17 Pounds Of Plastic Kills Whale, Highlighting Ocean Pollution

Some 80 plastic bags extracted from within a whale are being laid out in Songkhla, Thailand, in this still image captured from video footage.

Thailand's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources/Social Media/via REUTERS ATTENTION EDITORS

Around 80 sopping wet, black plastic bags lined the floor of an operating room in Thailand last week after they were pulled from the stomach of a whale found stranded on a beach.

The pilot whale, which washed ashore in the southern province of Songkhla, later died after veterinarians tried for five days to save its life, according to the country's Department of Marine and Coastal Resources. An autopsy found nearly 17 pounds of plastic inside the whale's belly, a marine official told Reuters.

The whale's death and photos released by the department serve as a reminder of a growing global problem: plastic debris flowing into the ocean and killing wildlife.

"We are creating the horrible dystopian future that nobody wanted," Enric Sala, an explorer-in-residence and marine ecologist with National Geographic, tells Here & Now's Robin Young.

NPR

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waterfowl genital

A sexual arms race waged with twisted genitals has been discovered in waterfowl. 

The genitalia of the females of these species have at times apparently evolved to make it harder for males to successfully impregnate them, according to new findings that shed light on the eternal war of the sexes. 

Most birds lack phalluses, organs like human penises. Waterfowl are among the just 3 percent of all living bird species that retain the grooved phallus found in their reptilian ancestors.

Male waterfowl are especially unusual in that their phalluses vary greatly among different species in length, ranging from a half-inch to more than 15 inches long. They also display a remarkable level of diversity how elaborate they are, ranging from smooth to covered with spines and grooves. 

Scientists had speculated that male waterfowl evolved longer phalluses to give them a competitive edge over those not as well-endowed when it came to successfully fertilizing females. 

After looking at the genitalia of a male duck, "I became immediately intrigued by what the female anatomy would look like to accommodate such a bizarre organ," said behavioral ecologist Patricia Brennan, who researches at both Yale University and the University of Sheffield in Britain. 

Now Brennan and her colleagues unexpectedly find the vaginas of female waterfowl can be just as ornate as male genitalia, full of "dead ends" and other countermeasures that all seemed design to exclude the phallus, findings to be detailed online May 2 in the journal PLoS ONE. 

Like lock and key

In most birds, the vagina or oviduct is a simple tube. However, in some waterfowl, there are sacs in the sides of this tube, pockets that are just inside the opening of the oviduct. These sacs appear "to function as 'dead-ends,' or false passages," Brennan said. "If the phallus were to enter one of these sacs, it would not progress further into the oviduct where it would deposit sperm more effectively." 

Waterfowl oviducts can also possess a series of tight, clock-wise spirals. "Interestingly, the male phallus is also a spiral, but it twists in the opposite, counterclockwise, direction," said Yale ornithologist Richard Prum, one of Brennan's co-authors on the research. "So, the twists in the oviduct appear designed to exclude the opposing twists of the male phallus," behaving like the opposite of a lock-and-key system. 

The number of sacs and spirals in the reproductive tract of various female waterfowl seems to increase as the male phallus gets longer across the 14 different species of ducks and geese tracked by Brennan and her colleagues. 

"I became very good at predicting what the genitalia of one sex would look like by looking at the other sex first," Brennan said. 

This suggests the genitalia of males and females have evolved to surpass each other in a kind of escalating arms race over which sex gets to control reproduction. 

"Despite the fact that most waterfowl form monogamous pairs, forced copulations by other males—the avian equivalent of rape—are common in many waterfowl," said Prum. The length of the phallus of a species is strongly linked with the frequency of forced copulations. 

"In response to male attempts to force their paternity on females, female waterfowl may be able to assert their own behavioral and anatomical means of controlling who fathers their offspring," Brennan said. 

This means that male waterfowl evolve more ornate phalluses to attempt to successfully overcome the physical defenses raised by ever more elaborate vaginas, and vice versa. 

"Some large waterfowl that are highly monogamous, like geese and swans, have small phalluses, whereas other species that are quite small but more promiscuous have more elaborate genitalia," Brennan said. "A larger phallus is advantageous in situations where there is more promiscuity, while more monogamous species have a much reduced phallus."

livescience

America's most misspelled words

The best and worst places to be a working woman

The Economist has published its fifth annual “glass-ceiling index”. It combines data on higher education, workforce participation, pay, child-care costs, maternity and paternity rights, business-school applications and representation in senior jobs into a single measure of where women have the best—and worst—chances of equal treatment in the workplace. Each country’s score is a weighted average of its performance on ten indicators. 

The overall picture painted by the data is that the long trend of improving conditions for working women has flatlined within the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries. In 2005, 60% of women were in the labour force; ten years later, this ratio had edged up only slightly to 63% (it was 80% for men in both years). With relatively few women climbing the ranks, and strong old-boys’ networks helping men reach the top, female representation in well-paid and high-status jobs is closer to a third than half. And the gender wage gap—male minus female wages, divided by male wages—is still around 15%, meaning women as a group earn 85% of what men do.

These broad averages conceal wide variation between countries. The Nordic countries clearly lead the world on gender equality at work. The top four positions this year belong to Iceland, Sweden, Norway and Finland, just as they did in 2016 (though Sweden and Norway did switch places). Women in these countries are more likely than men to have a university degree and be in the labour force. They make up 30-44% of company boards, compared with an average of 20% across the OECD. And voluntary political-party gender quotas mean that women are well-represented in parliaments. In October, women won a record 48% of the seats in Iceland’s lower house. At around two-fifths, Scandinavian women’s share of parliamentary seats ranks in the top 10% globally.

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At the other end of the index are Japan, Turkey and South Korea. Women make up only around 15% of parliaments in these countries, and are underrepresented in management positions and on company boards. In South Korea, just 2% of corporate directors are female. Similarly, fewer women than men have completed tertiary education and are part of the labour force. Only 35% of Turkish women are working or looking for work, and a mere 16% have graduated from university.

Progress in gender equality has a tendency to build upon itself. In Iceland, which currently provides the most equal working environment for women according to our index, female workers staged a protest last October in which they marched out of their offices early to call attention to the country′s 14% gender pay gap. If Japanese women were to do likewise, they would be leaving much earlier.

more charts on the economist

WATCH: Raindrops Catapult Bacteria Into The Air, And It's Beautiful

When you step outside after a big rainstorm and take a deep whiff of that fresh, earthy smell, you're mostly smelling a chemical called geosmin.

It's a byproduct of bacteria and fungi. And something about rain lofts the chemical — and sometimes the organisms themselves — into the air, a process that not only helps release that earthy smell but may, in very rare conditions, spread diseases.

Somehow raindrops launch tiny living things off the ground.

Wind can pick bacteria up from the ground and bring into the sky, sometimes settling in clouds thousands of feet above us. Sea spray can also send bacteria flying. The mystery has been, how does rain do it?

Now, mechanical engineers writing Wednesday in the journal Nature Communications say they've figured it out. It has to do with tiny bubbles.

Using high-speed cameras and fluorescent dye, the researchers filmed drops of water as they fell on different types of soil infused with bacteria. They watched as the drops delicately catapulted the microbes into the air. WATCH!

who benefits under trump and the republicans health care plan

Both Obamacare and the recent Republican replacement proposal use refundable tax credits to help people buy their health insurance. That is part of the reason the new G.O.P. bill is under fire from conservatives, who see it as a new entitlement program.

But the structure of the tax credits is really different. Obamacare calculated the credits based on the cost of insurance in a given area and how much the purchaser could afford to pay. The Republican plan hands out tax credits on a flat basis, according to age. (Both plans cut off subsidies at a certain income level, on the assumption that high earners can pay their own way.) That means that the government subsidy you might get under the different plans would depend on a number of factors – age, income, address.

Analysts at the Kaiser Family Foundation estimated these subsidies for every county in the United States across these three variables. The result, shown in the maps above, reveals stark contrasts in federal support, particularly for lower-income Americans.

The biggest losers under the change would be older Americans with low incomes who live in high-cost areas. Those are the people who benefitedmost from Obamacare.

For some people, the new tax credit system will be more generous. The winners are likely to be younger, earn higher incomes and live in areas where the cost of health insurance is low.

Obamacare's subsidies were structured to limit how much low- and middle-income Americans could be asked to pay for health insurance. Under the G.O.P. proposal, many of the people whose tax credits would fall sharply would be likely to end up uninsured. For people with few resources, a gap of several thousands of dollars between their tax credit and the cost of coverage would be impossible to make up.

That's why many policy experts believe that the new system would result in fewer Americans having health insurance.

But if you put Obamacare out of your mind, this program still represents a very large outlay of federal money to help Americans buy health insurance. Before Obamacare passed, those buying their own insurance did not receive government subsidies. And the tax credits in the Republican bill would go to people regardless of whether they even paid taxes -- another reason conservatives oppose it.

nytimes

women's marches around the world

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/01/21/world/womens-march-pictures.html

Mexico

Antarctica

 Sydney, Australia

Bangkok

Chicago

London

Nairobi

New York

Oslo

 Paris

Vancouver

Washington, DC

snowballs wash up on beach

There were snowy, icy balls everywhere.

Videos and photos from western Siberia, on the Gulf of Ob, showed an entire beach covered in snowballs that had apparently washed ashore. In one image published online by the Siberian Times, a woman sat on the frozen balls. In another, a dog ran near the balls, which had also formed what looked like a vertical mass of balls mashed together into an icy ball-wall.

The BBC reports that the balls started washing up about two weeks ago. They're strung along some 11 miles of coast and are said to range from about the size of a tennis ball up to almost 3 feet across.

Here's a video of the beach shot by someone named Valery Togo, who told the Russian news site Vesti Yamal that he lives in the nearby town of Nyda, which is on the Yamal Peninsula just above the Arctic Circle.

The BBC reports the chilled orbs that washed ashore "result from a rare environmental process where small pieces of ice form, are rolled by wind and water, and end up as giant snowballs." It adds:

"Russian TV quoted an explanation from Sergei Lisenkov, press secretary of the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute:

" 'As a rule, first there is a primary natural phenomenon — sludge ice, slob ice. Then comes a combination of the effects of the wind, the lay of the coastline, and the temperature and wind conditions.'

" 'It can be such an original combination that it results in the formation of balls like these.' "

The Collins English Dictionary defines "slob ice" as "sludgy masses of floating ice" in Canadian English.

Rare and original as the ball-forming process might be, this is not the first time humans have witnessed these globular creations. In 2010, a Chicago Tribune video showed snowballs that washed up along Lake Michigan.

npr

Hurricane Matthew Took A Big Bite Out Of Southeastern States' Beaches

Beaches in the Southeastern U.S. took a tremendous beating last month from Hurricane Matthew. The U.S. Geological Survey has found that the storm washed over and damaged 15 percent of sand dunes on Florida's Atlantic Coast, 30 percent along Georgia's coastline and 42 percent of the dunes on South Carolina beaches.

In Florida, few coastal areas were hit harder by the hurricane than the 18 miles of dunes and beaches in Flagler County. County Administrator Craig Coffey says, "What Matthew did to us essentially [was] eat about 30 feet of coastline all the way along the county, and created a bunch of breaches through that dune system."

Matthew also washed out a big chunk of coastal highway A1A in Flagler Beach. The state and county are working to have that road repaired and open within 45 days. Fixing that highway is important, Coffey says. But he is equally worried about damage to the county's beaches and dunes, which provide the community with important protection from tides, wave action and storm surge.

When Hurricane Matthew overtopped and breached Flagler County's beaches, some 800 homes were flooded. Coffey says, "We're trying to figure out how can we protect those for next hurricane season so we don't have more breaches. We literally were fighting breaches in about 10 locations." Flagler County is hoping federal money will be available to help it begin restoring the dunes, which provide protection for hundreds of coastal homes.

Photos taken before Hurricane Matthew (Sept. 6, 2014, above) and after (Oct. 13, 2016, below) show that the storm cut a new inlet between the Atlantic Ocean and the Matanzas River near St. Augustine, Fla., stripping away a 12-foot dune and carrying sand into the estuary.

Many other communities are facing similar problems. The USGS says 53 miles of dunes were damaged and overtopped in Florida. In Georgia, 32 miles of shoreline were affected. Seventy-seven miles of dunes were damaged in South Carolina.

Hilary Stockdon, a research oceanographer at USGS, says a survey of the beaches compared aerial photos taken before and after the storm. It showed extensive beach erosion all along the Southeast Atlantic coast, Stockdon says, "where waves removed sand from beaches and sharply eroded sand dunes. There were locations where houses were undermined or roads were undermined. And we also saw locations where the sand was pushed inland."

After small storms, Stockdon says, beaches and dunes can recover naturally. With major storms like Hurricane Matthew, though, sand is washed inland and bulldozed away, she says. Restoring sand dunes after those events often requires big engineering projects.

Photos taken before Hurricane Matthew (Sept. 6, 2014) and after (Oct. 14, 2016) show that the storm washed away a 16-foot sand dune, destroying boardwalks and decks and exposing a seawall at Vilano Beach, Fla.

npr

Washing clothes releases thousands of microplastic particles into environment

More than 700,000 microscopic fibres could be released into waste water during each use of a domestic washing machine, with many of them likely to pass through sewage treatment and into the environment, according to new research.

A study by Plymouth University examined the mass, abundance and size of fibres present in waste effluent following washes of synthetic fabrics at standard temperatures of 30˚C and 40˚C.

It found hundreds of thousands of tiny synthetic particles could be released in each wash, confirming earlier work at Plymouth University that the washing of clothes is a major source of microscopic fibres within the aquatic environment.

The research, published in Marine Pollution Bulletin, was led by PhD student Imogen Napper in conjunction with Professor Richard Thompson, who is a leading international expert on microplastics and marine debris having worked in the field for more than 20 years.

For the study, a series of polyester, acrylic and polyester-cotton items were washed at 30˚C and 40˚C using various combinations of detergent and fabric conditioner. Fibres were then extracted from the waste effluent and examined using an electron microscope to determine the typical size and any differences in mass and abundance among treatments.

The research found that laundering an average washing load of 6kg could release an estimated 137,951 fibres from polyester-cotton blend fabric, 496,030 fibres from polyester and 728,789 from acrylic. The polyester-cotton blend was consistently found to shed fewer fibres than both the other fabric types, regardless of the differing treatments, however the addition of bio-detergents or conditioners tended to release more fibres.

Professor Thompson, who leads the International Marine Litter Research Unit at Plymouth University, recently gave both written and oral evidence to the microplastics inquiry held by the House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, which led to recommendations for a ban on the use of microbeads in cosmetics. read more

Filipino Fisherman Reveals 75-Pound Pearl He Kept Hidden For A Decade

A fisherman in the Philippines might have discovered the largest natural pearl ever found — and then kept it hidden under his bed for 10 years.

The pearl's existence was revealed by Aileen Cynthia Maggay-Amurao, a tourism officer in Puerto Princesa, on the island of Palawan.

She says the fisherman is one of her relatives and that he discovered it in a giant clam and kept it as a good-luck charm.

When he was moving out of his home, he decided to give the pearl to Maggay-Amurao for safekeeping instead of transporting it with him — "since it's quite heavy," she told The Guardian.

In fact, the pearl weighs in at 34 kilograms, Maggay-Amurao says — or approximately 75 pounds.

It's more than 2 feet long and 1 foot wide, CNN reports.

That would make it far and away the largest natural pearl ever found in a giant clam. The current world record is held by another pearl found off the coast of Palawan — "The Pearl of Allah" or "Pearl of Lao Tzu," which was discovered in the '30s and cost a diver's life to retrieve.

That pearl, which the Guardian says was valued at $93 million in 2003, weighs 14 pounds — a fraction of the size of the newly revealed pearl.

The 75-pound pearl is now on display in the city hall of Puerto Princesa; the local government has dubbed it the "Pearl of Puerto."

Maggay-Amurao, who says she persuaded her relative to display the pearl instead of hiding it, has called for gemologists to visit Puerto Princesa to examine the pearl for authenticity and an estimate of its value.

A spokesman for the Puerto Princesa government says the fisherman who found the pearl hasn't signed it over to the city, Agence France-Presse reports. "It remains his property," the spokesman says, confirming that the man could be in for an extraordinary windfall.

For the record, a 75-pound pearl would be 170,000 carats. npr

When People Ate People, A Strange Disease Emerged

Most of the world didn't know anyone lived in the highlands of Papua New Guinea until the 1930s, when Australian gold prospectors surveying the area realized there were about a million people there.

When researchers made their way to those villages in the 1950s, they found something disturbing. Among a tribe of about 11,000 people called the Fore, up to 200 people a year had been dying of an inexplicable illness. They called the disease kuru, which means "shivering" or "trembling."

Once symptoms set in, it was a swift demise. First, they'd have trouble walking, a sign that they were about to lose control over their limbs. They'd also lose control over their emotions, which is why people called it the "laughing death." Within a year, they couldn't get up off the floor, feed themselves or control their bodily functions.

Many locals were convinced it was the result of sorcery. The disease primarily hit adult women and children younger than 8 years old. In some villages, there were almost no young women left.

"They were obsessed with trying to save themselves because they knew demographically that they were on the brink of extinction," says Shirley Lindenbaum, a medical anthropologist with the City University of New York.

But what was causing it? That answer eluded researchers for years. After ruling out an exhaustive list of contaminants, they thought it must be genetic. So in 1961, Lindenbaum traveled from village to village mapping family trees so researchers could settle the issue.

But Lindenbaum, who continues to write about the epidemic, knew it couldn't be genetic, because it affected women and children in the same social groups, but not in the same genetic groups. She also knew that it had started in villages in the north around the turn of the century, and then moved south over the decades.

Lindenbaum had a hunch about what was going on, and she turned out to be right. It had to do with funerals. Specifically, it had to do with eating dead bodies at funerals.

In many villages, when a person died, they would be cooked and consumed. It was an act of love and grief.

As one medical researcher described, "If the body was buried it was eaten by worms; if it was placed on a platform it was eaten by maggots; the Fore believed it was much better that the body was eaten by people who loved the deceased than by worms and insects."

Women removed the brain, mixed it with ferns, and cooked it in tubes of bamboo. They fire-roasted and ate everything except the gall bladder. It was primarily adult women who did so, says Lindenbaum, because their bodies were thought to be capable of housing and taming the dangerous spirit that would accompany a dead body.

"So, the women took on the role of consuming the dead body and giving it a safe place inside their own body — taming it, for a period of time, during this dangerous period of mortuary ceremonies," says Lindenbaum.

But women would occasionally pass pieces of the feast to children. "Snacks," says Lindenbaum. "They ate what their mothers gave them," she says, until the boys hit a certain age and went off to live with the men. "Then, they were told not to touch that stuff."

Finally, after urging from researchers like Lindenbaum, biologists came around to the idea that the strange disease stemmed from eating dead people. The case was closed after a group at the U.S. National Institutes of Health injected infected human brain into chimpanzees, and watched symptoms of kuru develop in the animals months later. The group, which won a Nobel Prize for the findings, dubbed it a "slow virus."

But it wasn't a virus — or a bacterium, fungus, or parasite. It was an entirely new infectious agent, one that had no genetic material, could survive being boiled, and wasn't even alive.

As another group would find years later, it was just a twisted protein, capable of performing the microscopic equivalent of a Jedi mind trick, compelling normal proteins on the surface of nerve cells in the brain to contort just like them. The so-called "prions," or "proteinaceous infectious particles," would eventually misfold enough proteins to kill pockets of nerve cells in the brain, leaving the cerebellum riddled with holes, like a sponge.

The process was so odd that some compared it to Dr. Jekyll's transformation to Mr. Hyde: "the same entity but in two manifestations — a 'kind', innocuous one and a 'vicious', lethal one." npr

WATCH: Bacteria Invade Antibiotics And Transform Into Superbugs

The Evolution of Bacteria on a "Mega-Plate" Petri Dish from Harvard Medical School on Vimeo.

npr

If you've ever wanted to watch a superbug evolve before your very eyes, you're in luck. Researchers filmed an experiment that created bacteria a thousand times more drug-resistant than their ancestors. In the time-lapse video, a white bacterial colony creeps across an enormous black petri dish plated with vertical bands of successively higher doses of antibiotic.

The colony pauses when it hits the first band of antibiotic, creating a stark border between the white colony and the black petri dish. Then the bacteria start to edge their way into the toxic soup. More dots appear and they start growing, racing to the next, stronger band of antibiotic. The bacteria are evolving. After almost two weeks of real time have passed, they've become resistant to the strongest antibiotic and completely taken over the kitchen-table-sized petri dish.

We know dangerous bacteria are getting stronger all the time and that it's our fault because of our excessive and indiscriminate use of antibiotics. Each year, 23,000 people in the U.S. die as a result of superbug infections. But we typically don't get to see superbugs created.

For most people, evolution is just conceptual, says Tami Lieberman, an evolutionary microbiologist at MIT. She and her Ph.D. adviser, Roy Kishony at Harvard Medical School, wanted something that would make the evolution of superbugs seem more concrete. "The goal was to see evolution, not to abstract it," she says.

Their video and report were published Thursday in the journal Science.