Elephant banging on a car and attacking tourists – YouTube

via Elephant banging on a car and attacking tourists – YouTube.

Tran Phuong

Published on 14 Jul 2015

This is the incredible moment three abused circus elephants went on the rampage in a Danish seaside town, smashing up a car and terrorising tourists.
Footage of the incident was filmed in Karrebæksminde, where the animals named Lara, Jenny and Jungla were being led down to the water to cool off after a hard day performing.
When it was time to leave the water the animals became restless, prompting one of the circus employees to beat the animal.
Rather than calming the three animals down, it only led to them becoming even more agitated, escaping their handlers and rampaging through the seaside town – smashing and lifting cars with their trunks and chasing terrified holidaymakers.

• Category

  • News & Politics

• Licence

  • Standard YouTube Licence

 

Why are saiga antelope dying in record numbers? | MNN – Mother Nature Network

via Why are saiga antelope dying in record numbers? | MNN – Mother Nature Network.

Scientists race to identify the cause of the mystery die-off, as half of the species’ population perishes within a matter of weeks.

By: Bryan Nelson – Tue, Jun 02, 2015

The saiga is perhaps most recognizable for its unique, elephant-like nose. (Photo: Saiga Conservation Alliance)

The saiga antelope, an ice age relic, once roamed alongside woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. Today, the population of this ancient species is in collapse. In just a 15-year period, their numbers have dropped by 95 percent, which represents the sharpest collapse for a mammal species ever recorded. Poaching and habitat loss are historically the main culprits, but over the last several years a new scourge has arrived: a mysterious disease that has wiped out more than 120,000 saiga in a matter of weeks, nearly half of the remaining worldwide population, reports Nature.

It’s difficult to comprehend the loss that this species has suffered in such a short time. “Apocalyptic” is not too strong a word.

“I’m flustered looking for words here,” Joel Berger, a senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society, told the New York Times. “To lose 120,000 animals in two or three weeks is a phenomenal thing.”

So what could cause such a mass die-off? Scientists still aren’t entirely sure, but there are some clues. Here’s what they do know: Autopsies of dead saigas have revealed that they were infected with two species of bacteria, Pasteurella and Clostridium, and that these infections contributed to their deaths. But this knowledge hardly solves the mystery because these bacteria are present in most healthy antelope too. In other words, it’s likely that some other unknown ailment is crippling their immune systems, allowing the bacterial infections to take hold.

Scientists are also considering whether the cause is from something other than viral or bacterial pathogens. For instance, Central Asia has experienced heavy chemical pollution over the decades from factories and farms. Climate change could also be at fault. Heavier than normal rainfall has led to lush plant growth in the region, and saigas are known to overeat, become bloated and get sick. But so far these are mere speculations.

Whatever this disease is, it strikes with alarming quickness. Animals typically die within hours of developing symptoms, which include depression, diarrhea and frothing at the mouth. The only good news is that the mass die-off appears to be over, as few new deaths have occurred since the initial collapse. But unless scientists can identify exactly what is killing the antelope, there could be no stopping another catastrophe.

One reason for optimism is that the saiga is a resilient animal, and the species has survived population collapses in the past. Though not as severe as the recent die-off, similar events also occurred in 1984, 2010 and 2012, and the species was able to recover. Part of the reason the saiga is so well-adapted to such population collapses is that the animals have a high reproductive rate. They regularly produce triplets and have the highest fetal biomass of any mammal.

Still, it’s a long uphill climb for a species that has been so utterly decimated in such a short period of time, and there are heavy hearts for the conservationists who have worked so diligently to protect this beautiful antelope.

The fossil record reveals that the prehistoric range of the saiga stretched from the United Kingdom to Alaska, though today their range is limited to pockets in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Russia, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The species is most recognizable for unusual noses, which look roughly like rudimentary elephant trunks. Though the noses look goofy, they represent remarkable adaptations. They act as filters, protecting the animals from breathing in rising dust from the dry ground in summer, and warming the air during the cold of winter.

“It’s a remarkable structure, really,” said Dr. Kühl-Stenzel, a saiga expert, to the New York Times. “In the rutting season, the male’s nose swells even more, and then they shake their heads and it makes a squishy sound.”

Researchers take another step in bringing back a wooly mammoth

via Researchers take another step in bringing back a….

As someone who is generally proscience, this strikes me as little more than a vanity project of the worst possible kind.  Doing something because it’s possible isn’t always a great idea.  If you feel otherwise, I’m happy to engage in discussion on this matter.

A team of researchers working at Harvard University has taken yet another step towards bringing to life a reasonable facsimile of a woolly mammoth—a large, hairy elephant-like beast that went extinct approximately 3,300 years ago. The work by the team has not been published as yet, because as team lead George Church told The Sunday Times, recently, they believe they have more work to do before they write up their results.

Church is quick to point out that his team is not cloning the mammoth, instead they are rebuilding the genome of the ancient animal by studying its DNA, replicating it and then inserting the copy into the genome of an Asian elephant—the closest modern day equivalent. They are not bringing forth a new mammoth yet either—all of their work is confined to simple cells in their lab. What they have done, however, is build healthy living elephant cells with mammoth DNA in them. Their work is yet another step towards that ultimate goal, realizing the birth of a woolly mammoth that is as faithful to the original as is humanly possible.

 

Driving the sheep to a new field in the Lake District – England by rightstuffphotography on Flickr

via L’Assommoir – pagewoman: Driving the sheep to a new field in the….

pagewoman:

 

You give this corporation your money, you’re the one paying for the abuse to continue…

via jilli1205: freedomforwhales: You give this….

freedomforwhales:

J:  I not only hate Seaworld, but more than that I hate the lousy people who go there.  They are also the same rats that go to circuses.

No longer can ANYONE say “I didn’t know.”.

 

what it’s like to live alone everyday

via Always better together, minxundertone: what it’s like to live alone….

minxundertone:

Creepy like ‘Avatar’ – Scientists use brain interface to control another monkey’s movements

via Creepy like ‘Avatar’ – Scientists use brain interface to control another monkey’s movements – FUTURISTECH INFO.

Am I the only one to feel somewhat uneasy about this?

The brain of one monkey has been used to control the movements of another, “avatar”, monkey, US scientists report.

Brain scans read the master monkey’s mind and were used to electrically stimulate the avatar’s spinal cord, resulting in controlled movement.

The team hope the method can be refined to allow paralysed people to regain control of their own body.

The findings, published in Nature Communications, have been described as “a key step forward”.

Damage to the spinal cord can stop the flow of information from the brain to the body, leaving people unable to walk or feed themselves.

The researchers are aiming to bridge the damage with machinery.

Match electrical activity

The scientists at Harvard Medical School said they could not justify paralysing a monkey. Instead, two were used – a master monkey and a sedated avatar.

The master had a brain chip implanted that could monitor the activity of up to 100 neurons.

During training, the physical actions of the monkey were matched up with the patterns of electrical activity in the neurons.

The avatar had 36 electrodes implanted in the spinal cord and tests were performed to see how stimulating different combinations of electrodes affected movement.

The two monkeys were then hooked up so that the brain scans in one controlled movements in real time in the other.

The sedated avatar held a joystick, while the master had to think about moving a cursor up or down.

In 98% of tests, the master could correctly control the avatar’s arm.

One of the researchers, Dr Ziv Williams, told the BBC: “The goal is to take people with brain stem or spinal cord paralysis and bypass the injury.

“The hope is ultimately to get completely natural movement, I think it’s theoretically possible, but it will require an exponential additional effort to get to that point.”

He said that giving paralysed people even a small amount of movement could dramatically alter their quality of life.

Reality or science fiction?

The idea of one brain controlling an avatar body is the stuff of blockbuster Hollywood movies.

However, Prof Christopher James, of the University of Warwick, dismissed a future of controlling other people’s bodies by thought.

He said: “Some people may be concerned this might mean someone taking over control of someone else’s body, but the risk of this is a no-brainer.

“Whilst the control of limbs is sophisticated, it is still rather crude overall, plus of course in an able-bodied person their own control over their limbs remains anyway, so no-one is going to control anyone else’s body against their wishes any time soon.”

Instead, he said this was “very important research” with “profound” implications “especially for controlling limbs in spinal cord injury, or controlling prosthetic limbs with limb amputees”.

Realising that goal will face additional challenges. Moving a cursor up and down is a long way from the dextrous movement needed to drink from a cup.

There are also differences in the muscles of people after paralysis; they tend to become more rigid. And fluctuating blood pressure may make restoring control more challenging.

Prof Bernard Conway, head of biomedical engineering at the University of Strathclyde, said: “The work is a key step forward that demonstrates the potential of brain machine interfaces to be used in restoring purposeful movement to people affected by paralysis.

“However, significant work still remains to be done before this technology will be able to be offered to the people who need it.”

More on This Story

Related Stories

• Lab rats ‘acquire sixth sense’

  14 FEBRUARY 2013, SCIENCE & ENVIRONMENT

• Robotic arm ‘mind control’ hailed

  17 DECEMBER 2012, HEALTH

• Robotic arm controlled by thought

  16 MAY 2012, HEALTH

Related Internet links

• Dr Ziv Williams

The BBC is not responsible for the content of external Internet sites

What Are They Feeding Your Food? – Food & Water Watch

What Are They Feeding Your Food? – Food & Water Watch.

Here’s a quiz for you; do you know what the animals we eat, eat?  Take the quiz…then sign the petition.

Related article:

http://documents.foodandwaterwatch.org/doc/AntibioticResistance.pdf

Hormone Disruptors Rise from the Dead Like Zombies: Scientific American

Hormone Disruptors Rise from the Dead Like Zombies: Scientific American.

This may merit a new “Oh, Shit” category…  And don’t you just love the delicate handling of geographical distribution in the photo caption?

Hormone-disrupting chemicals may be far more prevalent in lakes and rivers than previously thought. Environmental scientists have discovered that although these compounds are often broken down by sunlight, they can regenerate at night, returning to life like zombies.

“The assumption is that if it’s gone, we don’t have to worry about it,” says environmental engineer Edward Kolodziej of the University of Nevada in Reno, joint leader of the study. “But we’re under-predicting their environmental persistence.”

“Risk assessments have been built on the basis that light exposure is enough to break down these products,” adds Laura Vandenberg, an endocrinologist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst who was not involved in the study. “This work undermines that idea completely.”

Endocrine disrupters — pollutants that unbalance hormone systems — are known to harm fish, and there is growing evidence linking them to health problems in humans, including infertility and various cancers. But pinpointing specific culprits from the vast array of trace chemicals in the environment has proved difficult. Indeed, concentrations of known endocrine disrupters in rivers often seem to be too low to explain harmful effects in aquatic wildlife, says Kolodziej.

Beefed up
He and his colleague David Cwiertny, an environmental engineer at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, decided to find out whether the breakdown products of endocrine disrupters could be boosting their environmental impact. Their team focused on trenbolone acetate, a synthetic anabolic steroid used as a growth promoter in more than 20 million cattle in the United States each year (this practice is banned in the European Union).

Cattle metabolize the steroid into compounds such as 17α-trenbolone, a potent endocrine disrupter commonly found in agricultural run-off water. In laboratory tests, just a few tens of nanograms of these compounds per litre can skew sex ratios and decrease fertility in fish. Some manufacturers have argued that these metabolites pose little risk in rivers, however, because sunlight breaks them down rapidly.

Kolodziej and his team put solutions of 17α-trenbolone and related compounds through several cycles of light and dark in the laboratory. Although concentrations fell during the simulated daytime, the scientists were surprised to see that levels rebounded during the dark periods. At neutral pH and 25 ºC, it took about five days to regenerate 60% of a sample of 17α-trenbolone from its breakdown products. Higher temperatures or slightly acidic or alkaline conditions accelerated this process.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” says Vandenberg. Field biologists usually collect water samples during the day, she says, and nocturnal regeneration “would certainly have the potential to impact those results.” Moreover, field studies have rarely reported the pH and temperature of water samples, which could have a big effect on true concentrations of contaminants. “I don’t think that anyone had conceived it could be so important,” she says.

The team found the same regeneration process occurring in water samples taken from the Iowa River, and from a test pond seeded with manure from cattle that had been treated with trenbolone acetate. They also note that other steroids with similar chemical structures can regenerate in the same way, including dienogest, an oral contraceptive, and dienedione, an illicit anabolic steroid. The results are published inScience.

Hiding in plain sight
Kolodziej says that the work casts considerable uncertainty over sampling results for steroid endocrine disrupters, and suggests that a survey of their breakdown compounds in the environment is now urgently needed.

It also highlights a serious drawback in relying on studies that look for single environmental contaminants, rather than a spectrum of their derivatives, he adds. Chemical studies should be complemented with bioassays that use living cells to detect endocrine disrupters, Vandenberg adds.

Last year, a bioassay of this kind found androgens in 35% of freshwater samples tested, far more than chemical assays would suggest. “What you really want to know is if there’s anything in there that can cause biological activity,” says molecular biologist Gordon Hager, at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, who developed the assay. Yet current environmental monitoring procedures still rely on checking “a list of chemicals, and they only know how to look for one thing at a time”, he says. “It’s a fool’s errand.”

Corporatizing Animals — from Cuteness to Cruelty by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent

Corporatizing Animals — from Cuteness to Cruelty by Jim Hightower on Creators.com – A Syndicate Of Talent.

Both the old and new media agree on this: If you need a story that’s guaranteed to be wildly popular — go with animals. “Kute kittens,” for example, are surefire winners, as is the entire p-group: puppies, porpoises, penguins and polar bears. And don’t forget baby chicks, goats and other farm animals — they can be awfully cute and cuddly, too.

One group that’s noticed this is corporate America, and some of the biggest corporations have jumped on the animal ploy as a way to push some of their ugliest profiteering schemes. For example, the Keystone XL pipeline, a project involving TransCanada Corp. and such oil giants as Exxon Mobil. They want to shove this massively polluting, ozone-depleting, wildlife-threatening pipeline from Alberta, Canada, down through the very center of America, carrying a toxic petro-sludge called tar sands oil all the way to export terminals on the Gulf Coast.

This is not exactly a popular idea in our country, and it was made less popular by a couple of recent, very nasty spills of this tar from existing pipelines — one into Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, and the other in the town of Mayflower, Ark. So, cue the animals!

Larry Kudlow, a shameless, corporate-hugging host of his eponymous TV show on CNBC, proclaimed in an August episode that — by gollies — Keystone would be terrific for wildlife. Why? Because, explained this noted expert on the habits of beasts in the wild, the loveable bears, deer, and such “like to snuggle under the pipeline (for) warmth.” An economist at the American Petroleum Institute — the chief lobbying group for big oil — immediately agreed with Kudlow, asserting that, “animals like the Alaskan crude oil pipeline quite a bit.”

How darling! And how wrong.

What we have here are a couple of shills mouthing a right-wing myth that’s been promoted on the political circuit for a while. Actual animal experts, however, note that Canadian caribou are now “listed as threatened,” largely because of the tar sands rush. And independent scientists studying the Keystone project say it will “wreak havoc” on animals all along its nature-destroying path.

How cute is that?

But while big oil is trying to convince the public that it is Bambi’s best buddy, today’s industrial agribusiness operations definitely do not want to be pictured with animals — nor do they want us seeing pictures of the chickens, hogs, cows, etc., that they confine in their animals factories.

They’ve gone so far as to get state laws passed to make criminals of anyone who even tries to photograph or video inside their so-called “farms.” That’s because it’s God-awful ugly in there.

For the corporate owners see animals as nothing but profit machines to be locked in tiny cages for life — fed pellets and antibiotics, allowed no connection to their natural world and then slaughtered (often brutally).

Seeing such ugliness has prompted Rep. Steve King of Iowa to spring into action. Declaring that he’s passionate about agricultural cruelty, he got his GOP colleagues in the House to pass his amendment to stop it. Sadly, though, King’s passion has a perverse twist to it: The cruelties that move him to the brink of tears are state laws that he claims are “slowly suffocating production agriculture out of existence.” Yes, he wants the federal government to stop states and cities from passing laws that restrict animal cruelty by corporate agbiz!

No more requirements that chicken cages provide enough room for the birds to stand up, he cries. No more rules outlawing the sale of horse and dog meat, the forced feeding of ducks, or the existence of puppy mills. And no more consumer laws requiring genetically manipulated foods to be labeled.

Oh, by the way, King also thinks dogfighting is a fine “sport” — so fine that even children should be allowed to watch. Cuddly animals are nice enough for kids, but there’s more excitement — and money — in watching animals fight to the death. Speaking of killing, King also hopes that his amendment, dubbed the “Animal Torture Protection Act,” will kill such busybody groups as the Humane Society and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

His bloodlust aside, isn’t it also a bit perverse that a so-called “conservative” Congress critter wants big government to overrule local authority? But King has never been one to let political consistency interfere with doing corporate favors.

To find out more about Jim Hightower, and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at http://www.creators.com.