Urban Eco-Eugenics

Mon Jul 30, 3:19 PM

LOS ANGELES (AP) - Hollywood residents believe they've found a humane way to reduce their pigeon population and the messes the birds make: the pill.

Over the next few months a birth control product called OvoControl P, which interferes with egg development, will be placed in bird food in new rooftop feeders.

"We think we've got a good solution to a bad situation," said Laura Dodson, president of the Argyle Civic Association, the group leading the effort to try the new contraceptive. "The poop problem has become unmanageable and this could be the answer."

Community leaders planned to announce the OvoControl P pilot program, which Dodson believes is the first of its kind in the nation, at a news conference Monday.

Dodson said representatives from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals contacted her group with the idea to use OvoControl P. Other animal rights groups, including the Humane Society of the United States, support the contraceptive over electric shock gates, spiked rooftops, poisons or other methods.

It's estimated about 5,000 pigeons call the area home. Their population boom is blamed in part on people feeding the birds, including a woman known as the Bird Lady, who was responsible for dumping 25-pound bags of seed in 29 spots around Hollywood.

OvoControl P has been registered with the state Department of Pesticide Regulation and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Developed by Rancho Santa Fe-based Innolytics, the substance contains nicarbazin, which interferes with an egg's ability to develop or hatch, said Erick Wolf, Innolytics chief executive.

The pilot program was expected to show results within a year, and the Hollywood area's pigeon population is expected to shrink by at least half by 2012, Dodson said.

The Teratological Sign

• 16:40 24 April 2007
• NewScientist.com news service
• Catherine Brahic

Scientists have identified the Godzilla of fungi - a giant, prehistoric fossil that has evaded classification for more than a century.

A chemical analysis has shown that the 6-metre-tall organism with a tree-like trunk was a fungus that became extinct more than 350 million years ago.

Known as Prototaxites, the giant fungus has intrigued scientists, who originally thought it was a conifer. In 2001, Francis Hueber at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, US, first suggested it may be a fungus, based on an analysis of the fossil's internal structure. But he had no conclusive proof.

"No matter what argument you put forth, people say it's crazy," says C. Kevin Boyce, a geophysicist at the University of Chicago in Illinois, US. "A 6-metre-fungus doesn't make any sense, but here's the fossil."

Boyce, who says Prototaxites "get his vote for being one of the weirdest organisms that ever lived", helped solve the mystery by comparing the types of carbon found in the giant fossil with plants that lived about the same time, some 400 million years ago.

Closer cousin

Plants only absorb carbon from carbon dioxide in the air around them. As a result, the ratio of two carbon isotopes found in atmospheric CO₂ - carbon-12 and carbon-13 - is the same for all plants that live during the same period.

"If you are an animal, you will look like whatever you eat," explains Boyce. Previously classified as plants, fungi are now considered a closer cousin to animals, although they chemically absorb their food rather than eat it mechanically.

The researchers found that the carbon ratios from the different fossil samples of the fungi differed much more than would have been expected of a plant from that era, strengthening the evidence that Prototaxites is a fungus that absorbed some of its carbon from sources other than the air.

Samples of the giant fungi have been found all over the world since its discovery a century ago. It lived between 420 million and 350 million years ago, at a time when millipedes and worms were among the first creatures to make their home on dry land. No animals with a backbone had left the oceans.

"A 6-metre fungus would be odd enough in the modern world, but at least we are used to trees quite a bit bigger," says Boyce. "Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates. This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape."

Journal reference: Geology (vol 35 p 399)

Because history is violent...

Nothing proves that we are more than nothing.

-E.M. Cioran

The World is a Mirror of the World That is a World of You Without You

The Antipodes, first mentioned by Cicero, are humans whose monstrosity is constituted by their inverted repetition of our every move and action in a place, the Antipodes, where inversion is the norm. They are our mirror images functioning only as a kind of pantomime of human existence - exact duplicates of every human body in existence transported to the realm 'below' where, foot to foot, they reenact each human gesture upside down. The monstrosity of the Antipode is that of parody, the location of the human body in a place that is the sphere of travesty itself.

[...]

The Antipodes challenge the concept of the individuality of the self and present the monstrosity of self and other as coexistent and identical. The world of the Antipode is a world of pure multiplicity where everything is double and where the very concept of unity is impossible. More devastating to a sense of the real than inversion or antithesis, the Antipode confronts us with the dissolution of meaning through similitude. By the duplication of the self, the distinctiveness provided by the concept of selfhood is undermined in a perverse mimesis of the arch-imitator, humanity.

--Williams, Deformed Discourse

Rock is Time

An ancient forest of cypress trees, estimated to be eight million years old, has been discovered in Hungary.

Archaeologists found the 16 preserved trunks in an open cast coal mine in the north-eastern city of Bukkabrany.

The specimens were preserved intact while most of the forest turned to coal thanks to a casing of sand, which was perhaps the result of a sandstorm.

It is hoped the trees may offer experts a valuable insight into Earth's climate eight million years ago.

The massive trunks are of a species known as swamp cypresses, which grew for 200-300 years.

The BBC's Nick Thorpe in Budapest says the wood of the trees is still brown in photographs taken by the archaeologists, giving the impression that it has only just been split.

The stumps, 2-3m (10ft) in diameter and 6m (19ft) high, stand uncovered on the lowest level of the mine.

However, now that the protective material around them has been stripped there is a danger that the trunks could turn to dust before the scientists' eyes.

Urgent measures are being taken to preserve them after an attempt to move one of the trunks failed.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/europe/6942733.stm

In Oz, you don't have friends; you have people who look the same as you.

Kerygmatic Twins

Mon Aug 13, 6:08 PM

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US doctors have called off their attempt to separate three-year-old conjoined twin girls who are fused at the head because the operation is too risky, the hospital said Monday.

"Further surgery is not in the best interest of the Dogaru twins," the medical team at University Hospitals Case Medical Center Rainbow Babies Childrens Hospital in Cleveland, Ohio said in a statement.

"The decision not to move forward with the surgical separation was a difficult one, but it was made with the safety of the twins in mind. After countless hours of discussion and medical analysis, the Rainbow team feels that the risk of further surgery outweighs the likelihood of benefit."

The girls, Anastasia and Tatiana Dogaru, underwent a first round of separation surgery in June but the operation was halted due to brain swelling in the dominant twin, Anastasia.

The twins were born in Italy to parents of Romanian origin.

The top of Tatiana's head is fused to the back of her sister's head, in a rare medical disorder known as total angular craniopagus. The girls' brain tissue is connected and they share the same circulatory system.

Doctors have admitted the attempt to separate the girls, who also have heart, kidney and bladder defects, was "very high-risk."

The hospital has described their condition as comparable to being diagnosed with a malignant, inoperable brain tumor, noting that most cranial conjoined twins die at birth and only 10 percent live until the age of 10.

The hospital said physicians and nurses had "developed strong emotional ties to the girls and their family " and would do "all that we can to support the family as they make plans for the future."

Thailand considers law allowing transsexuals to claim title of adopted gender

Mon Aug 13, 3:02 PM

BANGKOK, Thailand (AP) - Mr., Mrs. or Ms.? Thailand may soon let people who have had a sex change officially alter their title, too.

A proposal which would allow transgender men or women to choose how they are addressed is being considered by the country's National Legislative Assembly to support an anti-discrimination provision in the draft constitution, Thai newspapers reported.

Wiroon Tangcharoen, an assembly member who is also rector of Srinakharinwirot University, said he supported the move and did not believe it would affect room assignments in university dormitories, where students are segregated by sex, The Nation newspaper said.

Students wishing to live with members of their adopted gender would have to produce medical certificates proving they had undergone sex-change operations, he said.

"The university has nothing against male transsexual students staying in female dormitories on the campus," he was quoted as saying.

Even though Thailand is widely tolerant of gays, transvestites and transsexuals, many face family pressure, social prejudice and domestic violence.

Three years ago, a college in the northern province of Chiang Mai designated a bathroom for the exclusive use of the school's 15 cross-dressing students. The transvestites - who had to wear male attire at school but were allowed to sport feminine hairdos - had annoyed female students when using the women's bathrooms, and faced harassment in the men's facilities.

Secularism is deregulated religion.

Patty Hearst-like phantasy Passions style. One day soon, if it hasn't already happened, Paris Hilton will be the most radical character in America.

No Real Than You Are

Wed Aug 8, 10:23 AM

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) - A giant, smiling Lego man was fished out of the sea in the Dutch resort of Zandvoort on Tuesday.

Workers at a drinks stall rescued the 2.5-meter (8-foot) tall model with a yellow head and blue torso.

"We saw something bobbing about in the sea and we decided to take it out of the water," said a stall worker. "It was a life-sized Lego toy."

A woman nearby added: "I saw the Lego toy floating toward the beach from the direction of England."

The toy was later placed in front of the drinks stall.

The Smell of Difference

Tue Aug 7, 10:40 AM

By Ishani Ganguli

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Female mice became sexually voracious and tried to mate like males after scientists disabled a small sensory organ, casting fresh light on how gender-specific behavior develops in animals.

The difference seems to lie in how male and female mice use the vomeronasal organ to process pheromones, said Catherine Dulac, the Harvard biologist who led the research published in the journal Nature Sunday.

Pheromones are chemical signals that many animals, including humans, use to communicate socially and sexually.

The vomeronasal organ, found in the noses of some animals but not in people or higher primates, is a key processing center for pheromones.

Scientists had long attributed aggressive male mating tactics to a testosterone-induced hard-wiring of male brains.

"Here you have females that never had male hormones but have perfectly male behavior," Dulac said in a telephone interview.

In female mice, pheromones normally suppress male sex behaviors and activate female ones, the research suggests.

"This comes as a surprise to think that the neural circuitry for male behavior had been sitting in the female brain all this time," said Mark Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University not involved in the study.

The researchers said they bred female mice without a gene critical to the vomeronasal organ's function. They also sliced the organ from otherwise normal adult females.

In both cases, the females pursued cage mates aggressively, sniffing their rears and mounting them. They turned to other male mating behaviors, such as pelvic thrusts, while eschewing typically female roles like nesting and nursing.

"You feel sorry for the males. You imagine they're confused," Breedlove said in a telephone interview.

The females did not limit themselves to males, with some trying to mate with other females. It turns out female mice need the vomeronasal organ to tell the sexes apart, just as males have in earlier studies, the researchers said.

The role of pheromones in humans is more controversial.

"We're not so olfactory or pheromonal as mice or rats," Breedlove said.

"On the other hand, it does make you wonder if humans also contain both sets of neural circuitry in the brain, and if something other than odors is responsible for determining which set we'll use as we grow up."

The Apogee of Identity

Lovin' it: McBranding hooks preschoolers
Reuters
By Julie Steenhuysen Reuters - Monday, August 6 09:08 pm


CHICAGO (Reuters) - Preschoolers preferred the taste of burgers and fries when they came in McDonald's wrappers over the same food in plain wrapping, U.S. researchers said, suggesting fast-food marketing reaches the very young.
(Advertisement)

"Overwhelmingly, kids chose the one that they perceived was from McDonald's," said obesity prevention expert Dr. Thomas Robinson of the Stanford University School of Medicine, whose work appears in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine.

While prior studies have looked at the impact of individual ads on kids, Robinson and colleagues set out to study the overall influence of a company's brand -- based on everything from advertising to toy premiums and word of mouth.

It comes as many food and restaurant companies face pressure to cut back on marketing to children as rates of obesity among that age group continue to climb.

Robinson and colleagues conducted a taste test with a total of 63 kids aged 3 to 5 who were enrolled in a Head Start preschool for low-income families.

They were offered five pairs of foods and asked if they tasted the same or to point to the one that tasted better.

The food -- taken from the same order -- was wrapped in either McDonald's packaging or unbranded packages in the same colour and style.

In about 60 percent of the tastings, the kids preferred food in the McDonald's wrapper.

"They actually thought the food tasted better," Robinson said in a telephone interview.

EVEN 'MCCARROTS' PREFERRED

About 22 percent of the kids chose food in the plain wrappers while 18 percent said the food tasted the same or were unable to complete the experiment.

"It ranged from 48 percent who chose the hamburger up to over 70 percent who chose French fries as tasting better if they thought they were from McDonald's," he said.

"Even for baby carrots, kids said the carrots they thought were from McDonald's tasted better," Robinson said.

The same was true of milk.

He said the study supports efforts to ban or regulate advertising or marketing of high-calorie, low-nutrient foods and beverages directed to young children.

A McDonald's Corp. spokesman said the company has been working to address the need for responsible marketing to kids and providing healthy food choices.

"McDonald's is only advertising Happy Meals with white meat McNuggets, fresh apple slices and low-fat milk, a right-sized meal of only 375 calories," said spokesman Walt Riker, in a statement e-mailed to Reuters.

"Our recent program with 'Shrek' was our biggest-ever promotion of fruits, vegetables and milk, another indication of our progressive approach to responsible marketing," he said.

The recent effort put the green ogre of the "Shrek" movies on a diet in a campaign that promoted healthier foods.

Robinson acknowledged that fast-food marketers have added some healthy foods to their menus, but he said the study should raise some alarms for parents.

"The majority of their marketing and reputation and brand is based on foods that are high in calories and fat and low in nutritional value," he said.

The Narcotic Other

Study may explain roots of empathy

By Julie Steenhuysen Reuters - Sunday, June 17 06:05 pm

CHICAGO (Reuters) - When people say "I feel your pain," they do not mean it literally, but certain people really do feel something that appears to be an extreme form of empathy, British researchers said on Sunday.

They said watching someone being touched triggers the same part of the brain as actual touch, and this connection helps explain how we understand what other people are feeling.

People who experience a tactile sense of touch when they see another person being touched -- something called mirror-touch synesthesia -- was first studied in 2005 in one person.

But researchers at University College London have now studied 10 people with the same condition.

"It suggests there is a link between certain aspects of the tactile system and empathy," said Michael Banissy of the university's department of psychology, whose work appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Banissy and colleagues first did a series of experiments to authenticate peoples' claims that they felt something when they saw someone else being touched.

They asked the 10 people with mirror-touch synesthesia to identify when they were being touched on their own body while watching someone else being touched on the cheek.

The actual touch was sometimes in the same spot as the person they watched being touched, and sometimes it was on the other side.

"The idea was to see whether synesthetic and actual touch were confusable in any way," Banissy said in a telephone interview.

He said people with this mirror-touch capability were faster when the touch they saw was in the same location as actual touch.

"When actual touch and synesthetic touch were in different locations, sometimes they would confuse the two and report they were touched on both cheeks," he said.

This confusion did not occur in 20 people without synesthesia who performed the same experiments.

The mirror-touch people also scored higher than others on a questionnaire that measured empathy.

"We often flinch when we see someone knock their arm, and this may be a weaker version of what these synesthetes experience," Dr. Jamie Ward, who led the research team, said in a statement.

Other studies have suggested a link between empathy and mirror systems, but Ward said this was the first to suggest empathy involves more than one mechanism: an emotional gut reaction -- which appears exaggerated in the mirror-touch synesthetes -- and a cognitive process that involves thinking about how someone else feels.

"This appears to be the emotional component of empathy," Banissy said. "It was purely gut instinct."

One of the mirror-touch subjects in the study said the experience is all she has ever known.

"It is -- to me at least -- a perfectly normal response to seeing touch or pain inflicted on another person," she said in a statement.

The researchers are studying this empathy connection further and trying to determine how prevalent mirror-touch synesthesia is.

"It does appear to be more common than we first thought," Banissy said.

The Technology of Vegetables Part 1: Communications

Wed Jul 25, 11:58 AM

NEW YORK, July 25 (Reuters Life!) - Imagine answering your cell phone to hear your Scotch Moss plant telling you in a fake Glaswegian accent that it needs a drink.

This scenario is not far from reality with a group of postgraduate students at New York University developing a way for over-watered or dry plants to phone for help.

The "Botanicalls" project uses moisture sensors placed in the soil which can send a signal over a wireless network to a gateway that places a call if the plant's too dry or wet.

Recorded voices are assigned to each plant to match its biological characteristics and to help increase the charm of the phone message and give plants their own personality.

Interactive communications student Rebecca Bray, who developed the concept with three colleagues, said the technology was not new but it's the way of communicating by voice and adding personality to the plants that's different.

"They will call and tell you they are thirsty and need a lot of water. They are also really polite," Bray told Reuters.

"We wanted to make sure that you weren't just getting phone calls that were really needy. So we have them calling you back when you've watered them to say thank you for watering me."

For example, the Scots Moss is given a fake Scottish accent as it was not originally from Scotland despite its name. A prolific spider plant was given a cheerful, friendly voice.

"We wanted to provide a system so that the plants could actually survive by communicating to people," said Bray who developed the system with Rob Faludi, Kati London and Kate Hartman.

She said they were surprised how many people have approached them to acquire this service for homes and businesses but didn't expect the system to become available commercially for at least another six months.

"We hope that the system will help people learn how to take better care of their plants over time and maybe not even need the phone calls after a while," Bray said.

*For additional information on phone-vegetable developments, visit this blog.

Ex-Machina Surgery: The Sacralization of the surgeon via the suspended prostate

1 hour, 56 minutes ago

EDMONTON (CP) - A four-armed surgical robot that looks somewhat like an octopus will be used in an Edmonton hospital starting this fall for minimally invasive operations.

The robot will initially help treat prostate cancer by removing the prostate gland and some surrounding tissue. The robot works by holding a camera in one of its arms and wielding surgical instruments in its three other appendages.

It's anticipated the robot's work will eventually expand to include gynecology, pediatrics and cardiac surgery at the Royal Alexandra Hospital.

It cost $4 million to purchase the robot and retrofit one of the hospital's operating rooms.

Dr. Dan Birch of Capital Health's Centre for the Advancement of Minimally Invasive Surgery says surgical robots are the way of the future.

What Once Was Proof of God, is Now a Sacrificial Source to Prove Humanity

Thu Aug 2, 12:46 AM

WELLINGTON, N.Z. (AP) - A six-day-old lamb at a veterinary clinic on New Zealand's South Island bleats like any other newborn sheep but is rather different in other ways.

This lamb has seven legs. Two of the extra legs hang useless behind the lamb's forelegs. The animal has three hind legs, one of them with two hoofs. It walks using its two forelegs and three hind legs, the Ashburton Guardian newspaper said.

The lamb was born last Friday on the farm of Dave and Di Callaghan.

Dave Callaghan said he was surprised to find the seven-legged creature, born with a twin, walking round in the paddock with its mother and normal twin sibling.

"I have never seen anything like that," he said.

Veterinarian Steve Williams at the Canterbury Vets clinic in the rural town Methven said he believes an error during embryo formation resulted in the lamb being born polydactyl - with many legs - a condition that occurs once in several million sheep.

He said the lamb is also a hermaphrodite and missing a portion of its bowel so it is unable to pass feces and will have to be destroyed.

"To keep it alive is probably inhumane, really," Williams told the Ashburton Guardian.

Inter-Phylum Warfare in Ungoverned Space

Canadian Mounties chase rebel bees after hive coup d'etat

Thu Jul 26, 7:51 PM

OTTAWA (AFP) - Mounties in eastern Canada were called in to help round up rogue honeybees after a palace coup this week caused a split in the hive, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

"The beekeeper came to us and said that he lost half of his bees, about 30,000 to 40,000 of them," said Cheryl Decker, spokeswoman for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, as the Mounties are officially known.

"He said they were last seen near a Tim Horton's" donut shop on the edge of town, said the spokeswoman for the detachment in Shelburne, Nova Scotia. "He wanted us to help him round them up."

"It's the first time that the police have been called in to help capture bees," she noted.

Beekeeper Rodney Dillinger told AFP the colony was likely "stressed" and became dissatisfied with their queen. So, they raised a rival queen and then sent her into exile.

But half of the hive left with the deposed queen to "look for a new home."

"It's a common occurrence and they are not dangerous, but they look ugly to people who are not familiar with bees and I'm worried someone may attack them with a broom or a stick," he said.

According to reports, the swarm has been mistaken for a bear in a tree and a dark cloud in flight.

Once located, Dillinger said the queen bee would be placed in a bee box to start a new hive, with the swarm expected to follow. "We haven't found them yet. But I know which direction they went," he said.