:mrgreen:

Related: The giant panda is not at an “evolutionary dead end” and could have a long term viable future, according to new research involving scientists from Cardiff University.

It's 1 1/2 inches long?

Call him the Mona Lisa of the bird kingdom.

The rare recurve-billed bushbird, recently rediscovered by scientists in Colombia after a 40-year absence, sports a curving beak that gives the illusion of an enigmatic smile.

This photograph, taken by a conservationist with the Colombia-based nonprofit Fundación ProAves, is the first ever taken of a live bushbird.

It's simply stunning!

We all create a lifetime of bad habits and conditioning. Some indeed appear to be ingrained in our psyche. There appears to be truth in the adage that people cannot change their basic nature. Well let me tell you a story about a scorpion, a strong flowing river and an intrepid frog. I am sure you may have heard the story before.

Once upon a time, a frog found itself on a small island in the middle of the Limpopo in flood, in the company of a scorpion. The water was swiftly lapping at this island and soon the island would be entirely engulfed. Mr Scorpion asked the frog if he could ride on his back to the safety of the distant shore...

"Well Mr Scorpion," said the Frog, "if I let you on my back, surely you would sting me, after all this is what scorpions do!"

"Yes, but Mr Frog," replied the scorpion, "why would I do that, then I would die as I cannot swim."

The frog was a generous soul so he allowed the scorpion to climb on his back and proceeded to swim to the shore. Half way there Mr Scorpion sees movement ahead, a river snake has spotted the frog and sees a tasty meal. The scorpion jumps off the frog and lands on the river snake, stinging the snake to save the frog. The frog thanks the scorpion as he sinks into the depths with his tail still embedded in the snake...

"Thank you Mr Scorpion for saving my life," says the frog, "but now you yourself will die!"

The scorpion gasped, "You helped me, now spread the word, even a scorpion can change!"

So can you and you and you! It takes one step, one change in thought, a cold shower or a shoulder shaking. You can change the world, save the world and recreate reality. Give it a little thought.

:)

Wikipedia The Scorpion and the Frog.

A city stripped of advertising. No Posters. No flyers. No ads on buses. No ads on trains. No Adshels, no 48-sheets, no nothing.

It sounds like an Adbusters editorial: an activist's dream. But in São Paulo, Brazil, the dream has become a reality.

In September last year, the city's populist right-wing mayor, Gilberto Kassab, passed the so-called Clean City laws. Fed up with the "visual pollution" caused by the city's 8,000 billboard sites, many of them erected illegally, Kassab proposed a law banning all outdoor advertising. The skyscraper-sized hoardings that lined the city's streets would be wiped away at a stroke. And it was not just billboards that attracted his wrath: all forms of outdoor advertising were to be prohibited, including ads on taxis, on buses—even shopfronts were to be restricted.

"I think this city will become a sadder, duller place," Dalton Silvano, the only city councillor to vote against the laws and (not entirely coincidentally) an ad executive, was quoted as saying in the International Herald Tribune. "Advertising is both an art form and, when you're in your car, or alone on foot, a form of entertainment that helps relieve solitude and boredom," he claimed.

After a period of zero tolerance, Piqueira believes that advertising, albeit in a far more regulated form, will start to creep back into the city, either as a result of legal challenges, a change in administration, or compromises between media owners and the city.

Moya says. "There's still a lot to be done in terms of pollution—air pollution, river pollution, street pollution and so on. São Paulo is still one of the most polluted cities in the world. But I believe this law is the first step for a better future."

Some have called Euler the "Mozart of Mathematics," not only because of his genius but because of his prodigious output.

Euler contributed to essentially every field of mathematics -- calculus, geometry, number theory and the vast realm of applied mathematics. "He was a universalist when that was still possible," said Dunham, who has just edited a book, "The Genius of Euler," published by the Mathematical Association of America.

Nevertheless, Euler's greatest achievements may lie in what became mathematical analysis, which includes calculus and differential equations.

Although Newton and Gottfried Leibniz discovered calculus, Euler systematized it, made hundreds of discoveries and invented differential equations, which he successfully applied to mechanics and astronomy, transforming them from geometry-based disciplines to fully calculus-based ones. He almost single-handedly invented the calculus of variations, which among other things allowed the Apollo moon shot to hit its mark.

Euler's achievements were all the more remarkable because he lived a life that was both relatively normal and quite difficult.

In his early 30s, Euler lost most of the sight in his right eye. He developed a cataract in the other and was legally blind for the last dozen years of his life. He worked incessantly even after his eyesight failed, and was, it appears, a happy man.

Says Dunham: "You could hardly argue that he wasted a day of his life."

The phone socket connector wiring is off, he replaces it with a smaller phone socket.

Good! Don't need to call singnet support again.

A summary of my AdWords result. (only enabled on Google-search network)

Keywords and Ads Variations summary

A one line summary of his book :)

Daily Affirmation: I am always truthful, positive and helping others!

It is actually Red Panda.

The Red Panda is also known as the Wah because of its distinctive cry. This name was given to it by Thomas Hardwicke, when he introduced it to Europeans in 1821. It is called a Cat Bear because it was thought to be related to a small bear and washes itself like a cat by licking its entire body. Other names include Bear Cat, Cloud Bear, Bright Panda, Common Panda, Fire Fox, Fire Cat, Red Fox, Fox Bear, Himalayan Raccoon, Lesser Panda, Nigalya Ponya, Panda Chico, Panda Éclatant, Panda Rojo, Petit Panda, Poonya, Crimson Ngo, Red Cat, Sankam, Small Panda, Thokya, Wah, Wanker, Wokdonka, Woker, and Vetri, and Ye.

A google search of Red Panda turns out 3 photos of Red Panda at the top of the page! :)

Others Astronomy photos.

Worldwide, 10% to 40% of children grow up in households with no father at all. In the U.S., more than half of divorced fathers lose contact with their kids within a few years. By the end of 10 years, as many as two-thirds of them have drifted out of their children's lives. According to a 1994 study by the Children's Defense Fund, men are more likely to default on a child-support payment (49%) than a used-car payment (3%). Even fathers in intact families spend a lot less time focused on their kids than they think: in the U.S. fathers average less than an hour a day (up from 20 minutes a few decades ago), usually squeezed in after the workday.

Anthropologists are trying to figure out why. Homo sapiens produces the most slowly maturing young of all mammals. You'd think fathers would be hardwired to provide for such needy offspring. One thing that draws a human male to a child of his is that, hormonally speaking, men are a lot more similar to women than many of us realize, particularly during the critical survival period approaching a child's birth and its infancy.

When the men listened to a tape of a crying newborn and were shown a videotape of a newborn struggling to nurse, the ones who reported the greatest urge to comfort the baby were the ones whose hormone levels had changed the most.

But dads have to spend time close to babies for hormones to kick in, and this hasn't always been possible. With Mom often caring for more than one offspring and Dad busy rustling up food, the job sometimes had to be outsourced to grandmothers, aunts and others. It was this cooperative system that allowed mothers to have more babies than they could support and fathers to vary in how they cared for them.

Tackling air pollution, contaminated drinking water and other environmental problems could save millions of lives annually around the world, the World Health Organization said in a report Wednesday.

In 23 countries, more than 10 percent of deaths can be traced to two risk factors: unsafe drinking water and indoor air pollution caused by the burning of so-called solid fuels -- wood, cow dung or coal for cooking, the WHO said.

Simple water purification methods could decrease the rate of diseases such as diarrhea that affect many children, Weber-Mosdorf told a news conference in Vienna.

Around the world, children under five years old make up 74 percent of deaths from diarrhea and respiratory infections, the WHO said.

The WHO suggested that using gas or electricity for cooking, improving ventilation or keeping children away from smoke could reduce the number of deaths.

The Jesus Christ lizards are more properly known as basilisks—a colorful name referring to the legendary monsters whose breath and glances were fatal to those unfortunate enough to encounter them. Basilisks are quite large, as lizards go, up to three feet long, and the males have large crests on their heads, backs, and tails. This, and the fact that they run on two legs makes them look like little dinosaurs. :)

The once-flat shorelines were disfigured by a massive toppling over of the planet, scientists announced today. The warping of the Martian rock has hidden clear evidence of the oceans, which in any case have been gone for at least 2 billion years.

Somewhere along the way to toppling over 50 degrees to the north, Mars probably lost some of its water, leaving the Deuteronilus Ocean's shoreline exposed. "The volume of water was too large to simply evaporate into space, so we think there is still some subterranean reservoirs on Mars," Perron said.

The remaining sea would have been located in the same lowland plain as the Arabia Ocean, but almost 40 degrees to the north.

Near the equator, the surface of a planet stays in a relatively flattened bulge under the pressure of centripetal forces. But outside of the equator, the rock behaves elastically and often bunches up, like the surface of a deflating balloon. Perron and his team reasoned that the oceanic shorelines were once near the equator, but warped into hilly up-and-down elevations of rock as they move towards the north with the tilting planet.

:roll:

It's not just animals that can tell siblings from strangers.

Telling apart relatives from strangers is crucial in many animal species, helping them to share precious resources or avoid inbreeding. Now it seems that plants can perform the same trick.

Now, Susan Dudley and Amanda File of McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, have shown that plants grown alongside unrelated neighbours are more competitive than those growing with their siblings — ploughing more energy into growing roots when their neighbours don't share their genetic stock.

Plants 'know' more about their environment than they are often given credit for: they can sense the presence of neighbouring plants through changes in water or nutrients available to them or through chemical cues in the soil, and can adjust their own growth accordingly. "That plants have a secret social life is something well known to plant ecologists," says Dudley.

How the plants work out who's who is still a mystery. Dudley suggests that a protein or chemical signal specific to each plant's family might be secreted and detected by other roots in the nearby area.

For more than seven years, Genshin Fujinami dressed in white from head to toe while covering the backwoods trails of this sacred mountain MOUNT HIEI in one of the world's most grueling feats - a punishing quest that combined starvation, isolation and the equivalent of a lap around the equator.

For 1,000 days, rising well before dawn, Fujinami embarked alone, rain or shine, on his journey, running or briskly walking more than 50 miles - that's almost two marathons - each day as the trial neared its climax. Along with his white robes, his only gear was a pair of straw sandals, a long straw hat, candles, a shovel, a length of rope and a short sword.

The quest dates to the eighth century and is believed to be a path to enlightenment. Monks carry a little book of prayers and incantations, which they offer at about 300 temples and sacred spots along the way. Other than that, they don't stop for breaks.

Fujinami said his most difficult trial came during the fifth year, when he had to sit in the lotus position before a raging fire and chant mantras for nine days without food, water or sleep in an esoteric ritual called "doiri,'' or "entering the temple.''

"You can only do this after preparing,'' he said. "After about four days, you really start to lose your strength and your clarity. You stop caring about anything. But you have to keep sitting upright and repeating the mantras.''

Don't be overjoyed at the right.

Don't be distressed over the wrong.

For the ancient Masters, things are like flowers and blossoms;

Peach blossoms are red, plum blossoms are white, and roses are pink.

Though I ask the spring breeze why they are so, it knows nothing.

An hour after clutching her fourth French Open trophy, Justine Henin cradled other precious cargo in her arms: her 6-week-old niece.

Talking and laughing with friends and relatives in a lounge just off center court, Henin slowly rocked her brother's baby, then gently kissed her head. As much as a sixth Grand Slam title meant to the top-ranked Belgian, this scene was worth far more.

For Henin, life off the court has long presented far more problems than life on it. So after overwhelming No. 7 Ana Ivanovic of Serbia 6-1, 6-2 Saturday for a third consecutive French Open championship, Henin was thrilled to be able to sip champagne alongside family members with whom she only recently re-established contact.

"It's been a huge step in my life in the last few months. And I was glad I could give them this victory, because everyone suffered a lot," said Henin, who went about seven years without speaking to her father or three siblings. "Today, finally, we are united in this joy, and we can share this moment."

"I want to dedicate this victory to my family," she said. "I missed you. I want to offer this victory to you. I love you with all my heart."

"That was my heart that was talking," Henin said later. "What happened in the past is the past, and I just want to move forward, and look forward, and enjoy every moment of my life with them back in it now."

It was a brave and atypical public declaration that speaks worlds about how Henin has evolved from an athlete who looked exclusively dead ahead to a woman whose personal struggles have improved her depth perception.

She wouldn't discuss what precipitated the estrangement, nor what prompted the reconciliation. Her brother David said things changed when he was in a car accident this year and awoke from a coma to find Henin in his room.

Henin smiled almost teasingly when she declined to reveal the contents of several envelopes she opened during and after the match. They contained notes from Rodriguez. Most were about tactics, she said. As for the last one, "I'm going to keep it for me," Henin said.

Related: Justine Henin back on form.

Sep 9, Bonnie D. Ford: Season comes full circle for Henin.

김선생님은 대학교 선생님 이에요. 런던 대학교에서 한국말

을 가르치고 일본말도 가르쳐요. 매일 아침 공원에 가서

산책해요. 개하고 같이 가요. 공원은 아주 좋아요. 김선생님

의 개는 고기를 잘 먹어요. 작년부터 부인도 가끔 산책하기

시작했어요. 부인도 가면 둘이 식당에 가서 커피 한잔 마셔요.

김선생님은 대학교 선생님 이세요. 런던 대학교에서 한국말

을 가르치시고 일본말도 가르치세요. 매일 아침 공원에 가셔서

산책하세요. 개하고 같이 가세요. 공원은 아주 좋아요. 김선생님

의 개는 고기를 잘 먹어요. 작년부터 부인도 가끔 산책하시기

시작하셨어요. 부인도 가시면 둘이 식당에 가셔서 커피 한잔 마시세요.

가 - honorific stem 가시 - (+polite) 가셔요 (abbr. contracts->) 가세요

-서 form is (+polite - yo) hon. is 가셔서

See also korean-exercise-29

Two decades after an explosion and fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant sent clouds of radioactive particles drifting over the fields near her home, Maria Urupa says the wilderness is encroaching. Packs of wolves have eaten two of her dogs, the 73-year-old says, and wild boar trample through her cornfield. And she says fox, rabbits and snakes infest the meadows near her tumbledown cottage.

The return of wildlife to the region near the world's worst nuclear power accident is an apparent paradox that biologists are trying to measure and understand.

Some researchers insist that by halting the destruction of habitat, the Chernobyl disaster helped wildlife flourish. Others say animals may be filtering into the zone, but they appear to suffer malformations and other ills.

Both sides say more research is needed into the long-term health of a variety of Chernobyl's wildlife species, as governments around the world consider switching from fossil fuel plants, blamed for helping drive global climate change, to nuclear power.

In other studies, Mousseau, whose work is funded by the National Science Foundation and National Geographic Society and his colleagues have found increased genetic damage, reduced reproductive rates and what he calls "dramatically" higher mortality rates for birds living near Chernobyl. The work suggests, he said, that Chernobyl is a "sink" where animals migrate but rapidly die off.

Eating locally produced food is risky, health experts agree, because plants and animals can concentrate radioactive materials as they cycle through the food chain. Doe Maria fear the effects of her exposure to radiation?

"Radiation? No!" she said. "What humans do? Yes."

Discovery - Two parasites are also embedded in a 100-million-year-old piece of amber found in Burma.

An Oregon scientist and a Kentucky nurse have found the oldest known mushroom, entombed in a 100-million-year-old piece of amber from Burma.

A closer examination of the nine-hundredths-inch-long mushroom cap revealed that it had been infected by an ancient parasite, which a second parasite was feeding on.

"I was amazed enough with the mushroom," said George Poinar, a retired entomology professor in Corvallis. "But then seeing the parasites was astonishing. No one has ever seen this three-tier association before."

Joseph Spatafora, a fungi specialist and a professor of botany and plant pathology at OSU, said the amber discovery is significant because mushroom fossils are rare. Few ancient mushrooms -- the fruiting bodies of fungi -- survive because they lack bones or shells that help preserve other organisms.

"So the amber specimen can give us a lot of insight to what fungal diversity was at this time in the past," Spatafora said, and gives scientists an idea about fungi's role in forest ecosystems.

A frog with fluorescent purple markings (pic) and 12 kinds of dung beetles were among two dozen new species discovered in the remote plateaus of eastern Suriname, scientists said Monday.

The expedition was sponsored by two mining companies hoping to excavate the area for bauxite, the raw material used to make aluminum, and it was unknown how the findings would affect their plans.

Among the species found were the atelopus frog, which has distinctive purple markings; six types of fish; 12 dung beetles, and one ant species, he said.

About 80 percent of Suriname is covered with dense rainforest. Thousands of Brazilians and Surinamese are believed to work in illegal gold mining, creating mercury pollution that has threatened the health of Amerindians and Maroons in Suriname's interior.

The music industry is so desperate for new ways to make money that a Silicon Valley start-up is trying a counterintuitive approach: giving the music away as a way to jump-start sales.

Starting today, visitors to Palo Alto-based Lala Media Inc.'s Lala.com Web site will be able to listen for free on their computers to the digital catalog of Warner Music Group Corp. and hundreds of smaller independent music companies. Lala executives say they are working to secure licenses with the other three major music companies.

It's like a subscription music service, but without the monthly subscription fee. Lala is betting that in return for getting all that free access to music at home, listeners will pay to buy the songs they want to take with them on iPods and other music players. The prices will range from $6.50 to $13.50 for an album. (For now, Lala plans to sell music only by the album rather than song by song.)

Lala will work through a normal Web browser. Users of Lala's Web-based service can create and save playlists, send them to friends and browse the virtual collections of other users -- all for free.

More important still, the new service will work with Apple Inc.'s iPods -- something no iTunes competitor featuring major-label content has been able to do.

Less than one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) is all that stands between the tuatara—New Zealand's "living fossil" reptile—and extinction, scientists say.

The sex of tuatara—the sole surviving species of an ancient family of reptiles dating back 200 million years—is determined by the incubation temperature of its eggs. As the mercury climbs, so does the proportion of male hatchlings.

The mechanism is so delicate that a flagging population on remote North Brother Island in Cook Strait is already running short of breeding females.

"At 22 degrees Celsius [71.6 degrees Fahrenheit], we got 100 percent males. At 21 degrees Celsius [69.8 degrees Fahrenheit], we got three males out of 80 eggs," Nelson said.

Intensifying the problem is the slow reproduction rate of the reptiles. On average, female tuatara mate once every four years, and eggs take between 11 and 16 months to hatch.

"These creatures can live for more than a hundred years. We're talking perhaps a 5-degree jump in a single animal's lifetime," Nelson said.

"We're not talking adaptation—we're talking about the abilities of individuals to survive."

So scientists are gathering eggs from North Brother and from nearby Takapourewa, or Stephens Island, and raising them in artificial incubators.

"We can dial in whichever sex we like," Nelson said.

Saving the tuatara is a matter of pride among New Zealand's indigenous groups. The animals are revered by the Maori as a taonga, or treasure.

"In the Maori worldview we believe that everything is connected, so that tuatara are part of our whakapapa—our genealogy," Paine added.

"We are kaitiaki—guardians—of those tuatara, so we have an obligation from our ancestors to ensure their well-being, to make sure they're protected. To lose them would be like losing part of ourselves."

whether: -lkka or -ŭlkka

That teacher will come (to a party).

선생님이 파티에 올까 걱정해요.

That there won't be enough food.

음식이 모자랄까 걱정해요.

That Mr. Kim might not come.

김선생님이 않 오실까(봐) 걱정해요.

That your girlfriend might not like you any more.

여자 친구가 저를 않 좋아 할까(봐) 걱정해요.

That it might rain.

비가 올까(봐) 걱정해요.

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: An Indian tribe that has had no formal contact with Western civilization has been located in a remote Amazon region, federal authorities said Friday.

The Metyktire tribe, with about 87 members, was found last week in an area that is difficult to reach because of thick jungle and a lack of nearby rivers some 2,000 kilometers (1,200 miles) northwest of Rio de Janeiro, said Mario Moura, a spokesman for the Federal Indian Bureau, or Funai.

The tribe is a subgroup of the Kayapo tribe, and lives on its 4.9-million-hectare (12.1-million-acre) Menkregnoti Indian reservation, Moura said.

The Kayapo had no significant contact with the Metyktire until two tribe members inexplicably appeared at a Kayapo village last week, he said.

Megaron Txcucarramae, a Kayapo Indian and Funai representative in the region, met with the newly found group in Kremoro village and banned all but a medical team from entering or leaving, fearing the tribe could be more vulnerable to diseases than the Kayapo, Cunningham said.

Miriam Ross, a campaigner with the indigenous rights group Survival International, estimates there are more than 100 uncontacted tribes across the world.

Colour lovers Related:

Color Inspiration: Monsters and Dubious Characters.

Color Inspiration: 90+ Yellow Color Palettes

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January, February, March, April, May.

The Great Ape Trust in Des Moines, Iowa, is home to seven bonobos -- a close relative of the chimpanzee -- and three orangutans. But if you think Iowa might be a strange place for them to live, don't say it out loud … these apes understand English.

The residents of the Great Ape Trust are part of groundbreaking language research where the apes are being taught to communicate with humans by pressing 350 lexigrams -- symbols that appear on a screen and represent thoughts and objects.

The key to ensuring they grasp the language, the researchers said, is to start teaching them when they are young, just like you would with human babies.

"Language is culturally acquired. Its not learned," said Fields. "It's acquired in the immediate postnatal antogyny of the organisms life. The only organism capable of learning language are babies."

At the Great Ape Trust, researchers said the apes would likely never be able to vocalize words like humans; they are limited by the range of their vocal chords among other things.