Animal, Insect, Vegetable Altruism

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It’s been said that there’s an imbalanced focus on ornithology within our site, but we can also claim to have a slightly skewed preference for sloths as well. Whether it’s their permanently gentle grin or their slow, methodical movements we’re not sure, but we know we’re not the only ones who find them fascinating.

Sloths are found in both rainforest and dry tropical forest ecosystems but the biodiversity of their habitat is nothing compared to what they carry around with them in their arboreal lives. A team of biologists from the University of Wisconsin led Jonathan N. Pauli and M. Zachariah Peery has recently tackled a 35-year-old mystery about sloth behavior.

The sloth is not so much an animal as a walking ecosystem. This tightly fitting assemblage consists of a) the sloth, b) a species of moth that lives nowhere but in the sloth’s fleece and c) a dedicated species of algae that grows in special channels in the sloth’s grooved hairs. Groom a three-toed sloth and more than a hundred moths may fly out. When the sloth grooms itself, its fingers move so slowly that the moths have no difficulty keeping ahead of them.

Every week or so, the sloth descends from its favorite tree to defecate. It digs a hole, covers the dung with leaves and, if it’s lucky, climbs back up its tree. The sloth is highly vulnerable on the ground and an easy prey for jaguars in the forest and for coyotes and feral dogs in the chocolate-producing cacao tree plantations that it has learned to colonize. Half of all sloth deaths occur on the ground. The other serious hazard in its life is an aerial predator, the harpy eagle.

Why then does the sloth take such a risk every week? Researchers who first drew attention to this puzzle in 1978 suggested that the sloth was seeking to fertilize its favorite tree. Meanwhile, the algae that gave the sloth’s coat a greenish hue were assumed to provide camouflage.

Writing last week in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, the Wisconsin researchers assembled all these pieces in a different way. They started by trying to understand what would compel the sloth to brave the dangers of a weekly visit to ground zero. Continue reading →

Dictionary As Map To Identity

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English writer and broadcaster Robert Robinson holding the first volume of A Supplement To The Oxford English Dictionary in 1977. Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

We love dictionaries, but apart from the Scrabble usage, we do not always know why. Thanks to Alva Noe for these clues (click the image above to go to the story on NPR’s Cosmos & Culture website):

Among the clutter and furniture of our intellectual lives, there are dictionaries. Although they have probably disappeared from the bookshelves of most college students, they haven’t disappeared. They’ve migrated online.

I thought of this while reading an article in The New York Times on the truly Herculean labors going on at the offices of the Oxford English Dictionary, where a team of scholars are busy producing the OED’s third edition. They started in 1994 and now anticipate finishing in 2037. It’s going to be a long book, if it ever comes out in book form. The second edition, published in 1989, was nearly 22,000 pages. (As reported in The New York Times.) Continue reading →

Traditional Architecture Of Kerala

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Photo credits : Renjith

Photo credits: Renjith

Kerala has a rich legacy of architectural excellence. The ancient buildings, temples and palaces reflect the styles of sculpture and wood work adopted by artisans from ancient times. Traditionally the architecture of the state has been of a humble scale, an ensemble of simplicity and elegance tailored to suit Kerala’s climate and culture. Continue reading →

Good Arcs Make Good Stories

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Thanks to Maria Popova for sharing Kurt Vonnegut’s brief lesson on the basics of story-telling, a reminder to all of us that shaping the lines of the telling is key to the story-listener’s hearing of it.  As Seth shapes the story of Iceland’s role, and travelers’ story-telling roles, in the early precursor to modern nature tourism, the rest of us contributors to this site likewise note our own task in telling our stories effectively. In a written version on the same topic, Vonnegut put it this way:

…Now, I don’t mean to intimidate you, but after being a chemist as an undergraduate at Cornell, after the war I went to the University of Chicago and studied anthropology, and eventually I took a masters degree in that field. Saul Bellow was in that same department, and neither one of us ever made a field trip. Continue reading →

Qualities of the 19th Century British Traveller in Iceland: Part 2

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Glymur, Hvalfjörður, 1200-1500 feet deep.

In addition to being the first outsider to see several attractions in Iceland, Baring-Gould was also well known for his translations of the sagas he so admired. Anglo-Icelandic scholar Andrew Wawn believes Baring-Gould to have written “the first Iceland travel book to show any real awareness of manuscripts of sagas and eddic poems.” Thus, Baring-Gould’s actions set him apart once more as one of the discerning travellers discussed in Part 1 of this section. But does he engage in snobbish attempts to actively disparage tourists in addition to distinguishing himself as one who often strays from the beaten path? At one point he states that “Certainly a tourist who runs to the Geysirs and back to Reykjavík gets no true idea of Icelandic scenery,” and at the beginning of his book, when he arrives in Reykjavík, he satirically laments the presence of crinolines (i.e. petticoats) fashionable back home in one of the Danish stores. Neither of these examples is particularly harsh. When it comes to anthropogenic environmental degradation, however, he becomes more critical. It is instructive to quote Baring-Gould extensively here on the scene of a boiling hot spring whose conduit is obstructed by stones:  Continue reading →

A Non-Holi Technicolor Moment In Delhi

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Max Bearak. Amitabh Kumar painting a wall in Shahpur Jat, one of South Delhi’s urban villages

Max Bearak. Amitabh Kumar painting a wall in Shahpur Jat, one of South Delhi’s urban villages

Normally we have thought of vivid color in conjunction with India’s amazing holy days, especially those called Holi. Thanks to India Ink for this story about the street art going up, up north in India’s capital city:

Street Art Festival Brings Color to the Walls of Delhi’s Urban Villages

By Max Bearak

NEW DELHI — While looking out from a balcony in one of Delhi’s many urban villages – former villages that were swallowed up by the ever-expanding capital — more often than not, one is confronted by a boring, gray wall – the bare side of another building. Continue reading →

St. Mary’s Forane Church, Pullincunnu- Alleppey

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Photo credits : Ramesh Kidangoor

Photo credits: Ramesh Kidangoor

St. Mary’s Forane Church is one of the oldest Christian Churches in India. This church is situated at Pullincunnu on the bank of Pampa River. The village is part of the Kerala Backwaters, a network of lakes, wetlands, and canals. Pulincunno is notable for the annual Rajiv Gandhi Trophy boat race. Continue reading →

Making The Best Of A Surprise, Geothermal Energy Moves Forward In Iceland

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Getting into hot water - one of Iceland’s geothermal power plants. Gretar Ívarsson

Getting into hot water – one of Iceland’s geothermal power plants. Gretar Ívarsson

Frankly, we are more attuned at this moment to the historical vantage point, with this series reminding us of the earth’s untamed appearance via Iceland in centuries prior; but mindful of the future, of the need to find suitable energy solutions, and generally of our interest in scientific discovery the following article catches our attention:

Can enormous heat deep in the earth be harnessed to provide energy for us on the surface? A promising report from a geothermal borehole project that accidentally struck magma – the same fiery, molten rock that spews from volcanoes – suggests it could.

The Icelandic Deep Drilling Project, IDDP, has been drilling shafts up to 5km deep in an attempt to harness the heat in the volcanic bedrock far below the surface of Iceland. Continue reading →

Qualities of the 19th Century British Traveller in Iceland: Part 1

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Goðafoss. Gelatin silver print by Henry A. Perkins, courtesy of Cornell University Library’s Fiske Icelandic Collection, Department of Rare & Manuscript Collections.

For my previous post on part of my drafted chapter, click here.

Historian John Pemble, in his book on Victorians and Edwardians travelling in the Mediterranean, has written that “the claim to be a ‘traveller’, as opposed to a ‘tourist’ or an ‘excursionist,’ was in most cases only a special kind of snobbery … [implying] revulsion from the British masses.” This claim is in fact up for debate. On the one hand, a certain author on Iceland might lampoon so-called tourists for behavior that he engages in himself with seemingly no distinction other than his privileged background. On the other hand, Continue reading →

First Porsche, First Green Automobile?

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This is the first Porsche-designed vehicle, which had been stored in an Austrian garage since 1902

This is the first Porsche-designed vehicle, which had been stored in an Austrian garage since 1902

We are decidedly not the go-to source for information about automobiles, though from time to time we have been known to point out the innovations related to green tech and cars. Thanks to the BBC for their coverage of this intriguing conservation story we might file under cultural heritage, or alternative energy vehicles, or both:

Luxury automaker Porsche has revealed the first car designed by its founder was electric, in a show at its museum in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, Germany.

Ferdinand Porsche’s design was dubbed the Egger-Lohner electric vehicle C.2 Phaeton model, or the P1 for short. Continue reading →

Gujarat Street Photographer, Pranlal Patel

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Thanks to India Ink for bringing his work to our attention:

A Pioneer of Street Photography Leaves Behind Strong Images of Indian Women

By Zahir Janmohamed

AHMEDABAD, Gujarat — A little over five weeks before his first exhibition in the United States,  Continue reading →

Enchanting Beauty of Backwaters

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Photo credits Emmanuel Abraham

Photo credits: Emmanuel Abraham

The Backwaters of Kerala have  a unique ecosystem where fresh water from the rivers meets the salt water from the Arabian Sea. The partly brackish Backwaters stretch over 1900 km, providing drinking water and irrigating paddy fields. They include the large inland lakes of Kerala, as well as an entire network of canals, estuaries and curious water formations. Continue reading →

Mindfulness, Effectiveness And Health Benefits

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Take a brilliant, creative social scientist, without any respect for conventional wisdom and you get Ellen Langer. She is a fantastic storyteller, and Counterclockwise is a fascinating story about the unexpected ways in which our minds and bodies are connected. – Dan Ariely, Ph.D., author of Predictably Irrational

We are in constant search of better ways to focus our efforts and achieve more effective results. The work of Ellen Langer, whose new book (click the image above to go to her website) continues her “mindfulness” theme on into the realm of health, brought to our attention in a post on the New Yorker’s website today:

In the mid-nineteen-seventies, the cognitive psychologist Ellen Langer noticed that elderly people who envisioned themselves as younger versions of themselves often began to feel, and even think, like they had actually become younger. Men with trouble walking quickly were playing touch football. Memories were improving and blood pressure was dropping. The mind, Langer realized, could have a strong effect on the body. That realization led her to study the Buddhist principle of mindfulness, or awareness, which she characterizes as “a heightened state of involvement and wakefulness.”

But mindfulness is different from the hyperalert way you might feel after a great night’s sleep or a strong cup of coffee. Continue reading →

Wild Periyar – Lion-Tailed Macaque

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Photo credits : Aparna P

Photo credits: Aparna P

The Lion-Tailed Macaque, Macaca silenus, is ranked among the rarest and most threatened primates in the Western Ghats. The population is scattered across small patches of evergreens in Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, where they spend most of their lives in the upper canopy of tropical moist forests. Continue reading →

A Science Writer’s Public Service

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The famous forensic scientist Dr. Rama is dead – murdered – and suspicion has fallen on Ruby Rose’s father, the only family she has. Ruby is new to her school and is having enough trouble just making a friend; now she has far bigger problems. To save her father, she will have to solve the murder herself, relying for help on an elderly neighbor who used to be a toxicologist. But is this woman reliable? And is there enough time?

Benedict Carey is better known as a science reporter for the New York Times, but that is just his day job.  It certainly qualifies as public service, but in addition he moonlights on further public service. He explains his purpose:

Both books are adventures in which kids use science to save themselves and solve a mystery. It’s real science, accessible but not obvious, and builds understanding of some fairly advanced principles – transcendental numbers (among other things) in “Island of the Unknowns,” and mass chromatography in “Poison Most Vial.”

In a trailer park called Adjacent, next to the Folsom Energy Plant, people have started to vanish, and no one seems to care. At first Lady Di and her best friend, Tom Jones, barely notice the disappearances—until their beloved math tutor, Mrs. Clarke, is abducted, too. Mrs. Clarke has left them clues in the form of math equations that lead them and other kids all over the trailer park, through hidden tunnels under “Mount Trashmore,” and into the Folsom Energy Plant itself, where Lady Di and Tom Jones and a gang of other misfits uncover the sordid truth about what’s really happening there. That's Di on the left and Tom on the right.

In a trailer park called Adjacent, next to the Folsom Energy Plant, people have started to vanish, and no one seems to care. At first Lady Di and her best friend, Tom Jones, barely notice the disappearances—until their beloved math tutor, Mrs. Clarke, is abducted, too. Mrs. Clarke has left them clues in the form of math equations that lead them and other kids all over the trailer park, through hidden tunnels under “Mount Trashmore,” and into the Folsom Energy Plant itself, where Lady Di and Tom Jones and a gang of other misfits uncover the sordid truth about what’s really happening there. That’s Di on the left and Tom on the right.

Perfectly principled reality: if you had been restricted to Benedict Carey’s better known science reporting for the New York Times, that would be not such a bad thing. He also serves on the board of Edge, a non-profit which seeks to “arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” Again, not bad.

But we like in particular the effort to branch out further, reaching the next generation and aiding the mathematical and scientific efforts of educators who otherwise compete with entertainment of all sorts for the hearts and minds of youth.

That said, do not miss his reporting. He is a master at this trade, and improves the quality of conversation we are determined to engage in more often. His most recent article for the Times reviews the research into cognitive performance and aging and with humor and gravitas all at once he acknowledges why as we get older we tend not to be too interested in these findings: Continue reading →