Slothy Sloths

/ Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment
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Source news.wisc.edu

Sloths are my favorite arboreal folivore, which is just the short, scientific way of saying an animal that lives in trees and feeds only on leaves. Observing this placid-looking creature was and still is quite a novelty for visitors (and locals, like me) to Costa Rica given that its sluggish nature is uncommon for a arboreal vertebrate…and its adorable fuzziness is simply too cute not to stare at. To understand the rarity of this type of animal (arboreal folivores) better, a group of researchers from the University of Wisconsin traveled to Costa Rica and began to investigate the sloth’s adaptation to a slow lifestyle. Continue reading →

Farm-to-Car Research by Ford Motor Co.

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Photo of an agave plant by Stan Shebs via WikiMedia Commons

Plant-based plastics and the circular economy are both concepts that we like but have not seen enough of since their introduction into the discourse of sustainability and the collective fight against climate change. Below, Lauren Hepler from GreenBiz reports on Ford’s continued research in “farm-to-car” materials like soy-based foam and car parts reinforced by castor oil byproducts, rice husks, and other recycled waste, but we can’t forget that despite the carbon and petroleum saved by these changes, the use of gasoline as fuel is still the biggest problem:

With thick, spiky leaves that can grow up to 7 feet tall, so-called “blue agave” is a hearty plant that grows in high-altitude desert climates. The succulent’s claim to fame: being the essential ingredient in authentic Mexican tequila.

Luckily for distillers such as Jose Cuervo, agave grows well when cultivated in arid regions such as Southern Mexico. Still, with a processing volume of 200-300 tons per day, the company is often left with considerable waste from the 90-plus-pound plants — which is exactly what appealed to the company’s unlikely new business partner.

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Hydrogen Derived from Grass, Sunlight, and Nickel

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A type of fescue grass in the UK, photo by T. Voekler via WikiMedia Commons

Another research university, another new chemical conversion. Yesterday we shared an innovative prototype system from Cornell to generate electricity, and today we learned via Eurekalert.org, “the global source for science news,” that hydrogen, a source of renewable energy, can be produced by the cellulose found in fescue grass during a chemical reaction with sunlight and a metal catalyst such as nickel, according to researchers from Cardiff University and Queen’s University in the UK:

It is the first time that this method has been demonstrated and could potentially lead to a sustainable way of producing hydrogen, which has enormous potential in the renewable energy industry due to its high energy content and the fact that it does not release toxic or greenhouse gases when it is burnt.

Co-author of the study Professor Michael Bowker, from the Cardiff Catalysis Institute, said: “This really is a green source of energy.”

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What’s the Longest Living Animal?

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Some sea sponges can live for centuries, and are indeed animals. PHOTOGRAPH BY JAD DAVENPORT, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC CREATIVE

That’s a question National Geographic reader Mohamed Larbi Bahou asked the columnists of “Weird Animal Question of the Week,” and a question we hadn’t asked ourselves. Liz Langley answers Mohamed’s question – thanks to both of them for these interesting facts:

Some days it feels like it might be me.

Kidding aside, humans these days live pretty long lives: The average global life expectancy of someone born in 2015 is 71.4 years.

That’s not bad compared with some adult female mayflies, which live for under five minutes—just long enough to mate and lay eggs. Talk about speed dating.

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Kakaw Designs

/ Jocelyn Toll / 3 Comments
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Image from Vimeo

Recently I was introduced to a small online business that sells handmade women’s boots and bags called Kakaw Designs. Seth met the company’s founder, Mari, before his work at the school they both taught at in the Galapagos four years ago and mentioned the ethical concept of her business.

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Cornell Research on Capturing Carbon to Generate Electricity

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Architectures of metal/CO2 electrochemical cells as capture systems. (A) Secondary metal/CO2 electrochemical cell where CO2 is concentrated by recharging. (B) Primary metal/CO2 electrochemical cell where captured CO2 is concentrated or converted to Cn (n ≥ 2) valuable products. Image and caption from Science Advances, W.I. Al Sadat and L.A. Archer

Several of our contributors have a Cornell background, and this new technology that can convert carbon dioxide to electricity through a simple series of chemical reactions is the product of a couple researchers at the School of Chemistry and Biomolecular Engineers. Prachi Patel reports for Conservation Magazine:

A new technology offers a one-two punch against carbon pollution. Researchers have made an aluminum-based battery cell that captures carbon dioxide and simultaneously generates a large amount of electricity. That means a way to mitigate carbon emissions while meeting increasing demand for energy.

Continue reading →

Must-see Aerial Insectivores in the Greater Antilles: Part 3/5

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Antillean Palm-Swifts in flight as well as entering and exiting nests located within the hanging fronds of palm trees, Jamaica. (photos by Justin Proctor)

This post is part of a series; visit Part 2 here.

Antillean Palm-Swift (Tachornis phoenicobia)

This is going to be the most noticeable and easy to identify swift out there. However, that doesn’t mean you’re going to get a really good look at one right away. They are fast, and they are small. Luckily they are gregarious and colonial nesters, which means that you will usually come across them in large numbers as they forage or move into and out of their nests – which, amazingly, are a blend of saliva, plant fibers, and feathers attached to the undersides of dead, hanging palm fronds.

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UK Starbucks to Trial Actually Recyclable Cups

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© frugalcup

It turns out that only one in four-hundred paper coffee cups are recycled in the UK; the rest of the 2.5 billion cups used every year are thrown in landfills or turned into greenhouse gases via incineration. The main problem, apart from people simply not throwing the cups in recycling bins, is the plastic lamination on the paper that makes the cups more waterproof. A new cup being released this week, made by a company called Frugalpac uses a thinner film that can be more easily removed to recycle the paper, which itself is less chemically treated than conventional cups.

Starbucks in the UK has announced that it will trial these more easily recycled cups, and hopefully they’ll stick with it. Rebecca Smithers writes for The Guardian:

The cups will feature in a forthcoming television investigation by Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. For his next War on Waste documentary, which airs on BBC1 on 28 July, the chef and campaigner has challenged major coffee shop chains to explain why more cups are not recycled and consumers not given better information about environmentally friendly disposal. But Starbucks, one of the UK’s largest coffee chains, is set to be the first retailer to test the product, saying it will trial the Frugalpac cup in some branches.

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Pinocchio in the Forest

/ Jocelyn Toll / 1 Comment
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Source: BBC.com

Eccentric and alien-like creatures abound on Earth, but often times these species are found in very remote and small areas. The Ecuadorian horned anole, also known as the “Pinocchio lizard,” is a species that would likely appear in Discovery Channel’s TV series Life (if it has not done so already).  This curious lizard with a long, malleable nose was found in the Mindo cloud forests of Ecuador’s Pichincha Province in the 50’s. Aside from its peculiar nose, what makes the story more intriguing is that it ‘disappeared’ from human research world for almost 40 years until it was rediscovered by a group of birders (hurray birders!) in 2005. The purpose of the horn and how it moves are still a mystery, but Jason Goldman has written an article for the BBC Earth website that elucidates some of the rare reptile’s habits:

Lucas Bustamante carefully aims his laser pointer at a small branch some 50ft (15m) above the ground. The green spot of light is clearly visible, but I just cannot see the lizard he has spotted: just branches, leaves and moss.

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Honeyguide Relationship can Include Talking

/ Seth Inman / Leave a comment

Greater Honeyguide specimen used in Cornell’s Ornithology course (photo and handling by a teaching assistant)

When I took Cornell’s course in ornithology, we learned about all the bird families in the world to varying extent, often based on the number of species within each family or how interesting they were to our professor. One family that we did not cover with great depth, but which was considered a “cool” example of evolution that could either make for a fascinating science experiment or just good cocktail-party chatting––we were gently reminded that the latter shouldn’t always revolve around weird bird things––was Indicatoridae, or the honeyguides.

While not all members of this family are literally guides to honey, one species in particular, the Greater Honeyguide, is well known for actually showing (or indicating) the way to beehives, where humans can harvest honey and the birds can eat larvae and wax. In this week’s edition of Science, researchers from Cambridge University and University of Cape Town published a paper revealing that the wild birds can actually be better guides when they receive a certain signal from the human honey-hunters. Nicola Davis reports:  Continue reading →

Ants & Agriculture

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Tiny nurse ants tending to white ant larvae are dwarfed by the queen ant in the upper right. All the ants feed upon protein-rich food produced by a white-grey fungus that they cultivate underground. (Karolyn Darrow)

Thanks to the folks at Smithsonian for this one:

Were Ants the World’s First Farmers?

A new study shows that a group of ants have been conducting a subsistence type of farming since shortly after the dinosaurs died out

By Jackson Landers

Humans have been practicing agriculture for about 10,000 years. But the attine ants of South America (which include the well-known leafcutters) have us beat by a long way.

According to a new paper co-authored by entomologist Ted Schultz, curator of ants at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, attine ants, which farm on an industrial scale similar to humans, have been carefully cultivating gardens with a complex division of labor to grow an edible fungus. Schultz’s team found that the ants have been doing this far longer than previously believed—up to 65 million years—and that we have much to learn from them. Continue reading →

Library Law’s Legacy

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The National Library of the Czech Republic in Prague. Pavel Horejsi for The New York Times

If you search this site for topics written about frequently, library might be among the top 10 topics, for reasons that many of those earlier posts would make clear. Today, a lovely short item from Eastern Europe, that makes us wonder:

Why Libraries Are Everywhere in the Czech Republic

What in the World

By HANA de GOEIJ

PRAGUE — In the age of Amazon and the internet, the idea of going to a public library to borrow a book may seem ever more quaint and old-fashioned in many parts of the world, but one country, at least, is clinging to it tenaciously: the Czech Republic. Continue reading →

The New Ranchera (In Practice)

/ Jocelyn Toll / Leave a comment

Ranchos, mountains, and coastline make up the bulk of Baja California Sur. The languid cattle or skittish chickens are what one most commonly sees when one is driving along the dirt roads, but if you take what might look like a short cut or a fun exploration route, you are most likely driving on someone’s driveway and will find a ranchero’s home at the end of it. I was keen to do some off-road exploring, particularly through the arroyos, but a car would not make it through and walking seemed too inefficient.  We were told by our neighbors (the only family that comes to vacation at their beach house exclusively in the summer time) two houses down from Villa del Faro that the family who delivers the water has a mule that they let people ride. As we talked more about the possibility of riding their mule up the arroyo, I learned that it was not a typical offer the family made to strangers, so that meant we were going to have to get introduced.

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Mountain Lions to Save Drivers and Deer from Collisions

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Image: ©Brother Magneto/Flickr

It’s strange news, but a great sign of innovation that both helps a large keystone mammal come back from reduced population numbers and cull a troublesome species that is creating more and more road hazards every year. Brandon Keim reports for Conservation Magazine:

What’s one simple, inexpensive way to make driving safer?

Letting big predators live.

If mountain lions returned to the eastern United States, say researchers, their predatory habits would literally get white-tailed deer off the road, reducing collisions between drivers and deer by 22% over the next 30 years.

Continue reading →

2.5 Minutes With David Lynch, Well Spent

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Lynch1

Take a moment, just listen to this unusual, gifted man speak:

David Lynch on Where Great Ideas Come From

In 2008, The Atlantic sat down with the filmmaker David Lynch as he mused about inspiration and how to capture the flow of creativity. Now, we’ve animated his words of advice. “A lot of artists think that suffering is necessary,” he says. “But in reality, any kind of suffering cramps the flow of creativity.”

Belize, We Love You For So Many Reasons

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BelizeShrimp

I said a while back that you would be hearing more on Belize, and tomorrow after I arrive there I will keep that promise. For now, in the spirit of anticipation, I share a snapshot just taken from the seafood section of a Wegmans grocery store in Northborough, MA (USA) during a pre-Belize reconnaissance mission.