Eureka! from Creators Syndicate

Same Old Song (Not) for 05/06/2010

Thu, 06 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Birds are not born with a song in their hearts or their heads. They must learn them from other birds.

So naturally, it seems only reasonable that these songs evolve, with each generation tweaking tunes to fit their times.

And, in fact, this is what happens, researchers say, though the rate of song-change appears to vary with species.

For some birds, like indigo buntings, a ...

Updated: Thu May 06, 2010

Walleye Fans See Danger in Duo for 04/29/2010

Thu, 29 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Walleyes reside at the apex of the natural food chain in the Great Lakes and are a prized sports fish, critical to a $7 billion-a-year local fishery. But that lofty and much-admired perch (the spot, not the fish) is becoming increasingly precarious, thanks to a pair of lowly invaders: the round goby and the zebra mussel.

The threat to the walleyes is not direct, but rather an example of ...

Updated: Thu Apr 29, 2010

Digging Up Trouble for 04/22/2010

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

A different kind of mine disaster may be in the offing as researchers watch and worry about the human and environmental consequences of mining antimony, an element whose effects in nature and upon the human body are largely unknown.

"Antimony is an emerging contaminant," said Faye Liu, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington. "People have not paid enough attentio ...

Updated: Thu Apr 22, 2010

Digging Up Trouble for 04/22/2010

Thu, 22 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

"Antimony is an emerging contaminant," said Faye Liu, a researcher at Indiana University in Bloomington. "People have not paid enough attentio ...

Updated: Thu Apr 22, 2010

Apes Go Aquatic for 04/15/2010

Thu, 15 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Generally speaking, orangutans are deathly afraid of lakes or rivers, which in their natural habitat tends to be where predatory snakes and crocodiles lurk. Plus, the apes are lousy swimmers. Their dense bodies tend to sink in water. Some zoos, which had used water-filled moats around their orangutan exhibits, filled them in after too many apes drowned.

But new research suggests that eit ...

Updated: Thu Apr 15, 2010

Light is a Feather for 04/08/2010

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Bird bones are hollow, a fact once explained by the simple presumption that hollowness made birds lighter and that made flight easier. In fact, bird bones weigh just as much as the bones of similarly sized mammals. The skeleton of a two-ounce hummingbird weighs just as much as the skeleton of a two-ounce mouse.

In a new paper, University of Massachusetts bat researcher Elizabeth Dumont e ...

Updated: Thu Apr 08, 2010

CSI: Microbe City for 04/01/2010

Thu, 01 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Computer keyboards of the future may be crime scenes of the future, too, not necessarily for what was typed on them, but what fingers did the typing. Researchers at the University of Colorado say they have found a way to identify the users of keyboards — computer mice, too — based on skin bacteria left behind by their fingers and hands.

"We were very surprised to see tha ...

Updated: Thu Apr 01, 2010

Plastic Squid for 03/25/2010

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Gunther von Hagens and his plastinizing engineers in Dalian, China are best known for preserving human bodies in various poses (playing cards, jumping rope) and displaying them in exhibits that travel the world. Less known is von Hagens' work with other animals, such as giraffes, horses and elephants.

Now von Hagens says he's plastinized a giant squid.

Plastination involves replac ...

Updated: Thu Mar 25, 2010

Spammed A Lot for 03/18/2010

Thu, 18 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Stuff that might not get through your filter:

The first spam or unsolicited e-mail was sent in May 1978 by Gary Thuerk of the Digital Equipment Corporation in Massachusetts on the ARPANET, the forerunner of the Internet, which connected just a handful of academic and military labs in the United States. It was an advertisement for an upcoming sales event.

In 1999, most spam involve ...

Updated: Thu Mar 18, 2010

Shore-to-Ship for 03/11/2010

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

As cargo ships grow ever larger, they become a problem for ports not deep or large enough to accommodate their size. Korean engineers have come up with a solution: a mobile harbor.

Indeed of dredging and deepening a port, Kwak Byung Man and colleagues at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science propose building a harbor that can be moved out to an awaiting ship. More than $22 million has ...

Updated: Thu Mar 11, 2010

Share Bears? for 03/04/2010

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Disappearing habitat apparently isn't the only threat to polar bears. Now they face the prospect of sharing space with grizzly bears.

Biologists report an increasing presence of grizzly bears in what was traditionally thought of as strictly polar bear habitat. Preliminary data in Canada's Wapusk National Park in Manitoba Province shows grizzly sightings on the rise: nine confirmed betwee ...

Updated: Thu Mar 04, 2010

Pachyderms on Pace for 02/25/2010

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Do elephants run? And if they do, what exactly does it look like?

These are not silly questions. Well, not entirely. A charging elephant can clearly cover a lot of ground fast, but is it really running? Or just walking very fast? John Hutchinson of the Royal Veterinary College in the United Kingdom set out to find out.

Hutchinson constructed an elephant-sized force platform and in ...

Updated: Thu Feb 25, 2010

Nervousness is Just the Ticket for a Cricket for 02/18/2010

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

In terms of maternal instinct, crickets don't have any. The females lay their eggs and leave. But some experiments at the University of South Carolina suggest cricket moms still pass along a few lessons to their never-seen young.

Jonathan Storm, a behavioral ecologist, briefly exposed adult lab-grown crickets to predatory wolf spiders. The spiders' fangs were immobilized with wax. The cr ...

Updated: Thu Feb 18, 2010

Bee Seeing You for 02/11/2010

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

You would think bees would be too busy to remember faces, but apparently they can.

Experiments in 2005 suggested bees were able to learn to associate tasty sugar snacks with pictures of human faces, though some scientists suspected the bees weren't actually discriminating between human faces. "The insects were rewarded with a drop of sugar when they chose human photographs," sa ...

Updated: Thu Feb 11, 2010

Running Man for 02/04/2010

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Jamaican sprinter and Olympic Gold medal winner Usain Bolt is capable of running at speeds of almost 28 miles per hour.

That's obviously not in the same league as cheetahs (70 mph), pronghorn antelope (61 mph) or even warthogs (30 mph), but it still makes Bolt the fastest known human on the planet. It's a fleeting title, however, and may be gone faster than you think.

In a new pap ...

Updated: Thu Feb 04, 2010

Cold Comfort for 01/28/2010

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

One place where folks are likely to talk just as much about cold temperatures as global warming is Vostok Station in Antarctica. The place holds the current record for coldest spot on the planet: minus 128.6 degrees Fahrenheit, set July 21, 1983.

British scientists analyzed the weather conditions that created that record chill and say it was produced by an unusual, near-stationary atmosp ...

Updated: Thu Jan 28, 2010

What Were They Drinking? for 01/21/2010

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Back in the late 19th century before people knew better, it was thought the recent discovery of radioactivity was a harbinger of good health to come. All manner of dubious medical devices and treatments were concocted to expose people to the beneficial qualities of radiation, everything from toothpaste to suppositories.

Among the most famous was the Revigator, an earthenware vessel that ...

Updated: Thu Jan 21, 2010

Seafood on Ice for 01/14/2010

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Melting Alaskan glaciers provide a veritable buffet of nutrients to organisms living just offshore, scientists report. An unprecedented study of five glaciers near Juneau, Alaska, found that they are surprisingly rich in organic carbon scraped off the glaciated landscape. The amount isn't comparable to levels of organic matter from a forested watershed, but the source is likely the same.

Updated: Thu Jan 14, 2010

Dam the Sky for 01/07/2010

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Dams do a heckuva job of controlling river flooding, but at a possible cost from on high: Bigger and more extreme storms.

Researchers at Tennessee Technological University analyzed weather patterns before and after construction of 633 of the largest dams in the world. They found that at many of these dams the level of rainfall in the most extreme storms grew by an average of 4 percent pe ...

Updated: Thu Jan 07, 2010

She's a Perfect .36 to .46 for 12/31/2009

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

If you want to know whether you're beautiful, walk away from the mirror and find a ruler. According to a study by researchers at the University of San Diego and University of Toronto, beauty can be measured in the distance between a woman's eyes and the distance between her eyes and her mouth.

Pamela Pallett and Stephen Link of UCSD and Kang Lee in Toronto asked university students to ma ...

Updated: Thu Dec 31, 2009