Adaptation at it's finest

Good news wednesday thursday. Lots of good news this week. However this good news isn't for us, it's good for the animals.

* On Tuesday Pete had a great post about dolphins that stash trash to get food tomorrow. Today we learn that fewer and fewer dolphins are getting caught in fishing nets. "The most recent dolphin counts in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean suggest that two species decimated by deaths in tuna fishing nets may be making a comeback." (discovery news) Have they learned and adapted to avoid the nets? Maybe.

* Macaque monkeys have been discovered fishing in Indonesia. And (according to EIGN) unlike us, they (according to discovery news) "are a survivor species, which has the knowledge to cope with difficult conditions." Adaptation at it's best.

Good News Wednesday X: We'll all be robots soon

Good news for those of you that really, really want to become robots sooner rather than later. EIGN has two stories in one day from different UK news sites; both about bionic people alive today. The future is already upon us. be afraid.

"Meet the real bionic woman - the mother who has had almost all her joints replaced." (dailymail.co.uk)

The world's first commercial bionic hand. (telegraph.co.uk)

Sorry about the lack of anything witty or at least any attempts at being witty with this post. This EIGN contributor is tired today. Happy wednesday.

Saving for a Rainy Day

Dolphins, tricks, trash, and the future - this article links them all. And certainly in a manner more alarming than you're thinking. Not long ago there was a post about a monkey using brain power to manipulate a robotic arm to feed itself, now allow me to introduce you to Kelly, who has certainly pared if not one upped that course.

"All the Dolphins at the center are trained to retrieve trash that has mistakenly fallen in to their pools. Upon seeing a nearby trainer, they are to take said trash to the trainer. In return, they receive a fish for their cleanliness.

However it seems that Kelly has found a loophole in the system, and is exploiting it to interesting ends. She hoards her trash, underneath a rock at the bottom of her pool, and when she sees a trainer she goes down and removes a piece of paper or trash to get her fish. However she won’t use all her paper at once, instead she holds on to them for the future. It is an interesting behavior, considering that it is very much like humans storing food for the winter; it displays an awareness of tomorrow." (daily galaxy . com)

Well... sounds to me like the word has gotten out in the marine mammal community. Perhaps we should be following their lead and start stock piling for the impending shit storm. 12.21.2012.

And so it begins: 2012 makes its presence known with the force of a tire iron. Gas is just one of the many soon to be scarse natural resources. It appears 2012 is closing in on us faster then we thought. Gear up, beacuse we're sure this is just the begining.

Space Rocks Falling.

The odds that a potentially devastating space rock will hit Earth this century may be as high as one in 10.
An object falling from the sky only 300 meters wide could release as much energy as 1000 nuclear bombs. But even scarier, it turns out not all "space objects" leave craters. WTF? How could we not have known that earlier. Which leads to this scary revelation:

"A generation ago, the standard assumption was that a dangerous object would strike Earth perhaps once in a million years. By the mid-1990s, researchers began to say that the threat was greater: perhaps a strike every 300,000 years. This winter, I asked William Ailor, an asteroid specialist, what he thought the risk was. Ailor’s answer: a one-in-10 chance per century of a dangerous space-object strike." (the atlantic)

Maybe Chicken Little was right all along. We're sorry we ever doubted you!

Scary Food Stories Are So Easy To Find

Nearly every major paper or on-line news site has some story regarding serious food issues glaring back at me on their homepages this morning. Starting with this little nugget about salmonella in raw tomatoes. (sfgate)
More importantly, however, there is a story on msnbc about how higher costs of food are causing school lunch prices to sky-rocket. In some cases by as much as 50 percent! (msnbc)
Oh and then there's the story about how Immigrants in the Washington DC region are sending food home to their families in the countries they left for a better world. Prices and availability is becoming so bad in some countries such as the Philippines and Haiti that it is now cheaper, or in some cases even possible, to eat necessities such as rice. (wapo)
Oh, and last but not least, apparently the cost of water is going up. WATER. (the street via yahoo)

All of these stories come back to increasing energy prices. I'd say we're all up shit's creek, but it probably now costs too much to even get there.

Bees, bees, everywhere

"Bees from opposite ends of the Earth can communicate more easily than people, a discovery that suggests bees can learn a new language easily." (telegraph.co.uk)

Apparently if you put honey bees from africa alongside honey bees from asia, among other places, they are able to learn each others "dance languages" and "communicate." Seriously, bees can learn? WTF. First they tell us that bees are going to die via some crazy colony collapse disorder (which Pete talked about here).

We also talked about how the bees are beginning to not do their jobs because of pollution. But learning a new "langauge." We're screwed either way. Basically the bees are going to disappear and our environment will start to collapse, or bees from around the world team up and take over the planet. (They have already started their initial attacks). I, for one, am now officially terrified of all bees, and not just this one. The only good news is that being stung won't turn you into a zombie...I hope.

UPDATE 11:22am from Pete:
This guy set fire to a shed trying to get rid of bees. He won this round, but wait until the bees in asia here about this. (AP)

Police State in the District of Columbia

From the (washington) examiner:

"D.C. police will seal off entire neighborhoods, set up checkpoints and kick out strangers under a new program that D.C. officials hope will help them rescue the city from its out-of-control violence."

A DC Councilman said "that he worried about D.C. “moving towards a police state.”" Well, at least DC is being granted some sort of state status.

UPDATE: [06.13.2008] Apparently D.C. police have given up on this idea. (the raw story)