strangelyenough

Rocketing food prices and hundreds of millions more starving people will be part of humanity’s grim future without concerted action on climate change and new investments in agriculture, experts reported this week.

Climate change is incriminated in a wide range of environmental and public health disasters. A contender for the top calamity is the idea that climate change is encouraging malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases, and that this rise will become catastrophic in coming years. To the layperson, the notion is persuasive because it is intuitive - malaria is rife where the world is hot, so if the world gets hotter there will be more of it. Not so to the scientist. The epidemiology of the disease is highly complex, and the dominant factors are the ecology and behaviour of both humans and mosquitoes.

A TEAM of Japanese adventurers say they have discovered footprints they believe were made by the legendary yeti, which is said to roam the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Tibet.

“The footprints were about 20cm long and looked like a human’s,” said Yoshiteru Takahashi, the leader of the Yeti Project Japan.

Mr Takahashi was speaking after he returned with his seven-member team from their third attempt to track down the half-man-half-ape, tales of which have gripped the imaginations of Western adventurers and mountaineers for decades.

An extraordinary fish that existed 375 million years ago had unique features in its head that helped pave the way for vertebrate animals to live on land, scientists said on Wednesday.
 
Scientists for the first time described features in the underside of the skull of Tiktaalik roseae, the so-called ‘walking fish’ discovered in the Canadian Arctic in 2004. It is considered an important transitional animal in the evolution of fish into amphibians, the first land-dwelling vertebrates.

The findings showed that the migration from water to land was more complicated than merely having a fish’s fins transform into legs, the scientists wrote in the journal Nature.

AN Antarctic fur seal, not normally seen in Australian waters, has been found in South Australia’s Spencer Gulf.

The seal, nicknamed Phillip, was first spotted last week under a bridge on the Port Pirie River, north of Adelaide.

Scientists said it was one of only a handful of Antarctic fur seals to make the 4500km journey to Australia in the past 10 years.

QUEENSLAND wildlife officials are investigating reports of a 4.8-metre crocodile in Hervey Bay in the state’s southeast. The state’s Environment Minister Andrew McNamara said today the report followed another alleged sighting about seven weeks ago of a crocodile at the other end of the Great Sandy Region in Baffle Creek, about 150km northwest. A Victorian man, staying with a friend in the Hervey Bay marina, photographed what he said were the marks of a 4.8m-crocodile on Round Island, about 500m off the town’s main harbour.

A paleontologist whose beachfront home in Texas was destroyed during Hurricane Ike has found a football-size tooth in the debris.

Dorothy Sisk and Jim Westgate are scientists at Lamar University. They discovered the fossil tooth in the front yard of Sisk’s home in Caplen on the devastated Bolivar Peninsula.

Westgate believes the fossil is from a Columbian mammoth common in North America until around 10,000 years ago.

The tooth looks like a series of boot soles or slices of bread wedged together.

abundance of objects unearthed where the ship ran aground along Namibia’s notorious Skeleton coast, where hundreds of vessels were wrecked over the centuries, has amazed even hardened experts.

Six bronze cannons, several tonnes of copper, huge elephant tusks, pewter tableware, navigational instruments, and a variety of weapons including swords, sabres and knives have all been tugged out of the beach sand.

‘Over 2,300 gold coins weighing some 21 kilograms (46 pounds) and 1.5 kilograms of silver coins were found worth over 100 million dollars,’ Alves said, adding that the ship’s contents suggest it was bound for India or somewhere in Asia.

‘About 70 percent of the gold coins are Spanish, the rest Portuguese,’ Alves said. Precise dating was possible thanks to examination of the coin rims that showed “some of them were minted in October 1525 in Portugal.’ About 13 tonnes of copper ingots, eight tonnes of tin and over 50 large ivory elephant tusks together weighing some 600 kilograms have also been excavated from the seabed.

Einstein once warned if the bee disappears from the surface of the earth, humans would follow within four years.

the Chinese Taikonauts have returned from their space program. The three men returned on Sunday, September 28th, at 5:40 p.m., in a remote location in Inner Mongolia. The Shenzhou VII Taikonauts and the flawless completion of the mission prove, once again, that the Chinese have unprecedented and unmatched technology, savvy and logistics. For instance, Zhai Zhigang performed the mission’s spacewalk. He was locked outside of the ship for about twenty minutes, and in-between collecting space matter samples, he took the time to wave a little Chinese flag