King Solomon is said to have told sluggards to look to the hard-working ant and be wise. Aesop, too, extolled the virtues of the humble ant in his fable explaining why the insect's constant toiling through the summer months would make for an easier winter compared with the fortunes of the lazy, singing grasshopper.

Now there is another reason to admire the tiny, colonial denizens of the insect world. Ants not only work hard and are prepared to lay down their lives for their fellow ants, they also take bigger risks for the good of the colony as they get older – and they can even assess how much time they have left in life.

It is well established that worker ants tend to take greater risks as they get older. Scientists have shown that this behavioural trait benefits the colony because certain risky activities, such as foraging far from the nest, are best done by ants coming to the end of their useful lives – it doesn't pay to put young workers in high-risk jobs.

One remaining question, however, was whether ants had some internal mechanism that told them how old they were and how much time they had left before dying.

Dr Moron believed that it might be possible to manipulate an ant's lifespan artificially, and to observe changes to its risk-taking behaviour as a result. His study, published in the latest issue of the journal Animal Behaviour, did just this by increasing the concentration of carbon dioxide in a chamber housing an ant's nest. High concentrations of carbon dioxide increase the acidity of the blood and curtail an ant's lifespan.

As the scientists predicted, the worker ants in the colony began to forage further afield earlier than they would have done if they had been brought up in a low carbon dioxide atmosphere. The findings are further evidence of the apparent altruism of the ant. These workers are not only prepared to sacrifice their lives to serve and protect their queen, they also have the ability to make careful calculations of just how much risk they should take based on their current life expectancy.

Many different kinds of animals, other than ants, are known to be altruistic and the issue of how this could evolve in a world of selfish genes remained unresolved until about 40 years ago with the work of the late William Hamilton of Oxford University. It was Hamilton who showed that the altruism seen in ants and other social insects could be explained by something called kin selection.

But would the altruism of the simple ant explain human altruism? Most people show the greatest kindness to their own children, followed by the children of their closest relatives. It cannot explain the more conscious acts of true altruism that people often show to complete strangers. Human altruism may be far more complex, but the humble ant has at least given us a hint of how our own unselfish behaviour first evolved.

Related:

Ants Plug Holes to Smooth Journey.

It's been a rough off-season for the NBA, but then what off-season isn't? There were the usual nightclub-related lawsuits and arrests, more than the usual superstar griping, and a spectacularly unusual betting scandal involving a previously unknown referee named Tim Donaghy, who first attracted the suspicion of investigators when he called a traveling violation. (Talk about previously unknown!) But now all is well, because the regular season begins Tuesday night, when the champion San Antonio Spurs with center-of-the-moment Tim Duncan take on the Portland Trail Blazers with center-of-the-future...uh...Joel Przybilla.

..

ESPN - Daily Dime: For openers, Kobe still in Los Angeles. Who cares as long as Rockets win! :)

Nov 9, 2007, Yao's Rockets get best of Yi's Bucks in players' first NBA matchup. (ESPN recap)

Yao Ming thinks Yi Jianlian will be a better player than him some day. The game was an enormous event in China, where it started early Saturday morning. It was being broadcast on 19 television networks and NBA officials were expecting the largest-ever viewing audience for a game, well over 200 million.

About 90 minutes before the game, Yao and Yi shook hands at midcourt and posed for about two dozen photographers, most of them Chinese. It was a staged photo opportunity, and Yao had to wait a few minutes before Yi came out of the Bucks locker room.

"You know what?" Yao said afterward, with a kidding smile. "Rookies should not do that."

the natural environment still manages to fill us with a sense

of awe and amazement. despite the amount of scientific

knowledge mankind has gathered, nature still holds great

mysteries that we may never be able to unravel.

this complexity has continually daunted man. in frustration, we

try to control nature by enforcing order. as a result,

we have distanced ourselves from the earth, even though

our survival is completely dependent on it. we are now trying

to regain our close connection to nature.

there is an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind's

desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment.

referred to as 'natural architecture', it aims to create a new,

more harmonious, relationship between man and nature by

exploring what it means to design with nature in mind.

the core concept of the movement is that mankind can live

harmoniously with nature, using it for our needs while

respecting its importance.

all of the works in the movement share a central ethos that

demonstrates a respect and appreciation for nature.

these works are meant to comment on architecture and provide

a new framework to approach buildings and structures.

they aim to infuse new ideas into architecture by subverting

the idea that architecture should shelter nature. instead,

the structures deliberately expose the natural materials used

in the building process.

the designers aren't suggesting that architecture must conform

to their vision, they are just providing ideas that they hope will

inspire us all to rethink the relationship between nature and the

built environment.

natural architecture (the book) by alessandro rocca.

I wrote this python script stp-import.py to import the tags to Wordpress 2.3 database.

[~]$ python stp-import.py

The script will ask for the Wordpress database name, the database user and password, and the Wordpress database tables prefix (default is wp) to import the tags. Tested on my database.

Database: dbname

Database user: dbuser

dbuser Password:

Wordpress table prefix [wp]: wp

215 tags imported.

Beautiful photos in black & white 8)

Nick Brandt's first book of photographs, "On This Earth", was published in October 2005, by Chronicle Books.

.. Another paradox: the majority of the world's hungry people live in rural areas, where nearly all food is grown.

World Food Day on October 16 is a good time to try and understand the conundrum of world hunger. The root of the problem is the inequitable distribution of the resources needed to either grow or buy food (also known as poverty). World Food Day is an equally good time to call out one of the main culprits of the crisis: industrial agriculture, the very type enshrined in the Farm Bill that's currently before the US Senate.

The Farm Bill is set to perpetuate a process whereby heavily subsidized US factory farms overproduce grains that are dumped in poor countries, bankrupting local farmers, who can't compete with subsidized prices. We've begun to hear a bit about the plight of these farmers, but few people know that most of them are women.

US Agribusiness: Swallowing Up Lands and Livelihoods

Big Farming is part of a larger corporate economic model that prioritizes profit-making over all else, even the basic right to food. Around the world, agribusiness bankrupts and displaces small farmers, and directs farmers to grow export crops instead of staple foods.

Not long ago, most farm inputs came from farmers themselves. Seeds were saved from the last harvest and fertilizer was recycled from animal and plant wastes. Farmers found innovative ways to control pests by harnessing local biodiversity, such as cultivating insect-repelling plants alongside food crops. While these techniques can produce enough food to feed the world and sustain its ecosystems, they don't turn a profit for agribusiness. That's why corporations developed genetically modified seeds, chemical fertilizers, and synthetic pesticides.

These inputs are both expensive for farmers and highly damaging to the natural systems on which sustainable farming and, ultimately, all life depends. As the cost of farming has gone up, farmers' incomes have gone down due to trade rules that favor large-scale agribusiness over small farmers.

Over the past 50 years, as much of the world's farmland has been consolidated in fewer and fewer hands, millions of people have been forced to abandon their rural homes.

The same practices that have devastated women farmers and their communities worldwide have contributed to environmental destruction that impacts us all.

Export agriculture is a major contributor to global warming because it requires huge inputs of petroleum: it takes 100 gallons of oil to grow just one acre of US corn. It also requires a massive global transportation infrastructure, including ports, railways, fuel pipelines, and superhighways, often built at the expense of local people and ecosystems.

Trade rules have so distorted agricultural markets that almost anywhere you go, food from the other side of the world costs less than food grown locally. So people in Kenya buy Dutch butter, while those in the Big Apple buy apples from Chile.

The good news is that our global food systems may be on the verge of a great transition. Although agribusiness has unprecedented control over the world's farmers and food supply, the realities of climate change, resource depletion, and the human suffering caused by industrialized farming have led more people to start thinking about the links between food, the environment, and social justice.

The theme of this year's World Food Day is the right to food. Securing this basic human right for all people, including future generations, will require fundamental changes in the way we use the Earth's natural resources to grow and distribute food. As we face rising temperatures and declining supplies of cheap energy, change will come of necessity. It's up to us—working in partnership with small-scale farmers around the world—to demand a change for the better.

According to The Library of Congress, video games are just as important to our historical past as literature, movies and music. And at the moment, the LoC is teaming up with major universities across the country to begin a 2-year initiative with the sole intent of figuring out just how institutions can preserve video games for years to come, while making the content accessible for use and study.

Our story today is about the very real victory for game developers, enthusiasts and scholars, in which the top library in the nation has said they're part of this video game fad for the count.

In truth, the Library of Congress has been collecting games since the 1980s. Due to their advantageous position—the Copyright Office is part of their organization— they've come across various collections just by receiving copies of published materials as mandated by copyright law.

How does one build a video game archive in the digital age?

"One of the facets we want to document with videogames [as we did with film] is not only having the actual games themselves, but many of the associated material to have the real sense of the full gamut of what videogames and the industry meant in cultural terms," said Senior Cataloger Brian Taves. Yes, he means the sweatshirts, the posters and the shoes. They want all the cultural materials they can find.

The National Digital Information Infrastruction Preservation Program is a huge initiative interested in digital preservation. This encompasses basically everything imaginable on Earth. Under that, there is the Preserving Creative America initiative. Here is where you see the Library's interest in preserving all sorts of creative works, like film or books, into digital formats. Then, one of the eight grants under this Creative America umbrella is the Preserving Virtual Worlds Project.

Spearheaded by the University of Illinois, the Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a 2-year program starting in 2008 that will hopefully build a model of game and interactive fiction archiving. In a partnership with Stanford University, University of Maryland, Rochester Institute of Technology, and one commercial institution—Second Life makers Linden Lab— University of Illinois hopes to create metadata standards to make content manageable before moving forward to create case studies (ie test examples) of actual video game archiving.

.. Copyright is meant to protect an IP, but ultimately, that copyright may prevent researchers from saving a work from extinction. Microsoft once explained to me the difficulty of tracking down IP owners to reproduce their games as XBLA titles. Protip: If Microsoft can't find the source of an IP, nobody can.

The only way to solve copyright issues moving into the future is to bring commercial partners on board.

Research libraries will absolutely need the support of commercial video game publishers to archive their work. Whether it's to help create metadata (companies provide information on everything from the engine they used to their plotline) or just supplying access to those precious IPs, the commercial aid is not an option, it's a necessity.

"So the question is, do they have strong enough interest in preserving the content to contribute any of their own resources towards it. How much do they care about their own game alive?"

..

The sea was host to a plethora of anaerobic microorganisms, but there were also a few members of a newly evolved variety: cyanobacteria. These adapted bacteria were the first to use water and sunlight for photosynthesis, producing oxygen as a by-product of their metabolism.

The cyanobacteria were a struggling minority at first, but scientists believe that these new microbes began to dominate with the help of meltwater from a few glaciers scattered across the young continents. These glaciers spent centuries scraping across the Earth collecting minerals, ultimately depositing their rich nutrient payloads into the oceans. The cyanobacteria flourished in the presence of the increased minerals, and the rapidly growing population was soon venting increasingly large amounts of its poisonous waste oxygen into the environment.

The underwater oxygen began to chemically react with the abundant iron, eventually scrubbing the seas clean of the element through oxidation. This series of developments was nothing short of an ecological disaster– oxygen was poisonous to most of primitive Earth's inhabitants, and many bacteria relied on the iron as a nutrient.

Once the oceans' supply of iron was exhausted, oxygen began to seep from the sea into the air. The free oxygen they produced reacted with the air, gradually breaking down the methane which kept the Earth's atmosphere warm and accommodating. It took at least a hundred thousand years– a short duration in geological terms– but the Earth was eventually stripped of her methane, and with it her ability to store the heat from the sun. Temperatures fell well below freezing worldwide, and a thick layer of ice began to encase the oxygen-saturated planet.

Almost every living thing on Earth died as a result of this massive bacteria-induced climate change, an event known as the oxygen catastrophe.

The survivors of the oxygen catastrophe eventually adapted to consume the abundant oxygen and produce carbon dioxide. This greenhouse gas very gradually made its way into the atmosphere, increasing in concentration and nudging temperatures back into the hospitable range over millions of years.

..

One man's meat is another man's poison. Just a line separates life from death.

Seventy years locked up in institutions hardly seems to be a punishment that befits the crime of stealing half-a-crown.

However, it is just such a fate that befell Jean Gambell when at the age of 15, in 1937, she was falsely accused of stealing 2s 6d (12.5p) from the doctor's surgery where she worked as a cleaner.

She was sectioned under the 1890 Lunacy Act and even though the money was later found, she has been moved from mental institution to mental institution. More recently, she went into a care home and has been lost to her family, who thought she was dead.

But last month, by chance, her brother stumbled across correspondence which led to the discovery of her existence and the family was reunited.

..

They were told by staff that their 85-year-old sister was deaf, could only communicate in writing and was very unlikely to remember them.

"A little old lady on walking sticks came in," said Alan. "She looked at us and cried out: 'Alan...David'. Then she put her arms around us. It was very emotional.

"I am sure that what has kept her going all these years was the challenge of proving to the authorities that she had a family. The trouble was, nobody would listen to her."

..

Chip Conley is CEO of Joie de Vivre Hospitality, the world's second- largest boutique hotel company. After a severe downturn in his business after 9/11, Conley read Abraham Maslow's works as inspiration for his turnaround plan. It worked: Joie de Vivre is again thriving, and Conley has written a book about what he learned - not only from Maslow, but from companies like Nike, Apple, and Harley-Davidson, which follow Maslow's thinking.

Chip's book is Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow.

Q - What's the main idea of "Peak"?

The main idea is that we're all humans in the workplace - whether employees, customers, or investors - and those companies that succeed and become peak performers touch us as people in the workplace, by focusing on higher needs, as opposed to base needs.

Q - How is Abraham Maslow significant?

Maslow wrote about the hierarchy of needs in the mid-20th century. There's no psychologist or psychiatrist quoted more in business schools or corporations than Maslow.

What's interesting is that the psychology profession - including Freud, Skinner, and others - commonly looked at the worst practices in behavior in defining the human condition. Maslow says, let's look at best practices - people who are fulfilled or self-actualized, who can "be all you can be" and have clicked in to doing what they're supposed to be doing.

Q - Describe the pyramid containing the hierarchy of needs.

Reading Maslow woke me up to the idea that if there are self-actualized people in the world, then maybe there could be self-actualized companies, since companies are just collections of people.

So in "Peak" I break down Maslow's pyramid and apply it to key relationships - employees, customers, and investors. I took Maslow's five levels and turned them into three levels: the first two levels, physical and safety needs, are just survival. Levels 3 and 4, social and esteem, are just success needs, how the world sees you. At the top of the pyramid, self-actualization, is a transformative state, where you've moved beyond your own ego. So I created the "transformation pyramid": survival on the bottom, then success, and transformation at the top. I then applied those three levels to the motivations of employees, customers, and investors.

..

How do you put your attention on the top of the pyramid? The three levels represent money, recognition, and meaning: let's translate each to a word that describes a person's relationship with their work: a "job", a "career", or a "calling." Employers that move their employees up the pyramid get more happy and fulfilled and productive employees, who are much likelier to stay longer, and a positive spirit in that workplace. The fact is, I have 3,000 employees, and 1,200 of them clean toilets for a living. So it's a challenge for me to create that with my employees.

..

Pure customer satisfaction is at the base of the pyramid. The success need is having desires met, and that creates customer loyalty. By meeting the unrecognized needs of a customer, which the customer may not be able to articulate themselves, you create a customer evangelist. So there's customer loyalty in the middle, and evangelism at the top. Companies that do this well create not just loyalty but a marketing machine.

Q - What are some best practices of companies that use the customer pyramid to great effect?

There are four qualities that define companies that are creating these customer evangelists. First, they help their customers meet their highest goals - allowing a customer to achieve their ideal goals from using the product. Second is giving your customers the ability to truly express themselves. Third is making customers feel like they're part of a bigger cause. The fourth quality is offering customers something of real value they hadn't even imagined.

It's got the same climate as Earth, plus water and gravity. A newly discovered planet is the most stunning evidence that life - just like us - might be out there. The discovery was announced today by a team of European astronomers, using a telescope in La Silla in the Chilean Andes.

The Earth-like planet that could be covered in oceans and may support life is 20.5 light years away, and has the right temperature to allow liquid water on its surface.

The new planet, which orbits a small, red star called Gliese 581, is about one-and-a-half times the diameter of the Earth. It is the first exoplanet (a planet orbiting a star other than our own Sun) that is anything like our Earth. Gliese 581 is among the closest stars to us, just 20.5 light years away (about 120 trillion miles) in the constellation Libra. It is so dim it can be seen only with a good telescope.

It has a mass five times that of Earth, probably made of the same sort of rock as makes up our world and with enough gravity to hold a substantial atmosphere.

Astrobiologists - scientists who study the possibility of alien life - refer to a climate known as the Goldilocks Zone, where it is not so cold that water freezes and not so hot that it boils, but where it can lie on the planet's surface as a liquid. This new planet lies bang in the middle of the zone, with average surface temperatures estimated to be between zero and 40c (32-102f). Lakes, rivers and even oceans are possible.

The surface gravity is probably around twice that of the Earth and the atmosphere could be similar to ours.

Although the new planet is in itself very Earth-like, its solar system is about as alien as could be imagined. The star at the centre - Gliese 581 - is small and dim, only about a third the size of our Sun and about 50 times cooler. The two other planets are huge, Neptune-sized worlds called Gliese 581b and d (there is no "a", to avoid confusion with the star itself).

The Earth-like planet orbits its sun at a distance of only six million miles or so (our Sun is 93 million miles away), travelling so fast that its "year" only lasts 13 of our days. The parent star would dominate the view from the surface - a huge red ball of fire that must be a spectacular sight. Its sun is an ancient star - in fact, it is one of the oldest stars in the galaxy, and extremely stable. If there is life, it has had many billions of years to evolve.

This makes this planet a prime target in the search for life. According to Seth Shostak, of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in California, the Gliese system is now a prime target for a radio search.

The real importance is not so much the discovery of this planet itself, but the fact that it shows that Earth-like planets are probably extremely common in the Universe. There are 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone and many astronomers believe most of these stars have planets.

Related: Star System 'Just Right' for Building an Earth.

The Nature Conservancy has brokered the largest debt-for-nature swap in history — a deal that will secure long-term, science-based conservation for Costa Rica’s tropical forests:

• The United States will forgive $26 million in debt owed to it by Costa Rica.
• This move will in turn provide necessary funds that will be used to finance forest conservation in Costa Rica over the next 16 years, protecting one of the world’s richest natural treasures for future generations.

And science — the Conservancy's hallmark — is at the center of the deal.

"This debt swap is unique in that it utilizes scientific analysis to determine the sites towards which the funds will be directed,” says Zdenka Piskulich, program director for the Conservancy in Costa Rica.

Costa Rica is a small nation — but it's home to some of the largest tracts of concentrated biodiversity on Earth. Its lush tropical forests are home to several endangered species such as jaguars, quetzals, scarlet macaws, howler monkeys, tree frogs and a host of other wildlife.

"The funding that is a result of this debt swap will also allow local communities, 80 percent of which live in The Amistad Region, to pursue sustainable and economically viable livelihoods, thus improving their lives and sustaining the biodiverse resources on which they depend," said Piskulich.

Where The Nature Conservancy Works - Year in Review 2007.

Related: Red-Eyed Tree Frog: Rainforest Ambassador.

Changes are made to wp-cache-phase2.php.

function wp_cache_ob_callback($buffer) {
 ..
	/* we avoid caching incomplete files */
	if (is_404() || !preg_match('/(<\/html>|<\/rss>|<\/feed>)/i',$buffer) ) {
		$new_cache = false;
		return $buffer;
	}
	// dun cache password protect post <-- add here
	global $post;
	if (is_single() && !empty($post->post_password)) {
		$new_cache = false;
		return $buffer;
	}

They have put together a selection of the 50 Brain Teasers that people have enjoyed the most in their blog and speaking engagements.

They classify them into attention, memory, pattern recognition and planning, visual workouts and illusions, logic, math puzzles and some fun experiments.

Have a good workout! :)

I am using WP-Cache plugin also, so twitter updates may not be seen immediately (for up to an hour).

Modified Twitter Tools so that tweets from my blog posts don't show the tinyurl link.

Efforts to avoid embarrassment often keep us from imagining, let alone fulfilling, the measure of our destiny. To claim it, we need to develop a mental dimmer switch.

Gilovich and Medvec have found in other studies that, in the long run, people most often regret the things they failed to try, rather than the things they bombed at. Trying yields either success or an opportunity to learn; not trying has no positive result besides avoiding mockery or envy that (research shows) wouldn't be nearly as big or bad as we fear.

The first time I actually stood under a spotlight, in a high school play, the director told me, "Small gestures look embarrassed, so they're embarrassing. If you're going to do something, and you don't want to look foolish, do it BIG."

Now, thanks to Gilovich, Medvec and Savitsky, I know how big to make my actions -- about twice as big as I think they should be.

The next time you feel performance anxiety in any form, remember that the negative attention you fear does not exist except in your mind -- if this works with the hard, cold reality of my ice block, I guarantee it will work with something as vaporous as other people's opinions.

Act as if there is no spotlight on you, even if there is one. Say, do, and be what you would if no one else were looking. It will be scary at first, but if you persist, there will come that liberating moment when you'll feel yourself sailing straight through your life's most inhibiting barriers without even feeling a bump.

Once, I had an intense, emotional cell phone discussion with a friend while riding in a taxi. At a certain point I fell into a strangled silence.

"What's wrong with you?" my friend asked. "Why aren't you talking?"

Covering my mouth with one hand, I whispered, "The driver can hear me."

At this point, my friend said something so lucid, so mind expanding, so simultaneously Socratic and Zenlike, that I memorized it on the spot. I've gained comfort by repeating it to myself in many other situations. I encourage you, too, to memorize this question and use it when you find yourself shrinking back from an imaginary spotlight. My friend said -- and I quote:

"So?"

This brilliant interrogatory challenged me to consider the long-term consequences of being embarrassed (really, who cares?). It reminded me that failing to act almost always leaves me with more regret than taking embarrassing action. I suggest using it every time you feel yourself hesitating to do something that might deepen or broaden your life.

Stuart Baker-Brown, 43, a photographer and writer based in Dorset, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1996. On World Mental Health Day, he delivers a unique personal insight into how his condition has nurtured his artistic expression.

In the past, schizophrenia has broken my life and taken away many of life's opportunities, such as work and the ability to interact with society and family or even myself.

The symptoms have been very disabling and destructive and have included psychosis (delusion and hallucinations) which is understood to be a disturbance of sensory perception and creates the inability to recognise reality from the unreal.

Other daily symptoms, such as depression, suicidal thoughts, the feeling of being controlled by outside forces, paranoia and fear of persecution, have made life very difficult to cope with.

There is also the stigma and discrimination attached to the condition, especially the perceived link to violence - less than 1% of those diagnosed are violent towards others.

Many people with schizophrenia are naturally creative and turn to the arts to release their inner thoughts and emotions and to express the meaning of their symptoms.

In my experience, schizophrenia is potentially a very creative tool which, as yet, has not been understood or recognised and is mistreated and so its powerful symptoms manifest as confusion and destruction.

I am now in a very fortunate position and my creativity is beginning to be achieved. My symptoms have eased greatly, due to my own personal belief and will to survive and finding a medication, Seroquel, that truly works with me.

The symptoms feed me the tools to become creative. I seem to be thinking all the time and the psychosis is not necessarily destructive. The experience of a hallucination can often be recalled in the creation of artwork or poetry, for example.

Sometimes it feels that the symptoms of my condition are very naturally creative and often without any prompting my imagination comes alive. My mind, as others with the condition, is often very stimulated, as if on a more heightened awareness than people without it.

But the problem is expressing what I see or hear because strong cognitive difficulties - such as memory loss, disorganized thoughts, difficulty concentrating and completing tasks - impair my ability to enhance and capture my true creative potential.

Unfortunately psychiatry leans far more towards controlling schizophrenia, rather than showing understanding towards a patient's true needs and potential capabilities.

There needs to be far more emphasis on working with the symptoms. A far greater holistic approach needs to be adopted.

Creativity linked to Schizotypy.

Is Calvin (Hobbes) a schizophrenia?

Read The Letter D: Calvin: An Intimate Portrait.

Calvin, I have to lead off with a question that I used to debate with my friends. When no one else was around, was Hobbes real? Or was he just a figment of your imagination? ..

The story of Prince Siddhartha and his spiritual transformation into the Buddha.

Life of the Buddha. (BuddhaNet)

Related:

Buddha’s Compassion And The Story of Kisa Gotami and The Mustard Seed.

Vanessa Alarcon saw them while working at an antiwar rally in Lafayette Square last month.

"I heard someone say, 'Oh my god, look at those,' " the college senior from New York recalled. "I look up and I'm like, 'What the hell is that?' They looked kind of like dragonflies or little helicopters. But I mean, those are not insects."

That is just one of the questions hovering over a handful of similar sightings at political events in Washington and New York. Some suspect the insectlike drones are high-tech surveillance tools, perhaps deployed by the Department of Homeland Security.

No agency admits to having deployed insect-size spy drones. But a number of U.S. government and private entities acknowledge they are trying. Some federally funded teams are even growing live insects with computer chips in them, with the goal of mounting spyware on their bodies and controlling their flight muscles remotely.

The robobugs could follow suspects, guide missiles to targets or navigate the crannies of collapsed buildings to find survivors.

A recent report by the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College warned that if traffic rules are not clarified soon, the glut of unmanned vehicles "could render military airspace chaotic and potentially dangerous."

Only recently have scientists come to understand how insects fly -- a biomechanical feat that, despite the evidence before scientists' eyes, was for decades deemed "theoretically impossible." Just last month, researchers at Cornell University published a physics paper clarifying how dragonflies adjust the relative motions of their front and rear wings to save energy while hovering.

In August, at the International Symposium on Flying Insects and Robots, held in Switzerland, Japanese researchers introduced radio-controlled fliers with four-inch wingspans that resemble hawk moths. Those who watch them fly, its creator wrote in the program, "feel something of 'living souls.' "

If such devices are being used to spy on political activists, she said, "it would be a significant violation of people's civil rights."

For many roboticists still struggling to get off the ground, however, that concern -- and their technology's potential role -- seems superfluous.

..

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery -- even if mixed with fear -- that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, our perceptions of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which only in their most primitive forms are accessible to our minds: it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man... I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence -- as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature."

A lucky kangaroo! :)

How often do you let other people's nonsense change your mood? Do you let a bad driver, rude waiter, curt boss, or an insensitive employee ruin your day? Unless you're the Terminator, for an instant you're probably set back on your heels. However, the mark of a successful person is how quickly she can get back her focus on what's important.

Sixteen years ago I learned this lesson. I learned it in the back of a New York City taxi cab. Here's what happened. I hopped in a taxi, and we took off for Grand Central Station. We were driving in the right lane when all of a sudden a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his brakes, skidded, and missed the other car's back end by just inches!

Here's what happened next. The driver of the other car, the guy who almost caused a big accident, whipped his head around and he started yelling bad words at us. How do I know? Ask any New Yorker, some words in New York come with a special face.

Now, here's what blew me away. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy. And I mean, he was friendly. So, I said, "Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!" And this is when my taxi driver told me what I now call, "The Law of the Garbage Truck™."

Many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full of disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it. And if you let them, they'll dump it on you.

When someone wants to dump on you, don't take it personally. You just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. You'll be happy you did. I guarantee it.

So this was it: The "Law of the Garbage Truck™." I started thinking, how often do I let Garbage Trucks run right over me? And how often do I take their garbage and spread it to other people: at work, at home, on the streets? It was that day I said, "I'm not going to do it anymore."

..

A bottlenose dolphin goes into labour . . . then a calf emerges, tail first. Mother guides baby gently to the surface, where they swim together for the first time.

Very few dolphin births have been captured on film in such astonishing detail.

This one was recorded at a wildlife park pool in Rimini, Italy, where photographer Leandro Stanzani was in exactly the right place at the right time.

Video: How Baby Dolphins Learn the Secrets of Survival. (National Geographic)

What effortless swimming! 8)

Related:

Just How Smart Are Dolphins?

Who would have thought that the secrets to long life might exist in the naked, wrinkled body of one of the world's ugliest animals? Probably not many, but current research may be leading seekers of the Fountain of Youth to a strange little beast — the naked mole rat.

These small rodents are hairless, wrinkled, blind and buck-toothed. Stan Braude, Ph.D., lecturer in biology in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis, however, is attracted to these animals and has been studying them for over 25 years, with about 20 of those years being in the field in Kenya.

"I make the case [in my book] that if you really want to understand the lab work you also have to know what these animals are doing in the wild," said Braude.

Some of the "hottest" research on naked mole rats today concerns senescence, or aging. Naked mole rats in the lab have reached up to 28 years of age. And it's not just the controlled environments of their captivity that are doing this. Braude has observed mole rats in the wild that are 17 years and older. But these are the breeders. Lab researchers didn't realize that in the wild workers only live two or three years.

"For a rodent of this size, they are ridiculously long-lived," said Braude.

A key component in the aging of any species is oxidative damage, where the cells accrue damage from poisons, environmental toxins and other effects throughout life. In such a long-lived rodent, it was thought that naked mole rats had a very efficient way of repairing oxidative damage. This wasn't the case, however, and current theory points to the strange metabolism of this hairless wonder.

Naked mole rats appear to deal with oxidative stress in pulses, largely due to their ability to essentially shut down their metabolism when there are hardships, such as lack of food. In this way, mole rats may be able to rid their body of harmful reducing agents and poisons more easily during these metabolic pulses.

He considers himself a behavioral ecologist and takes his perspectives on physiology and applies it to these animals in the wild. He was originally drawn to these animals, as were many researchers at the time, because of their eusocial behavior. Naked mole rats, like bees and ants, have a queen and workers.

During his time with naked mole rats in Kenya, Braude has observed many traits and behaviors that make this animal unique. Naked mole rats in nature kidnap pups from other colonies and bring them back to serve as workers in their own tunnels; naked mole rats will invade neighboring colonies and fight for hostile takeover; and when naked mole rats disperse, or leave the colony to found a new one, they have often been found up to two kilometers away.

Braude is writing a synthetic monograph that will pull together all the different threads — from the ecology in the wild, from the behavior, from the physiology — with the unique perspective of living with these animals in their natural environment for almost 20 years.

Braude has also written an illustrated children's book about the day in the life of a naked mole rat. Imagine that as a bedtime story.

It looks ugly! But, it is cute! :)

Nissan's Pivo concept car can drive sideways too. (Google news)

Japan's Nissan Motor Co. on Friday unveiled a new version of its egg-shaped Pivo concept car that can drive sideways and has a small robot to assist with navigation or calm down angry drivers.

A round-eyed robot head sitting on the dashboard has cameras that can tell when a driver is getting sleepy. It can also nod or shake its head, helping to improve the mood of irate or glum drivers.

An Earth-like planet is likely forming 424 light-years away in a star system called HD 113766, say astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Scientists have discovered a huge belt of warm dust - enough to build a Mars-size planet or larger - swirling around a distant star that is just slightly more massive than our sun. The dust belt, which they suspect is clumping together into planets, is located in the middle of the system's terrestrial habitable zone. This is the region around a star where liquid water could exist on any rocky planets that might form. Earth is located in the middle of our sun's terrestrial habitable zone.

"The timing for this system to be building an Earth is very good," said Carey Lisse, of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, Baltimore, Md. "If the system was too young, its planet-forming disk would be full of gas, and it would be making gas-giant planets like Jupiter instead. If the system was too old, then dust aggregation or clumping would have already occurred and all the system's rocky planets would have already formed."

According to Lisse, the conditions for forming an Earth-like planet are more than just being in the right place at the right time and around the right star - it's also about the right mix of dusty materials.

Lisse says that HD 113766 does not contain any water ice, carbonates, or fragile organic materials; stuffs that makes up infant solar systems and comets.

Studies tell us that metals began separating from rocks in Earth's early days, when the planet's body was completely molten. During this time, almost all the heavy metals fell to Earth's center in a process called "differentiation." Lisse says that, unlike planets and asteroids, the metals in HD 113766 have not totally separated from the rocky material, suggesting that rocky planets have not yet formed.

"The material mix in this belt is most reminiscent of the stuff found in lava flows on Earth. I thought of Mauna Kea material when I first saw the dust composition in this system - it contains raw rock and is abundant in iron sulfides, which are similar to fool's gold," said Lisse. Mauna Kea is a well-known volcano in Hawaii.

"It is fantastic to think we are able to detect the process of terrestrial planet formation. Stay tuned - I expect lots more fireworks as the planet in HD113766 grows," he adds.

Related:

Mars Once Had Large Oceans.

Related:

Campus launches YouTube channel. (UC Berkeley)

UC Berkeley is the first university to make videos of full courses available through YouTube. Visitors to the site at youtube.com/ucberkeley can view more than 300 hours of videotaped courses and events. Topics range from bioengineering, to peace and conflict studies, to "Physics for Future Presidents," the title of a popular campus course. Building on its initial offerings, UC Berkeley will continue to expand the catalog of videos available on YouTube.

UC Berkeley has been a leader in the open-source video movement in higher education since fall 2001, when the campus's Educational Technology Services (ETS) launched webcast.berkeley.edu, a local site that delivers course and event content as podcasts and streaming video.

"YouTube's ongoing innovations create a great environment in which students and lifelong learners alike can discover, watch and share educational videos," said Ben Hubbard, ETS co-manager of webcast.berkeley. "We are excited to make UC Berkeley videos available to the world on YouTube and will continue to expand our offerings."

MIT Open Courseware.

8)

The Thousand Islands are a chain of islands that straddle the U.S.-Canada border in the Saint Lawrence River as it emerges from the northeast corner of Lake Ontario.

In this old, dusty village, two cousins -- Ghassan and Samer Alayan -- wearing sweat-drenched PeacePlayers International shirts sit and talk about the history of Beit Safafa. They speak of resistance and cooperation, roots and exile, the joy and the despair of everyone, on both sides, who chooses to live in this place. Both have just spent the past week running coexistence and leadership basketball camps in Israel and the West Bank.

Ghassan's father ambles up the stairs and joins the conversation.

He looks at the PeacePlayers shirts with a furrowed brow.

"This word 'peace,' " he says, pointing to the shirts. "We [Palestinians] hate this word. Peace, peace, everyone always comes talking about peace. You know the problem with this word? Everyone talks about peace. No one does peace. We are tired of hearing a word that is not real."

In August, I spent a week in Israel and the West Bank following up with a program that we covered last year: PeacePlayers International (formerly Playing for Peace). PeacePlayers is a program that, through the game of basketball, brings together young people living in communities of conflict.

Here, the main activity of PeacePlayers is the Twinned Basketball Clubs, a program that brings together Palestinian and Israeli youth on a weekly basis. The youth participate in basketball, life skills and leadership training, in addition to activities that facilitate intergroup relations and dialogue. Ideally, children begin the program at age 10 and continue until age 16, when they have a chance to become coaches and role models for the youth in their communities.

While PeacePlayers has created deep roots in Northern Ireland and South Africa, the Middle East poses unique challenges that make it harder to measure success. Still, PeacePlayers is experiencing tremendous growth in the Middle East, having worked with more than 2,000 youth. Last year, 600 children enrolled in its yearlong program, with some 40 local coaches employed and 15 interns trained.

The following are the stories of the dedicated volunteers in the region who are planting those seeds. They range from the general manager (R. C. Buford, Spurs General Manager) of the NBA champs to a former Israeli solider (Yoav Shapiro) who once raised tigers in Thailand to a 13-year-old Jericho girl who made a splash this summer in North Carolina when she was named to an All-Star team of 16- and 17-year-olds.

Each one, in his or her own way, is taking the sport of basketball and using it as a tool for peace.

---

..

While serving in the army can harden a soldier's view, it had a different effect on Yoav. "I had many chances to kill them, but I couldn't do it," he says with a pained expression. His reddhish hair is in dreadlocks, his facial hair a Fu Manchu.

"I would see them taunting us, and it made me angry. But then, after while, I began to understand why he hates us. We destroyed his neighborhood. We took his things from his house. We mistreated him at the checkpoints. Everyone, Israelis and Arabs, were behaving the wrong way."

..

Later, Yoav was a camp counselor working with 10 Israeli and Arab children at the basketball camp.

The first day was rocky. By Day 2, things began to change. After a night of movie-watching and swimming, and with competitive games on the line, the kids were starting to get along.

As the camp prepares to end, an ecstatic Yoav is bouncing around the gym. "Can you believe this? They are playing together. Passing to each other. High-fiving! If you had asked me if this was possible yesterday, I would say it was impossible. Today, everything is possible."

That evening, Yoav commits to working in the program in Jerusalem for the entire year.

"I'm not sure I was ready for this when I came," he says in a subdued voice later that night. "My family doesn't like Arab people. I didn't like them either.

"But when you see things like this, it causes you to re-examine your assumptions. Maybe I do believe that peace can still come. Maybe the problem is, we just don't know the way. Seeing basketball used like this makes me think that maybe there's a way."

---

During an adidas Streetball tournament in 1997 in Jerusalem, Ghassan's team made it to the semifinals. They lost in the semifinals, but the difficult conditions won him and his team a few admirers. Even though some fans wanted him dead, Israeli players congratulated him and his team for their play. (Ghassan Alayan, Palestinian Player and PeacePlayers Coach)

"Playing basketball, for the first time in my life, brought me some respect," Ghassan says. "I didn't forget this."

Ghassan admits that the basketball part of PeacePlayers is more important to him than the peace part -- a common reality for many of the participants.

This means PeacePlayers is preaching not only to the converted, the liberal, the open-minded children who already want peace. PeacePlayers is engaging coaches and children who might not initially be open to integration or conciliation. As a general rule, "encounter programs" suffer because the participants are self-selected to fit the program. The fact that PeacePlayers overcomes this hurdle attests to the power of sport to bring together people who otherwise would not be open to meeting and interacting with each other.

Still, given the circumstances, Ghassan remains skeptical that peace can be made via basketball or anything else.

He notes the disparities between the two groups still serve as a wall. Most of the Israeli kids play in new, air-conditioned gyms. Only two such gyms exist for Arabs in the country. The Arab kids almost always have to travel to the Israeli towns when the teams mix. The Israeli parents won't allow their kids to visit the Arab areas -- which leads to less understanding among the Israeli players about the conditions that many Palestinians face.

..

Despite the problems in making peace in the region, Ghassan has noticed changes in his kids, the Israeli kids and himself since starting the program.

"I think we've learned respect for each other through the game," he says. "This conflict is about a lot of things, but clearly a lack of respect is at the heart of it. If this program builds even a little of that, I've seen what it can do."

---

"PeacePlayers is a great opportunity to be around kids using basketball to bridge damaged relationships in areas that need some good things to happen," Buford says.

As the GM for the Spurs, Buford is known as a guy who can see the big picture. From the sound of things, that trait has helped PeacePlayers.

"Basketball is a game where all five players need to share the ball," Buford says. "If it is played with great teamwork, the sum of the parts is greater than the individual. It's a great forum for building trust. A lot of the game happens with things you can't see. Communication and trust with teammates is the key. It seems to me that the same can be said of peacemaking."

Buford's support of PeacePlayers isn't the only area in which he has given kids a chance. ..

---

Khaled took the role of mentor to many of the younger players in the camp. He made sure everyone's needs were taken care of and even earned a nickname: Coach Khaled.

Khaled's leadership during the camp illustrated one of the PeacePlayers ideas that makes the program sustainable -- making mentors and coaches of the older players in the program.

With several others, Khaled will pilot the new Leadership Development program this fall.

---

Another success story is PeacePlayers' new girls' program. The girls' program was launched last September as a partnership with the Jerusalem Girl's Basketball League. PeacePlayers' involvement signified the first time Arab girls were included in the league. With the support of coaches like Osnat Ginati, an Israeli women's basketball player from Jerusalem, the demand for the program has been enormous.

"I think with girls it's easier," Osnat says. "I think the biggest issue is culture. Many of the Jewish girls from the poorer neighborhoods dress in ways that the Arab girls find immodest. That's been the biggest obstacle."

..

"I was thinking that Jewish people were cold and didn't like Palestinians," Serene remembers. "But Bar was warm and cared. I think she trusted us, and that was great."

The story of Bar and Serene, says Osnat, has an important effect not only on the kids, but also on the adults.

"I think kids like that, who are willing to open themselves up, despite real danger of being rejected, inspire us all to be better," Osnat says with tears in her eyes. "Some of my family tells me I'm crazy to believe a program like this will ever work. That Arabs will never change. But I see this, and I say to myself, maybe both of us are capable of change."

---

"You come here with one impression about the place and the people," Sigafoos says. (Sigafoos, Program Director) "But it's totally erased when you're here. The people are better than you'd think. The conflict is more complicated that it appears from the outside. But most of all, you just see a lot of people trying to create a normal life out of an extraordinary situation.

"My work for PeacePlayers has been so rewarding to me personally because of the challenges we face on a daily basis. It's hard to make a difference in the larger context of the conflict. We're not overreaching or deluding ourselves in that way. What we can do, as a small and passionate grassroots organization, is make a real difference in the lives of everyone we work with. PPI is succeeding and creating positive change among our players and coaches because of the talent and passion of the entire PPI staff, especially our local coaches, for change and for a better future."

---

Enter Samer Alayan, Ghassan's cousin. Not only does Samer now coach three teams for PeacePlayers, a girls' team and two boys' teams, in Beit Sefafa, he also now heads up a new program for PeacePlayers: BasketPal.

The idea behind the program is to strengthen the basketball infrastructure in Palestine. As a Palestinian, he often was embarrassed when playing against Israelis. The lack of formal coaching and facilities often left the Arab teams underprepared. Out of addressing that concern, as well as the difficulty of Palestinian teams traveling to Israel, BasketPal was born.

The program started with seven teams in Tul Karem and two in Jericho, and is expanding to Ramallah and possibly Bethlehem this year. The goal is to spread the program throughout the entire West Bank.

"If the kids can't play, the respect won't come. In fact, the stereotype that Arabs are worthless just increases." Samer says.

Samer has been beating the bushes looking for support, and he's found a lot of it from a local Palestinian company: Hadara Technologies, the Internet service provider arm of PalTel, which provides broadband services to the 7 percent of Palestinian households that have access to the Web.

"For many Palestians, the Internet is the only way to reach the outside world," says Huda Eljack, Hadara's CEO. "They are so trapped, it's difficult for them to get access to new ideas or even entertainment."

"You can't have peace if people don't have jobs," she says, "so we've tried to create as many jobs in Palestine as we can the last few years."

Her support for the program is enthusiastic. "They aren't just creating basketball players," she says. "They are building life skills and gaining role models.

"Programs like this teach kids to deal with each each and connect them in important ways. Finding the right role models in Palestine, with all of the religious and political strife in the region, is very difficult. To have the coaches develop relationships with the kids may be the most important piece of this."

The BasketPal program itself already has produced its first star, a 13-year-old Christian girl from Jericho named Natalie. Natalie might be the best player in the PeacePlayers program, boy or girl, regardless of age, religion or nationality.

Her goal is to make it to the United States and play high school basketball, with an eye toward playing Division I college basketball. She has the potential to do it, and thanks to BasketPal, she might have the chance.

---

Karen Doubliet (Middle East Managing Director) is one of the few Israelis who can say she actually has spent time on the other side of the wall -- in Tul Karem, Ramallah and Bethlehem -- in any capacity other than as a solider. Now Doubliet, with a strong academic background in conflict resolution, is taking PeacePlayers to new places as well. She has been working furiously as PeacePlayers expands its programs and adds new curriculum to provide better leadership and coexistence training to both the program directors and the coaches.

"I felt I was spending too much time on history when there was a real live conflict in front of my eyes," she says. "I felt a responsibility to contribute to something I can change. It was the beginning of new path for me."

She enrolled in Bar-Ilan University to study conflict management and negotiation.

"Bar-Ilan is a religious university, and I wasn't particularly religious," she says. "But I wanted to see the religious perspective of the conflict. I felt that, in order to totally understand the conflict, you need to understand the narratives of all sides: right and left, religious, and secular. You need to understand the perspectives of your friends and your foes. The program was professional and neutral, but the life experiences of the faculty and students gave me a deeper insight into a new way of thinking about the conflict."

"It is a miracle that we are even bringing Palestinian and Israeli youth together under these circumstances, and creating a forum where coaches from both sides can work together, creating a joint future. There is no doubt that the program has a significant impact on the lives of the children with whom we work -- many of whom would be playing on the street and getting into trouble if it weren't for the program and the positive role models.

"This is a necessary part of the process. Bottom-up peace-building is a gradual process; it's about changing attitudes and opening people's minds to other possibilities. These kids won't create the political agreements that need to be made. But it open minds and prepares them for the peace when it comes. If we impact even a few kids, it may not make peace in and of itself; it's another drop in the bucket. Eventually, we'll have a full bucket."

The success has not gone unnoticed. Adidas's corporate foundation, the Adi Dassler Fund, recently awarded PeacePlayers a significant grant that will support PeacePlayers' programs in the Middle East and New Orleans.

Former President Bill Clinton mentioned PeacePlayers in his newest book, "Giving: How Each of Us Can Change the World," as a program that can foster communication, cooperation and leadership in the Middle East and around the globe.

The plan is to continue growing, adding a community a year as PeacePlayers receives more financial support.

More from ESPN:

2006 Chad Ford's first report from Israel and Palestine.

ESPN Mag: PeacePlayers making progress in Ireland, too.