Are elephants so smart that they can spot the difference when they hear people speaking different languages? Armed with a giant loudspeaker in the back of a land rover, it is a possibility that researchers have been exploring on the plains of Amboseli National Park in Kenya. We are a bit limited by how little we know about elephants, but the odd glimmers we get seem to be rather remarkable They have also been trying to see if elephants can count lions and figure out the age of other elephants. Elephants do not have good eyesight but their sense of hearing is acute. It is much more sensitive than ours. The same is true for their sophisticated sense of smell. The scientists on the research team have been playing sounds or laying down scents which elephants would encounter in nature, but doing so in clever ways that reveal elephant knowledge and thought processes. Mental skills Dick Byrne, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at St Andrew’s University has studied the cognitive abilities of primates and has been carrying out the experiments with elephants at Amboseli, using different scents to probe mental skills. He said: […]
Clinics that offer to ‘bank’ stem cells from the umbilical cords of newborns for use later in life when illness strikes are fraudsters, a top US scientist said. Clinics in many countries allow parents to deposit stem cells from their neonate’s umbilical cord with a view to using the cells to cure major illnesses that could occur later in life. In Thailand, for example, parents pay in the region of 3,600 dollars to make a deposit in a stem cell bank, thinking they are taking out a sort of health insurance for their child. But Irving Weissman, director of the Institute of Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine at Stanford University in California, said the well-meaning parents were being fleeced by the stem cell bankers. ‘Umbilical cords contain blood-forming stem cells at a level that would maintain the blood-forming capacity of a very young child,’ Weissman told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). ‘They could also have derived mesenchymal cells — fiberglass-like cells that have a very limited capacity to make scar, bone, fat — but they don’t make brain, they don’t make blood, they don’t […]
Australia has set a deadline for Japan to stop whaling in the Southern Ocean by November this year, or face international legal action. Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said he was still hopeful that talks with Japan would lead to a voluntary halt. Japan’s Foreign Minister Katsuya Okada is to visit Australia this weekend. Despite a 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling, Japan kills hundreds of whales each year, ostensibly for scientific research. Blunt talk Mr Rudd told the Channel 7 TV station that Australia would ‘work with the Japanese to reduce, through negotiation, their current catch to zero’. If we don’t get that as a diplomatic agreement, let me tell you, we’ll be going to the International Court of Justice ‘If that fails – and I’m saying this very bluntly… – if that fails, then we will initiate that court action before the commencement of the whaling season in November 2010.’ Australia has made such threats before but correspondents say the timing and assertive tone of this statement – coming just one day before Mr Okada is due to visit – gives the words added weight. The BBC’s Nick Bryant in […]
The amount of wind power that theoretically could be generated in the United States tripled in the newest assessment of the nation’s wind resources. Current wind technology deployed in nonenvironmentally protected areas could generate 37,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity per year, according to the new analysis conducted by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory and consulting firm AWS Truewind. The last comprehensive estimate came out in 1993, when Pacific Northwest National Laboratory pegged the wind energy potential of the United States at 10,777,000 gigawatt-hours. Both numbers are greater than the 3,000,000 gigawatt-hours of electricity currently consumed by Americans each year. Wind turbines generated just 52,000 gigawatt-hours in 2008, the last year for which annual statistics are available. Though new and better data was used to create the assessment, the big jump in potential generation reflects technological change in wind machines more than fundamental new knowledge about our nation’s windscape. Wind speed generally increases with height, and most wind turbines are taller than they used to be, standing at about 250 feet (80 meters) instead of 165 feet (50 meters). Turbines are now larger, more powerful and better than the old designs that were used to calculate previous […]
WASHINGTON — Bush administration lawyers who wrote ‘torture’ memos have been cleared of allegations of professional misconduct after a Justice Department internal investigation, which recommends no legal consequences for their actions. The report by the Justice Department concludes the high-ranking lawyers who developed controversial legal guidance on waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques may have exercised poor judgment, but not professional misconduct. The conclusion resulted from a decision by top career Justice Department executive David Margolis to reverse a recommendation of investigators that found the two lawyers’ legal memos did constitute professional misconduct. That tentative conclusion, which was overruled by Margolis, said the lawyers should be referred to their state bar associations for potential disbarment. But in the final report, the examination of the legal guidance written by Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee found they did not constitute a professional breach that could have led to state disbarment. The report by the Justice Department ethics office, called the Office of Professional Responsibility, also examined and cleared attorney Steven Bradbury. He headed the Office of Legal Counsel, which provided legal guidance to the executive branch during President George W. Bush’s second term. The […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
