#John Steinbeck On Why'Camping Is For The Birds'Earlier this month we published John Steinbeck's 1966 letter to the editor of Popular Science in
In the essay below titled Camping Is For The Birds Steinbeck contrasts the idyllic imagery of motorhome advertisements (A glowing wife is cooking something delicious
I have for stepping on a butterfly I know is going to lay the eggs that make the worms that eat up my cabbages.
The present American passion for moving about in motorized caravans is surely interesting as an ethnic development and to the gadget manufacturers highly profitable and as far as
We followed the food supply living in caves brush piles hollow trees or under the dried skins of animals.
and domesticate food animals had need we or reason to build a house and then a hamlet and then a city;
Right away your dog tangles with the dog next door and next door is so next that you can't get out of your car.
Then you may discover that ants have to work hard for a living too and before long that chlorophyl is a definite soporific.
If it does making beef from stem cells could be an environmentally friendly alternative to you know killing animals for food.
It also crunches some numbers on how much this animal-free beef would cost. Growing meat in lab is resource-intense and expensive it turns out.
Like the techniques that made last year's burger bioengineer Johannes Tramper's proposed method starts with a small number of stem cells taken from an animal.
In fact although one of the benefits of lab-grown meat is that it's not supposed to harm any animals for now growth medium requires animal products to make.
but that it's not a guaranteed solution to the problems of world's appetite for animals.
or even whole insects Tramper wrote to Popular Science in an email. Beyond price there's one comparison many have missed says a Texas-based science communicator who goes by the name Dr. Ricky.
me that one of the definitive diagnostics of the human animal besides being the key to his success in survival
With the domestication of animals the roving continued but only following the grass. With the beginning of agriculture the crops stood still
But over the years by selection the animals changed and the cereals changed. The grains we use today have little resemblance to their ancestor seeds
and the animals could not be recognized by their early progenitors. Man has changed the face of the earth and the inhabitants thereof with the possible exception of himself.
We peck like sandpipers along the edges for the small treasures the restless waves wash up.
Even the killer whale herds the sperm whales and kills them only when it needs food but we have wiped out some species entirely.
More important in the near future the plankton the basic reservoir of the world's food live in the sea.
We have wiped out the animal predators that once decimated embattled families. We are by way of defeating the micro-enemies
We peck like sandpipers along the edges for the small treasures the restless waves wash up.
which put down a drill string to the earth's crust under 18000 feet of water near Guadalupe Island off the west coast of Mexico.
and improve the breeds of animals because we are shortly going to need them. And we must mine the minerals refine the chemicals to our use.
scalding-hot liquid to start with then a feverish but perfringens friendly 100 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit for the starter sponge and dough.
and baking soda into a batter-like sponge and keep it warm for a few more hours until it too swells with bubbles.
He tested these bread strains on guinea pigs and found that they didn't cause gangrene.
To make the sponge: 1 t baking soda 1 C water warmed to 120ãf the starter 2 C all-purpose flouradd the soda
1 t salt the sponge 3 to 4 C all-purpose flour1. Stir salt into sponge then knead in enough flour to make a resilient dough.
Divide the dough between 2 greased loaf pans and allow to rise in a warm place until the volume has increased significantly 2 to 6 hours. 2. Preheat oven to 425ãf.
They could try to cultivate insects guinea pigs or other small animals but caring for these would add to their already enormous workload.
Small-scale agriculture is notoriously inefficient Hunter warns. I worry about the colonists underestimating the amount of human capital needed to grow
In recent years it has spread across Asia and Australia devastating plants there that bear the signature yellow supermarket fruit.
or Jordan or Mozambique hen it is possible it is already in Latin america. Only time will tell. n
#'Chameleon'Vine Looks like Whatever Tree It Climbschameleons aren t the only species that excel at mimicry as biology professor Ernesto Gianoli discovered in Chile s temperate rainforests.
Researchers are reporting that a baboon is still alive after receiving a heart transplanted from a pig The Telegraph reports.
The baboon has lived with the heart in its abdomen for more than a year. Its longevity is a milestone.
Previously when researchers tried to transplant pig hearts into primates the primates'bodies would reject the transplants within six months The Telegraph reports.
which conducted the baboon study. Those who are waiting can use mechanical devices but those aren't perfect the institute says.
It seems pig hearts are just a little too foreign for primate bodies to accept easily however.
In previous studies the hearts would trigger a massive immune response in the primates they were transplanted into.
To make hearts that baboons nd in the future humans on't reject the National Heart Lung
The researchers also gave their baboons drugs to suppress their immune systems. Human patients take immunosuppressant drugs
when it tried other drug regimens their baboons died in less than a year. Baboons who received hearts from un-genetically modified pigs rejected the hearts within a day.
Now that the team has shown pig hearts are able to hang around inside primates safely the next step will be to actually replace baboons'hearts with pig hearts The Telegraph reports.
The baboon in this study has a pig heart in its body alongside its own heart
which is doing all the work. This baboon study hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal yet
but its authors presented it yesterday at the annual meeting of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery.
#Scientists Rank World's Most'Evolutionarily Distinct'Birdsis a bird more worth saving from extinction if it is evolutionarily unique as well as physically rare?
That's one challenging question raised by newly published research that factors together the distinct evolutionary history of the world's bird species with how healthy their population numbers
Arne Mooers a professor of biodiversity at Canada's Simon Fraser University and colleagues worked for seven years to assess how much evolutionary history a specific bird represents compared to other bird species currently alive.
In order to do it the team developed an evolutionary tree containing all 9993 known bird species says Mooers
They then ranked the birds by how much of that work each accounted for. The species that top the list go back furthest in evolutionary history and share that history with few or no living relatives.
The title of most evolutionarily distinct goes to the oilbird a Central and South american species that alone accounts for 80 million years of avian evolutionary history Mooers says.
Its name derives from the layers of fat on oilbird chicks which have historically been rendered for use as torches.
The average grackle or chickadee by comparison has so many close relations that they all share the same evolutionary effort.
The research also sets evolutionary distinctness against the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List ranking the 575 bird species considered threatened
or endangered on that list by their unique evolutionary histories. The Giant Ibis tops the list by this reckoning followed by the Kagu the New Caledonian Owlet-nightjar the Plains-wanderer and the California condor.
This information could help conservationists natural resource managers and policy-makers set priorities says Mooers when trying to figure out how to allocate resources to saving endangered bird species. The team has created also a compound metric that sets a bird's evolutionary uniqueness against how widely it can be found in the world.
Some species may be distinct but they may be spread over a very large range like the osprey
which has the widest range of any bird in the world says Mooers. Or you could have something like a kiwi or a kakapo which only lives in one place.
You can think of that distinctness being concentrated in a very small place for that species. The project took seven years to complete in part
because when it started there was no single overarching analysis or evolutionary tree of bird evolution.
But there is no single perfect tree of birds. So we had to do this over we had to create many millions of possible trees
The project has already put the research to work with its list of Top 100 EDGE Birds that are at risk of extinction.
Click here for a gallery of some of the world's most evolutionarily unique birds including some of the most endangered e
and how trees and birds react. Scienceinsider Nature News
#Has The Reintroduction Of Wolves Really Saved Yellowstone? The story goes something like this: Once upon a time we exterminated the wolves from the Rocky mountain West including the part that would become Yellowstone national park.
We thought this was a good idea because wolves frightened us and also because they ate the domestic livestock we liked a lot more.
But then interest in environmental conservation took hold. Scientists discovered that without wolves present in Yellowstone to hunt
and kill prey the elk population grew so large it ate up all the young willow trees until there were none.
This affected the habitat of many other animals and plants in harmful ways and the ecosystem became unbalanced.
Or as science puts it we caused a harmful top-down trophic cascade by removing an apex predator the wolf from the food web.
It followed that returning the apex predator might right that balance; and field biologists began to find some evidence for this idea even as popular support increased for bringing wolves back.
So with conservation ethics and ecological science in pretty good alignment we reintroduced the wolves to Yellowstone where today they scare away the hungry elk herds from the tasty young willows.
Thanks to the wolf balance has been restored. Or not? Earlier in the week field biologist Arthur Middleton got a big reaction from readers
when he asked Is the wolf a real American hero? in the opinion pages of The New york times. This story that wolves fixed a broken Yellowstone by killing and frightening elk is one of ecology s most famous he wrote.
But there is a problem with the story: It s not true. Animated discussion ensued in the comments
(which The New york times actively curates for signal over noise) with some readers protesting that the wolves have been crucial to Yellowstone's ecological revival.
Inside Yellowstone hich is where the writer is talking about even though his research was done outside Yellowstone lk are
what wolves eat commented well-known conservationist Carl Safina. As a Phd ecologist myself it's hard to see how 60%fewer elk could affect vegetation as much as before.
Journalist Emma Marris who recently wrote about wolf/ecosystem science for the journal Nature finds that Middleton's stance aligns with a growing body of evidence.
It's an evolving understanding that started out with a really beautiful and simple story
and is just getting more complex says Marris author of the book Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World.
There's legitimate scientific disagreement here. But I think it can't be denied that the beauty of that story plays a role in how much attention it gets.
This shifts our understanding of apex predators as keystone species whose presence makes or breaks a healthy ecosystem.
Every population of wolves has a different interesting story going on with them says Marris.''In some places there are not enough of them in some places people are concerned there are too many.
At Yellowstone despite the re-introduction of wolves the willows are not actually recovering as well as was hoped.
One reason Marris found may be that wolves don't actually scare elk away from their preferred feeding areas as earlier research suggested they might.
When elk are really hungry they're going to take their chances with the wolves Marris says.
Another reason for poor willow recovery may be that the wolves came back to Yellowstone too late to affect the fate of another animal population:
the beavers. Elk populations were really high while the wolves were gone says Marris. That was caused by the absence of wolves but also presumably by human management decisions climate and other factors.
Elks and beavers competed for the same food: willow. The elks won beaver numbers dropped
and so did the extent of marshy habitat. Without beaver dams creating willow-friendly environments Marris says the willows can't recover.
In reporting her article Marris learned that beyond the pages of scientific journals the gaps between researchers who do
and don't support the apex predator theory are really fairly narrow. Generally it's accepted that there is a lot more involved in balancing an ecosystem.
But some still believe carnivores are somewhat special in their top-down effects on the ecosystem she says.
Wolves generate a lot of emotion as well as attention because they've become a bell-weather for the fate of wilderness.
Everywhere wolves exist says Marris they tell stories about how people and wild things make peace
or don't make peace in the 21st century. What's most at risk as we debate the role of wolves in the ecosystem seems to be our hope for a really straightforward story that explains
what's going on around us x
#IBM's Watson Made Me A Kebabyou've probably heard of Watson IBM's super-intelligent supercomputer that dominated on Jeopardy!
not too long ago. Turns out he's not a bad cook either. At South By Southwest IBM has set up a food truck staffed with chefs from the Institute of Culinary Education who are whipping up (strange uncanny surprisingly tasty) daily recipes dreamed up by the machine.
Here's the background. For about two years IBM has been working on a way to harness Watson's data-driven computing into more creative fields--the kinds of things where unlike a game show there's no one right answer.
To add to the environmental insults meat animals are fed about 1 billion metric tons a year of the same cereal grains that humans consume increasing the pressure on supplies of food and fresh water.
But globally more and more people are turning to farmed animals for dietary protein. Meat production is on track to more than double by 2050.
In response an international research team suggests eight ways to make ruminant agriculture aising cows goats sheep buffalo camels llamas reindeer and yaks for meat and dairy nvironmentally sustainable.
With around 70 percent of cereal grains consumed in developed countries going to feed animals and around one-third of the world's grain supply worldwide the most important step may be feeding animals less human food.
Far from being incompatible the researchers emphasize that C rop and livestock farming complement each other.
Animals pull ploughs and carts and their manure fertilizes crops which supply postharvest residues to livestock.
and other ruminants should get as much food as possible from sources humans cannot consume. These include grazing fodders like hay
It's how ruminants are supposed to eat judging from the fact that they naturally have forestomachs that can break down fibrous plant matter into nutritious calories
We need to be able to use ruminants in the way that they evolved. Maximize grazing and then using byproducts as well from other industries says co-author Michael Lee of Bristol University in a podcast that accompanies the article.
Sometimes we get dead animals he says. We get everything. He plucks out a black fragment that looks like plastic.
I caught the plastics bug. Biddle later got a Ph d. in polymer science and engineering at Case Western Reserve University.
Another photo depicts a dead albatross on Midway Island in the Pacific its open stomach revealing hundreds of brightly colored plastic bits.
If that unassuming building on a street corner in Shoreditch is actually a trap for hundreds of tons of carbon imagine an entire city of Stadthauses.
#Wolf Decline Could End World's Longest Predator-Prey Studymoose eat balsam fir trees. When the moose population expands unchecked by predation fewer fir seedlings can grow large enough to escape into the canopy above the reach of moose
and reproduce. There is already a missing generation of trees from between about 1910 when the moose arrived on the island
and 1940 when the wolves came. Most of Isle Royale s balsam firs are thus either older than 100 years and near the end of their lives or young and short enough to be browsed to death.
In other words wolves are vital for the proper function of the ecosystem as we know it (something that has been shown over and over again
whether the top predator is wolves lions or sharks). But there's a problem: the wolves are in trouble.
So far this year only 10 have been counted in aerial surveys. This is primarily because the population has suffered from inbreeding being isolated from other groups of wolves on the mainland.
The last outside wolf to arrive was a male who came via an ice bridge in 1997 providing a much-needed boost of genetic diversity siring 34 pups.
For the second time since 1997 a 15-mile ice bridge has formed once again connecting the island with land
and offering a stray wolf or wolves a chance to reach the island or to allow the wolves on the island to wander off.
But nobody knows what will happen. The decline of Isle Royale's wolves has initiated a debate among scientists--what to do?
Should wolves be imported to add much-needed genetic diversity? Or should wolves just be allowed to die out?
Many say that a watch and wait policy is the best for now--perhaps a wolf
or two will arrive naturally and add some diversity to the island. But if that doesn't happen scientists are divided on what to do.
Some suggest letting nature take its course. However it's not like wolves haven't been impacted by humans even on the island.
Dozens were killed by a virus linked to domestic dogs in the 1980s for example and in 2012 three wolves were found dead in an abandoned mine pit.
To learn more about the controversy and the details of the iconic study read the story at Nature.
And for a firsthand story of one scientist's work on the island check out this long feature at the Lansing State Journal. u
#Letters From Charles Darwinthese letters originally appeared in the March 1903 issue of Popular Science.
The Hitherto Unpublished Letters of Charles darwin were compiled and edited by Darwin's son Francis Darwin and The british botanist Albert Charles Seward.
If 1000 pigeons were bred together in a cage for 10000 years their number not being allowed to increase by chance killing then from mutual intercrossing no varieties would arise;
but if each pigeon were a self-fertilising hermaphrodite a multitude of varieties would arise.
Q. E d. If the number of 1000 pigeons were prevented increasing not by chance killing but by say all the shorter-beaked birds being killed then the whole body would come to have longer beaks.
Do you agree? Thirdly if 1000 pigeons were kept in a hot country and another 1000 in a cold country and fed on different food and confined in different-size aviary
and kept constant in number by chance killing then I should expect as rather probable that after 10000 years the two bodies would differ slightly in size colour and perhaps other trifling characters;
this I should call the direct action of physical conditions. By this action I wish to imply that the innate vital forces are led somehow to act rather differently in the two cases
I cannot even grapple with the idea even with races of dogs cattle pigeons or fowls;
I see plainly that Welwitschia will be a case of Barnacles. I have another plant to beg
I hear has been lecturing on birds; and admits that all have descended from one and advances as his own idea that the oceanic wingless birds have lost their wings by gradual disuse.
He never alludes to me or only with bitter sneers and coupled with Buffon and the Vestiges.
It bears on design that endless question. Good night good night! Read the rest of the letters in the March 1903 issue of Popular Science magazine c
#Chickens Wear Prosthetic Dinosaur Tails, For Sciencethe humble chicken is distantly related to the T. rex.
but there being few dinosaurs available stuck a prosthetic tail on the creatures'fowl analog raising them from birth to adapt for walking in a more dinosaur-like way.
These results indicate a shift from the standard bird knee-driven bipedal locomotion to a more hip-driven locomotion typical of crocodilians (the only other extant archosaur group) mammals
and hypothetically bipedal non-avian dinosaurs the researchers write in the study. So although we don't quite have any dinosaurs to double check the scientists are pretty sure this is a fair representation of how dinos strolled.
One step closer to a Jurassic park petting zoo. Onward science. PLOS ONE via io9 E
When these chunks of genetic material enter the rootworm perhaps after being sprayed onto the crop the animal reacts to this RNA snippet as it would an invading virus. This prompts a response that attacks and silences the corresponding gene in the host's own DNA.
but applying it to fight pests is a recent development. The EPA met on Tuesday (Jan 28) to discuss safety issues regarding the technique
Monsanto has applied for regulatory approval of corn that is genetically engineered to use RNAI as the approach is called for short to kill the western corn rootworm one of the costliest of agricultural pests.
at the agency s conference center in Arlington Va. There are concerns that RNAI could kill good species closely related to the target pest have health effects on humans or other unknown consquences.
#Rise Of The Insect Dronesas they sat nursing their beers Guiler and Vaneck watched as a fly appeared to slam into a window.
Instead of breaking apart on contact as their drones did bounced the insect off the glass and recovered.
Then it did it again. It was an epiphany says Vaneck who works for the Massachusetts research and development company Physical sciences Inc. PSI.
But until recently inventors lacked the aerodynamics expertise to turn diagrams into mechanical versions of something as quotidian as a fly or a bee.
And engineers have developed the first flying insect-inspired vehicles opening the door to an entirely new class of machine:
More likely they will look like the animals around you. Although insects and their relatives represent roughly 80 percent of the world s animal species ome 900000 known types he mechanics of their flight had long been an enigma.
Traditional fixed-wing aircraft rely on a steady flow of air over the wings. The same is true of helicopters and rotors.
But as the wings of insects flap back and forth the air around them is constantly changing.
And the stubby wings of bees and other insects lift far more weight than can be explained using conventional steady-state aerodynamics principles.
Engineers have developed the first insect-inspired vehicles opening the door to an entirely new class of machine:
In the 1970s Torkel Weis-Fogh a Danish zoologist at the University of Cambridge used high-speed photography to analyze the exact wing motions of hovering insects and compare them to the insects morphological features.
From this he formulated a general theory of insect flight which included what he called the clap-and-fling effect.
When insect wings clap together and then peel apart between the up and down strokes the motion flings air away
This vortex creates the force necessary to lift the insect between wing flaps. Similar vortices might be generated by the angle
Charles Ellington a Cambridge zoologist and former Weis-Fogh student built a robotic wing that could precisely mimic the movements of a hawk moth.
At the University of California at Berkeley neurobiologist Michael Dickinson built a robotic fruit-fly wing that likewise mimicked a fly s natural motion
Dickinson and electrical engineer Ron Fearing won a $2. 5-million DARPA grant in 1998 to apply these principles to a fly-size robot.
Flies have really complex wing trajectories. There are a whole bunch of subtle things that happen Wood says.
he had built a gyroscope that could mimic the sensors insects use to detect body rotation;
What remained was to put it all together into a working insect-size flying machine. On a freezing day in 2006 Wood arrived at his Oxford street laboratory at Harvard.
On the workbench sat a 60-milligram robot with a three-centimeter wingspan and a thorax roughly the size of a housefly.
and demonstrating for the first time stable hovering and controlled flight maneuvers in an insect-scale vehicle. I didn t end up sleeping the rest of that night Wood says.
In 2011 California-based Aerovironment demoed its Nano Hummingbird. The aircraft has a 16.5-centimeter wingspan;
Techject a company that spun off from work done at the Georgia Institute of technology recently unveiled a robotic dragonfly with a six-inch wingspan.
The Techject Dragonfly takes advantage of an aerodynamics principle called resonance. When wings flap at their most efficient frequency hich happens
The audible result is the hum of a hummingbird or buzz of a bee says Jayant Ratti Techject s president.
After observing the fly at the bar the two engineers searched for someone with experience replicating insect flight.
By closely observing the positions of the flies body parts they could measure the exact flip and twist of wings and legs.
I thought the fly would tumble a bit and lose a lot of altitude Vaneck says. But the fly recovery was elegant.
Just before the moment of impact the fly flew at an angle that ensured its legs touched the glass first.
Every time the fly slammed into the window it reflexively surrendered to the crash momentum and fell.
Then its wings flapped again propelling the insect into a controlled hover. It can hit
in order to mimic the alternating wing speed that provides four-winged insects with exceptional control. When the vehicle is blown out of position
Unlike the much larger Instanteye Nano Hummingbird and Dragonfly drones Robobees must be connected to an external power source.
But what we discovered was flapping-wing birds and insects are suited perfectly for environments where you have dynamic obstructions he trees are moving the branches are moving.
If they do get stuck by their very motion they get unstuck. They kind of beat their way through.
Today he runs a lab at the University of Washington and works with advanced imaging systems to study insect flight.
Fifteen years ago the flies looked like little fuzzy UFOS he says. Now the biologists use cameras that can run at 7500 frames per second significantly higher than what was once available to researchers and that work in infrared light.
he s using electrodes to record the activity of neurons in insects brains. He links them to a flight-simulation system and presents them with visual stimuli picture of a predator for instance hat cause them to react.
We can begin to learn how neurons in the brain are processing information in flight and how sensory information is transformed into action Dickinson says.
which animals keep themselves in the air. Now we are going beyond that to understand how flies steer and maneuver.
The british Forces have begun recently using a microdrone a hand-launched helicopter called the Black Hornet to scout for insurgents in Afghanistan.
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