A giant squid (Architeuthis
dux) carcass has been recovered with significant identifiable stomach contents,
including the tentacle
club of a giant squid.
ISSN 1534-0236
Technology and ideology alike are exercises in applied imagination.
A giant squid (Architeuthis
dux) carcass has been recovered with significant identifiable stomach contents,
including the tentacle
club of a giant squid.
Accidental self-ingestion, autophagy or cannibalismBecause dactylic suckers, marginal and fragmented manus suckers, and carpal suckers with knobs still attached were recovered from the stomach contents of this Architeuthis, we conclude that portions of an entire tentacle club have been consumed, perhaps as an aftermath of inter-architeuthid aggression or mating. It is possible that the large unidentified suckers reported by Zeidler & Gowlett-Holmes (1996) from an Architeuthis stomach caecum are referable to Architeuthis, which would then constitute another record of either cannibalism or autophagy in the genus.
Regeneration of a damaged tentacle club has been reported for Architeuthis (Aldrich & Aldrich 1968), so the loss of the club has precedent and need not be fatal.
The authors also survey previous published reports, and conclude that A. dux is a pelagic rather than benthic (bottom-dwelling) species, feeding primarily on smaller squid and fish.
Cannibalistic giant squid would be amusing--autophagous ones are moreso, and somewhat disturbing, even given the taxonomic distance between them and us.
[via Squidblog, with thanks to fluffcthulhu]
In her most recent
column,
Molly Ivins points out the parallels--and specific connections--between the current administration
and that of Richard Nixon. Beginning by quoting Marx on how history repeats itself, she connects the
dots of the current tragedy (I wish I could see it as farce), and ends with an explicit call for
impeachment.
Alas, while Cheney and Rumsfeld are still around and powerful, Jack Sirica and Sam Ervin are not.
Are there any U.S. government
agencies that are still telling the truth? All those reassuring government statements
about canned tuna are
misleading,
if not actually lies.
The first problem is that three different kinds of fish are canned as "light tuna," and while skipjack is relatively low in mercury, albacore and yellowfin are not. When questioned about this,
"We do not have information on what is put in canned light tuna," said David Acheson, the FDA's chief medical officer. But he said the agency stands behind its position that canned light tuna is a good choice for at-risk groups concerned about mercury exposure.
Yes, that's what it says--they don't know what's in the cans and they claim that whatever it is, is safe. It gets worse.
Documents and interviews show that the FDA has repeatedly failed to tell Americans about the true risks of all varieties of canned tuna, at times after heavy lobbying by the fishing industry.For instance, when the FDA issued a mercury warning for seafood in 2001, it excluded canned tuna because, the agency said, people did not eat enough to cause harm - even though at the time canned tuna was the No. 1 consumed seafood in America. Shrimp has since become No. 1.
Last year, the FDA and EPA jointly warned pregnant women, nursing mothers, women of childbearing age and young children not to eat more than 12 ounces of fish a week, including no more than 6 ounces of canned albacore tuna.
But when the FDA updated its warning last year, it arbitrarily classified canned light tuna as low in mercury to "keep market share at a reasonable level," one agency official told an FDA advisory panel, according to transcripts of the meeting.
There's a long-standing
argument in linguistics and psychology about the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:
loosely, the assertion that what language(s) we use affects how we think.
One fairly straightforward difference between languages is color names:
many languages use the same basic word for "blue" and "green" rather
than distinguishing. (This is separate from the ability to name "sky blue"
and "navy blue" and "turquoise" and "indigo" and so on--the names for shades
aren't as basic to English-speakers.) Followers of Whorf expect speakers of
those languages to have a harder time distinguishing between shades that are
near the boundary between green and blue.
A recent study looked at how the different sides of the brain handle this sort of color perception.
Volunteers were presented with various shades of blue and one green, all chosen to be close to what people generally consider the blue-green "boundary," so that they were hard to tell apart.Clearly, this doesn't "prove" the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis--which is vaguely enough stated that it would be difficult to either establish completely or refute completely--but it does support it, at least in this area. The parts of the hypothesis that excite the most energetic discussion, of course, aren't about teal and turquoise, but the famous "200 Eskimo words for snow" and whether different verb forms and uses affect how people see or think about time.The researchers found that language influenced people’s perceptions only if the colors were in their right visual field, which the left half of the brain controls. In these cases, they found, the brain tends to sharpen the distinctions between "blue" and "green," while blurring the differences between shades that fall under the same category. This is what one would expect to happen if language were influencing the perception process, they noted.
Moreover, the differences between the left- and right- brain performance was weakened if the participants simultaneously performed a task that engaged word skills, the researchers found. Presumably, they added, this happened because this second task distracted the brain’s language centers so that they were no longer available to contaminate the color naming test performance.
If the volunteers performed a different distractor task, not involving words, the normal pattern of left- and right- brain differences in color naming returned.
[via Moominmuppet]
The bones of
approximately twenty dodos (MRaphus cucullatus)
have been
discovered in Mauritius. The collection of bones--found in a single
layer of clay dating to about 2000 years ago--may include beaks and the remains
of chicks. The researchers who found them hope to extract DNA samples, and
reconstruct a complete dodo skeleton--the
last known set of bones had destroyed by a fire in the 18th century.
Now that the 2005
Atlantic hurricane season is over, we can stop worrying about how far
through the Greek alphabet we're going to get, and look back a bit.
The National Hurricane Service has released its reports on all 26
named storms. Hurricane
Katrina made landfall in Louisiana as a Category 3 hurricane. The Army
Corps of Engineers is talking about rebuilding the levees to their previous
strength, which was supposed to be proof against a Category 3 storm.
Jeff
Masters (who, unlike me, is a trained meteorologist) points out that
this is partly because the Saffir-Simpson Scale combines two different aspects
of storm danger--wind speed and storm surge--into a single number. In terms
of storm surge, Katrina was category 5. But he also notes that the storm surge
on Lake Pontchartrain was Category 3, and the lake overtopped the levees.
Masters doesn't limit himself to the NHS report:
Death Toll
The official death toll so far is 1336, with 1090 of those victims in Louisiana and 228 in Mississippi. This makes Katrina at least the fifth deadliest U.S. hurricane of all time. The death toll could go much higher, making Katrina the third deadliest. Over 4,000 people are still listed as missing. Most of these missing people are probably alive and well, according to Kym Pasqualini, CEO of National Center for Missing Adults. However, she indicates that 1,300 of the missing from the most heavily damaged areas of New Orleans are a matter of great concern, and many of these people may have died in the storm.Damage
The report quotes a preliminary figure of $75 billion in damage for Katrina, a number used by the American Insurance Services Group (AISG). This would make Katrina, by a least a factor of two, the costliest hurricane ever. A recent estimate by the world's largest re-insurance company, the Swiss Munich Re Foundation, put Katrina's total damage closer to $125 billion.
This
is what the CIA is doing to innocent civilians: kidnapping and torture, even when some
of the CIA employees realize they have grabbed a random innocent, because someone else
doesn't believe in innocence, or wants to impress his colleagues by having caught a "terrorist."
Khaled Masri came to the attention of Macedonian authorities on New Year's Eve 2003. Masri, an unemployed father of five living in Ulm, Germany, said he had gone by bus to Macedonia to blow off steam after a spat with his wife. He was taken off a bus at the Tabanovce border crossing by police because his name was similar to that of an associate of a 9/11 hijacker. The police drove him to Skopje, the capital, and put him in a motel room with darkened windows, he said in a recent telephone interview from Germany.The police treated Masri firmly but cordially, asking about his passport, which they insisted was forged, about al Qaeda and about his hometown mosque, he said. When he pressed them to let him go, they displayed their pistols.
Unbeknown to Masri, the Macedonians had contacted the CIA station in Skopje. The station chief was on holiday. But the deputy chief, a junior officer, was excited about the catch and about being able to contribute to the counterterrorism fight, current and former intelligence officials familiar with the case said.
"The Skopje station really wanted a scalp because everyone wanted a part of the game," a CIA officer said. Because the European Division chief at headquarters was also on vacation, the deputy dealt directly with the [Counterterrorist Center] and the head of its al Qaeda unit.
In the first weeks of 2004, an argument arose over whether the CIA should take Masri from local authorities and remove him from the country for interrogation, a classic rendition operation.
The director of the al Qaeda unit supported that approach. She insisted he was probably a terrorist, and should be imprisoned and interrogated immediately.
Others were doubtful. They wanted to wait to see whether the passport was proved fraudulent. Beyond that, there was no evidence Masri was not who he claimed to be -- a German citizen of Arab descent traveling after a disagreement with his wife.
The unit's director won the argument. She ordered Masri captured and flown to a CIA prison in Afghanistan.
Masri was eventually released, but only after the CIA demanded--and got--the agreement of the German Interior Ministry not to talk about the case. Nonetheless, a German prosecutor is investigating, and has verified specific details of his kidnapping.
Masri can find few words to explain his ordeal. "I have very bad feelings" about the United States, he said. "I think it's just like in the Arab countries: arresting people, treating them inhumanly and less than that, and with no rights and no laws."
The hallmark of terrorism is that terrorists attack innocent people in order to create fear in a population. It's still terrorism if it's got a multi-billion-dollar budget and is backed by a nuclear power. And it still doesn't make those civilians like you. [via Riba Rambles]
Excavation
of a cave
on Kaua'i is revealing 10,000 years of Hawai'ian history, including
pre-settlement plant and animal life. The cave conditions have preserved
excellent fossils and large amounts of pollen, as well as human artifacts
such as nails and fishhooks. Species thought to have been
Polynesian imports turn out to be native, and what have been rare
upland plants as long as humans remembered used to grow in the lowland.
The lead researcher is affiliated with the National Tropical Botanical Garden, and is overseeing reforestation with plants that they now know used to grow there.
Pollen and seed found in the pre-human layers prove many plants that are now rare or only known from isolated or upland areas were once part of a complex coastal forest. That led Burney to the theory that today's dominant native forest trees like 'ohi'a, hala and koa were once comparatively small parts of the forest ecosystem. Once the ecosystem was disturbed by human contact, these survivors were able to gain greater density as other plants disappeared.[Thanks, Andy.]"Probably the key difference between pre-human times and now is that the early forests were much more diverse," Burney said.
Copyright 2006 Vicki Rosenzweig. Comments welcome at vr@redbird.org.
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