Cat Lap: Engineers Unravel the Mystery of How Felines Drink

One morning a few years back Roman Stocker was watching his cat, Cutta Cutta, drink, and began to wonder about the mechanism by which cats lap fluid into their mouths.

For Stocker, an associate professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the thought was not an idle one. After investigating the mechanism via high-speed videography, experimental simulation and research on other feline species with visits to zoos and YouTube, Stocker and his colleagues have now produced a scientific description of cats' lapping mechanism. Their study was published online November 11 in the journal Science.

"There is an increase in interest in taking inspiration from nature to look for solutions to physical problems," Stocker says. Watching Cutta Cutta lap, he says, made him realize "there was probably an interesting biomechanical problem there." A cat's curious method of lapping, which involves bending the tip of its tongue downward toward its chin to pull liquid into its mouth, had been explained in general terms but had not, apparently, been investigated in scientific detail.

"It was certainly surprising" that the mechanism had not been more fully explored, says M.I.T. engineer and study co-author Pedro Reis. The new work builds on that of another M.I.T. engineer, Harold Edgerton, who pioneered stroboscopic (strobe light) photography in the 1930s. In a short film about Edgerton's work, Quicker 'N a Wink, which won the Academy Award for best one-reel short of 1940, high-speed videography shows a cat bending its tongue downward and pulling liquid up and into its mouth. Edgerton "saw something interesting about cats' lapping, but no one did any work since him," Reis says.

Having provided the inspiration, Cutta Cutta made a logical subject for detailed observation. "The first thing we did was take high-speed movies of my own cat," Stocker says. Movies of Cutta Cutta and other house cats at an animal shelter showed that cats do not dip their tongue into the liquid to scoop up water, as dogs do in lapping. Rather, a cat touches its tongue, with tip bent downward, against the surface of the liquid before drawing its tongue rapidly back into its mouth. Liquid at the surface rises with the retreating tongue, which pulls it up into a column of fluid. The cat then traps that liquid in its mouth, swallowing only after several laps have accumulated a significant volume of fluid in its mouth.

To uncover the physical principles at work, the researchers used a robotic system with a round glass disk, mimicking the tip of the feline tongue, that could be placed on a liquid surface and rapidly pulled upward [see video below]. "You can't tell a cat, 'Please lap at a different frequency,'" Reis says. "So we developed a mechanical, robotic version of the cat's tongue." He notes that it was a challenge just to mimic the tongue's quickness, which can rise at speeds nearing one meter per second. "To do that experimentally is not so easy," Reis says.

The feline films and the simulation revealed that fluid inertia is the prime mover in forming the column of liquid that rises with the tongue into the mouth. When the tongue leaves the liquid, adhesion pulls fluid with it from the surface, and inertia causes more liquid to follow. Gravity acts against the upward motion of the column, eventually pinching it off at a certain height. To trap the most liquid in its mouth, the researchers found, a cat should close its mouth around the column just before gravity pinches it off—a strategy that house cats, at least, seem to have internalized.

Numerically, each cat has an optimal drinking frequency—say, four laps per second—and the researchers' analysis showed that larger feline species, which tend to have larger tongues and drink from greater heights above the surface of the liquid, should lap more slowly to maximize their intake. Specifically, the group predicted that the lapping frequency should scale with the cat's mass raised to the power of –1/6.

To check that theory, the group filmed a lion, a tiger, a jaguar and an ocelot at the Stone Zoo in Stoneham, Mass., and the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. Then they hit YouTube, where countless individuals have filmed bobcats drinking in backyards or larger cats glimpsed on safari slaking their thirst. "We realized that was a source of information that we could use in a very simple way," Stocker says. With six additional data points gleaned from those videos, the actual lapping of various felines agreed well with the predicted scaling.

Turning to YouTube for data, although not exactly common for major-journal studies, was a natural leap for the researchers to make. "You pose a question, and you have to answer it," Reis says. "Whatever tools you can grab to come to an answer, you go for it."

Pure curiosity, such as that inspired in Stocker by watching his cat lap, can drive some very fundamental research, Reis adds. "Now we're worrying about black holes and particle colliders and nanotechnology, but there is a lot of science all around," he says. "When you stop for a second, you realize you don't understand everything around you." And in this case, Reis is careful to point out, curiosity did not kill the cat—no animals were harmed in the making of this study.

By John Matson
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-do-cats-lap 

The Ant and the Chrysalis

An Ant nimbly running about in the sunshine in search of food came
across a Chrysalis that was very near its time of change. The
Chrysalis moved its tail, and thus attracted the attention of the Ant,
who then saw for the first time that it was alive. "Poor, pitiable
animal!" cried the Ant disdainfully. "What a sad fate is yours!
While I can run hither and thither, at my pleasure, and, if I wish,
ascend the tallest tree, you lie imprisoned here in your shell, with
power only to move a joint or two of your scaly tail." The Chrysalis
heard all this, but did not try to make any reply. A few days after,
when the Ant passed that way again, nothing but the shell remained.
Wondering what had become of its contents, he felt himself suddenly
shaded and fanned by the gorgeous wings of a beautiful Butterfly.
"Behold in me," said the Butterfly, "your much-pitied friend! Boast
now of your powers to run and climb as long as you can get me to
listen." So saying, the Butterfly rose in the air, and, borne along
and aloft on the summer breeze, was soon lost to the sight of the
Ant forever.


 "Appearances are deceptive." 

1. Write a short reflection on a time in which you found appearances to be deceptive.  

Glowing Bacteria Control Squid Hosts

Being jolted awake every morning by an alarm clock is plenty annoying, but at least that alarm doesn’t actually live in your body.
The Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes) has an internal alarm clock that’s run by a species of glowing bacteria known as Vibrio fischeri. This bacterium and the squid are symbiotic, which means the two species live together for mutual benefit. (See “Large, ‘Glamorous’ New Glowing Squid Species Found.”)

A Hawaiian bobtail squid. Photograph courtesy Chris Frazee, McFall-Ngai Lab/University of Wisconsin

Now a recent study published in the journal mBio shows that V. fischeri are required for the squid’s daily circadian rhythm.

“There’s been a lot of work looking at how circadian rhythm in the host can affect symbiosis, but not many people have looked whether symbionts could affect the circadian rhythm in the host,” said study leader Elizabeth Heath-Heckman, a Ph.D. candidate in the lab of Margaret McFall-Ngai at the University of Wisconsin.

An organism’s sleep-wake cycle is perhaps the most dramatic example of a circadian rhythm. But these rhythms also regulate 98 to 99 percent of our body’s genes, and have strong effects on everything from eating and digestion to how the immune system works.
“An organism has different stresses at different times of the day, and pretty much every group of organisms out there, from bacteria up through us, has evolved the capability of keeping time,” said Heath-Heckman, who has been studying these squid and bacteria for over two decades. (Read how even vegetables have internal clocks.)

Protective Glow
Humans are diurnal, which means daylight triggers our brains to wake us up and get us out and about. For nocturnal animals like the bobtail squid, it’s the lack of light that prods it to emerge from its burrow and start to feed. (Also see “How a Rooster Knows to Crow at Dawn.”)
But the squid doesn’t emerge alone: It has a specialized light organ on its body that’s inhabited by the bioluminescent V. fischeri. In exchange for a home and a diet of sugars and amino acids provided by the squid, the bacterium helps protect E. scolopes from predators by illuminating it with a blue glow. This counter-illumination hides the squid’s silhouette by helping it blend in with its surroundings.
Blue light, Heath-Heckman explained, is a potent activator of the body clock genes that govern circadian rhythm. Since the Vibrio only glow at night, when the squid is active and feeding, she wondered whether the light might also help regulate the squid’s circadian rhythm.

Cycles of Expression
Heath-Heckman and colleagues started by identifying a set of genes known as cryptochromes in the squid. Cryptochromes help to “wind” the biological clock, she said.
“The clock can run without the cryptochromes, but what these proteins do in invertebrates is to allow sunlight to tell them what is going on,” Heath-Heckman said. These proteins keep the squid’s internal clocks in sync with the natural patterns of daylight.
In invertebrates like squid, these genes are switched on by blue light, like the kind produced by Vibrio. The cryptochrome proteins then activate the internal clock genes. In the head of the squid, which is not colonized by V. fischeri, the cryptochrome genes are activated by ambient light in the environment. (See more pictures of glowing animals.)
Cryptochrome gene expression in the bacteria-colonized light organ, however, is very different. There, Heath-Heckman and colleagues found, the bacteria-made light switched on the genes. What’s more, the cryptochrome genes of young, lab-raised squid that weren’t colonized by the bacteria didn’t cycle at all—meaning they need the bacteria to work.
The cryptochrome genes were only able to cycle when the squid were exposed to the wavelength of light produced by the bacteria and certain bacterial proteins.

Illuminating Chronobiology
Understanding something as complicated as the circadian rhythm has long perplexed researchers, but in recent years, the study of circadian rhythm—known formally as chronobiology—has really taken off.
Heath-Heckman said that bacteria may dictate circadian rhythms in other animals—including us.
“We have an extremely large and important consortium of bacteria in our guts. The immune cells and the cells that line our intestines both turn genes on and off in a circadian manner. Maybe the bacteria are saying something to these cells and entraining their circadian rhythm the same way that we see in squid,” Heath-Heckman concluded. (Also see “Night Owls Stay Alert Longer Than Early Birds.“)
So the next time your alarm rings and you blindly fumble for a way to make that awful racket stop, just think of the Hawaiian bobtail and be glad that you have a snooze button.

Posted by Carrie Arnold in Weird & Wild on June 25, 2013

Cardboard bicycle can change the world, says Israeli inventor

(Reuters) - A bicycle made almost entirely of cardboard has the potential to change transportation habits from the world's most congested cities to the poorest reaches of Africa, its Israeli inventor says.
Izhar Gafni, 50, is an expert in designing automated mass-production lines. He is an amateur cycling enthusiast who for years toyed with an idea of making a bicycle from cardboard.

He told Reuters during a recent demonstration that after much trial and error, his latest prototype has now proven itself and mass production will begin in a few months.

"I was always fascinated by applying unconventional technologies to materials and I did this on several occasions. But this was the culmination of a few things that came together. I worked for four years to cancel out the corrugated cardboard's weak structural points," Gafni said.

"Making a cardboard box is easy and it can be very strong and durable, but to make a bicycle was extremely difficult and I had to find the right way to fold the cardboard in several different directions. It took a year and a half, with lots of testing and failure until I got it right," he said.

Cardboard, made of wood pulp, was invented in the 19th century as sturdy packaging for carrying other more valuable objects, it has rarely been considered as raw material for things usually made of much stronger materials, such as metal.

Once the shape has been formed and cut, the cardboard is treated with a secret concoction made of organic materials to give it its waterproof and fireproof qualities. In the final stage, it is coated with lacquer paint for appearance.

In testing the durability of the treated cardboard, Gafni said he immersed a cross-section in a water tank for several months and it retained all its hardened characteristics.

Once ready for production, the bicycle will include no metal parts, even the brake mechanism and the wheel and pedal bearings will be made of recycled substances, although Gafni said he could not yet reveal those details due to pending patent issues.

"I'm repeatedly surprised at just how strong this material is, it is amazing. Once we are ready to go to production, the bike will have no metal parts at all," Gafni said.

Gafni's workshop, a ramshackle garden shed, is typically the sort of place where legendary inventions are born. It is crammed with tools and bicycle parts and cardboard is strewn everywhere.
One of his first models was a push bike he made as a toy for his young daughter which she is still using months later.

Gafni owns several top-of-the-range bicycles which he said are worth thousands of dollars each, but when his own creation reaches mass production, it should cost no more than about $20 to buy. The cost of materials used are estimated at $9 per unit.

"When we started, a year and a half or two years ago, people laughed at us, but now we are getting at least a dozen e-mails every day asking where they can buy such a bicycle, so this really makes me hopeful that we will succeed," he said.

A ride of the prototype was quite stiff, but generally no different to other ordinary basic bikes.
"GAME CHANGER"

Check Out Gafni's Video!

Nimrod Elmish, Gafni's business partner, said cardboard and other recycled materials could bring a major change in current production norms because grants and rebates would only be given for local production and there would be no financial benefits by making bicycles in cheap labor markets.
"This is a real game-changer. It changes ... the way products are manufactured and shipped, it causes factories to be built everywhere instead of moving production to cheaper labor markets, everything that we have known in the production world can change," he said.

Elmish said the cardboard bikes would be made on largely automated production lines and would be supplemented by a workforce comprising pensioners and the disabled.

He said that apart from the social benefits this would provide for all concerned, it would also garner government grants for the manufacturers.

Elmish said the business model they had created meant that rebates for using "green" materials would entirely cancel out production costs and this could allow for bicycles to be given away for free in poor countries.

Producers would reap financial rewards from advertisements such as from multinational companies who would pay for their logo to be part of the frame, he explained.

"Because you get a lot of government grants, it brings down the production costs to zero, so the bicycles can be given away for free. We are copying a business model from the high-tech world where software is distributed free because it includes embedded advertising," Elmish explained.
"It could be sold for around $20, because (retailers) have to make a profit ... and we think they should not cost any more than that. We will make our money from advertising," he added.
Elmish said initial production was set to begin in Israel in months on three bicycle models and a wheelchair and they will be available to purchase within a year.

"In six months we will have completed planning the first production lines for an urban bike which will be assisted by an electric motor, a youth bike which will be a 2/3 size model for children in Africa, a balance bike for youngsters learning to ride, and a wheelchair that a non-profit organization wants to build with our technology for Africa," he said.





CHEAP AND LIGHT

The bicycles are not only very cheap to make, they are very light and do not need to be adjusted or repaired, the solid tires that are made of reconstituted rubber from old car tires will never get a puncture, Elmish said.

"These bikes need no maintenance and no adjustment, a car timing belt is used instead of a chain, and the tires do not need inflating and can last for 10 years," he said.

A full-size cardboard bicycle will weigh around 9 kg (about 20 lbs) compared to an average metal bicycle, which weight around 14 kg.
 
The urban bicycle, similar to London's "Boris bikes" and others worldwide, will have a mounting for a personal electric motor. Commuters would buy one and use it for their journey and then take it home or to work where it could be recharged.

He said that as bicycles would be so cheap, it hardly mattered how long they lasted.
"So you buy one, use it for a year and then you can buy another one, and if it breaks, you can take it back to the factory and recycle it," he said.

Gafni predicted that in the future, cardboard might even be used in cars and even aircraft "but that is still a way down the road."

"We are just at the beginning and from here my vision is to see cardboard replacing metals ... and countries that right now don't have the money, will be able to benefit from so many uses for this material," he said.

By Ori Lewis and Lianne Gross

Critical Thinking:
1. Analyze the passage and come up with advertising points for the cardboard bicycle. What are some of the benefits of using/buying the cardboard bike versus regular bikes? How is this a revolutionary invention? Who made it, what could you use it for, etc.? How can this invention change the world?

After Drifting For Hours On Arctic Ice Floe, 20 Tourists Are Safe

A group of tourists got a bit more adventure in the Canadian Arctic than they wanted Tuesday, after they realized the ice floe on which they were camping had split off and begun drifting into open water. The 20 tourists and their guides Wednesday afternoon.
The tourists were part of a week-long expedition hosted by Arctic Kingdom, a company that offers "Arctic safari" trips to guests who camp on Baffin Island and other areas to see animals such as polar bears, bowhead whales, and narwhals in their natural habitats.
But Tuesday morning, the guides woke up to realize their group was camping on top of an ice floe that had become disconnected from the shore in Admiralty Inlet, off the coast of Arctic Bay, Nunavut. They used GPS technology to confirm that their camp was drifting away, then called for help with radio satellite phones.
Graham Dickson of Arctic Kingdom says the company's guides are trained to stay far from the edge of the ice when they establish their campsites. He says strong tides from this weekend's Supermoon and strong winds caused an unexpectedly large chunk of ice to break off the mainland sometime between Monday night and Tuesday morning.
When the ice, which was reportedly , broke off, it took the entire camp with it.
Dickson says the Arctic Kindgom camp atop the ice floe included dining rooms, cooks, and 300-square-foot tents. "Our people had all the comforts of home in their safari camp," he said.
Many of the guests on the expedition were comfortable, happy, and easygoing throughout the rescue, Dickson says, noting that many of them were experienced world travelers.
Yvonne Niego of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police says that it is fairly common for people to get stranded on ice floes moving away from land in this area.
"Annually we receive this sort of call for help, but it is usually just one to two people who get stranded," Niego says. "This is the first one over several years that is this large.... it's a bit extraordinary."
And with limited ability to land aircraft and helicopters, rescue efforts in this region are difficult, Niego says. The tourists received a survival kit delivery from the Royal Canadian Air Force Tuesday, which included large rafts in case the ice floe split.
Later, the tourists were able to get back on land, after their floe drifted toward the shore again. There, they waited in a small cabin with supplies and food, until a military helicopter picked them up.

by Ginny Fahs

Avocado-Fed Pork? Why Animal Feed Is Going Gourmet

Peanuts, flax, sprouts and avocados: It's not the menu at a health food deli, but the menu inside some barns. What's more, many farmers experimenting with these gourmet feeds are growing the ingredients themselves.

Take Russ Kremer, the Missouri pig farmer whose operation served as the inspiration for the trend. Kremer hasn't bought commercial animal feed in 30 years. Instead, he grazes his hogs in a pasture, and grows (or buys from neighbors) grains and legumes to supplement their nutrition.

Kremer and some of the other farmers developing specialty feed say they are willing to shoulder the extra cost and time to produce it because they're turned off by conventional feed mixes. The conventional mixes are what most of the hogs in the U.S. consume, and can include commodity corn and soybeans, blood protein, animal waste and rendered fats, according to Kremer.

Kremer also runs a co-op where farmers can pool resources to mill their own feed. "We opt for grains like barley and oats as often as possible, because most corn and soy is now [genetically modified]," he says.

The scarcity of non-GMO corn and soybeans is what led hog farmers Kelley and Mark Escobedo of to experiment with peanuts.

Using their own 1950s-era mill, the farmers combine peanuts, peanut hay, and oats to boost the animals' protein intake and overall health — especially important because they raise their animals without antibiotics. The resulting meat has a delicate, nutty flavor that has helped them attract a loyal customer base willing to pay a higher price for the meat. "I've never had anyone come back and say it's not worth it," says Escobedo.

She and other farmers even take custom feed requests. Case in point: One restaurant shaped a special meal around a single hog that the Escobedos fed avocados (along with the peanut-based feed) for the last 6 weeks of its life.

"The meat was soft and delicious," Escobedo recalls. "It was the most delightful dinner I've ever eaten." (Pot-fed pigs are getting similarly rave reviews in Washington state, as .)
Farmers are supplementing animal feed with other ingredients found in gourmet kitchens, too. To boost his animals' immunity, Kremer uses . To add omega-3 fatty acids, many cattlemen are adding the to feed. And Nigel Walker of California's Eatwell Farm not only grows his own wheat to feed his egg=-laying hens, he also for added nutrition.

Even as farmers learn to market meat from animals raised on special diets, only a small percent of consumers are willing to pay extra for it. A pastured chicken fed with homegrown grains, for instance, can cost as much as $20 to 25, compared with $10 for a conventional chicken in the grocery store.

The cost to farmers, in terms of both dollars and time, also remains significant. Kremer says he can afford homegrown feed because he saves money on veterinary care since he doesn't use antibiotics. His pigs also have a higher survival rate than average (just 1 percent mortality compared to nearly 5 percent industry-wide). But his operation is also much smaller than average, so the risks are different from a large hog operation.

Jack Lazor, author of the forthcoming book , and owner of Butterworks Farm in Vermont, says homegrown animal feed has fundamentally transformed his farm. Lazor supplements his dairy cows' diets with homegrown grains and feeds his laying hens kelp and soybeans he grows and roasts himself, using a developed by Polyface Farm's Joel Salatin. The birds gain more weight, and the eggs are yellower, but more important to Lazor is the sense of being in complete control of what he calls the "craft of farming."
"When you're feeding an animal you can tweak it one way or the other based on the herd or the season," he says. "Plus, it just adds more meaning to your life."

by Twilight Greenaway

1. Summarize this article; identify the thesis statement and supporting evidence.

Yamamoto's Elaborate Salt Labyrinths

http://www.npr.org/blogs/pictureshow/2011/02/15/133678617/yamamotos-elaborate-salt-labyrinths

Want to Understand Mortality? Look to the Chimps.

Pansy was probably in her 50s when she died, which is pretty good for a chimpanzee. She passed in a way most of us would envy — peacefully, with her adult daughter, Rosie, and her best friend, Blossom, by her side. Thirty years earlier, Pansy and Blossom arrived together at the Blair Drummond Safari and Adventure Park near Stirling, Scotland. They raised their children together. Now, as Pansy struggled to breathe, Blossom held her hand and stroked it.

Enlarge This Image

Illustration by Denise Nestor

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When the scientists at the park realized Pansy’s death was imminent, they turned on video cameras, capturing intimate moments during her last hours as Blossom, Rosie and Blossom’s son, Chippy, groomed her and comforted her as she got weaker. After she passed, the chimps examined the body, inspecting Pansy’s mouth, pulling her arm and leaning their faces close to hers. Blossom sat by Pansy’s body through the night. And when she finally moved away to sleep in a different part of the enclosure, she did so fitfully, waking and repositioning herself dozens more times than was normal. For five days after Pansy’s death, none of the other chimps would sleep on the platform where she died.

This account was published in 2010 in the journal Current Biology, but it’s not the only time scientists have watched chimpanzees, bonobos and other primates deal with death in ways that look strikingly like our own informal rituals of mourning: watching over the dying, cleaning and protecting bodies and displaying outward signs of anxiety. Chimps have been seen to make loud distress calls when a comrade dies. They investigate bodies as if looking for signs of life. There are many cases of mothers refusing to abandon dead infants, carrying and grooming them for days or even weeks. Still, it’s rare to capture primate deaths, especially those of chimpanzees and bonobos, in detail. It happens just often enough that many scientists are starting to think there’s something interesting, maybe protohuman, going on.

But this sort of speculation is laden with epistemological issues: are the scientists guilty of anthropomorphizing their subjects? Are these just isolated events? Are they more likely in captivity? Stories like Pansy’s are mere anecdotes in a world that demands testable hypotheses, and they color the fringes of a continuing scientific debate: Can we find the basis for aspects of our culture in the behavior of other primates?

Earlier this month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued a proposal to put captive chimpanzees on the federal endangered species list. (Wild chimps have officially been endangered since 1990.) The goal is to clear up a bureaucratic catch that treats some chimps different from others, but it has big implications for what we can do with the animals — both as medical-research subjects and comic relief on screen. It’s also part of a shift in how we perceive chimps: Are they just animals, or are they something closer to us? Understanding how chimpanzees cope with death is part of that increasing sense of closeness.

Brian Hare, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University, is convinced that an ape death he witnessed gave him a glimpse into something significant, especially because the animals acted so thoroughly against their own interests. “As a person, I can tell you what it feels like to watch,” says Hare, who describes the experience as emotionally intense. “As a scientist, though, you’re supposed to rely on ideas that can be tested and falsified. And how could you possibly do an ethical experiment here?” Hare studies how chimpanzees and bonobos solve problems, and in 2007 he happened to see one of our closest evolutionary relatives die. He was at a bonobo orphanage in the Democratic Republic of Congo when Lipopo, a newcomer to the orphanage, died unexpectedly from pneumonia. Although the other bonobos could have moved away from his body and traveled anywhere in their very large, heavily forested enclosure, they chose to stay and groom Lipopo’s corpse. When their caretakers arrived to remove the body, the vigil morphed into a tense standoff. In the video Hare took, Mimi, the group’s alpha female, stands guard over Lipopo’s body. When the caretakers try to push the corpse out of the enclosure with long poles, Mimi fights them, viciously. She grabs the poles with both hands, wrenching them away from Lipopo. She calls to other bonobos, who help her fend off the humans from two sides. Even when the vet arrives with a tranquilizer gun, Mimi stands her ground, her mouth open wide in a scream that’s inaudible in the silent film. Mimi wasn’t related to Lipopo. In fact, she barely knew him, Hare told me. But Mimi was willing to risk an encounter with a gun to protect the body of a mere acquaintance. “That’s why I started to cry,” Hare said. “I don’t know why she did it.”

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The results of primate-behavior studies can be humbling for humans because they often call into question our anthropocentric view of the world. Scientists used to say only humans used tools. Then, in 1960, Jane Goodall watched a chimpanzee catch termites using a blade of grass as a lure. A similar watershed moment happened in 1953, when a Japanese macaque named Imo began washing sweet potatoes that scientists gave her. By the 1970s, most of her descendants had learned to do the same. It was a new idea, not shared by all groups of macaques, spread from one monkey to another by social interaction — exactly how scientists define culture.

Tetsuro Matsuzawa, a primatologist at the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University in Japan, says that variations in tool use provide an easy way to see that chimps are capable of sustaining a culture over multiple generations. The chimpanzees that Goodall observed in Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania may use grass to fish for termites, but the group Matzusawa studies in Guinea doesn’t. (They can break open nuts with a pair of rocks, though; Goodall’s didn’t.)

Scientists want to better understand how much of this death behavior is cultural and how much is innate — or if it’s even widespread at all — but that will be rather difficult. Observable deaths don’t happen often, and they don’t happen in quite the same way each time. It’s hard to say definitively what Hare saw: Mimi might have been as protective of anything left in her pen, whether dead body or old sandbag.

Further observation might help us identify the substrate beneath human culture. Take the grooming of the dead, for instance. All human cultures address the cleaning of dead bodies in different ways, Hare says, but all of them do something to cleanse corpses. In fact, compared with most other animals, primates share an inordinate concern for cleanliness, even for those no longer with us. Finding out if this is behavior we share with chimps and bonobos, as it appears to be, could cast a new light on our own funerary rituals and even, perhaps, our notions of purity in the afterlife.

Our understanding of how chimps deal with death may remain limited and speculative, but it hints at the need for a new approach to great-ape conservation. As we’re now poised to end a somewhat arbitrary regulatory distinction between wild and captive chimps, it’s worth considering how we’re protecting actually distinct groups of chimps, some of which may have developed their own cultures. When they die off, they take with them behaviors that we might not find anywhere else and that we don’t yet understand — maybe including, somewhat tragically, the extent to which they comprehend their own demise.


By: Maggie Koerth Baker
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/magazine/want-to-understand-mortality-look-to-the-chimps.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Dragonflies with Backpacks May Advance the Science of Prey Capture

Dragonflies are straight “A”  hunters, capturing fruit flies in mid-air about 95 percent of the time, a grade that puts  a head-of-the-class predator like a lion to shame.
The insect’s efficiency—combined with hackable biology (less moving parts—i.e., neurons) compared to any mammal big or small—makes  the dragonfly an alluring organism to study the neural underpinnings of a basic but still complex behavior like prey capture.
Intrigued by the dragonfly, biologist Anthony Leonardo and colleagues from Intan Technologies and Duke University set about creating the instrumentation that will enable the researchers to monitor the activity of a group of neurons in the species Libellula lydia that appear to be essential for guiding the hunt. This summer, Leonardo’s group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research campus in Virginia wants to demonstrate what happens in the dragonfly’s nervous system during the course of carrying out a complex  behavior—zooming in for the kill—over the second or so that it unfolds. “The dragonfly catches moving flies in the air,” Leonardo says. “In the process of doing that, it has to think of a moving fly or mosquito and think about where it’s going, where it is now, where it’s going to be in the future how its own body works and that kind of  goal is constantly changing.”
Carrying out these experiments requires both tracking the dragonfly and devising the necessary instrumentation to monitor the 16 neurons hypothesized to steer the insect’s movements as it closes in on a Drosophila. The team was able to successfully outfit dragonflies with a set of small reflective balls on the head and wings to track them as they move through an insect version of the Roman Coliseum where they feast away on fruit flies.
The hard part is yet to come during coming months when the insects will be equipped with backpacks that can record signals from brain cells when going after a fly and then transmit them by a radio signal to a computer for analysis. A dragonfly weighs 400 milligrams, less than half the weight of a paper clip, so building a backpack that would not pin the insect to the ground or radically change its behavior is a major challenge.
The smallest practical battery for the telemetry in the backpack would have totaled about a third the weight of the dragonfly, and might have dampened the insect’s ardor for the hunt. So Leonardo and team designed a 40-milligran backpack that is powered by energy from  radio waves. By doing so, they can record from the insect’s steering neurons that guide it during prey capture—the garb should enable monitoring other  groups of neurons as well. The backpack has tiny wires, miniature sensors, that connect to the ventral nerve cord, the dragonfly equivalent of a spinal cord. The backpack should be able to transmit 5 megabits per second of information about what the insect’s neurons are doing as it descends upon its lunch.
If these tests go as planned, the work will provide new insights into how circuits operate during dynamic neural processes that take in sensory information and process it to make decisions about future actions. “Our hope is that what we learn about the dragonfly will be broadly applicable to how neurons solve problems in general,  Leonardo says. “This is a broad class of computation problems that nervous systems have to solve—and in some what they’ve evolved to solve.”

By: Gary Stix
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/talking-back/2013/06/17/dragonflies-with-backpacks-may-advance-the-science-of-prey-capture/

Vitamins: Too much of a not-so-good thing?

Editor's note: To see Offit's interview with Dr. Sanjay Gupta, check out "Sanjay Gupta, M.D." Saturday at 4:30 p.m. and Sunday at 7:30 a.m.

(CNN) -- Dr. Paul Offit doesn't take any vitamins.

In fact, while you might think that vitamins are great in any quantity, Offit urges you to take a step back and think before swallowing the equivalent of eight cantaloupes in a single dose.

"I think that alternative medicine is often given a free pass," he told CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta. "I think we should hold alternative medicine to the same standard that we hold conventional medicine. It lives under this sort of untouchable halo. I think we should be a little more skeptical."

Offit, chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia, is no stranger to controversy -- previously he has taken on the anti-vaccine movement. His book "Do You Believe in Magic? The Sense and Nonsense of Alternative Medicine," came out Tuesday.

Vitamins and supplements, representing about a $27 billion industry, are necessary to convert food into energy, but it's possible to take them in excess, Offit said. For instance, it's not uncommon to hear of someone taking 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C, but that's about the same amount in 14 oranges.

"Vitamins live under this notion that you can't possibly hurt yourself," he said. "But you can, by challenging Mother Nature and taking these vitamins and concentrating them to these exceptionally large quantities that you would never normally eat."

Opinion: Alternative healing or quackery?

You may have heard the term "antioxidant" as a buzzword that applies to some vitamins. Antioxidants combat free radicals -- molecules produced when your body breaks down food, or by environmental exposures like tobacco smoke and radiation, according to the National Institutes of Health. Free radicals damage cell membranes and DNA.

Doctors recommend a healthy intake of fruits and vegetables containing antioxidants to prevent this from happening and apparently decreasing the risk of conditions such as cancer and heart disease.

However, oxidation is necessary for life, and preventing too much of this process can be a bad thing because cells that need to be destroyed, such as cancer cells, won't be.

There have been several important studies showing the harmful effects of vitamins.

As Offit wrote in an op-ed the New York Times, a 1994 New England Journal of Medicine study on 29,000 Finnish smokers found beta carotene was associated with lung and heart disease death. Beta carotene and vitamin A in combination were shown in another New England Journal of Medicine study to be linked to a 46% greater risk of death from lung cancer than placebo.

A 2012 Cochrane review of multiple randomized clinical trials showed an increase in risk of death may be linked to beta carotene and vitamin E, as well as higher doses of vitamin A.

The likely explanation, Offit said, is that supplemental antioxidant vitamins, taken in large quantities, cause unnatural behavior in the body, counteracting oxidation too much and leaving the immune system weaker in its defenses against invaders.

In response to Offit's op-ed, the nonprofit Consumer Healthcare Products Association countered that there is research underscoring the benefits of multivitamins, and that these supplements are prominent in the health care regime of many consumers.

"Consumers should always use caution when considering 'megadoses' of any supplements, carefully research these choices, and consult a healthcare professional with questions," the CHPA said. "While Dr. Offit shares his own hypothesis on supplemental antioxidants in this piece, it has yet to be substantiated. Until that time, we look forward to future research that would provide guidance for public health."

The Council for Responsible Nutrition, a trade association representing the dietary supplement industry, reacted strongly to Offit's book, saying he "weaves together a series of tired old arguments."

"Dr. Offit's credentials as a respected medical physician are well-established, making his dismissal of the value of dietary supplements all the more unfortunate," council president Steve Mister said in a statement.

"With more than 150 million Americans taking dietary supplements each year, it would be a shame if consumers reading this book mistake the opinion of one doctor for the opinion of the medical community as a whole. It is important for consumers to have an open dialogue with their health care practitioners about their dietary supplement regimens, and hopefully this book won't deter them from doing so."

The abundance of strong studies on the harmful effects of megavitamins suggests to Offit that these supplements are worse than Vioxx. That was an anti-inflammatory drug that its manufacturer, Merck, voluntarily withdrew from the market in 2004 after evidence emerged of its harm to the heart in some people.

"I think if vitamins were a regulated industry, you could argue that megavitamins would have a black box warning on them," he told CNN.

Because the industry is not regulated, no one knows if alternative remedies are actually the same, or have a standard concentration, from batch to batch. No safety or efficacy data is available, either, the way there is with pharmaceuticals regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

"I think people have the misconception that these products -- dietary supplements and vitamins -- are made by elves and old hippies that have meadows and flowers," he said.

The 1994 Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act had the effect of defeating the FDA's attempt to regulate the supplements industry, so consumers don't know what they are buying, Offit said.

"We are the victims of enormous marketing campaign regarding some of these vitamins and supplements," he said.

Despite the widespread popularity of vitamins and supplements, doctors shouldn't encourage patients to take these substances just because they want them, he said. "I think the message is this: That patients are not customers, and we're not waiters."

By: Elizabeth Landau

Using your 'inner bat' to help navigate

Bats are famous for using sound to navigate successfully, and new research suggests we could all use our "inner bat" to get around.

Blind people are aware of this technique. Some click their tongue or tap their cane on the floor and use the resulting echoes to help them move around safely.
Researchers in Southampton have found that we could all make use of the soundscapes that surround us, whether we can see or not.
The new study, which involved both sighted people wearing blindfolds and blind people, looked at the types of sound that were best to locate an object.
Lead researcher Dr Daniel Rowan, a lecturer in audiology at the University of Southampton, said in one test the longer sounds, lasting around half a second, made things easier.

"What the experiment showed is that as the duration of the sound got shorter and shorter, people's ability to tell whether an object was to the left or right got worse. Having a longer duration signal appears better than a short one."

But if you want to know something different about an object - like how close it is - it may be that a shorter duration, of just 10 milliseconds, could be better.
"Some bats that use echolocation. If they're hunting prey, they change their call as they get closer to the prey to reveal different sorts of information."
Never crash Claire Randall, who has been virtually blind from birth, uses echolocation.
"I think the first time I was aware of it was when I was about five. I used to ride a bike and I developed the ability to swerve past a lamp post and miss it by millimetres, too regularly for it to be a coincidence."

Her mother marvelled at her ability to miss obstacles.

"One day my mum asked me how I always managed to miss the lamp post, and the only way I could explain it was, 'It goes dark past my ears.' "
The history of echolocation is fascinating. Back in the 1940s and 50s there was an idea that we had a separate sense on the face specially for detecting echoes.
Now we know it's the hearing system that does it and, although blind people seem to have honed their skills, we are all capable of navigating using sound.
One reason sighted people may not exploit this ability so much is that their world is dominated by vision.
This is seen in the "ventriloquism effect", where sounds are attributed to a dummy because its mouth is moving, overriding where the sound is really coming from, the poker-faced ventriloquist.
Previous research has involved real-life locations. But this study used "virtual obstacles", represented by sounds mimicking echoes from those imaginary objects in headphones worn by the study participants.
Extraordinary feats Dr Rowan said: "In using virtual objects there were no other clues that someone might use: for instance, the creaking as you move an object around or the wafting of air across their face as you move something around."
He has heard the reports of extraordinary feats.
"There are some expert echolocators who are able to do some fairly amazing things, such as ride a bike or play basketball, and World Access for the Blind trains people to do this.
"But we know less about how blind people in general use echoes."
The findings have just been published in the journal Hearing Research. Dr Rowan hopes that they will help to improve echolocation skills.
He said: "One of the things we wanted to try to contribute to with our research is to provide some underpinning science that may help the development of training programmes, to help blind people use echoes that arrive at their ears more effectively.
Hugh Huddy, from the charity VISION2020UK, said: "This research study is important because not enough is known about the way blind people utilise sound to get around, or indeed how people in general are able to hear the world.
"The link with bats is not helpful though. If this study leads to a better understanding of the amazing yet ordinary hearing abilities within everyone, this may help blind people to make the most of their hearing.
"If scientists can provide answers to big questions like does hearing improve when eyesight becomes impaired, how do blind people develop their hearing skills, and are streets safer for everyone when they are designed for hearing as well as seeing, then there are exciting possibilities for the future."

By Paula McGrath
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-22805748

Eye-Tracking Seen As Way To Detect Autism, Other Brain Disorders

Eye-tracking has become the tech trend du jour. Advertisers use data on where you look and when to better capture your attention. Designers employ it to improve products. Game and phone developers utilize it to offer the latest in hands-free interaction.
But eye-tracking can do more than help sell products or give your finger a rest while playing Fruit Ninja. Years of research have found that our tiny, rapid eye movements called saccades serve as a window into the brain for psychologists just as for advertisers—but instead of giving clues about our preferred cookie brands (pdf), they elucidate our inner mental functioning. The question is, can capturing such movements help clinicians make diagnoses of mental and neurological disorders, such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Parkinson’s disease and more? For many researchers in this growing field, the outlook so far looks positive.
“Visual scanning reflects a model of the world that exists inside the brain of each individual,” explains Moshe Eizenman, a leading eye-tracking researcher at the University of Toronto. “People with mental disorders have a model of the world that is slightly different than that of normal people—and by moving their eyes, they provide information about this different model.” Autistic children, for example, tend to avoid social images in favor of abstract ones, and they also more rarely and fleetingly make eye contact when looking at faces in an image or video in comparison with nonautistic kids. Similarly distinct, abnormal eye-movement patterns occur in a number of mental disorders, scientists have found.
Until recently, such insights have remained relegated to the lab setting, where researchers traditionally rely on special tools (like mounted headgear) and instructed tasks (like following a moving target across a computer screen). Now, as the cost of the technology drops and accuracy of more common—and practical—tools improves, eye tracking may find wider use in the clinical setting. “There is going to be a huge growth in the accessibility of eye-tracking devices to clinicians and others,” Eizenman predicts. “It won’t remain the domain of experts.” But technological advancements themselves are not enough to make eye-tracking for mental health monitoring go mainstream. The big challenge ahead, he says, is meaningful analysis of eye movement information.
Laurent Itti of the University of Southern California’s iLab is a part of a team working on this very challenge. Along with a group of researchers from U.S.C. and Queen’s University in Ontario, last year Itti devised a data-heavy, low-cost method of identifying brain disorders via eye-tracking. Subjects in this “free viewing” test sit and naturally watch a video on TV for 15 minutes while their eye-movements are recorded. The result is a deluge of data (the average person makes three to five saccadic eye movements per second), so Itti’s team uses advanced machine learning—algorithms that enable a computer to recognize patterns without explicit human instruction—to parse the results and distinguish deviant eye-movements from normal patterns.
In a small, proof-of-concept study (pdf) Itti’s team found that their algorithm could classify mental disorders through eye-movement patterns: They identified elderly Parkinson’s patients with nearly 90 percent accuracy as well as children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or fetal alcohol spectrum disorder with 77 percent accuracy. “This is very different from what people have done before. We’re trying to have completely automated interpretation of the eye movement data,” Itti says. “So you don’t need to have a scientist look at the data to figure out what’s going on; we’re using algorithms and machines to [identify] the linkage between eye-movement and cognition.”

By Nadia Popovich
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/18/eye-tracking-autism-brain-disorders_n_3460303.html?utm_hp_ref=science

A Rose

http://teenink.com/nonfiction/all/article/373859/A-Rose/

Uncultured Project - There is No "Them"

Project for Awesome

Record Corn and Soybean Yields Are Predicted

By JOHN ELIGON

Published: June 12, 2013

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — The government is predicting record corn and soybean yields this year despite intense spring showers that have delayed planting, damaged crops already in the ground and prevented farmers from sowing all of their seeds. But the projections are based on estimates made before the heavy rains came about how many acres of crops will be planted.

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Steve Hebert for The New York Times

Parts of the Midwest have gone from drought last year to oversaturated fields with this spring’s heavy rains. Rob Korff, a farmer near Norborne, Mo., says his corn should be waist-high by now.

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The Department of Agriculture, in a report released on Wednesday, estimated that 14 billion bushels of corn will be produced this year, a forecast that, if it holds true, would crush the previous record of 13.1 billion set four years ago. The World Agricultural Supply and Demand Estimates report also forecast that a record 3.39 billion bushels of soybeans would be harvested.

The projections assume that 97.3 million acres of corn and 77.1 million acres of soybeans will be planted this year — estimates that the department gathered during a survey of farmers this year. Analysts expect that fewer acres will actually be planted. The department will conduct another survey this month and release more accurate planting numbers at the end of the month.

“The projections are still highly tentative,” Joseph W. Glauber, the U.S.D.A.’s chief economist, wrote in an e-mail.

As of Monday, about 4.5 million acres of corn and 22 million acres of soybeans remained unplanted, according to Christopher A. Hurt, an agricultural economist at Purdue University. By this time last year, all of the nation’s corn crop had already been planted.

Record rainfall and flooding across vast swaths of the Farm Belt this spring mucked up fields, keeping many farmers from getting out with their heavy farm equipment to sow crops. Many reported that they planted their corn about a month later than usual this spring, and some said they had yet to plant any of their soybeans.

The late planting of corn could hurt the crops’ health because they may not pollinate until late July or August, when temperatures are typically at their peak. Hot weather thwarts the pollination process, which could prevent corn plants from producing their normal yields. Had the corn been planted on time, the pollination would have occurred earlier in the summer, when temperatures are not usually as high.

Because of the late planting, the U.S.D.A. did reduce its forecast for corn production by 135 million bushels from last month’s report. Still, agriculture experts say they expect the production numbers to come down even more.

“Anybody around the Midwest knows those numbers, they’re not right,” Professor Hurt said.

But even a moderate decrease in the U.S.D.A.’s current projections would still mean a much more bountiful crop than last year, when one of the most widespread droughts in the nation’s history led to a harvest of about 10.8 billion bushels.

Last year’s poor production leaves a lot of room for improvement this year, which could translate into an ease on commodity prices.

“It still looks like a reasonable crop,” Professor Hurt said. “That’s going to keep us from having extraordinarily high prices, as we had from the 2012 crop. This is going to be beneficial in terms of our basic food supplies and our basic inflation in our food.” 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/13/us/record-corn-and-soybean-yields-are-predicted.html?src=recg

Music in Istanbul Is Intermission for a Protest

ISTANBUL — After days of being the target of tear gas and police water cannons, protesters in Gezi Park, in Taksim Square here, were tense on Wednesday night, girded for conflict. Instead they got a piano performance.

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A Peaceful Piano Protest

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Davide Martello, a German musician in the new age, Paul Winter mold, arrived with a three-man team, hauling a grand piano in a trailer. After unloading the instrument and placing it inside the entry to the park, he began to play.

People stopped to listen. The restless crowd began to calm and organize around Mr. Martello. Soon photos and videos of the performance were zinging around the globe, ending up on blogs, online news sites and Facebook pages.

By the time Thursday night rolled round, word had gotten out, and according to estimates from those there, 1,500 people gathered in the park to hear this unknown 31-year-old pianist play again.

Speaking during a pause in the performance, Mr. Martello explained that he was on a self-directed world tour, hoping to play in major cities across the globe. He had been in Sofia, Bulgaria, on Wednesday morning and wanted to stop by Istanbul to witness the protests, which started as an effort to save Gezi Park from destruction and morphed into a broader expression of dissatisfaction with the authoritarian tactics of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“The idea is to inspire politicians through music,” Mr. Martello said, wearing a fedora and dressed in red in honor of the Turkish flag.

The square has long been a destination for gatherings and performances, but Mr. Martello — who played for 14 hours straight, starting Thursday evening — had an unusual and mesmerizing effect.

“Police in the background and this grand piano in the middle,” said Zeynep Turkmen, a 24-year old protester who has been staying in the park for more than a week. “This guy is writing history here.”

Police officers, there to protect the nearby monument bearing the statue of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the secular Turkish Republic, joined the audience, resting on their riot shields.

The Nicest Thing a Mother (or Anyone) Can Say by Maya Angelou

In her new memoir Mom & Me & Mom, Maya Angelou explains how she reconnected with the mother who abandoned her during her childhood, but who came to be a strong, vital force in her adult life. An Oprah.com Excerpt:

By the time I was twenty-two, I was living in San Francisco. I had a five-year-old son, two jobs, and two rented rooms, with cooking privileges down the hall. My landlady, Mrs. Jefferson, was kind and grandmotherly. She was a ready babysitter and insisted on providing dinner for her tenants. Her ways were so tender and her personality so sweet that no one was mean enough to discourage her disastrous culinary exploits. Spaghetti at her table, which was offered at least three times a week, was a mysterious red, white, and brown concoction. We would occasionally encounter an unidentifiable piece of meat hidden among the pasta. There was no money in my budget for restaurant food, so I and my son, Guy, were always loyal, if often unhappy, diners at Chez Jefferson.

My mother had moved into another large Victorian house, on Fulton Street, which she again filled with Gothic, heavily carved furniture. The upholstery on the sofa and occasional chairs was red-wine-colored mohair. Oriental rugs were placed throughout the house. She had a live-in employee, Poppa, who cleaned the house and sometimes filled in as cook helper.

Mother picked up Guy twice a week and took him to her house, where she fed him peaches and cream and hot dogs, but I only went to Fulton Street once a month and at an agreed-upon time.

She understood and encouraged my self-reliance and I looked forward eagerly to our standing appointment. On the occasion, she would cook one of my favorite dishes. One lunch date stands out in my mind. I call it Vivian's Red Rice Day.

When I arrived at the Fulton Street house my mother was dressed beautifully. Her makeup was perfect and she wore good jewelry. After we embraced, I washed my hands and we walked through her formal, dark dining room and into the large, bright kitchen.

Much of lunch was already on the kitchen table.

Vivian Baxter was very serious about her delicious meals.

On that long-ago Red Rice Day, my mother had offered me a crispy, dry-roasted capon, no dressing or gravy, and a simple lettuce salad, no tomatoes or cucumbers. A wide-mouthed bowl covered with a platter sat next to her plate.

She fervently blessed the food with a brief prayer and put her left hand on the platter and her right on the bowl. She turned the dishes over and gently loosened the bowl from its contents and revealed a tall mound of glistening red rice (my favorite food in the entire world) decorated with finely minced parsley and green stalks of scallions.

The chicken and salad do not feature so prominently in my tastebuds' memory, but each grain of red rice is emblazoned on the surface of my tongue forever.

"Gluttonous" and "greedy" negatively describe the hearty eater offered the seduction of her favorite food.

Two large portions of rice sated my appetite, but the deliciousness of the dish made me long for a larger stomach so that I could eat two more helpings.

My mother had plans for the rest of her afternoon, so she gathered her wraps and we left the house together.

We reached the middle of the block and were enveloped in the stinging acid aroma of vinegar from the pickle factory on the corner of Fillmore and Fulton streets. I had walked ahead. My mother stopped me and said, "Baby."

I walked back to her.

"Baby, I've been thinking and now I am sure. You are the greatest woman I've ever met."

I looked down at the pretty little woman, with her perfect makeup and diamond earrings, and a silver fox scarf. She was admired by most people in San Francisco's black community and even some whites liked and respected her.

She continued. "You are very kind and very intelligent and those elements are not always found together. Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt, Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune, and my mother—yes, you belong in that category. Here, give me a kiss."

She kissed me on the lips and turned and jaywalked across the street to her beige and brown Pontiac. I pulled myself together and walked down to Fillmore Street. I crossed there and waited for the number 22 streetcar.

My policy of independence would not allow me to accept money or even a ride from my mother, but I welcomed her and her wisdom. Now I thought of what she had said. I thought, "Suppose she is right? She's very intelligent and often said she didn't fear anyone enough to lie. Suppose I really am going to become somebody. Imagine."

At that moment, when I could still taste the red rice, I decided the time had come to stop my dangerous habits like smoking, drinking, and cursing. Imagine. I might really become somebody. Someday.

Source: http://www.oprah.com/relationships/Maya-Angelous-Mother-An-Excerpt-from-Mom--Me--Mom/1

Student Response:

For Maya Angelou, food has an important role because it identifies the social classes between the rich and the poor. In the beginning, the landlady, Mrs. Jefferson, was kind and generous enough and "...insisted on providing dinner for her tenants". Maya couldn't afford to buy any other food because "there was no money in (Maya's) budget for restaurant food" so she had to eat Mrs. Jefferson's unappetizing meals. The food shows the social class differences because of how the actual cooking is done and what ingredients each one of them use.

Mrs. Jefferson's food had an, "unidentifiable piece of meat hidden among the pasta" while Maya describes Mrs. Baxter's dish as "Two large portions of rice (which) sated my appetite... a dish that made (Maya) long for a larger stomach so that (she) could eat two more helpings."
The way Maya describes the food helps to identify the social classes because the food's description shows how Maya is fond of her mother, even though she really appreciates Mrs.Jefferson's meals.
We knew that Maya appreciated both Mrs. Jefferson and Mrs. Baxter but she describes Mrs. Jefferson's food negatively and Mrs. Baxter's food as heavenly. 


Sample Response to Food as a Symbol:

In her memoir, "The Nicest Thing a Mother (or Anyone) Can Say", Maya Angelou uses food as a symbol of powerful family tradition, comparing and contrasting two food memories that were meaningful to her for different reasons. The two dishes represent a dichotomy of her life, her current situation as a determined young woman struggling to provide for her son and the safe haven of her home life, one she is inspired to regain by her own merit.

As a twenty-two-year-old single mother living in San Francisco, Angelou begins the story by describing the everyday dinners prepared by her kind but culinarily-disastrous landlady as an "unidentifiable piece of meat hidden among… pasta", explaining that she often had no choice but Ms. Jefferson's food to eat, and no money in her budget for restaurant food. She describes herself and her son as "loyal, if often unhappy, diners at Chez Jefferson".

Angelou continues on to describe her mother and her positive impact on her life during this time, as Vivian Baxter "picked up Guy twice a week and… fed him peaches and cream and hot dogs", living in "another large Victorian house… filled with Gothic, heavily carved furniture". Angleou describes her mother's red rice in more savory detail than anything else in the passage, as "a tall mound of glistening red rice (my favorite food in the entire world) decorated with finely minced parsley…emblazoned on my tongue forever". Not only does she find comfort in this special dish, she associates it with morality and inspiration. She says, "when I could still taste the red rice, I decided the time had come to stop my dangerous habits… Imagine. I might really become somebody. Someday."

The Most Massive School Shutdown in History

9-year-old Speaks Up To Keep His School From Closing

This video is particularly inspiring, an eloquent and passionate speech given by a 9-year-old elementary school student from Chicago at a public rally. You can see the determination in his eyes as he gives his opinion on politicians who intend to shut down his elementary school; this kid is serious about his education, and his desire to keep the school open is purely infectious. The school ended up staying open, one of the 15 out of 65 schools in Chicago that were saved from being shut down.

Farming Feminism: Could Empowering Women Fix the Global Food System?

When it comes to fixing the way humans eat, there’s no shortage of proposed methods and philosophies. But if we could do just one thing to fix the global food system, what would that be? The answer, according to many experts, may surprise you: empower women.
Gender equality and women’s empowerment is one of eight Millennium Development Goals—a vision set by many nations and development organizations to meet the needs of the world’s poorest people by 2015. Food and agriculture is one of the areas where this goal is most needed.
Consider: Women comprise about half the agricultural labor force in the developing world, and in some countries—particularly Sub-Saharan Africa—make up 80 percent of farmers. Here in the United States, more farms than ever are run by women—especially among new and young farmers (there has been a 19 percent increase in female operators since the 2002 U.S. Farm Census). And as the primary purchasers of food worldwide, women control the majority of food choices families make—choosing how to spend as much as 80 percent of a family’s food dollar.
However, women typically don’t have the same access to land, banking and financial services, credit, education, or extension services as men do, says Danielle Nierenberg, cofounder of Food Tank, a food-policy think tank. She says that if women had the same access to these resources as men, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that yields could increase by 20 to 30 percent and global malnutrition could be reduced by up to 17 percent. As a result, one of the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goals is to promote gender equality and empower women.
But to achieve these goals requires significant action at the policy level, an arena controlled almost exclusively by men.
“Policy dictates what we grow, what we eat, what markets are available, how much we can mitigate risk as producers,” Leigh Adcock, Executive Director of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, tells TakePart.
But policies focused on women in agriculture have been scarce, given that men have long been seated at the highest levels of government and food business. According to a 2011 report from the Environmental Working Group, “Agriculture by the Numbers,” 98 percent of boards of directors of agriculture’s largest commodity groups are men. And despite comprising half the population, women still make up less than 25 percent of Congress.
Nierenberg says women have traditionally grown the foods that families eat—like vegetables, fruits, protein rich grains—and raised livestock, while men typically grow commodity crops or crops for market. Could increased gender equality in government result in more sustainable farm and food policies—including the hulking Farm Bill, which has traditionally focused heavily on subsidizing high-yield commodity crops over sustainable food systems? Adcock of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network thinks so.
“I believe any policy covering food production and farming will take food nutrition and safety and land stewardship into account far more comprehensively when women have a say, from the community level to Congress,” Adcock says.

A Rogue Mission to Enlist a New Generation of Farmers

There’s an emerging movement to address the inequality in the halls of power and direct more resources toward women and girls. Plate to Politics, for instance, is an emerging national program created by the Women, Food and Agriculture Network, and the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES)’s mission is to train women in the movement to ramp up their leadership at all levels of public engagement, “from the farm house to the White House.” Meanwhile, Food Tank, which was cofounded by Nierenberg and Ellen Gustafson, is using its extensive knowledge base in food and agriculture to promote programs that empower women. (Nierenberg recently praised 14 global organizations to empower women to change the food system)
Women aren’t only farming and starting food advocacy organizations, they’re also starting fast-growing sustainable food businesses, launching innovative urban agriculture projects, and documenting the movement for the world to see. (A Place at the Table, directed by Kristi Jacobson and Lori Silverbush, is a recent example of a woman-powered food documentary.)
Besides strong women, the common core of all of these efforts is a commitment to health, justice and sustainability, says Nierenberg, who spoke at last week’s Women Deliver conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, which addressed reproductive health, economic empowerment, food security, social justice, and the environment.
“It’s becoming more and more clear that we can’t separate [food] production from social justice issues,” she says. “Food needs to be safe, farmers, both women and men, need fair wages, and it needs to be environmentally sustainable.”

How Books Can Open Your Mind

http://www.ted.com/talks/lisa_bu_how_books_can_open_your_mind.html

3 Myths About Working Women

By Rick Newman | The Exchange – Fri, May 31, 2013 3:06 PM EDT

Working women have been a growing force in the economy for three decades, as more women graduate from college, take professional jobs and influence household spending decisions. In some important ways, women even outpace men. They fared better during the recent recession, for instance, and women now earn the majority of bachelor’s and advanced degrees.

A few indicators, however, suggest that women’s economic gains have been frustratingly limited. Perhaps the most prominent is a stubborn "gender wage gap" that seems to leave women earning less than men for comparable work. According to one oft-quoted study, women still earn 23% less than men, a deficit that has produced heated debate over workplace policies, family priorities and the changing nature of motherhood (and compelled a lot of men to simply keep their mouths shut).
New research by compensation analysts at Payscale might hearten working women while lowering the temperature on the whole issue. Payscale crunched numbers on pay and other factors in dozens of fields and extracted insights that suggest women are making larger strides than are often recognized. Here are three enduring notions about working women that might need to be reexamined:
Women earn far less than men. On an aggregate basis this is true, but Payscale controlled for a variety of factors and found that the pay gap is far narrower among men and women who have similar levels of experience, work in the same fields and locations, have the same skills and certifications and are otherwise workplace clones. Among non-managerial workers, Payscale found no pay gap at all, on an apples-to-apples basis. At more senior levels, women do earn slightly less than men, but the biggest gap was only 8.5% -- far lower than the frequently mentioned 23%. And that gap may exist because top male executives put in more hours, travel more and spend more time with clients than their female counterparts, which is hard to measure among salaried employees.
As other pay experts have pointed out, women tend to earn less overall because they are more likely to work in fields such as health care, education and social work that pay less than male-dominated fields such as vocational trades, engineering and financial services. But women don't go into the workforce blindly, and they often know the tradeoffs.
"Women consider a lot of factors and not just monetary benefits," points out Katie Bardaro, lead economist for Payscale. "Many women choose jobs with a certain level of flexibility." And that, incidentally, often benefits the men in their lives.
Women don't "lean in." Facebook (FB) executive Sheryl Sandberg famously encouraged women to be more aggressive about getting ahead in her recent bestseller "Lean In." But the assumption that working women are more timid than their male counterparts is a flimsy one. Payscale found that women were just as likely to ask for a raise as men at every income level up to $100,000 -- and slightly more likely in some cases. As women become more senior, they also become more likely to ask for a raise, but men outpace them on aggressiveness as they rise on the career ladder.
So the real message for ambitious women might be, lean in further and further the more you get ahead.
Women only do well in "female-dominated" industries. Large differences in the proportion of men and women in different fields suggests that some women may deliberately avoid male-dominated industries, perhaps because they feel they will be unwelcome there. But Payscale's data show that women in several traditional male industries earn just as much as the fellas. In jobs such as security manager, mechanical drafter, mechanical engineer, information technology assistant, computer repair technician and civil engineer, Payscale found no wage gap at all. And in many other industries, the gap was small.
Women still face the fact of being the only sex able to bear children, which can clearly disrupt a career, no matter what the data say. Still, young women choosing a career may have more good options than they realize. And women who are more established in their careers might be rewarded more than they think for cranking up their ambitions. Before long, it might be the guys who have to lean in more.

How the coconut tree provides food, fuel, roofing, rope and more for Sri Lankan farmers

Sami Grover
Science / Sustainable Agriculture
May 7, 2013

The Perennial Plate/Video screen capture
When I wrote about using coconut coir as a soil amendment, commenter Ruben suggested I should look closer to home for organic matter that originates from my own bioregion.
Whether or not my defense—that I was using up a waste product that is readily available and relatively efficiently shipped—holds any water will depend on your perspective on sustainability (and the path to getting us there), but there's little doubt that my paltry efforts are reducing my own impact pale into insignificance compared to people who REALLY know how to use a coconut.
As one of the latest episodes from The Perennial Plate—the people who brought us video of urban farmers and brass bands in New Orleans, and cows retiring in Iowa—demonstrates, the idea of coconut coir as a waste product is a bit of an anathema to the small scale coconut farmers whose families have been growing this crop for generations.
From roofing materials to firewood to rope to a natural alcoholic beverage harvested from the flowers, Sri Lankan farmers have learned to use almost every single part of the tree. If every farmer farmed like this, I doubt there'd be much coir left over to ship over to me for my soil amendments.
Ruben will be pleased to know that my leaf mulch pile is well on its way to being ready for use.

Mars Rodent

'Mars Rat' Taking Internet by Storm

By Mike Wall | SPACE.com – 16 hrs ago

Related Content

• View PhotoOnce seen, it cannot be unseen. …

A Mars rock that bears a passing resemblance to a rodent is scuttling across the Internet with gusto, even inspiring some fans to set up a Twitter account in its name.

UFO buffs spotted the purported "Mars rat" in a panoramic photo snapped in September 2012 by NASA's Curiosity rover. Zooming in on a portion of the image reveals what appears to be a rodent crouching between two rocks, its nose to the ground.
"It's a cute rodent on Mars. Note its lighter-color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach," Scott Waring wrote at UFO Sightings Daily back in December. "Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors." ['Mars Rat' Photographed by Curiosity Rover (Video)]

In an update to that post, Waring raised the possibility that NASA flew the rat/squirrel to Mars secretly, as part of an experiment testing out the Red Planet's ability to support life as we know it.
"Why would they not tell us about it?" Waring wrote. "Because the squirrel would be expected to die eventually and that would get PETA [People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals] to fight against them in a court of law."
The Mars rat has now gone viral, jumping from the pages of UFO Sightings Daily to more mainstream publications such as Discovery News, Fox News and a host of other outlets (including, of course, SPACE.com).
The rodent has even picked up its own Twitter account, @RealMarsRat. Just 49 people were following the rat as of Friday afternoon (May 31), but that's still pretty good for a rodent.
While some people seem to really believe that a squirrel is crawling around on the Red Planet (or was in September, anyway), the Mars rodent is actually an example of a psychological phenomenon called pareidolia.
Pareidolia refers to the tendency of the human brain to perceive animals or other familiar shapes in vague or random images. The phenomenon has fueled a great deal of excited speculation about the Red Planet over the years, most famously after some people saw a humanoid face on Mars in photos taken by NASA's Viking 1 orbiter in 1976.
And just this March, UFO Sightings Daily reported that an apparent animal, perhaps a rat or a lizard, lurked in another one of Curiosity's photos.
It's highly unlikely that a rat, squirrel, lizard or any other organism could survive on the cold, dry Martian surface today, researchers say, though some scientists think the Red Planet may still be able to support microbial life in select underground pockets.
Things were likely different in Mars' wetter and warmer past, however. Curiosity's observations led mission scientists to announce earlier this year that microbes could have survived on the Red Planet billions of years ago.

Questions:
Did NASA fly a rodent secretly to Mars to take the picture?
Describe pareidolia in your own words.
According to this article, how many times has an animal spotting on Mars occurred?
What does gusto mean in the context of the first paragraph? A)great enthusiasm B)reluctance C)ambivalence D)curiosity