Congolese Women's Workout

A really funny but touching video by New York Time Op-Ed columnist Nicholas D. Kristof on the physical and mental toughness of Congolese women-MA

The "What are you carrying?" video can be found HERE

Thanks to Chrissie E for the link

New orangutan population found in N. Sumatra

from the Jakarta Post

A population of Sumatran orangutan has been found in Batan Toru forest in North Sumatra, but their number had not yet been determined. The population, found in areas located in South Tapanuli, North Tapanuli and Central Tapanuli, is believed to be the first found this year. Last year, an orangutan population was found in Dairi regency. Nasir Siregar, a resident of Sipirok in South Tapanuli, said he found four big orangutan nests in the forest. "Based on their location, it's unlikely the nests are made by animals other than orangutans," he said.

Spokesman for the Orangutan Conservation Services Program (OCSP) in Sumatra, Erwinsyah, said on Wednesday that at the sites found last year, the orangutans were estimated to number around 200. "We still don't know the number of Sumatran orangutans *in the wild*," he said. Data from Directorate General of Forest Protection and Nature Conservation in 2005 cited 7,334 Sumatran orangutans were found in the wild, mostly in Aceh and small part of them in south of North Sumatra.

Case stronger' on climate change

image from verydemotivational.com

From BBC News
By Pallab Ghosh

A review from the UK Met Office says it is becoming clearer that human activities are causing climate change. It says the evidence is stronger now than when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change carried out its last assessment in 2007. The analysis, published in the Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews Climate Change Journal, has assessed 110 research papers on the subject. It says the earth is changing rapidly, probably because of greenhouse gases.

In 2007 the IPCC's report concluded that there was "unequivocal" evidence that the Earth was warming and it was likely that it was due to burning of fossil fuels. Since then the evidence that human activities are responsible for a rise in temperatures has increased, according to this new assessment by Dr Peter Stott and colleagues at the UK Met Office.

The study, which looks at research published since the IPCC's report, has found that changes in Arctic sea ice, atmospheric moisture, saltiness of parts of the Atlantic Ocean and temperature changes in the Antarctic are consistent with human influence on our climate. "What this study shows is that the evidence has strengthened for human influence on climate and we know that because we've looked at evidence across the climate system and what this shows very clearly is a consistent picture of a warming world," said Dr Stott.

The study brings together other research from a range of disciplines. "We hadn't [until now] looked in detail at how the climate system was changing," says Dr Stott. "[Our paper looks at] not just the temperatures but also the reducing Arctic sea ice and it includes changing rainfall patterns and it includes the fact that the atmosphere is getting more humid. "And all these different aspects of the climate system are adding up to a picture of the effects of a human influence on our climate."

The Met Office study said that it was harder to find a firm link between climate change and individual extreme weather conditions - even though models predicted that extreme events were more likely. According to the report: "Extremes pose a particular challenge, since rare events are by definition, poorly sampled in the historical record and many challenges remain for robustly attributing regional changes in extreme events such as droughts, floods and hurricanes."

The Met Office study comes at a time when some have questioned the entire basis of climate science following recent controversies over the handling of research findings by the IPCC and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.
Dr Stott denies that the study has been published as part of a fight back by the climate research community. "We started writing this paper a year ago. I think it's important to communicate to people what the science is showing and that's why I'm talking about this paper."

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/science/nature/8550090.stm

CNN reports on the Cross River gorilla

photo from the North Carolina zoo website

From CCN.com
In search of world's rarest and most endangered gorilla
By Christian Purefoy

We shouldered our packs -- leaving behind us a small town of wooden shacks, and making our way up a steep climb into the Mbe mountains and Nigeria's last rainforest. In this area there's no mobile phone network and only a few hours of electricity a month for the local community. One of our guides waved towards the forest ahead of us: "We used to hear the gorillas roar from here in the town," reminisced Joseph Njama. "But not anymore."

We're searching for the world's rarest and most endangered gorilla -- the Cross River gorilla. In Nigeria and Cameroon there are thought to be only 300 left, and in these Mbe mountains maybe only 30 remain. The gorillas are under threat from local poachers, who sell the meat in local bush-markets. So far, it seems the rugged terrain of the Mbe mountains has saved the gorillas from extinction -- difficult access and thick forests make it a perfect hiding place. But with Nigeria's burgeoning population of 150 million people -- the small gorilla population is under increasing pressure.

Our guides -- or "eco-guards" -- are ex-poachers now turned guardians for the gorillas, patrolling the rainforest daily for hunters. But even they see the gorillas maybe only two or three times a year.

As we trekked through encroaching farmlands, scattered banana plantations and then cutting our way through the rainforest, eco-guard Joseph Njama would point out the few signs that show the gorillas still inhabit the region. "These are the teeth of the gorilla," Joseph pointed to teeth-markings in an old fruit. "Look at them biting it -- forcing it to break." The U.S.-based Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the local Cross River government are throwing their support behind a community-based conservation program.

The nine local communities living in the shadow of the Mbe mountains have come together to try to protect the gorillas -- holding regular meetings on how to stop poachers and farmland encroachment. But disagreement over exactly how is proving divisive. And the conservation support they've been promised by government, says local king Oduo Abang-Aban, has not been forthcoming. "We're trying to cry to government -- we who are trying to keep this mountain safe ... otherwise some people will encroach." And so the consequences of neglect and delay remain.

Emmanuel Oshibeka untied his small nylon bag, and one by one, pulled out four gorilla skulls. He was jailed for only six months after he killed three gorillas in 2006. A tenth of the local gorilla population in one day. "They were in a group and I was with a dog. The dog ran and met them and they began to shout. Then I also entered and I saw them on top of a tree," Emmanuel explained the moment when he killed the three gorillas. "I began to shoot three of them in the trees, and as they fell to the ground I went and slaughtered them," Emmanuel pulled his hand across his throat in a graphic description of how he killed them. WCS now help him tend bees as an alternative to hunting. But so far, only one out of five hives have successfully colonized. "When I do not succeed in beekeeping and there's no money from there -- I can still go back to the forest," Emmanuel warned.

But as we continued our search through the rainforest we find further signs of life. Bent branches and leaves all folded into a small bed on the ground -- a gorilla nest only two to three weeks old. "The only way we can get information on the population is by finding nests such as this," explained Inaoyom Imong, a local biologist with WCS, "To give an idea of the population size and ranging behavior. And also looking at the food remains you can see what plants the gorillas are eating." As he pulled out a tape measure to record the size of the nest, Inaoyom described an encounter with the gorillas.

"It's exciting -- they're huge animals, very charismatic -- they're a beauty to withhold. The way they charge at you, roar, open their fangs -- it's exciting, fearful but very exciting."

And finding nests like this, says Nigerian WCS Director Andrew Dunn, is a hopeful sign that their efforts are not in vain. "There are people who wrote off the Cross River gorilla entirely, but we've shown that although there are only three or four small groups left -- there are corridors left between these remaining groups. So the future is not entirely bleak."

As we trekked out of the mountains and the end of our three day trip, the sound of singing and church service rang through the communities banana plantations -- a warning of human encroachment towards the forest. We didn't see any gorillas but the more these gorillas fear humans and stay hidden the better their chances of survival.

Jean-Michel Cousteau's Statement on Captive Orcas

From youtube:
Jean-Michel Cousteau comments on the tragedy on February 24th, 2010, when trainer Dawn Brancheau was dragged into the water and killed by Tilikum, an orca at Sea World's Orlando park. This is the third death associated with Tilikum while in captivity. The tragic death of the trainer suggests that maybe we have outgrown the need to keep such wild, enormous, complex, intelligent and free-ranging animals in captivity, where their behavior is not only unnatural, it can become pathological.

For more info visit oceanfutures.org

PETA also has a petition against SeaWorld which you can read and sign here.

Thanks to Cleve H for the link

Computer program can compose as good as the masters.

Triumph of the Cyborg Composer
David Cope’s software creates beautiful, original music. Why are people so angry about that?
By Ryan Blitstein
from miller-mccune.com:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/

Excerpt 1:

Emmy was once the world’s most advanced artificially intelligent composer, and because he’d managed to breathe a sort of life into her, he became a modern-day musical Dr. Frankenstein. She produced thousands of scores in the style of classical heavyweights, scores so impressive that classical music scholars failed to identify them as computer-created. Cope attracted praise from musicians and computer scientists, but his creation raised troubling questions: If a machine could write a Mozart sonata every bit as good as the originals, then what was so special about Mozart? And was there really any soul behind the great works, or were Beethoven and his ilk just clever mathematical manipulators of notes?

Cope’s answers — not much, and yes — made some people very angry. He was so often criticized for these views that colleagues nicknamed him “The Tin Man,” after the Wizard of Oz character without a heart. For a time, such condemnation fueled his creativity, but eventually, after years of hemming and hawing, Cope dragged Emmy into the trash folder.

This month, he is scheduled to unveil the results of a successor effort that’s already generating the controversy and high expectations that Emmy once drew. Dubbed “Emily Howell,” the daughter program aims to do what many said Emmy couldn’t: create original, modern music. Its compositions are innovative, unique and — according to some in the small community of listeners who’ve heard them performed live — superb.

Excerpt 2:

The results were a great improvement. Yet as Cope tested the recombinating software on Bach, he noticed that the music would often wander and lacked an overall logic. More important, the output seemed to be missing some ineffable essence.

Again, Cope hit the books, hoping to discover research into what that something was. For hundreds of years, musicologists had analyzed the rules of composition at a superficial level. Yet few had explored the details of musical style; their descriptions of terms like “dynamic,” for example, were so vague as to be unprogrammable. So Cope developed his own types of musical phenomena to capture each composer’s tendencies — for instance, how often a series of notes shows up, or how a series may signal a change in key. He also classified chords, phrases and entire sections of a piece based on his own grammar of musical storytelling and tension and release: statement, preparation, extension, antecedent, consequent. The system is analogous to examining the way a piece of writing functions. For example, a word may be a noun in preparation for a verb, within a sentence meant to be a declarative statement, within a paragraph that’s a consequent near the conclusion of a piece.

Finally, Cope’s program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach’s spirit — and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he’d begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would’ve taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.

To read the entire article go to: http://www.miller-mccune.com/culture-society/triumph-of-the-cyborg-composer-8507/

Thanks to Claudio T for the link

Vertebrate DNA in Fecal Samples from Bonobos and Gorillas: Evidence for Meat Consumption or Artefact?

Reference:
Hofreiter M, Kreuz E, Eriksson J, Schubert G, Hohmann G (2010) Vertebrate DNA in Fecal Samples from Bonobos and Gorillas: Evidence for Meat Consumption or Artefact? PLoS ONE 5(2): e9419. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0009419

Background
Deciphering the behavioral repertoire of great apes is a challenge for several reasons. First, due to their elusive behavior in dense forest environments, great ape populations are often difficult to observe. Second, members of the genus Pan are known to display a great variety in their behavioral repertoire; thus, observations from one population are not necessarily representative for other populations. For example, bonobos (Pan paniscus) are generally believed to consume almost no vertebrate prey. However, recent observations show that at least some bonobo populations may consume vertebrate prey more commonly than previously believed. We investigated the extent of their meat consumption using PCR amplification of vertebrate mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) segments from DNA extracted from bonobo feces. As a control we also attempted PCR amplifications from gorilla feces, a species assumed to be strictly herbivorous.

Principal Findings
We found evidence for consumption of a variety of mammalian species in about 16% of the samples investigated. Moreover, 40% of the positive DNA amplifications originated from arboreal monkeys. However, we also found duiker and monkey mtDNA in the gorilla feces, albeit in somewhat lower percentages. Notably, the DNA sequences isolated from the two ape species fit best to the species living in the respective regions. This result suggests that the sequences are of regional origin and do not represent laboratory contaminants.

Conclusions
Our results allow at least three possible and mutually not exclusive conclusions. First, all results may represent contamination of the feces by vertebrate DNA from the local environment. Thus, studies investigating a species' diet from feces DNA may be unreliable due to the low copy number of DNA originating from diet items. Second, there is some inherent difference between the bonobo and gorilla feces, with only the later ones being contaminated. Third, similar to bonobos, for which the consumption of monkeys has only recently been documented, the gorilla population investigated (for which very little observational data are as yet available) may occasionally consume small vertebrates. Although the last explanation is speculative, it should not be discarded a-priori given that observational studies continue to unravel new behaviors in great ape species.