Pitcher plants glow under UV light to attract prey

It's long been known that carnivorous plants lure their insect prey in a range of ways: irresistible nectars, vivid colors and alluring scents that range from rose to rotten flesh. But recently, a group of scientists at the Jawaharlal Nehru Tropical Botanic Garden and Research Institute in India discovered a previously hidden means of beckoning among the most ruthless of greenery. Some carnivorous plants, they discovered, lure insects to their death with a fluorescent glow invisible to the human eye...

"To our great surprise, we found a blue ring on on the pitcher rim," Baby says. "Then, we looked at other Nepenthes species and the prey traps of other carnivorous plants, including the Venus flytrap, and we consistently found UV-induced blue emissions." These colors, found in a total of twenty carnivorous plant species and documented in a study published in Plant Biology, were the first time such distinct fluorescent emissions were ever detected in the plant kingdom...

An ant—which can't see red, but is extremely sensitive to blue and violet light—would see rings of blue florescence, the result of metabolic compounds in the plant that absorb UV radiation from the Sun and re-emit it as visible light...

...the plants might use their fluorescence for other purposes as well. Recent field studies in Borneo indicated that some species of pitchers may have a symbiotic relationship with small nocturnal mammals, such as rats, bats and tree shrews—these mammals come and drink nectar from the plants, and deposit nutritious feces nearby, which serve as a fertilizer.

More photos and explanation at Smithsonian.  You learn something every day.

A clever way to transport automobiles by rail

Known as Vert-A-Pac, the railcar was designed to maximize the amount of vehicles being transported, and GM made at least one vehicle that was specifically made for this kind of duty: the Chevy Vega.

In order to keep the price at a rock bottom level, these Chevys were designed to fit on railcars that could carry twice as many Vegas than usual, for a total of 30. In order to fit all 30 cars, each rail car had 30 doors, 15 on each side, that folded down so that a Vega could be secured inside in a vertical, nose-down fashion. Then a forklift would come along and lift the door (and car) into place.

Via the new shelton wet/dry.

I am so very very VERY tired of deleting spam comments

Every morning I wake up to be greeted by an emailbox showing new comments to TYWKIWDBI for me to review and weed.  And every morning I have to delete utter crap like the above, some of which has made its way through filters and has to be manually expunged.

I don't want to ban comments, which thanks to the readership here often contains more insights and information than the posts themselves, and I don't want to make the signup too onerous.  I have wondered if there is a mechanism to stop comments on posts older than XX days (?30, ?60 should allow access by all regular readers), but then some of the classic posts like Squirrel eating a bird or How to break your arm on purpose, which continue to garner relevant comments years after they were posted, would be inaccessible.  But that may be the tradeoff to make my mornings more pleasant.

Is there such a time-based filter available via Blogspot?  I can't seem to find one.  Any other suggestions would be appreciated.

Devastated by a rolling stone

YouTube link.

The first time I watched this video of the aftermath of a rockfall in Italy, I was baffled by how the footage was obtained.  Apparently this was filmed by a drone (?quadcopter).

More details at The Independent, via Nothing to do with Arbroath.

Modern foraging for food

YouTube link.

Foraging not in dumpsters, but rather in backyards, fields, and parks.

More information at Meadows and More.

Via The Dish.

What do these people have in common?

Ann-Margret
Ingrid Bergman
Werner von Braun
Greta Garbo
Werner Heisenberg
Hubert H. Humphrey
William Hurt
Johannes Kepler
Thomas Mann
Karl Marx
Edvard Munch
Jean-Paul Sartre
Jesse Ventura
Dr. Seuss
Jimmy Olsen (comics)
Bruce Willis
Steve Jobs
Gary Larson

Answer below the fold

1740 book on Stonehenge now online

In 1740, British vicar William Stukeley published Stonehenge, A Temple Restor’d to the British Druids.

In more than 30 illustrations, Stukeley’s book documents the way Stonehenge appeared when he visited it in the early 18th century. The historian was only the second scholarly investigator (after the 17th-century antiquarian John Aubrey) to take an interest in the site, and the first to publish a comprehensive account of what he found on his visits, including images of the way that the monument looked in context of the surrounding farmland.

In maps and vistas, Stukeley tried to capture the layout of the monument’s stones. Much of his sense of urgency in the task came from his belief that the stones’ arrangement needed preservation, as the monument was under constant threat of vandalism and interference. For example, Aubrey found and documented 20 stones in one area of the monument; a century later, Stukeley found only five remaining.

A digitized copy of the book has been posted online by Harvard's Widener Library.

Via Slate's Vault.

Dumping on the Great Barrier Reef

"Australia's Great Barrier Reef watchdog gave the green light on Friday for millions of cubic metres of dredged mud to be dumped near the fragile reef to create the world's biggest coal port and possibly unlock $28 billion in coal projects.

The dumping permit clears the way for a major expansion of the port of Abbot Point for two Indian firms and Australian billionaire miner Gina Rinehart, who together have $16 billion worth of coal projects in the untapped, inland Galilee Basin.

Environmentalists, scientists and tourist operators had fought the plan, which they fear will harm delicate corals and seagrasses and potentially double the ship traffic through the World Heritage marine park.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, an independent government agency charged with protecting the reef, acknowledged the concerns, but said expanding Abbot Point would require much less dredging than other port options.

"It's important to note the seafloor of the approved disposal area consists of sand, silt and clay and does not contain coral reefs or seagrass beds," the marine park authority's chairman, Russell Reichert, said in a statement..."

Fortunately, the dredged material will all stay in one place after it's dumped, and won't move around or anything like that, because there aren't any, you know, currents or waves or such.

Addendum August 2014:  A hat tip to reader expatQLD for sending in these followup details on the outcome of the proposal.

The Great Barrier Reef Marine Park is likely to be spared from having 3 million cubic metres of dredge spoil dumped on it as part of the Abbot Point coal terminal expansion.

Dawson MP George Christensen confessed in an open letter to Whitsunday residents that “I got it wrong” and is in negotiations with North Queensland Bulk Ports (NQBP) to find a land-based dumping site for the spoil.

Details at the link.

"Look at that, you son of a bitch"

(Reposted from 2011 to accompany the Great Barrier Reef post above.)

Trailer for "How To Die in Oregon"

YouTube link.

Excerpts of Edward Snowden's interview with German media

"There was an article that came out in an online outlet called BuzzFeed where they interviewed officials from the Pentagon, from the National Security Agency and they gave them anonymity to be able to say what they want and what they told the reporter was that they wanted to murder me. These individuals - and these are acting government officials. They said they would be happy, they would love to put a bullet in my head, to poison me as I was returning from the grocery store and have me die in the shower...

The National Security agency operates under the President’s executive authority alone. He can end of modify or direct a change of their policies at any time...

When you are on the inside and you go into work everyday and you sit down at the desk and you realise the power you have  - you can wire tap the President of the United States, you can wire tap a Federal Judge and if you do it carefully no one will ever know because the only way the NSA discovers abuses are from self reporting...

The Five Eyes alliance is sort of an artifact of the post World War II era where the Anglophone countries are the major powers banded together to sort of co-operate and share the costs of intelligence gathering infrastructure.  So we have the UK’s GCHQ, we have the US NSA, we have Canada’s C-Sec, we have the Australian Signals Intelligence Directorate and we have New Zealand’s DSD...

You could read anyone’s email in the world. Anybody you’ve got email address for, any website you can watch traffic to and from it, any computer that an individual sits at you can watch it, any laptop that you’re tracking you can follow it as it moves from place to place throughout the world...

I don’t want to pre-empt the editorial decisions of journalists but what I will say is there’s no question that the US is engaged in economic spying.  If there’s information at Siemens that they think would be beneficial to the national interests, not the national security of the United States, they’ll go after that information and they’ll take it...

(re outsourcing work to private companies) The problem there is you end up in a situation where government policies are being influenced by private corporations who have interests that are completely divorced from the public good in mind. The result of that is what we saw at Booze Allen Hamilton where you have private individuals who have access to what the government alleges were millions and millions of records that they could walk out the door with at any time with no accountability, no oversight, no auditing, the government didn’t even know they were gone...

I worked alone. I didn’t need anybody’s help, I don’t have any ties to foreign governments, I’m not a spy for Russia or China or any other country for that matter. If I am a traitor who did I betray? I gave all of my information to the American public, to American journalists who are reporting on American issues. If they see that as treason I think people really need to consider who do they think they’re working for. The public is supposed to be their boss not their enemy... "

The fulltext (in English) is at the German website NDR.

This telephone is 1,200 years old

Not an electric telephone obviously, but a true "phone" designed to transmit sounds over distances, created in South America before the era of European contact.  Smithsonian has the story:

The marvel of acoustic engineering—cunningly constructed of two resin-coated gourd receivers, each three-and-one-half inches long; stretched-hide membranes stitched around the bases of the receivers; and cotton-twine cord extending 75 feet when pulled taut—arose out of the Chimu empire at its height. The dazzlingly innovative culture was centered in the Río Moche Valley in northern Peru, wedged between the Pacific Ocean and the western Andes. “The Chimu were a skillful, inventive people,” Matos tells me as we don sterile gloves and peer into the hollowed interiors of the gourds. The Chimu, Matos explains, were the first true engineering society in the New World, known as much for their artisanry and metalwork as for the hydraulic canal-irrigation system they introduced, transforming desert into agricultural lands...

More at the link.  I've been unable to locate a better photograph than the embed, but it's clear that this was the equivalent of a modern tin-can telephone.

"Six ways from Sunday" began as a description of strabismus

The big problem... is that the expression has appeared in many forms down the years, such as four different ways from Sunday, eight ways from Tuesday, forty ways till Sunday, and a thousand ways for Sunday.

The key to its origin lies in this early slang collection, which was pointed out to me by Douglas Wilson:

SQUINT-A-PIPES. A squinting man or woman; said to be born in the middle of the week, and looking both ways for Sunday; or born in a hackney coach, and looking out of both windows; fit for a cook, one eye in the pot, and the other up the chimney; looking nine ways at once.

----Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, by Captain Francis Grose, 1785.

This is an early American version:

The brow projected exuberantly, though not heavily, over a pair of rascally little cross-firing twinkling eyes, that, as the country people said, looked at least nine ways from Sunday.

----Cobus Yerks, a short story by James Kirke Paulding, in The Atlantic Souvenir for Christmas 1828.

It would seem that Paulding employed an amalgamation of the first and last of Grose’s expressions to describe what is properly called a strabismus, in which the eyes appear to be looking in different directions...

As well as the multitudinous versions, the sense has shifted yet again, to mean completely, thoroughly or by every imaginable method, as in this example from 1894: “if you want to collect any bills from them you will have to chase them seven ways from Sunday”. Another, from 2013, also has that sense: “They both insist that their staff are the best in the business, and have been checked five ways to Sunday before they get hired.”

More details at the always-interesting World Wide Words.

Pentagon to give away 13,000 armored vehicles

The Pentagon wants to give away 13,000 mine-resistant, ambush-protected trucks because they have outlived their original purpose.

Although the trucks' armored bodies are credited with protecting U.S. troops from roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, military planners want more-versatile vehicles that can be deployed quickly as troop levels decrease. A full-size MRAP (pronounced EM-rap, of course) weighs about 40,000 pounds, stands 10 feet tall and costs the Pentagon about $500,000 new...

Interest from foreign militaries has been tepid. But they are a hit with stateside police agencies. Almost 200 trucks have been distributed to police departments since August and requests are pending for an additional 750 trucks. The vehicles, many of which feature machine-gun turrets, are off-limits to private citizens and businesses.

Lucky recipients run from the Ohio State University campus police force to Florence County, S.C., which replaced an armored vehicle from the 1970s that the sheriff department's SWAT team had used for about 15 years. A new armored truck would have cost at least $188,000...

"Nobody will want them," says Dean Lockwood, an analyst with Forecast International Inc. "The Afghan terrain is hell on vehicles. It's eating them alive."

For police, though, the bulky trucks project a show of force at hostage incidents, civil disturbances and other situations where SWAT officers with military-grade weapons, uniforms and helmets are deployed.

Thirteen thousand surplus vehicles that cost a half-million dollars each.
Going to American urban and campus police forces.
To be replaced by even more vehicles.

I'm going to defer commentary.

Say goodbye to the axolotl

The axolotl... also known as a Mexican salamander (Ambystoma mexicanum) or a Mexican walking fish, is a neotenic salamander, closely related to the tiger salamander. Although the axolotl is colloquially known as a "walking fish", it is not a fish, but an amphibian. The species originates from numerous lakes, such as Lake Xochimilco underlying Mexico City. Axolotls are unusual among amphibians in that they reach adulthood without undergoing metamorphosis. Instead of developing lungs and taking to land, the adults remain aquatic and gilled.

Sad news today, as reported by The Guardian:

Mexico's salamander-like axolotl may have disappeared from its only known natural habitat in Mexico City's few remaining lakes....

The axolotl is known as the "water monster" and the "Mexican walking fish." Its only natural habitat is the Xochimilco network of lakes and canals, which are suffering from pollution and urban sprawl. Biologist Armando Tovar Garza, of Mexico's National Autonomous University, described an attempt last year by researchers to try to net axolotls in the shallow, muddy waters of Xochimilco as "four months of sampling zero axolotls"...

The Mexican Academy of Sciences said a 1998 survey had found an average of 6,000 axolotls for each square km, a figure that dropped to 1,000 in a 2003 study, and 100 in a 2008 survey.

Our children's children will grow up in a vastly depleted and markedly less interesting world.  (Unless they are interested in cockroaches and jellyfish).

Update (March 2014): I should have used "au revoir" rather than "goodbye" in the title, because some survivors in the wild have been located -

"...biologist Armando Tovar Garza of Mexico's National Autonomous University said Friday that members of the team carrying out the search had seen two axolotls during the first three weeks of a second survey expected to conclude in April."