 20 years, hypothesizes that the cooperative fishing disorients and isolates the fish. As the fishermen cast their nets, the school panics, and the dolphins exploit the chaos. They catch larger, quicker fish that would be difficult to capture in a straight-out chase.
Most of the dolphins in the region are residents. A few are vagabonds, traveling up and down the coastline. They have spread the cooperative tradition to a community about 150 miles to the south. Of the 55 resident dolphins identified in the area, 21 cooperate with fishermen; the rest generally don't. About 200 fishermen take their cues from the botos bons, or ?good? dolphins. Those that keep to themselves are described as botos ruins, ?bad? dolphins.
Most of the fishermen are part-timers, spending a few hours here before returning to their day jobs. One told me, ?You can?t live on fish alone.?
Many are deeply tanned, relishing their time at the shore. ?Everything's computerized,? another complained. ?I detest computers.?
Ferraz de Bem says that he likes computers?we exchange Facebook info?but why browse the day away? A few spend the entire day here, fishing and gabbing: Pensioners, like de Bem, have all kinds of time.
Fishing here depends in part on the tides, but mostly it follows the dolphins and their biosonar, their ability to use echoes to navigate and hunt. The water is too turbid to see much below the surface.
Sim?es-Lopes has shown statistically what these fishermen already know: When they fish cooperatively with dolphins, they have more fishing opportunities (the frequency of casts per hour is higher), and they land more fish. And the fish they do bring ashore?mostly mullet in winter, anchovies in summer?are larger.
In the 20th century, humans trained thousands of dolphins. They taught them to ?walk? backward in aquariums in the manner of Flipper, to be brushed and fondled in theme parks, and to detect underwater explosives for the military. For a while during the Cold War, it was thought that dolphins could even attach warheads to enemy submarines, though it is likely that the U.S. Navy?s chief interest in dolphins was in how to learn from their extraordinary powers of propulsion. The Navy released a propaganda film with ?a perfectly fantastic ?Human-Dolphin Translator,? ? the Princeton historian of science D. Graham Burnett has written. ?And (I could not make this up) the Navy scientists ultimately decided to try speaking to them in Hawaiian, on the grounds that this language seemed likely to be closest to their own.? (It being the 1960s, some saw this as preparation for communicating with extraterrestrials.) The Navy is set to phase out its sea mammal program beginning in 2017, the mine-hunting dolphins to be replaced by underwater drones.
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=877dac1db5b5e79bf0951ff0956859bb
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Archaic Native Americans built massive Louisiana mound in less than 90 days
Thursday, January 31, 2013
Nominated early this year for recognition on the UNESCO World Heritage List, which includes such famous cultural sites as the Taj Mahal, Machu Picchu and Stonehenge, the earthen works at Poverty Point, La., have been described as one of the world's greatest feats of construction by an archaic civilization of hunters and gatherers.
Now, new research in the current issue of the journal Geoarchaeology, offers compelling evidence that one of the massive earthen mounds at Poverty Point was constructed in less than 90 days, and perhaps as quickly as 30 days ? an incredible accomplishment for what was thought to be a loosely organized society consisting of small, widely scattered bands of foragers.
"What's extraordinary about these findings is that it provides some of the first evidence that early American hunter-gatherers were not as simplistic as we've tended to imagine," says study co-author T.R. Kidder, PhD, professor and chair of anthropology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
"Our findings go against what has long been considered the academic consensus on hunter-gather societies ? that they lack the political organization necessary to bring together so many people to complete a labor-intensive project in such a short period."
Co-authored by Anthony Ortmann, PhD, assistant professor of geosciences at Murray State University in Kentucky, the study offers a detailed analysis of how the massive mound was constructed some 3,200 years ago along a Mississippi River bayou in northeastern Louisiana.
Based on more than a decade of excavations, core samplings and sophisticated sedimentary analysis, the study's key assertion is that Mound A at Poverty Point had to have been built in a very short period because an exhaustive examination reveals no signs of rainfall or erosion during its construction.
"We're talking about an area of northern Louisiana that now tends to receive a great deal of rainfall," Kidder says. "Even in a very dry year, it would seem very unlikely that this location could go more than 90 days without experiencing some significant level of rainfall. Yet, the soil in these mounds shows no sign of erosion taking place during the construction period. There is no evidence from the region of an epic drought at this time, either."
Part of a much larger complex of earthen works at Poverty Point, Mound A is believed to be the final and crowning addition to the sprawling 700-acre site, which includes five smaller mounds and a series of six concentric C-shaped embankments that rise in parallel formation surrounding a small flat plaza along the river. At the time of construction, Poverty Point was the largest earthworks in North America.
Built on the western edge of the complex, Mound A covers about 538,000 square feet [roughly 50,000 square meters] at its base and rises 72 feet above the river. Its construction required an estimated 238,500 cubic meters ? about eight million bushel baskets ? of soil to be brought in from various locations near the site. Kidder figures it would take a modern, 10-wheel dump truck about 31,217 loads to move that much dirt today.
"The Poverty Point mounds were built by people who had no access to domesticated draft animals, no wheelbarrows, no sophisticated tools for moving earth," Kidder explains. "It's likely that these mounds were built using a simple 'bucket brigade' system, with thousands of people passing soil along from one to another using some form of crude container, such as a woven basket, a hide sack or a wooden platter."
Kidder analyzes the varied colors and layers of the soils of Mound A, which are a result of the building process. Indians carried basket-loads of dirt weighing roughly 55 pounds and piled them up carefully to form the mound.
To complete such a task within 90 days, the study estimates it would require the full attention of some 3,000 laborers. Assuming that each worker may have been accompanied by at least two other family members, say a wife and a child, the community gathered for the build must have included as many as 9,000 people, the study suggests.
"Given that a band of 25-30 people is considered quite large for most hunter-gatherer communities, it's truly amazing that this ancient society could bring together a group of nearly 10,000 people, find some way to feed them and get this mound built in a matter of months," Kidder says.
Soil testing indicates that the mound is located on top of land that was once low-lying swamp or marsh land ? evidence of ancient tree roots and swamp life still exists in undisturbed soils at the base of the mound. Tests confirm that the site was first cleared for construction by burning and quickly covered with a layer of fine silt soil. A mix of other heavier soils then were brought in and dumped in small adjacent piles, gradually building the mound layer upon layer.
As Kidder notes, previous theories about the construction of most of the world's ancient earthen mounds have suggested that they were laid down slowly over a period of hundreds of years involving small contributions of material from many different people spanning generations of a society. While this may be the case for other earthen structures at Poverty Point, the evidence from Mound A offers a sharp departure from this accretional theory.
Kidder's home base in St. Louis is just across the Mississippi River from one of America's best known ancient earthen structures, the Monk Mound at Cahokia, Ill. He notes that the Monk Mound was built many centuries later than the mounds at Poverty Point by a civilization that was much more reliant on agriculture, a far cry from the hunter-gatherer group that built Poverty Point. Even so, Mound A at Poverty Point is much larger than almost any other mound found in North America; only Monk's Mound at Cahokia is larger.
"We've come to realize that the social fabric of these socieites must have been much stronger and more complex that we might previously have given them credit. These results contradict the popular notion that pre-agricultural people were socially, politically, and economically simple and unable to organize themselves into large groups that could build elaborate architecture or engage in so-called complex social behavior," Kidder says. "The prevailing model of hunter-gatherers living a life 'nasty, brutish and short' is contradicted and our work indicates these people were practicing a sophisticated ritual/religious life that involved building these monumental mounds."
###
Washington University in St. Louis: http://www.wustl.edu
Thanks to Washington University in St. Louis for this article.
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Warning over sports aid after marathon death
A coroner has warned of the dangers of a legal stimulant as it emerged that a runner who collapsed and died during the London mara-thon had taken the drug in a bid to boost her performance.
Claire Squires (30), above, suffered a cardiac arrest a few hundred metres from the finish line.
An inquest heard that she had bought a powder supplement called Jack3d which contained DMAA (dimethylamine), a drug with similar properties to amphetamines and is said to boost energy, concentration and metabolism.
Her boyfriend, Simon van Herrewege, told Southwark Coroner's Court that she bought it online as she was keen to beat her personal best race time.
Irish Independent
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Video: Economy Shrinks, Fed Reacts
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'Arrow': Pain Is The Game As 'Fringe''s Seth Gabel Brings Count Vertigo To Life (VIDEO)
Oliver Queen faced a new villain on "Arrow," and the villain survived! Not all of his comic book foes have been so fortunate, though it's possible that Count Vertigo may wish he was dead. The Count was the man behind the Vertigo drug hitting the streets of Starling City.
After infiltrating his drug ring, Oliver came face to face with The Count, played with reckless abandon by Seth Gabel ("Fringe"). The police intervened, though, and Oliver wound up with a vial full of The Count's special "pain" toxin. The pain was so agonizing that a man earlier in the episode committed suicide after only a few minutes of enduring it.
The toxin continued to affect Oliver throughout the episode, but he nevertheless tracked The Count down, and got the drop on him. Rather than take him out, he instead injected him with his own "pain" toxins. So while The Count lives to breathe another day, he may wish he was dead. And in police custody, he won't find an easy out, either.
The comic book adventures continue every Wednesday on The CW's "Arrow" at 8 p.m. EST.
TV Replay scours the vast television landscape to find the most interesting, amusing, and, on a good day, amazing moments, and delivers them right to your browser.
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Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/31/arrow-count-vertigo-seth-gabel-video_n_2587563.html
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Israel hits Syria arms convoy to Lebanon: sources
BEIRUT |
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli jets bombed a convoy on Syria's border with Lebanon on Wednesday, sources told Reuters, apparently targeting weapons destined for Hezbollah in what some called a warning to Damascus not to arm Israel's Lebanese enemy.
"The target was a truck loaded with weapons, heading from Syria to Lebanon," said one Western diplomat, adding that the consignment may well have included anti-aircraft missiles.
The overnight attack, which several sources placed on the Syrian side of the border, followed warnings from Israel that it was ready to act to prevent the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad leading to Syria's chemical weapons and modern rockets reaching either his Hezbollah allies or his Islamist enemies.
A source among the Syrian rebels said an air strike around dawn (0430 GMT) blasted a convoy on a mountain track about 5 kilometers (3 miles) south of where the main Damascus-Beirut highway crosses the border. Its load probably included high-tech anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles, but not chemical weapons.
"It attacked trucks carrying sophisticated weapons from the regime to Hezbollah," the source said, adding that it took place inside Syria, though the border is poorly defined in the area.
A regional security source said the target was weaponry given by Assad's military to fellow Iranian ally Hezbollah:
"This episode boils down to a warning by Israel to Syria and Hezbollah not to engage in the transfer of sensitive weapons," the source said. "Assad knows his survival depends on his military capabilities and he would not want those capabilities neutralized by Israel - so the message is this kind of transfer is simply not worth it, neither for him nor Hezbollah."
With official secrecy shrouding the event, few details were corroborated by multiple sources. All those with knowledge of the event - from several countries - spoke anonymously.
There was no comment from the Israeli or Syrian governments nor Hezbollah. Israel's ally the United States declined all comment. A Lebanese security source said its territory was not hit, though the army reported a heavy presence of Israeli jets through the night after days of unusually frequent incursions.
Such a strike would fit Israel's policy of pre-emptive covert and overt action to curb Hezbollah and does not necessarily indicate a major escalation of the war in Syria. It does, however, indicate how the erosion of the Assad family's rule after 42 years is seen by Israel as posing a threat.
Israel this week echoed concerns in the United States about Syrian chemical weapons, but its officials say a more immediate worry is that the civil war could see weapons that are capable of denting its massive superiority in airpower and tanks reaching Hezbollah; the group fought Israel in 2006 and remains a more pressing threat than its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.
Wednesday's strike could have been a rapid response to an opportunity. But a stream of Israeli comment on Syria in recent days may have been intended to limit surprise in world capitals.
The head of the Israeli air force said only hours before the attack that his corps, which has an array of the latest jet bombers, attack helicopters and unmanned drones at its disposal, was involved in a covert "campaign between wars".
"This campaign is 24/7, 365 days a year," Major-General Amir Eshel told a conference on Tuesday. "We are taking action to reduce the immediate threats, to create better conditions in which we will be able to win the wars, when they happen."
JETS OVER LEBANON
In Israel, where media operate under military censorship, broadcasters immediately relayed international reports of the strike. Channel Two television quoted what it called foreign sources saying the convoy was carrying anti-aircraft missiles.
Israeli jets routinely fly over Lebanon and there have been unconfirmed reports in previous years of strikes on Hezbollah arms shipments. An attack inside Syria could be diplomatically provocative, however, since Assad's Iranian ally said on Saturday that it would view any strike as an attack on itself.
There was no immediate comment on the incident from Tehran, which Israel views as its principal enemy and with which it is engaged in a bitter confrontation over Iran's nuclear program.
On Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, set for a new term after an election, told his cabinet that Iran and turmoil in Arab states meant Israel must be strong: "In the east, north and south, everything is in ferment, and we must be prepared, strong and determined in the face of all possible developments."
The Israeli military confirmed this week that it had lately deployed two batteries of its Iron Dome rocket-interceptor system to around the northern city of Haifa, which came under heavy Hezbollah missile fire during a brief war in 2006.
Israel's refusal to comment on Wednesday is usual in such cases; it has, for example, never admitted a 2007 air strike on a suspected Syrian nuclear site despite U.S. confirmation of it.
By not acknowledging that raid, Israel may have ensured that Assad did not feel obliged to retaliate. For 40 years, Syria has offered little but bellicose words against Israel. A failing Assad administration, some Israelis fear, might be tempted into more action, while Syria's Islamist rebels are also hostile to Israel and could present a threat if they seize heavier weapons.
Israeli Vice Premier Silvan Shalom said on Sunday that any sign that the Syrian army's grip on its presumed chemical weapons stocks was slipping could trigger Israeli intervention.
But Israeli sources said on Tuesday that Syria's advanced conventional weapons, much of it Russian-built hardware able to destroy Israeli planes and tanks, would represent as much of a threat to Israel as chemical arms in the hands of an enemy.
Interviewed on Wednesday, Shalom would not be drawn on whether Israeli forces had been in action in the north, but he described the country as part of an international coalition seeking to stop spillover from Syria's two-year-old insurgency.
Recalling that President Barack Obama had warned Assad of U.S. action if his forces used chemical weapons, Shalom told Israel Radio: "The world, led by President Obama, who has said this more than once, is taking all possibilities into account.
"Any development ... in a negative direction would be something that needs stopping and prevention."
LEBANON WAR
During the 2006 war in Lebanon, Israel's air forced faced little threat, though its navy was taken aback when a missile hit a ship. Israeli tanks suffered losses to rockets, and commanders are concerned Hezbollah may get better weaponry.
In what might have been a sign of seeking to reassure major powers, Israeli media reported this week that the country's national security adviser was despatched to Russia and military intelligence chief to the United States for consultations.
Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London saw any strike on Wednesday as intended to deliver a signal rather than heralding a major escalation from Israel.
"The Israelis are sending a message not just to Hezbollah but also to Assad's forces that they have no wish to get dragged in, but chemical weapons and certain types of missiles are a red line for them, and that regime forces ought to signal, in turn, to Hezbollah that they should proceed with caution," he said.
Worries about Syria and Hezbollah have sent Israelis lining up for government-issued gas masks in recent days. According to the Israel post office, which is handling distribution of the kits, demand roughly trebled this week.
"It looks like every kind of discourse on this or that security matter contributes to public vigilance," its deputy director Haim Azaki told Israel's Army Radio. "We have really seen a very significant jump in demand."
(Additional reporting by Myra MacDonald in London; Writing by Alastair Macdonald; Editing by Will Waterman and David Stamp)
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