#Raw milk Sickened Scores Despite Inspections Even under the best circumstances unpasteurized milk can make people sick a new report concludes.
#Real Cause of'Satanic Sacrifice'Pony Found A pony found in Dartmoor England in July apparently died under mysterious and horrific circumstances:
The 2-month-old male pony apparently had its genitals eyes tongue and one ear removed.
and dismember a young pony. Now the mystery has been solved. Witches & Wiccans: 6 Common Misconceptions Devon and Cornwall police concluded earlier this week that the pony had died of natural causes.
The much-discussed mutilation was not in fact mutilation at all but instead the normal result of wild animals eating the pony's organs and scattering its entrails.
Initial media reports linked the death of the pony to satanic cults and ritualistic killing the police said in a statement.
The police have sought the advice of experts and have come to the view that the death of this pony was through natural causes.
All the injuries can be attributed to those caused by other wild animals. This incident received significant media reporting some
of which was clearly sensationalist. Mysterious predation? But if the pony died of natural causes what about the claims and rumors of satanic or pagan sacrifices?
How did those come about? Part of the answer as the police noted is surely that the animal-sacrifice angle made the story sensational and interesting.
and ritually sacrifice animals especially ones as cute and beloved as ponies there's little wonder why the media ran with it.
After all presumably dead animals are not uncommon on farms and ranches; surely a livestock official would be able to tell the difference between an animal that died of natural causes
and was set upon by scavengers and an animal carefully killed in some sort of ritual sacrifice right?
Spooky! Top 10 Unexplained Phenomena Not necessarily for several reasons. One problem is that most ranchers
and livestock officials have no idea what occurs in a real animal ritual sacrifice so they can hardly make a valid comparison.
which has very specific procedures and rituals for the sacrifice (and typically sacrifice chickens or goats not horses).
when the pony died it's impossible to know what exactly killed it; suspects include wild animals disease or even lightning.
The fact is scavenger animals eat soft tissues of the body first including the parts missing from the pony:
the genitals eyes tongue and ears. Since the pony had been dead for several days before its body was found there was plenty of time for birds maggots blowflies
and other carrion-eating animals to scavenge on or even carry off these mysteriously missing body parts.
Dale A. Wade an extension wildlife specialist with the Texas A&m University Research and Extension Center in San Angelo Texas is co-author of Procedures for Evaluating Predation on Livestock and Wildlife (Agrilife Extension Texas A & M System 2010).
and even livestock experts may not recognize what killed an animal since it is often difficult
or even by handling a dead animal. Instead to determine what killed the animal the person studying the body should examine carcasses for wounds hemorrhage bruises broken bones and feeding.
If necessary the entire carcass should be skinned and opened to identify internal wounds and other factors which help confirm the cause of death.
For example some animals are killed by a single grip at the throat which causes suffocation but leaves little external evidence.
The misidentification of normal animal predation is a common element in mysterious animal deaths such as cattle mutilations
In other words just because the pony's cause of death was unknown doesn't logically mean the animal was sacrificed by satanists witches or anyone else;
Though the case resulted in some red faces the best news that can be drawn from the incident is that the pony died naturally
A few hours after his death back in England Carnarvon's beloved dog Susie let out a yelp
French merchant Jean Baptiste Tavernier according to legend stole a 115-carat blue diamond from the eye of a Hindu idol in India for this sacrilege Tavernier was mauled supposedly to death by dogs.
His wife and dog died not long after however and his home caught fire. Did Native american leader Tecumseh curse William Henry Harrison after Harrison's troops emerged victorious at the Battle of Tippecanoe?
or for any vegan animals that accumulate toxins in their fat; they don't cleanse themselves with their raw plant-based diet.
Raw-only foods are natural No other animal cooks food many a raw vegan has stated. One can just as well say that no other animal combines their kale
and clover with tropical bananas in a high-speed blender to make the foods more palatable and digestible.
Or that no other animal plays chess. Judging what is natural is a slippery slope.
A traditional animal-based diet eaten by natives of Siberia is just as natural as a traditional diet eaten by unnamed tribes in the Amazon.
Eating Meat Made Us Human Study Suggests Our raw-vegan cousin the gorilla has three times the body size of humans but one-third the brain cells;
According to a study published in October 2012 the gorilla would have needed to eat raw plants for more than 12 hours a day to consume enough calories to evolve a humanlike brain.
#Real-life Smoking Caterpillar Uses Nicotine as Defense Ripped from the pages of Lewis carroll's Alice in wonderland scientists have discovered a smoking caterpillar of sorts.
While this find may not push Alice's hookah-smoking insect from its psychedelic pedestal this caterpillar is pretty snazzy as it can use nicotine to ward off hungry wolf spiders.
The researchers found a gene in hornworm caterpillars that allows them to puff nicotine out through their spiracles (tiny holes in their sides) from the tobacco they consume as a warning to their would-be predators.
Video See the Smoking Caterpillars in Action It's really a story about how an insect that eats a plant co-opts the plant for its own defense said study researcher Ian Baldwin a professor at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical
But said Baldwin it's also an example of the importance of studying animals in a natural habitat rather than just in the lab. We never would have discovered the function of this gene
if the spider hadn't told us he told Livescience. The researchers discovered the odd halitosis
when trying to find out how hornworm caterpillars could consume tobacco plants despite the toxic nicotine within the plant's tissues.
In fact these caterpillars are hundreds of times more resistant than humans who smoke are to the toxic effects of nicotine.
By feeding hornworm caterpillars tobacco plants with and without nicotine researchers identified the gene that was activated
when the caterpillars consumed nicotine-containing tobacco plants. The scientists then placed so-called interference RNA matching that gene in tobacco plants grown in the lab. The interference RNA targeted that gene preventing the caterpillars from using their defense.
When caterpillars consumed the gene-altered tobacco they lost their ability to produce the tobacco halitosis
and thus their ability to ward off the spiders. As a result they were consumed at a higher rate by wolf spiders a rate similar to that found for caterpillars consuming nicotine-depleted tobacco plants.
 This RNA-interference technique might someday be used in genetically modified crops produced with specific nutritional goals in mind as interference RNA targets a specific gene.
Early trials of medications using a similar principle to treat a rare disease called transthyretin amyloidosis in humans were published earlier this year.
While the study involved wolf spiders the nicotine halitosis does not necessarily turn away other predators. This defense Berenbaum noted has the advantage of warning a predator of a prey's toxicity without requiring the prey to lose a limb.
Scientists may also want to determine whether hornworm caterpillars have other defenses against predators. For instance the caterpillars also consume plants such as tomatoes which contain alkaloids that are not volatile like nicotine is.
If a compound is not volatile it isn't easily vaporized and so couldn't be emitted from tiny pores.
The study is being published today (Dec 30) in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide trap heat helping warm the globe. The surge in carbon dioxide levels due to human activity since the Industrial revolution is now causing an overall warming of the planet that is having impacts around the globe.
which facilitates proliferation of good bugs and inhibits growth of pathogenic bacteria. All of this extra fermentation and availability of SCFA provides fuel
and more good bugs colonize and thrive Higgins added. In this way resistant starch acts as a probiotic.
#Reviving the Woolly mammoth: Will De-Extinction Become Reality? Biologists briefly brought the extinct Pyrenean ibex back to life in 2003 by creating a clone from a frozen tissue sample harvested before the goat's entire population vanished in 2000.
Ten years later a group of researchers and conservationists gathered in Washington D c. today (March 15) for a forum called TEDXDEEXTINCTION hosted by the National geographic Society to talk about how to revive extinct animals from the Tasmanian tiger and the saber-toothed cat to the woolly mammoth and the North american passenger pigeon.
Some have their hopes set on the woolly mammoth a relative of modern elephants that went extinct 3000 to 10000 years ago and left behind some extraordinarily well preserved carcasses in Siberian permafrost.
and an Asian elephant egg a challenging prospect as no one has ever been able to harvest eggs from an elephant.
Bringing Extinct Animals Back to Life if (typeof (defined poll functions)==undefined'&& $(#poll javascript. size()<0){ define poll functions=1;
poll options 50 160=Passenger pigeon; poll options 50 161=Tasmanian tiger; poll options 50 162=Woolly mammoth; poll options 50 163=Gastric brooding frog;
poll options 50 165=Saber-toothed cat; load poll (50; But DNA from extinct species doesn't need to be preserved in Arctic conditions to be useful to scientists researchers have been able to start putting together the genomes of extinct species from museum specimens that have been sitting on shelves for a century.
If de-extinction research has done anything for science it's forced researchers to look at the quality of the DNA in dead animals said science journalist Carl Zimmer whose article on de-extinction featured on the cover of the April issue of National geographic magazine.
It's not that good but you can come up with techniques to retrieve it Zimmer told Livescience.
For instance a team that includes Harvard genetics expert George Church is trying to bring back the passenger pigeon a bird that once filled eastern North america's skies.
They have been able to piece together roughly 1 billion letters (Each of four nucleotides that make up DNA has a letter designation) in the bird's genome based on DNA from a 100-year-old taxidermied museum specimen.
They hope to incorporate those genes responsible for certain traits into the genome of a common rock pigeon to bring back the passenger pigeon
or at least create something that looks like it. A few years ago another group of researchers isolated DNA from a 100-year-old specimen of a young thylacine also known as Tasmanian tiger.
The pup had been preserved in alcohol at Museum Victoria in Melbourne. Its genetic material was inserted into mouse embryos
which proved functional in live mice. Photos: The Creatures of Cryptozoology Should we? Now that de-extinction looms as a possibility it presents some thorny questions:
Should we bring back these species? And what would we do them? Stuart Pimm of Duke university argued in an opinion piece in National geographic that these efforts would be a colossal waste
if scientists don't know where to put revived species that had been driven off the planet because their habitats became unsafe.
Those of us who attempt to reintroduce zoo-bred species that have gone extinct in the wild have one question at the top of our list:
Some people feel that watching scientists bring back the great auk and putting it back on a breeding colony would be very inspiring Zimmer told Livescience.
The great auk was the Northern hemisphere's version of the penguin. The large flightless birds went extinct in the mid-19th century.
Other species disappeared before scientists had a chance to study their remarkable biological abilities like the gastric brooding frog which vanished from Australia in the mid-1980s likely due to timber harvesting and the chytrid fungus.
This was not just any frog Mike Archer a paleontologist at the University of New south wales said during his talk at TEDXDEEXTINCTION which was broadcast via livestream.
These frogs had a unique mode of reproduction: The female swallowed fertilized eggs turned its stomach into a uterus
and gave birth to froglets through the mouth. No animal let alone a frog has been known to do this change one organ in the body into another Archer said.
He's using cloning methods to put gastric brooding frog nuclei into eggs of living Australian marsh frogs.
Archer announced today that his team has created already early-stage embryos of the extinct species forming hundreds of cells.
I think we're gonna have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again he said.
Diatoms are one of the most common types of phytoplankton and a major group of algae.
There's this idea that the early diatom was a small flagellate but what we're finding at the base of the diatom tree are things that are long and tubular much like the tube inside of a paper towel roll said Edward Theriot professor of molecular evolution at The University of Texas at Austin and director of its Texas Natural science
Theriot uses TACC to host a web portal that supports the research in the lab called Protist Central.
That ruled out poop pellets or pelican regurgitation as a possible source he said. There were no hints of layers.
and bird die offs. A canal breach created the Salton Sea in 1905. With no outlet and no water source except for farming run off the lake has been shrinking
Adding to the danger of the dry brush is the bark beetle over western forests which is killing scores of trees
#San diego Zoo Welcomes Season's 1st Condor Chick The San diego Zoo welcomed its first California condor chick of the hatching season on Feb 24 the zoo announced yesterday (March 11) as part of their breeding program
to help save the endangered species. The two-week-old condor dubbed Wesa is doing well
and has a healthy appetite eating up to 15 mice a day the zoo said in a statement.
Like other condors born at the zoo Wesa will eventually be released into the wild. Senior condor keeper Ron Webb has been caring for the baby bird with the help of a condor hand puppet.
The puppet is like a fancy glove Webb said in the statement. It covers our hands so the chick does not get any beneficial experiences from people.
 We want it to be a nice wild animal not relying on people for food.
Webb has also been monitoring the other condor eggs set to hatch this season to estimate how long before each chick pips
In a photo released by the zoo Webb is examining an egg on March 11 that he estimates will hatch in 21 days.
California condors are listed as critically endangered. When the zoo began its captive breeding program in the 1980s there were only 22 birds in the wild.
Since then the zoo has hatched 173 chicks and released 80 birds into the wild. There are now an estimated 400 wild birds.
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#Satellites Spy Beetle Attacks on Forests A new computer program detected a slow-motion decline and subsequent revival of forests in the Pacific Northwest in recent years.
But what was behind this mysterious pattern? Â It was as it turns out bugs said Robert Kennedy a remote sensing specialist at Boston University who designed the computer program inâ a NASA statement.
Kennedy's program called Landtrendr can detect minute changes in the health of forests by analyzing wavelengths of light given off by the landscape
and recorded in satellite images. Different types of vegetation reflect different wavelengths of light often in ways that the naked eye can't detect.
and seen in several areas through the Northwest was caused byâ mountain pine beetles. His program also detected a similar pattern of damage caused by the western spruce budworm.
Outbreaks of pine beetles have occurred in several areas according to the release including near Mount Hood in the 1980s an outbreak that peaked in 1992
Another outbreak near Mount Rainier lasted 10 years from its onset in 1994 until the insects killed all the trees
 Pine beetles still pose a huge threatâ to forests throughout the West. Kennedy's program also recognized a subtler decline of forests near these two mountains.
These insects eat the needles off of spruce trees This won't kill trees immediately but will if the insects return in following years NASA reported.
Landtrendr is still in development but has changed already the way the U s. Forest Service monitors ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest according to the NASA statement.
so that for example they could contain an insect outbreak before it causes too much damage. Reach Douglas Main atâ dmain@techmedianetwork. com. Follow him on Twitterâ@Douglas main. Follow Ouramazingplanet on Twitterâ@OAPLANET. We're also onâ Facebookâ andâ Google+e
or animals he thinks made the sounds. Paste them in the science notebook. Ask: oewhich sounds were louder?
</p><p>Birds can' t taste capsaicin the chemical that gives chili peppers their kick enabling birds to eat spicy peppers
and spread their seeds far and wide without being bothered by the irritant.</</p><p>American people didn'
The pigs'embryos were injected with a molecule from bioluminescent jellyfish that carries instructions to make green fluorescent protein or GFP.
This technique allows researchers to attach harmless glow-in-the-dark tags to specific proteins in animals.
and researchers have created previously glowing bunnies frogs and evenâ glow-in-the-dark cats in the name of science.
Study researcher Stefan Moisyadi a bioscientist from the University of Hawaii at Manoa explained in a statement that the GFP in the piglets is marker to show that we can take a gene that was not originally present in the animal
and now exists in it. Video footage of two of the piglets in the dark show that the gene is definitely present.
The researchers say the ultimate goal of their work is to figure out how to introduce foreign genes into larger animals that could result in more efficient treatments for disease.
For example October is a critical month for those that study birds as it's migration time.
(or band) migrating birds to monitor themand keep track of birds banded last season. Bird banding data is used to sleuth out reasons different bird species might be in peril.
Birds help reveal when there are problems in Earth's ecosystems from harmful toxins to the drivers of habitat loss for birds or their response to climate change.
Scientists rely on collective data from the past 50 years to paint a complete picture of birds On earth today.
Birds are migrating says Gwen Pearson an entomologist and science communicator. Crops are supposed to be harvested.
Biological (and geological and hydrological! life continues to happen all around us except now scientists are physically
and financially prohibited from studying it. We will have a big hole in our data this year.
me understand the importance of tracking birds during their yearly migration. She also wrote about the implications of the government shutdown for conservation and agricultural science in her column for Wired last Wednesday.
and branches in chimpanzee nests which are viewed as a feasible comparison for what a primitive human home might have been like.
Dr. Chris Kellogg who studies the microbiomes of deep-sea corals works at the United states Geological Survey (USGS). She's one of about 8500 scientists at the agency
The plan to build any kind of road through the Serengeti is controversial because of concerns about the road's impact on the many animals that migrate through the area.
These animals include more than 1 million wildebeest and zebra which make up one of the most amazing animal migrations on the planet.
Truckers currently have to take a road that circumvents Tanazania's Serengeti National park and Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve a long journey.
Quest for Survival: Incredible Animal Migrations International pressure from environmental groups helped force the Tanzanian government to scrap plans for a paved highway through the Serengeti in June 2011 according to the BBC.
But demand for a road is growing and many see construction as inevitable. A grand spectacle Speaking yesterday (May 14) at a conference on wildlife crime and poaching here at Rutgers University Leakey son of famed paleontologist and fossil hunters Louis and Mary Leakey
and himself a paleoanthropologist said building an elevated highway would allow animals to cross underneath.
It would be a grand spectacle to see animals migrating by underneath and signal Africa's commitment to wildlife Leakey said during the keynote speech he gave at the meeting.
While leading the Kenya Wildlife Service in 1989 Leakey came up with the idea of torching 12 tons of elephant tusks to bring attention to the widespread poaching of the animals for their tusks
and almost single-handedly suppressing elephant poaching for nearly two decades Ronald Clarke a Rutgers criminologist who helped organize the conference told Livescience.
and to address the underlying poverty that motivates people to kill and traffic animal products like rhino horns.
Rhino poaching is raging out of control and is worse than it has ever been.)
He also advocated building more fences around large reserves a suggestion that was met with some resistance by at least one ecologist present at the conference who questioned Leakey after his talk about the fence's ability to stop elephants.
Leakey noted that electrified fences were quite capable of stopping the large animals. In places where they've been installed he added sheep herders have come to rely on fences to protect their flock meaning they can help both people
and animals he said. Â Â The talk was received warmly by the audience a mixture of biologists criminologists conservationists and other curious students.
Dinosaurs Waggled Flashy Tails to Woo Mates Feathered dinosaurs might have used muscular tails to shake tail feathers
Although oviraptors were members of the meat-eating theropods making them relatives of such fearsome predators as T. rex
They were odd ducks strange dinosaurs said Persons who presented the study results at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting in November
Oviraptor tails were short but were made of many tailbones with many points between these vertebrae where they could flex.
Stunning Illustrations of Dinosaurs Their tails were not only very very flexible but quite muscular Persons said.
They could not only move them sinuously to strike a pose but also hold it to do a muscular dance with the tail.
Unusually at the very end of the tail in some oviraptors the last few vertebrae were fused actually together to become one solid ridged bladelike structure Persons said.
The only other kind of animal where you see that are modern-day birds where it's called a pygostyle
which serves as an anchor point for a big fan of tail feathers. Modern-day birds use pygostyles to help them fly
but oviraptors were not flying animals they had feathers but they didn't have big broad wings Persons said.
What else are used pygostyles for? Peacocks and turkeys use their tail feathers for courtship displays.
Past research has suggested that dinosaurs may have evolved first feathers for show not flight. Persons and his colleagues found that at least four known oviraptor species separated by 45 million years had pygostyles.
I think like peacocks oviraptors were strutting their stuff by shaking their tail feathers to show off Persons said.
Between the crested head and feathered-tail shaking oviraptors had a propensity for visual exhibitionism.
Although feathers on dinosaur forearms might have served as stabilizers that helped them steer that may not have been the case for any tail plumes.
Flightless birds such as ostriches and emus don't have big tail-feather fans and birds that do have big tail-feather fans such as peacocks
and turkeys don't try to use them to run at all but just keep them tucked in except
when fanned out for display. In the future Persons and his colleagues want to see if such tails were typically found in one sex or the other.
Maybe they were larger in males as we see in modern-day birds Persons said.
The problem there is that the tip of the tail is one of the rarest parts of a fossil skeleton to find
so it might be hard to discover evidence of these sexual differences. Persons and colleagues Philip Currie and Mark Norell detailed their findings in the Jan 4 issue of the journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
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