Video Footage Confirms Sumatran Tigers Breeding on Sumatra Island
Jan/100
Naturally, the Sumatran tiger was named for the Sumatra Island, which historically has been the species primary breeding location. However, in recent years, scientists have had more challenges in tracking the breeding patterns of these animals due to an inability to spot tiger cubs. This week, new footage was captured that provides more information.
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Video Footage Confirms Sumatran Tigers Breeding on Sumatra Island
Busted! Lost Luggage Reveals Endangered Fish
Dec/090
On April 5, 2009, 47-year-old Chee Thye Chaw flew home to the United States after visiting family members in Malaysia. While Chaw arrived at JFK Airport, his luggage apparently did not.
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Busted! Lost Luggage Reveals Endangered Fish
Have You Ever Seen a White Alligator?
Dec/090
White alligators are among the rarest of the species. While they do come in two forms – albino or leucistic – it’s the leucistic alligators that are especially unique. It is estimated that among the 5 million alligators that are in the United States, only about 12 of them have these unusual genetic traits. This species of alligator is not endangered, but does require some special care.
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Have You Ever Seen a White Alligator?
Store, Edit, and Share Documents with Microsoft Web Apps
Dec/090
One of the more exciting features available with the new Office 2010 release from Microsoft is the ability to share and edit documents with their Office Web Apps service. Today we take a look at how it works with Office 2010.
A while ago we took an overview look at the Office Live Web Apps feature and what you can expect. Here we’re going to take a closer look at it’s features with Office 2010 and what you can can accomplish with the new service.
Using Microsoft Live Web Apps with Office 2010
In this example we take a look at sharing MS Office documents and also preparing them for collaboration online. Before sharing a document you can click on the File tab which they call Backstage view. It includes the feature Prepare for Sharing which allows you to inspect the document, check Accessibility, and check compatibility.
In the Document Inspector, decide which type of content you want to analyze.
It gives you the results and you can click to remove different aspects of the document.
Save to SkyDrive
Click on the Share tab on the left side where it gives you options to share the document on you SkyDrive, SharePoint, publish to your blog, or send as an email.
When you share it to your SkyDrive you’re prompted to log into your Live account.
After logging in you can select which folder on your SkyDrive to save the document in.
It takes a moment for the connection to be established, Explorer opens up showing the files you have in the SkyDrive folder and you can save it like you normally would on your local machine.
While the document is saving you will see a progress bar at the bottom of the document showing it is uploading to the server.
Office 2010 has a feature called Upload Center that allows you to keep track of the documents you upload. From here you can manage the documents you upload to the servers.
If the MS servers are unreachable for some reason, the document will be shown as a pending upload in the Backstage section and you can try to upload it again or cancel the changes.
Access and Edit Documents Online
To access and edit the uploaded documents from the web, you’ll need to log into your Windows live account and go into SkyDrive and select the document you want to work on.
In the next screen yourself and other collaborators can leave comments on the document.
To share a document with others you’ll need to make sure they have permission to the folder the docs are stored in, then send them the Web address link.
The Web Apps service currently has limited functionality compared to the desktop app, but it does allow basic editing and is a good way to share and collaborate on your documents.
The PowerPoint Web App lets you make quick edits and create new basic presentations. There is no save option as edits to a presentation are automatically saved.
With PowerPoint presentations you can kick off a slide show. This is handy if you want to share a presentation in read only mode to others on the web.
Currently you can only read, print, or open Word Web Apps…there is no ability to edit them online, but according to Microsoft that option is on the way.
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Conclusion
Office Web Apps is still in technical preview and Office 2010 is in beta testing, but both are available to anyone and you might want to get started now. There are several ways to share and access documents online through Web Apps and also using SharePoint which is great for business. Another cool thing about Web Apps is they will work with browsers other than Internet Explorer. According to the site, it officially supports Internet Explorer 7 & 8, Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4 on Mac, although I have been able to get it to work fairly well in Google Chrome. If you’re looking for easy way to store, edit and share documents online or from a mobile device, Web Apps are an exciting new feature that you can start using now.
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Store, Edit, and Share Documents with Microsoft Web Apps
2000-Year Arctic Cooling Trend Reversed Itself Near Turn of 20th Century
Oct/090
Bylot Ice Cap on Bylot Island, one of the Canadian Arctic Islands, August 14, 1975 (USGS)
The Arctic: Cooling No More.
A group of climatologists at Northern Arizona University are confirming that 2000 years ago, the Earth’s Arctic region had already entered a prolonged cooling phase. The phase continued up through the Middle Ages and on past the so-called Little Ice Age (1400 – 1800 C.E.). However, that all started to change (in the positive direction) between 1850 and 1900 C.E.–roughly in parallel with the onset and rise of the Industrial Revolution in the U.S. and Europe. And, by 1950, the warming trend had picked up in earnest.
The results of their 2000-year reconstruction of Arctic temperatures also showed clearly that four of the five warmest decades occurred in the period between 1950 and 2000. This buttresses the mounting evidence (such as that from the International Polar Year studies) of recent climate change and would suggest some newer mechanism at work impacting global temperatures.
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2000-Year Arctic Cooling Trend Reversed Itself Near Turn of 20th Century
Freshwater Fish of the World – A Status Report
Oct/090
Pundamilia nyererei is a species of freshwater fish in the Cichlidae family. It is found in lakes in Kenya and Tanzania. It is becoming rare due to habitat loss.
In may not be a great surprise to learn that fish are the most species-rich vertebrate group on the Planet–with an estimated 32,500 member species. But what is surprising is that 43% of these species are found in freshwater habitats, such as lakes and rivers.
This rich diversity of freshwater species is all the more startling when one considers that freshwater systems represent just one hundredth of one percent (.01%) of the Earth’s surface water. According to Fishes of the World (J.S. Nelson), over 5000 new species of freshwater fish have been discovered in just the past three decades–a time period marked by expanded exploration of fish habitats and better understanding of “taxonomic boundaries” (mostly, due to more accurate genetic analysis).
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Freshwater Fish of the World – A Status Report
Maldives Government Ministers Meeting Under Water!
Oct/090
Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed has told his cabinet members to get ready for an underwater cabinet meeting later this month.
Maldives is a collection of islands and atolls in the Indian Ocean that is less than 2 meters above sea level. Therefore, it is the first country expected to go underwater due to climate change.
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Maldives Government Ministers Meeting Under Water!
Drink Wine to Save Endangered Hector’s and Maui’s Dolphins
Oct/090
A donation of three tons of grapes has been converted, via wine, into funds for the World Wildlife Fund’s (WWF) project to save endangered dolphins endemic to New Zealand.
A Hector’s Dolphin showing the characteristic round dorsal fin.
The Wine
It started with Gemma McGrath who had moved from a job on Whale Watch boats to a barmaid in the small Otago village of Bannockburn which is about as far away from the sea as one can get in New Zealand.
Missing the dolphins and concerned by the steady decrease in their numbers, she spoke of them so passionately and persistently that she eventually got a farmer in the area to donate 3 tons of Pinot Gris grapes.
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Drink Wine to Save Endangered Hector’s and Maui’s Dolphins
Air Quality Visualized at a Park or Forest Near You
Oct/090
The three summits of Mount Rainier: Liberty Cap, Columbia Crest,and Point Success (unaltered image)
Most of us would consider a trip to a state or national park to be a chance to get away from the pollution that plagues our cities. But it’s seldom easy to escape the effects of urban, industrial air pollution. Now, with a new art project called ECLIPSE, the web viewer or park visitor can see real time air quality data “imposed” on the otherwise scenic landscapes of our state and national parks.
ECLIPSE, based on an open source program, is the handiwork of artists Cary Peppermint and Leila Christine Nadir of EcoArtTech, and is a sponsored project of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc. for its website turbulence.org.
So, how does it work? Just select a State/National park from a drop down menu, click the “apply AQI (air quality index) conditions” button, and ECLIPSE then performs two “data scraping” functions…if air quality data is available for that park, the program sorts through Flickr.com for images tagged with that particular park’s name, then, the program “corrupts” or alters the image to reflect air quality data (culled from the most recent AQI updates on the www.airnow.gov website) of the nearest, large city within a 65 mile radius.
The air quality rating system uses the following scale: good – fair – moderate – unhealthy – very unhealthy –hazardous*. The AQI rating is a measure of particulate matter in the atmosphere, based on a range of 0 – 500 parts per million, with “good” being 0 – 50 ppm, and “unhealthy” being 151 ppm or higher.
Airnow.gov maintains 300 monitoring stations in cities across the country. With the ECLIPSE program, the more pollution present in the atmosphere of the park’s nearest city, the more visually “corrupted” the image becomes. This alteration process utilizes various algorithms that affect color, saturation, and contrast, and, additionally, impose intermittent mirroring, deletion, or cropping functions on the image’s data file.
Air quality is determined by the presence of particulate matter in the lower atmosphere. Particulate matter is a complex mixture of moisture and small particles of dust, soot, soil, various acids (e.g., nitrogen or sulfur containing acids) and trace metals.
The artists’ website notes that, In 2008, the EPA’s own Clean Air Scientific Advisory Council (CASAC) protested that the EPA was not upholding its mission to protect air quality standards according to
the scale.
*Note that U.S. air quality ratings are different than Canada’s AQ rating system, for example. The U.S. system has more gradations of air quality in which “moderate” in the U.S. system is rated as “unhealthy” on the Canadian scale. The site offers a visual comparison of air quality ratings between the US and Canadian indexes.
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Air Quality Visualized at a Park or Forest Near You
Earth Microbes to be Sent to Mars Moon
Sep/090
Phobos– the largest and innermost moon of Mars. Note the large crater shown in the lower right, known as ‘Sickney’.
The proposed experiment is called LIFE -Living Interplanetary Flight Experiment–and will be placed aboard Phobos-Grunt, a joint Russian-American mission to Phobos, the largest (and innermost) of Mars’s two moons (the smaller being Deimos). If all goes according to plan, it will be the first time living creatures from Earth will be sent intentionally beyond our Earth – Moon system.
The samples to be sent include four species of bacteria: Deinococcus radiodurans (a radiation resistant bacterium), along with three species of Archea (ancient, bacterial, life forms also known as “extremophiles” due to their ability to thrive in ultra-harsh conditions), several tardigrades (”water bears” – tiny, eight-limbed invertebrates known for their ability to repair their DNA), numerous yeast spores, seeds from the mouse-eared, cress plant Arabidopsis thaliana, and a soil sample from Israel’s Negev desert.
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Earth Microbes to be Sent to Mars Moon
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