yes, the watery part
On land all those small speciesses living IN the soil with funghi as base and on land perhaps even scorpions who are remarkable resilient for radioactivitiviy. Ants irrc as well.
Today I Learned #4: Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
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yes, the watery part
On land all those small speciesses living IN the soil with funghi as base and on land perhaps even scorpions who are remarkable resilient for radioactivitiviy. Ants irrc as well.
TIL that the New River (flowing through the Appalachian Mountains) is believed to be 1 of the 5 oldest rivers in the world, based on geological evidence. Good name 
The Forensic Scientists Fighting Timber Theft
BY LYNDSIE BOURGON
At the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service Forensics Lab in Oregon, researchers are building a chemical database of trees threatened by illegal harvesting.
Thirty percent of the world’s wood trade involves timber that was poached—illegally harvested from public or private land. The World Bank and Interpol have estimated that the global scale of illegal logging generates up to $157 billion annually, some of which goes to fund large-scale crime networks. The terrorist network Al-Shabab is known to traffic in poached wood and charcoal from Somalia. In Australia, organized- crime “firewood rings” haul in a million dollars’ worth of poached Tasmanian timber each year.
BY LYNDSIE BOURGON
At the U. S. Fish & Wildlife Service Forensics Lab in Oregon, researchers are building a chemical database of trees threatened by illegal harvesting.
Thirty percent of the world’s wood trade involves timber that was poached—illegally harvested from public or private land. The World Bank and Interpol have estimated that the global scale of illegal logging generates up to $157 billion annually, some of which goes to fund large-scale crime networks. The terrorist network Al-Shabab is known to traffic in poached wood and charcoal from Somalia. In Australia, organized- crime “firewood rings” haul in a million dollars’ worth of poached Tasmanian timber each year.
Most poached wood makes it into our homes in products made from rosewood, ebony, Dalbergia nigra, balsa and agar wood. The wood is often poached in countries like Cambodia, Peru and Brazil and sold to manufacturers in China, who then ship it to retailers and consumers around the world in the form of furniture, paper products, construction materials and musical instruments. According to many experts, the trade in poached wood can be very difficult to stop. Infrastructure projects in many countries offer easy access to deep stands of forest, and there is little political will to halt deforestation. “If you deal drugs or kill an elephant, you are constantly at risk” of being caught, explains Christian Nellemann, formerly a senior officer with the U.N. Environment Program. “If you deal timber, no one really cares.”
In 2008, the U.S. law prohibiting trade in endangered animals was expanded to include illegally harvested plants and timber. From a forensic standpoint, it was one of the largest challenges the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service had ever encountered. “When we first started looking” at tree poaching, “we were stunned,” says Ken Goddard, a former crime scene investigator who runs the Fish & Wildlife Service Forensics Lab in Ashland, Ore. “We were starting to hear stories from agents in other countries about entire forests being clear-cut and ships filled with raw trees in containerized cargo. At that point we couldn’t make an identification if it was milled into planks, so we had to come up with something.”
Today, the forensics lab houses an expansive warehouse that Mr. Goddard and his team are working to fill with “standards”—examples of each plant and animal currently being traded on the illegal market, which can be compared against incoming seizures. Madagascan rosewood, for instance, is the most trafficked tree in the world. Called the “tree that bleeds,” it is distinguished by its deep crimson heartwood, which is in high demand for musical instruments. In 2012, the Gibson company was fined $300,000 for purchasing poached rosewood from Madagascar to produce its renowned guitars. Samples of the rosewood from those instruments made their way to the forensic lab, where they were identified as poached by wood chemist Ed Espinoza and his team of researchers.
The lab’s maze-like rooms are now filled with examples of wooden guitars, violin pegs and watch faces. On the day I visited the lab, I spotted a chess set on a table; its pieces were about to be shaved and its wood analyzed, along with parts of the box that held them. On a wall nearby hung a photo of a trendy-looking wooden watch, marketed until recently on Instagram. The timepieces had been intercepted at the border and determined to be made from illegal timber.
To build a chemical database of every endangered tree in the world, Mr. Espinoza has developed a groundbreaking method using mass spectrometry to identify chemical compounds. The process involves converting oils found in the bark and wood into a gas, then injecting it into a device roughly the size of an office photocopier, known as the DART (for Direct Analysis in Real Time). Wielding a pair of tweezers, a technician places a tiny wood chip or bark shaving between two narrow silver cones, where the sample is heated to 450 degrees Celsius; I could see the edges of the wood smolder and give off steam. The vapor is then absorbed into the ma- chine, where its molecules are analyzed. Finally, the DART sends the data to a computer, where it is processed and mapped like a fingerprint, capturing a unique chemical pattern.
FROM TOP: LEAH NASH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST/ GETTY IMAGES; JES BURNS/ OREGON PUBLIC BROADCASTING
The process can be riskier than it looks. On one occasion, Mr. Espinoza was running a piece of rosewood through the DART when he suddenly felt light-headed and began to experience tunnel vision. He dropped the wood and staggered away. Rose-wood contains a natural insecticide, and it turned out that some of the gas had been leaking from the machine. “It was basically shutting down his brain,” says Mr. Goddard.
Mr. Espinoza has presented his techniques to wildlife-trade experts in many countries, and the lab now works in tandem with some of the largest botanical collections in the world. By feeding enough minuscule wooden shards through the DART, he and his team hope to create a profile for every endangered tree in the world—some 900 at last count. Many of the wood samples that make their way into the stockpiles of the Fish & Wildlife Service Lab come from xylaria—libraries of wood specimens that were once maintained at the world’s largest botanical gardens and in archival collections. Today most xylaria are gathering dust in storage rooms, but they have proven especially useful in criminal cases related to timber theft.
One fall day, forensic researcher Cady Lancaster ushered me into a side room of the sprawling lab compound in Ashland. Filing cabinets lined the walls. When she slid one open, the drawer was stuffed with folders containing small slips of folded white paper, each enclosing a sliver of wood. A few years earlier, Ms. Lancaster—then a Forest Service employee focused on the global wood-poaching trade—had been tasked with traveling the globe to shave splinters from archived wood samples, many of them collected hundreds of years before.
She unearthed book-sized slabs of wood from the Smithsonian Institution’s back rooms in Washington, D.C., and carried home slim white envelopes filled with wood slivers from the Royal Botanic Gardens in the U.K. “A lot of the reference samples we have from the original blocks say ‘from World Fair 1903,’” she says. “It’s just really cool.” Now those samples and countless others are filed away in Oregon, where they are steadily yielding their secrets to the DART. Ms. Bourgon is a historian and nature writer. This essay is adapted from her new book, “Tree Thieves: Crime and Survival in North America’s Woods,” which was published this week by Little, Brown.
Left: Ken Goddard, director of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service Forensics Lab in Ashland, Ore., 2018. Below: A cross section of wood under examination at the lab, 2015.
‘When we first started looking [ at tree poaching] we were stunned.’
KEN GODDARD Lab director
It should be the SOP of running a psychiatric treatment system to have such a test running constantly.
NYT
How to Imprint Ducklings
Hang around the ducklings right after they hatch. The birds open their eyes and immediately start looking for a caregiver.
Credit...Illustration by Radio
June 22, 2022
“Ducklings will imprint on anything that moves that’s bigger than a matchbox,” says Antone Martinho-Truswell, who co-founded the Duckling Laboratory at the University of Oxford while getting his doctorate in zoology. Ducks are what scientists call precocial birds — capable of feeding, swimming and walking soon after hatching. Still, ducklings are vulnerable, which is why the little puffballs evolved to seek and memorize the image of their mothers. Should a duckling hatch and not see her, it will eagerly imprint on something else, like you.
Hang around a duckling constantly, right after it hatches. Ducklings are most sensitive to imprinting 12 to 36 hours after they emerge from the egg (and the imprinting window lasts about 14 days). Place yourself where they can see you. Birds are visual creatures; a duckling opens its eyes and immediately starts looking for a caregiver. They prefer duck-size objects and S-curve-shaped necks, but they aren’t picky — they will imprint on humans, cats, dogs or, in the case of Martinho-Truswell’s lab research, brightly colored plastic balls or cardboard shapes suspended from a rotating boom on a string. Avoid wearing yellow; ducklings would rather not imprint on anything yellow-colored. “We think that’s to keep them from imprinting on their siblings,” Martinho-Truswell says. Don’t become a duck parent on a whim, though; it’s a big commitment. Imprinting is helpful if you’re a duck farmer, but otherwise might be a burden. Mallard ducks can live for more than 20 years. “You’re taking on something that is going to treat you as its mother for the first year and then as family for the rest of its life,” he says.
In the lab, Martinho-Truswell hatched his ducklings in the dark, and for almost two days the only moving objects they saw were the dangling shapes. After a day or so he would take the ducklings out of their boxes, and they seemed relieved to imprint on him instead, running and tumbling after him around the lab. “I really liked being a mom to all of those little ducks,” he says. Before that initial 14-day window closed, he would give the ducklings to a nearby farm so that the ducklings would transfer their imprint onto its farmer. Let yourself feel the interspecies tenderness of a duckling’s attachment; this tiny thing needs you. “In the egg, it can’t predict what its mother is going to look like,” Martinho-Truswell says.
How to Imprint Ducklings
Hang around the ducklings right after they hatch. The birds open their eyes and immediately start looking for a caregiver.
Credit...Illustration by Radio
June 22, 2022
“Ducklings will imprint on anything that moves that’s bigger than a matchbox,” says Antone Martinho-Truswell, who co-founded the Duckling Laboratory at the University of Oxford while getting his doctorate in zoology. Ducks are what scientists call precocial birds — capable of feeding, swimming and walking soon after hatching. Still, ducklings are vulnerable, which is why the little puffballs evolved to seek and memorize the image of their mothers. Should a duckling hatch and not see her, it will eagerly imprint on something else, like you.
Hang around a duckling constantly, right after it hatches. Ducklings are most sensitive to imprinting 12 to 36 hours after they emerge from the egg (and the imprinting window lasts about 14 days). Place yourself where they can see you. Birds are visual creatures; a duckling opens its eyes and immediately starts looking for a caregiver. They prefer duck-size objects and S-curve-shaped necks, but they aren’t picky — they will imprint on humans, cats, dogs or, in the case of Martinho-Truswell’s lab research, brightly colored plastic balls or cardboard shapes suspended from a rotating boom on a string. Avoid wearing yellow; ducklings would rather not imprint on anything yellow-colored. “We think that’s to keep them from imprinting on their siblings,” Martinho-Truswell says. Don’t become a duck parent on a whim, though; it’s a big commitment. Imprinting is helpful if you’re a duck farmer, but otherwise might be a burden. Mallard ducks can live for more than 20 years. “You’re taking on something that is going to treat you as its mother for the first year and then as family for the rest of its life,” he says.
In the lab, Martinho-Truswell hatched his ducklings in the dark, and for almost two days the only moving objects they saw were the dangling shapes. After a day or so he would take the ducklings out of their boxes, and they seemed relieved to imprint on him instead, running and tumbling after him around the lab. “I really liked being a mom to all of those little ducks,” he says. Before that initial 14-day window closed, he would give the ducklings to a nearby farm so that the ducklings would transfer their imprint onto its farmer. Let yourself feel the interspecies tenderness of a duckling’s attachment; this tiny thing needs you. “In the egg, it can’t predict what its mother is going to look like,” Martinho-Truswell says.
I came across a BMJ article on Medical myths. Most I knew, but two surprised me:
- Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
- People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
Spoiler All myths busted :
The turkey is also accompanied by copious amounts of mashed potatoes and gravy - definitely winter comfort food, and people tend to eat a lot of it.
EgonSpengler
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The turkey thing always sounded suspicious to me. I never felt sleepy after eating turkey.
otoh, I routinely only use 10% of my brain.
otoh, I routinely only use 10% of my brain.
That's not your fault, it's typical for your speciesotoh, I routinely only use 10% of my brain.
TIL: Must be a childhood thing, but somehow, until now, I always thought that the Tower of London, as in the prison part, was one of the towers of the Tower Bridge. I think I've never seen an actual picture of the tower before today (after clicking around a bit in wiki, by accident).
Guess you can be quite wrong about certain things.
EDIT: I think some blame is to give to "Asterix and Obelix in Britan"
.
Guess you can be quite wrong about certain things
.EDIT: I think some blame is to give to "Asterix and Obelix in Britan"
.
EgonSpengler
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I thought that Parliament, Westminster and Big Ben were 3 completely separate things well into adulthood. That the city of London and the City of London are two different things also eluded me for quite some time. And I had no idea the Japanese drive on the left side of the road until I went there. Could probably do a whole spinoff thread of "things I learned embarrassingly late in life", or something like that.TIL: Must be a childhood thing, but somehow, until now, I always thought that the Tower of London, as in the prison part, was one of the towers of the Tower Bridge. I think I've never seen an actual picture of the tower before today (after clicking around a bit in wiki, by accident).
Guess you can be quite wrong about certain things
EDIT: I think some blame is to give to "Asterix and Obelix in Britan"
It's not embarrassing if you didn't need to know it.
They are 3 different things:
- Parliament is a group of people and rules that make us all do what they want
- Westminster is a small city in that makes up part of London
- Big Ben is the largest bell in the bell tower of the Palace of Westminster
"Westminster" can also be used as shorthand for the government, because they sit in the Palace of Westminster, but Big Ben only refers to the bell in the Elizabeth Tower (and thus, by extension and incorrectly, the tower itself).
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