The fate of the worlds creatures is under threat from climate change. This is a fact that is a little like stating the obvious these days, however there is now evidence to suggest that their odds of survival could now be even shorter thanks to studies into the last Ice Age. The theory, which it must be stressed it still a theory, is that when the temperatures rise, the slower-moving animals – particularly amphibians – could become extinct because they cannot out run the changing conditions and reach suitable new territory. 

Research into the area that today forms Canada and Northern Europe shows that the slower the animal, the more likely it was to become extinct. Cold-blooded animals stood less chance than those that could run or fly away because it was harder to escape from the retreating ice. The results go on to suggest that the flatter the landscape – i.e. Denmark – the further the animals have to travel to survive, meaning more animals die out uniform landscapes and they subsequently see less endemic animals. In areas like Northern America, the indigenous Pika was able to hold on because all it had to do was climb the mountain. Areas considered to be “high velocity” – in other words those that saw high speed mass migrations – more than likely saw animals relocate by 100m a year, eventually leaving the area void of native life.

So what do these finding mean in terms of predicting the future? From these studies scientists predict that similar patterns will be seen with the increase in climate change, and, to make matters worse, this time the damage could be even more severe. With the temperatures rising at a greater rate than before, the consequence could be that the animals will have to travel even further in order to reach areas of safety. The chance of this happening is decreased further by the lack of freedom of movement available to creatures in the modern world. The worst case scenario is that when the time comes for migration, there will be nowhere to migrate. Survival will become impossible in the changing landscape and rates of extinction will soar to new levels. If the theories are correct, time is running out for these animals.

Christian Tryon, an archaeologist says that the discovered stone tools in Arabian Peninsula lack personality. He also said that none of the tools could be identified as African humans’ craftsmanship and it could have been made by any hominids. In the year 2010, Jeffrey Rose who is an archaeologist discovered tools in Oman which were identified as African craftsmanship which convinced Christian Tryon.

Jeffrey Rose says that you can identify the tools’ craftsmanship only when you understand the language of the tools. He also says that since everything gets eroded in a desert climate of Arabia and the only thing that stays is stone, the tools were made of stone. Several archaeologists under Jeffrey Rose discovered around 800 artefacts from Dhofar mountains’ riverbeds in the region of southern Oman. They believe that the stone tools were made from a rock chart with approximately 7 deliberate strikes with triangular blades. Jeffrey Rose identified this toolmaking as Nubian middle stone age which is found only in the region of northeast Africa and never beyond the Nile valley. A scientific journal named Plos One also reports that optically stimulated luminescence dating method showed that the stone tools were 106,000 years old by measuring the radiation in the mineral.

Even though other scientists do not agree completely, the one thing they agree is that the Oman tools show similarity to northeast African tools. Philip van Peer who is an archaeologist said that he is very much excited about this discovery. He said that the Arabian tools are almost more complex than Nubian tools. He said that this proves that the migration took place through the southern route. John Shea who is a paleoanthropologist also says that he is impressive about this study since Jeffrey Rose has been working in very difficult places to find the link between Africa and Arabia. Shea says that the convincing evidence for connection between Oman and Sudan is that they shaped their tools similarly, mainly chipping process. He also says that researches should find fossils of human nearby to prove Rose’s theory.

The question is if the humans lived in southern Arabia before 106,000 years, where did they go after that. As archaeologists describe human population dying out is a failed expansion. They also doubt whether they migrated through the northern route to explore the world. If the migration through northern route is proved, then it questions whether the humans went out of Africa 80,000 years ago. Rose suggests that everyone should start thinking about out of Arabia instead of out of Africa. To the question why the early humans entered Arabian Peninsula, Rose suggests that they might have gone due to curiosity.

Draw each circle 15 cm from the last one.

Number the circles starting with the outside one and moving inwards.

This throw is inside the 3, 2 and 1 circles.

Try throwing while standing on one leg, or with your eyes closed.

• Large concrete area
• Chalk
• Hacky-sack or small bean bag for throwing
• Some friends to play with
• Tape measure (optional)

To make the field

1. Draw five circles, one inside the other, on the concrete with chalk. They should all have the same centre point, and their diameters (widths) should be 30 cm, 60 cm, 90 cm, 120 cm and 150 cm.
2. Number the circles, with the largest circle numbered 1, the next largest 2, and so on. The smallest circle is numbered 5.

How to play

1. This game has several rounds, and each player has a go being first in a round.
2. Each round, the first player chooses a special way to throw the hacky sack (say over the head, or after spinning on the spot) and a place to throw from.
3. Starting with the first player, every player attempts to throw the hacky-sack onto the target in the special way.
4. Before the throw, each player must choose the target they are aiming for. They call out a number from 1-5.
5. If the hacky-sack lands inside the circle they called out, or a smaller circle, they made the shot! That player gets the points for the circle they called out (not the one the hack-sack landed in). If the hacky-sack landed outside the circle they called out, they score no points.
6. Once everyone has had a go at choosing the shot, players add up their points. The player with the highest score wins!

What’s happening?

This activity is all about estimating errors. If the players could always get the hacky-sack to hit the middle of the target, the game wouldn’t be any fun. If you make the throws hard enough, people won’t always hit the middle of the target and guessing the right circle becomes very important.

If you choose the ‘1’ circle all the time, you’ll get points on more rounds, but you’ll only get one point each time you succeed. If you pick the ‘5’ all the time, then you probably won’t get points very often, but when you do, it will be lots of points.

A good strategy is to match your prediction with how easy you think the shot is. If you think the shot is easy, then choose a high value target. You’ve got a good chance at getting lots of points. If you think the shot is hard, then choose a big target. That way you’ve got a better chance of getting at least something.

Applications

In many sports, players have to make the choice between making an easy shot for fewer points, or trying for a harder shot worth more. For example, in rugby league, a penalty can be taken as a kick for goal worth two points, or the team can tap the ball and go for a try worth four or even six points.

A team that is behind may be more likely to try for risky shots worth more points. On the other hand, if a team only needs a few points to secure their lead, they may choose to take low scoring, safe shots. Both of these actions have more pronounced effects at the end of the game, where there won’t be many more opportunities to change the final result.

Being good at throwing is very important in this game. If you want a game where guessing is more important than throwing, you could try this variant:

1. Before each player makes their throw, every other person writes down which circle they think the hacky-sack will end up in.
2. The throwing player doesn’t make a prediction.
3. The thrower scores points for the smallest circle they hit.
4. Everyone else scores points if their guess was right.

You could also try exchanging the hacky-sack for Velcro darts or any other game that uses a bull’s-eye target.

Scientists could try going in and counting the bats, but the bats don’t like being disturbed and could be hurt. Also, the cave is filled with toxic spores produced by a fungus that lives in bat poo.

Dr Doug Mills tried to count each bat as it flew out of the cave to hunt. He found it impossible to count them this way – they were leaving too fast and he couldn’t keep up.

Doug then used an infra-red video camera and computer software to record and count the bats leaving the cave. But Doug wasn’t sure whether the camera and the software counted the bats correctly.

To check the results from the computer, Doug played back the video in slow motion and counted the bats individually. It took him 15 hours to count the bats in just one and a half hours of video! He checked several nights’ worth of video and worked out that the computer counted a similar number of bats to his own counts.

Doug also wanted to find out how good he was at counting bats. He counted the bats in one video several times over and compared the numbers he got. He didn’t always get the same number, but they were very close, so he was probably quite accurate with his counting.

When he put all these bits of information together, he had an idea of how accurate the computer was at counting bats. Using this information, Doug can now count bats much more easily. And importantly, he knows when a change in bat numbers might just be a miscount, and when it’s big enough to worry about.

It has often been speculated as to how people sense and feel such bugs that are so tiny and microscopic on their bodies. A research study has been conducted in an attempt to answer this question. In the study, 19 volunteers were recruited. The volunteers that were used had different amounts of hair on their bodies, and each was asked to shave one of their arms. The subjects were then instructed to look away while bedbugs were released onto both their arms. The volunteers were asked to press a button upon immediately feeling something crawling on their arms.

The results of the study were reported online in Biology Letters. The study found that the participants, particularly the male participants, who had more hair follicles per square inch of their skin and who had longer body hairs, were several seconds faster at detecting bugs on their unshaven arms than participants with less hair follicles. On the other hand, it was found that all individuals took a while to feel bugs on their shaved arms. The researchers concluded that this observation probably explains why humans still have hair despite it being no longer necessary for keeping warm. The study showed that hairs on our body actually help us to sense objects and to even detect microscopic bedbugs.

NASA’s twin GRAIL spacecraft now together in lunar orbit is very useful to scientists. This Science mission of GRAIL will be monitoring these spacecraft orbitting the lunar in a particular arrangement and the radio signals transmitting between them can be very helpful to accurately measure their distance from time to time. The changes in the distance of two spacecraft due to difference in gravity as they pass over mountains and craters on the lunar surface can be analysed by scientists in order to understand the internal structure and thereby the evolution of Earth and the rocky neigbors in the solar system. Moreover, this will enable scientists to create high-resolution pictures of the lunar’s surface.

The MoonKAM (Moon Knowledge Acquired by Middle School students) project necessitates all of the GRAIL spacecraft to transport a small camera along with them. This can help a lot of students from fifth to eighth grade to point out areas in the lunar surface and get their snapshots back. These snapshots will be sent back by the GRAIL Satellite and will be very useful for academic purpose. As this is the case, the GRAIL spacecraft can have new names due to the students contest and its results might be announced this month.

Research in 1988 showed that the Rhesus monkey could understand the concept of an “ordinal number”. Given two sets of any object numbering 1 to 9, the Rhesus monkeys were able to, for example, place the objects in ascending order of numbers. Damien Scarf, the lead author of this study on pigeons is also the comparative psychologist at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand. He confirms that such abilities of numerical reasoning were found across all species of primates, but in a word of caution he also notes that this ability though observed significantly in primates has never been disproved in non primates.

Damien Scarf spent almost a year training a set of three pigeons to set in order three sets of objects. Each set consisted of one to three objects and his colleagues put a simple test of order in front of the three pigeons on a regular basis. The objects were displayed on a computer screen and the pigeons were rewarded with food if they placed the sets of different objects correctly in ascending order of numbers. Regardless of the shapes, the pigeons were able to do this with ease. Though they were trained with only three sets of objects, the pigeons still managed to place the objects in order when presented with a larger number of sets with different shapes.

This is proof that pigeons and primates may share a similar neural mechanism that lets them accomplish these tasks. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution and the consequent diverse species that have resulted from it gave completely different brain structures and organization to different creatures, but yet all species studied seem to solve a problem of numerical reasoning in a similar way. This ability is thought to be common amongst animals, though only detailed studies and testing can prove such abilities in other animal species.

Well documented research work gives us correct and proper information regarding all aspects of life; similarly, research done on seabirds and their breeding habits have startling results. Improper and uncontrolled fishing is leaving less of the fish in the sea for the seabirds to forage and this is adversely affecting their breeding capacity. It has been found that fewer eggs are laid when there is less small fish for the seabirds to dive and catch. 

The research was conducted by Philippe Cury of the Institute of Research for Development in Sete, France and other research workers from different parts of the world. The research paper stressed on the relation between availability of small fish and number of eggs. As an example, the Atlantic puffin laid a record number of fewer eggs during the 1960s when the herring was fished indiscriminately in the Norwegian Sea.

Cited as “the most important papers to be published in some time.” By Dee Boersma of the University of Washington in Seattle, the researchers worked hard on seven seabird species from seven different ecosystems to prove their findings. Their work covered a span of fifteen to forty seven years and always came up with the same results!

The research also points out that a number of seabirds lose their lives when they get caught in the fisherman’s’ nets or get stuck in the hooks. Fisheries may do well to wake up to this call and manage their fishing business in a more professional manner and also leave plenty of this food in the sea for the seabirds. This becomes all the more important if we do not wish to add the colorful seabirds in the list of extinct species.

The project combines the expertise of scientists in a number of different specialties. An important part of the research involves developing better computer models of cell behavior. To accomplish this task, biologists are joined by experts in computer science and informatics in the lab.

The researchers have already successfully programmed individual cells to complete tasks. The next step is to do the same with more complex organisms. Currently, the research is focused on e.coli bacteria.

The multi-disciplinary research is being conducted at the University of Nottingham, under the leadership of Professor Natalio Krasnogor, head of the Interdisciplinary Computing and Complex Systems Research Group.

Professor Krasnogor has been granted a leadership fellowship worth more than £1 million by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to fund the project. The scientific team in Nottingham is being assisted by a number of colleges from universities in the US, Scotland, Israel and Spain.

Professor Krasnogor describes the goal of the project as creating “a basic operating system for a biological cell.” He hopes that in the near future we will be able to compile, store and execute programs in cells.

This research allows scientists to quickly alter the behavior of biological systems without having to start from scratch every time. One of the benefits of re-programmable cells is to accelerate biological research. An accelerated schedule could lead to new areas of study as well as practical applications.

Scientists are hopeful that re-programmable cells could revolutionize a number of areas of study and help solve some important global problems.

For instance, organisms could be programmed to help reduce and remove pollution. They could be designed to counteract some of the negative environmental effects of using fossil fuels by capturing excess carbon. Heavy metals and other pollutants could be removed from vital water sources.

Medicine is another field that could clearly benefit from re-programmable cell technology. Easily tailored cells could allow doctors to better serve the needs of individual patients by enabling better drug delivery methods and treatments with reduced side effects. There is even a chance that new organs could be grown for transplant patients.

The fact that the mummy still had its baby teeth (with adult teeth coming in) and its long bones were not yet fully developed at the time of its death, helped experts date the child’s age to somewhere between 7 and nine years old.

Experts also noted that either the embalmers did not do a good job of preserving the body or it was not immediately treated after death. One hypothesis for the second reason might be that the child died during an epidemic, resulting in an overload for the embalmers over a short time period.
However, despite all the comprehensive modern testing and research, the mummy child has kept some of its secrets. There is still no conclusive evidence to date that suggests the child’s sex or cause of death.