Sometimes The Truth Is Hard To Believe

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Photo by Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com, modified by Phil Plait

Photo by Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock.com, modified by Phil Plait

We try to minimize the doom and gloom and accentuate the solutions; but sometimes our eyebrows rise to new heights and we must share:

Yup, a Climate Change Denier Will Oversee NASA. What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

By Phil Plait

So, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) was just named to be the chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness as Republicans take over the Senate. This subcommittee (which used to be just Space and Science but was recently renamed) is in charge of oversight of, among other things, NASA.

This is not a good thing. Just how bad it is will be determined. Continue reading →

Avian Odyssey

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As Seth and his team are in flight for their odyssey in search of the golden swallow, it seems fitting that we come across the stories of epic avian journeys. Just about a year ago we posted about the bar-tailed godwit, and it seems the species has some stiff competition in the semipalmated sandpiper.

Scientists from the Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences recovered data from a geolocator tagged sandpiper from sub-Arctic Coats Island revealing that the bird flew over 10,000 miles in the past year, including a remarkable six day, 3,300-mile nonstop flight across the Atlantic Ocean. Continue reading →

Packed and Ready to Go

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Six checked bags, three carry-ons, and two personal items. Three tickets for travel through three airports over a course of eight hours (including layover). One rental car for forty-eight hours, and thirty nights in Jamaica, around twenty-five of which should be in the bush. We’re hoping there’ll be enough internet access at the Windsor Research Centre to have some posts published throughout the next month, but it’s possible we’ll only have time for some very detail-packed posts. Regardless, we should be back in time for Valentine’s Day, February 14th!

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A Trio of Jamaican Endemics

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Jamaica has thirty endemic bird species, which is more than any other West Indies island. Justin, John and I have a good chance of seeing a good handful of those, especially since Cockpit Country and the Blue Mountains are such well-forested and protected areas. Although none of us are the type of birder that pursue “life lists” — a checklist of the thousands of bird species in the world that one has seen — we all use eBird and are definitely interested in seeing and identifying wildlife of any sort.

And if that type of animal happens to be found only in the area that we’re passing through, then that just makes us appreciate the relative rarity a little more. Endemism in a bird species does seem to assign that bird a bit of a higher status for life-listers, for the obvious reason that you have to be able to go to the certain region to find it — you can’t necessarily spot it merely by visiting a different continent, but rather you have to go to the country, or island, or mountain range.

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More Reasons To Disconnect

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Illustration by John Hersey/Courtesy of WNYC

Illustration by John Hersey/Courtesy of WNYC

Desire to drop everything and release yourself from the constant ringing, pinging distraction? We’ve suggested disconnection before. We have suggestions on where to do it too, some offering pure relaxation and others offering immersion in culture. But why do it? Plenty of reasons, and you do not need us to explain. Nonetheless, from National Public Radio (USA) a fun, unconventional reason:

Bored … And Brilliant? A Challenge To Disconnect From Your Phone

Studies suggest we get our most original ideas when we stop the constant stimulation and let ourselves get bored. The podcast New Tech City is challenging you to disconnect — and see what happens.

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If You Happen To Be In Fort Kochi

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V. Venu, director-general of the National Museum in Delhi (in blue), viewing Xu Bing’s work at Aspinwall House in Kochi on Sunday.

V. Venu, director-general of the National Museum in Delhi (in blue), viewing Xu Bing’s work at Aspinwall House in Kochi on Sunday.

If you are in town before the end of March, come see the show. We have mentioned the event in these pages more than once between its first iteration and this year’s; and if you follow Spice Harbour‘s social media you would have seen, among other things, that the formal opening of that property doubled as a fundraiser for KMB, as it is affectionately known to Raxa Collective. In today’s Hindu, an article reminds us that the event is not just for fancy folks, but serves a deeply important cultural education service for Indians of all backgrounds and education levels:

Prominent figures from the world of art, film personalities, art students, and the public turned up in large numbers at the Kochi Muziris Biennale on Sunday, even as the event completes a month on January 12.

Among the visitors to the contemporary art event on Sunday was V. Venu, director-general of the National Museum in Delhi. “The kind of consistent engagement by people from every walk is what makes the Biennale an unparalleled successful event in the country,” said Dr. Venu. Continue reading →

Cockpit Country

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© Google

Cockpit Country, the first of the two regions we’ll be traveling through during our pair of expeditions, is an area of roughly 500mi² in northwestern Jamaica. The country is divided into parishes, which are like the counties or provinces of other countries; Cockpit Country is in the southern section of Trelawny Parish, which at one point had the most sugar plantations on the island. The sugar factories were closer to the coastal ports, but Cockpit Country, full of forest and strange limestone terrain, was (and still largely is) uninhabited and difficult to traverse.

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Expeditions In The Interest Of Science, Nature And Conservation

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A male toad of an undescribed species hides in the limestone of the southwestern Dominican Republic. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY MIGUEL A. LANDESTOY

A male toad of an undescribed species hides in the limestone of the southwestern Dominican Republic. CREDIT PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY MIGUEL A. LANDESTOY

There is a reason why we highlight birds every single day. They are spectacular in many diverse ways, as well as beautiful in more ways than can be counted, and sometimes smile-inducingly odd; always exceptional ambassadors to the human world from their natural habitats, which are under constant pressure and threat. Birds may seem more charismatic than amphibians but from an ecologist’s point of view they are both extremely valuable indicators of ecosystem health. If you have been following Seth’s posts about the preparation for the Smithsonian expedition he is about to embark on, you will likely agree they would enjoy crossing paths with the team described in this story:

The southernmost corner of the Dominican Republic is dominated by limestone karst, a landscape with the look and feel of a petrified giant sponge. Snakes, small mammals, and fat, furry tarantulas live in the fissures and holes in the karst, as do toads, including one species that is not yet fully known to science. I met this new toad at three o’clock one late-fall morning, in a karst forest off a mining road near the town of Pedernales. I was with Miguel Landestoy and Robert Ortiz, a pair of freelance field biologists who have been friends since their youth, and who still spend much of their time looking for amphibians. Continue reading →

If You Happen To Be In Ithaca

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Bijayini Satpathy, top, and Surupa Sen in two duets, “Dheera Sameere” and “Kisalaya Sayana,” in Chennai, India. Credit Jyothy Karat for The New York Times

Bijayini Satpathy, top, and Surupa Sen in two duets, “Dheera Sameere” and “Kisalaya Sayana,” in Chennai, India. Credit Jyothy Karat for The New York Times

On February 4 Nrityagram, a dance troupe from India, will perform “Songs of Love and Longing” at Cornell University’s Barnes Hall. We normally do not take note of such performances at university campuses, even when the artist is from India. But this troupe is exceptional. Last week not far from Raxa Collective’s operations in Kerala, in the neighboring state, a Nrityagram dance performance led to this remarkable review in the New York Times:

A Sublime Touch, From Head to Heel

Odissi Stars at a Dance Festival in Chennai, India

By ALASTAIR MACAULAY JAN. 6, 2015

CHENNAI, India — Who are the greatest dancers in the world today? Most of the contenders considered in the West for this category are the roving international stars of ballet. But many of today’s finest dance artists have been performing here at the Music Academy’s weeklong dance festival, which ends on Friday. Some — all women — have touched on the sublime.

Three have been practitioners of the Odissi genre: Sujata Mohapatra, who performed on Sunday, and the two leading dancers of the Nrityagram company, Surupa Sen and Bijayini Satpathy, who presented solos and duets on Monday. (I’ll consider other festival performances next week, some no less superlative.)

Odissi is the classical idiom deriving from the eastern state of Orissa (now named Odisha). Though its roots go back 2,000 years, by the 1940s and ’50s it was scarcely known, whereas now it is taught and performed around the world. These three artists exemplify the qualities that have often made Odissi seem the most sensuously poetic of all dance idioms.

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Maps and Recordings

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Using Cornell’s Mann Library plotter printers and the Digital Printing Center’s laminating capabilities, John, Justin and I were able to make some versions of northwestern Jamaica maps this week. Cropped to show just Cockpit Country and its environs, the maps are big and waterproof and will be perfect for field use if our Garmin Oregon 650 handheld GPS unit fails for whatever reason. This area of Jamaica is full of interesting historical and vernacular place-names like Me No Sen You No Come, Look Behind, Cutthroat, and other regions we’re interested in getting a look at, at least from afar.

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A Brief Gear Preview

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P1010526_zps280e666dSince we’re doing most of our packing today, we figured it would be a good time to share some photos of our gear before everything is stuffed into a suitcase. Below is a random selection of items we’ll be taking down to Jamaica with us, from food to insect repellent.

Starting to our left, we have a small bottle of biodegradable all-purpose soap that can be used as bodywash, shampoo, and detergent for both clothes and dishes. I’ve already sampled it on some clothing and it seems to do a great job. Seeing as you can’t take a real shower in the field for five or six days at a time, it might be good to have some of this stuff handy.

Next are two types of water container that should grant us more mobility away from our base at the Windsor Research Centre. We’ve been told that there aren’t many natural sources of water in Cockpit Country, so we need to bring our own water with us. Our solution to this problem is hiring a mule to carry water and certain heavy equipment like tents for us, so we have two 26.5L bladders and two 8L carriers for water.  Continue reading →

Flipping Tortoises

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Credit: RubberBall / Alamy. Via BBC

A couple of our contributors have connections to tortoises through the Galápagos Islands, or at least from reading about them in the news. We’d always been aware of the danger for tortoises if they were flipped on their backs, but had never given the issue much evolutionary thought to consider the variations in the animals’ shells. Now, scientists at the University of Belgrade have published a paper on the self-righting ability of Hermann’s tortoises, which live in the Mediterranean. Matt Walker writes for the BBC:

Depending on your point of view, it is one of life’s great questions.

How does a tortoise that has flipped onto its back, get up again?

It’s not a rhetorical question, and it goes beyond being a metaphorical or metaphysical query, or a subject for drunken debate.

For a tortoise it is a deadly serious matter; being able to right itself counts as one of life’s epic struggles, a potential matter of life and death.

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Particulate Matter Pollution

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A view of the Eiffel Tower through smog in March. Several regions of France experienced high levels of particulate pollution that month. Credit Patrick Kovarik/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images. Via The New York Times.

We’re always interested in learning about pollution and ways to counter it, no matter what kind of pollution it is. Roughly a week ago Michael Greenstone, the Milton Friedman professor of economics at the University of Chicago, wrote a piece for the New York Times about particulate matter pollution, which we have limited knowledge of. Some of the data Greenstone explained was fairly surprising, and we learned more about this serious form of air pollution. Here he is on the topic:

The World Health Organization considers fine particulate matter pollution levels higher than 10 micrograms per cubic meter to be unsafe. The majority of American cities are in the safe zone, with the average pollution level at 9.6. Thirty-three percent of cities are above the W.H.O. standard. Those cities tend to be geographically dispersed throughout the United States, but are predictably cities with heavy industry and driving, like Cleveland, Chicago, Los Angeles and Philadelphia. Outside of the W.H.O., the United States has its own particulate matter standard of 12 micrograms per cubic meter. The pollution in 13 percent of American cities is higher than that.

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