NOAA's hurricane season outlook

" 'A below-normal season doesn't mean we're off the hook. As we've seen before, below-normal seasons can still produce catastrophic impacts to communities," said NOAA Administrator Kathryn Sullivan, Ph.D., referring to the 1992 season in which only seven named storms formed, yet the first was Andrew – a Category 5 Major Hurricane that devastated South Florida."

BTW- hurricane season starts June 1st!

mary ellen mark

http://www.maryellenmark.com/

DNA evidence suggests that the split between dogs and their wild ancestors occurred closer to 30,000 years ago

It looks like dogs might well have been man's (and woman's) best friend for a lot longer than once thought.

The long-held conventional wisdom is that canis lupus familiaris split from wolves 11,000 to 16,000 years ago and that the divergence was helped along by Stone Age humans who wanted a fellow hunter, a sentry and a companion.

Now, DNA evidence suggests that the split between dogs and their wild ancestors occurred closer to 30,000 years ago.

Publishing in Thursday's edition of Current Biology, the authors of a new study looked at the genome of a 35,000-year-old wolf from the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. "We find that this individual belonged to a population that diverged from the common ancestor of present-day wolves and dogs very close in time to the appearance of the domestic dog lineage," they wrote in the abstract.

The team, led by Pontus Skoglun, a research fellow at Harvard, concluded that the mutation rate for canines is "substantially slower than assumed by most previous studies, suggesting that the ancestors of dogs were separated from present-day wolves before the Last Glacial Maximum."

In other words, there may have been a faithful Fido walking with a human before the end of the last Ice Age (and before agriculture).

As The New York Times writes: "Based on the differences between the genome of the new species, called the Taimyr wolf, and the genomes of modern wolves and dogs, the researchers built a family tree that shows wolves and dogs splitting much earlier than the 11,000 to 16,000 years ago that a study in 2014 concluded."

However, a study reported in 2013 places the date of the canine split closer to the study published on Thursday. As NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce reported then, a team headed by Robert Wayne, a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and publishing in Science, used DNA analysis to peg the date at somewhere between 18,800 to 32,100 years ago.

In the new study, an author of the report was quoted by the Times as saying the simplest explanation for the new data is that dogs were domesticated as much as 30,000 years ago, but he cautions that the study does not prove it. "We can't just look at the DNA and say whether a canid was living with modern humans," he was quoted by the newspaper as saying.

"One scenario is that wolves started following humans around and domesticated themselves," Dalen told BBC. "Another is that early humans simply caught wolf cubs and kept them as pets and this gradually led to these wild wolves being domesticated. If this model is correct then dogs were domesticated by hunter gatherers that led a fairly nomadic lifestyle." npr

Census Reveals Universe Of Marine Microbes At Bottom Of The Food Chain

What's at the bottom of the bottom of the food chain? Well, think small ... smaller than you can see.

Microbes in the ocean!

There are (and scientists have done the math) trillions of microorganisms in the ocean: plankton, bacteria, krill (they're maybe bigger than "micro," but not by much), viruses, protists and archaea (they're like bacteria, but they aren't bacteria).

The Earth as we know it wouldn't exist without the trillions of microorganisms that live in the oceans. They're food for most everything that floats or swims, and they make oxygen that we need to breathe.

Now scientists have completed a census of this Lilliputian universe. And it's more diverse than anyone imagined.

Like Charles Darwin and other naturalists of the 18th and 19th century, the modern explorers spent years sailing around the world to accomplish this feat. They called their expedition Tara, after the name of the 110-foot schooner on which they lived for three years. 

The scientists aboard found more than 35,000 different kinds of organisms — many of them previously unknown to science. Their work fills five papers in the journalScience. Journal editor Marcia McNutt says it's time the world took notice of what wecan't see in the ocean.

"How can we save the whales if we can't save the krill?" she says. "There's something about the tragedy of the commons here."

Oceans are dumping grounds for the world's garbage. Climate change is making them warmer and more acidic. The Tara expedition was designed to measure what's out there and how it might be affected by a changing ocean.

To do that, the scientists siphoned up ocean water and used DNA probes to identify the organisms in the water. That also enabled them to understand how those organisms behave: eat, reproduce, interact.

Team scientist Eric Karsenti, from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, says he was surprised by how much these tiny organisms interact with each other, often in symbiotic relationships.

"It's not only survival of the fittest," he says, "but it's also how everybody collaborates with everybody else that makes life evolve."

They also discovered communities of organisms caught up in big eddies, like whirlpools. These eddies carry these little living eco-systems with them across the oceans. The researchers also found these microorganisms to be exquisitely sensitive to temperature changes. And in fact, the oceans already are warming due to climate change.

Steve Palumbi, a marine biologist at Stanford University, says all this is good reason to pay more attention to these microbes.

"Anything that goes on in that region of life, that bottom layer, these tiny things makes a big difference to how the planet functions," he says.

Not only are they food for so much of what lives in the ocean, but they add huge amounts of oxygen to the atmosphere. "Anywhere between 1 in 4 and 1 in 2 breaths we take comes out of the ocean," says Palumbi. And that's mostly coming from these tiny little microbes.

Palumbi says this scientific bite at the oceanic apple will take years for scientists to digest. But he notes that the Tara scientists have made the unusual gesture of giving anyone in the world access to their data — in the hope that many hands will make quick work of it. npr

Dense Breasts Are Just One Part Of The Cancer Risk Calculus

Almost half the states now require doctors to tell women if they have dense breasts because they're at higher risk of breast cancer, and those cancers are harder to find. But not all women with dense breasts have the same risks, a study says.

Those differences need to be taken into account when figuring out each woman's risk of breast cancer, the study says, and also weighed against other factors, including family history, age and ethnicity.

The researchers looked at the records of 365,426 women who had a normal mammogram, then looked to see which ones were diagnosed with breast cancer within a year — a cancer that may have been missed by the mammogram.

All told, 47 percent of the women in the study had dense breasts. But just half of those women had a higher cancer risk. The women who got cancer were more likely to be older and white, have a family history of breast cancer, and to have "heterogeneously" or "extremely" dense breasts, the top two categories of breast density.

The results were published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. npr

Earth's First Snake Likely Evolved On Land, Not In Water

Some scientists have speculated that snakes first evolved in water and that their long, slithery bodies were streamlined for swimming. But a new analysis suggests that the most recent common ancestor of all snakes actually lived on land.

This ancestral protosnake probably was a nocturnal hunter that slithered across the forest floor about 120 million years ago. And it likely had tiny hind limbs, left over from an even earlier ancestor, says Allison Hsiang, a researcher at Yale University.

"They probably weren't using them in locomotion in any way, but they did probably still have vestigial hind limbs stuck on the back of their bodies," Hsiang says.

The evolutionary origin of snakes has been a bit of a mystery for scientists, because the fossil record has an unfortunate dearth of snakes. "For a long time there weren't very good snake fossils," says Hsiang, who explains that researchers had not found "things that sort of told us what snakes looked like early on, or transitional fossils between snakes and their closest ancestors."

That's because snakes are mostly small, with fragile skeletons that aren't easily preserved — although there are some notable exceptions, such as Titanoboa, which lived 60 million years ago and could grow longer than 40 feet.

In the past decade, though, scientists have discovered a bunch of new snake fossils — some new species, as well as better-quality specimens of known species. "Previously, we just had, say, a few isolated vertebrae," says Hsiang, "which tells you it's a snake, but doesn't really tell you very much else."

The new fossils allowed Hsiang and some colleagues to do a rigorous, comprehensive analysis, to try to determine what the most recent common ancestor of all snakes might have been like. Besides fossils, the team studied the genes and anatomy of living snakes. "We had a total of 73 species, and I believe 15 of those were fossil species," says Hsiang.

Their analysis, described in the issue of BMC Evolutionary Biology published Tuesday, supports the idea of an early snake that slithered over the ground, and perhaps went into burrows to find food. "Snakes probably did not evolve, originally, to be in water," says Hsiang. "That's not why they developed this body plan; that's not what the earliest snakes were doing."

It looks like the ancestral snake had needle-like hooked teeth that it used to grab small, rodent-like critters, which it then swallowed whole. And it probably wouldn't have been able to eat anything much bigger than its own head. npr

How A Bigger Lunch Table At Work Can Boost Productivity

The loft-like San Francisco office of software maker Atlassian has an open central amphitheater, where all-staff gatherings and midday boot camp exercises are held.

Jay Simons, Atlassian's president, says the building was originally a book printing factory. He describes it "as a big, two-story warehouse with a lot of steel girders, a lot of natural light."

But the office's rapid expansion to 300 employees has led to gripes about conference room shortages. "We're butting up on growing out of the space," Simons says.

So, early this year, Atlassian installed heat and motion sensors to track when and how often every desk, room and table was used. The result? Desks were used only 20 percent of the workday; conference rooms an average of 40 percent, with peak utilization at mid-morning.

Simons says tracking employees' movements in an anonymous way will help guide choices to convert desk space into meeting rooms, or to stagger meetings to accommodate a growing staff.

"If we're using data to make an environment that people can be more productive in, ultimately that saves us money or helps us make more," he says.

One of Waber's clients found that software developers who ate lunch in large groups wrote 10 percent more code than those who ate solo or with fewer colleagues. Salespeople with more relationships across an organization sold measurably more. That led to larger lunch tables and more strategic placement of coffee machines.

"Where do you spend time, who talks to who and those patterns are so critical when it comes to how effective we are and how happy we are at work," he says.

Waber's company carefully tracks its own employees. Even for things like determining which free snacks tend to draw people into break rooms.

Congdon says designing the ideal workspace is well worth the effort. When Steelcase redid its own offices, she says workers ended up happier with the various options for working and meeting. And, as a bonus, the company reduced its real estate footprint by 48 percent. npr

distinctive leading cause of death by state 2001-2010

Black Rhino Is Killed By U.S. Hunter Who Won Controversial Auction

An endangered black rhino is seen in this file photo from the Etosha National Park in northern Namibia last year. An American hunter has killed one of the animals, under a special permit he bought for $350,000.

A Texas hunter who paid $350,000 for the right to hunt a rare black rhino in Namibia has killed the animal. The hunt has drawn controversy and spurred debate over the best way to manage endangered wildlife.

Corey Knowlton won an auction last January for a hunting permit that would allow him to kill a black rhino weighing around 3,000 pounds.

"There are only an estimated 4,000 to 5,000 black rhinos living in the wild," Mark wrote for the Two-Way last year. "Namibian authorities issue five kill permits per year."

The permit came from Namibia's Ministry of Environment and Tourism; each year, it targets several older rhinos that are no longer able to breed – but still pose a deadly threat to younger males. The proceeds are meant to go toward anti-poaching and conservation efforts.

Namibia is facing a surge in poaching — last week, the country's New Era newspaper said that 60 rhinos have been poached so far in 2015, leading Namibia's environmental ministry to double its reward for information about the killings.

After winning the auction, Knowlton then had to get special permission from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to bring the carcass back to America. The agency, which gave its approval in March, writes:

"The removal of limited numbers of males has been shown to stimulate population growth in some areas. Removing specific individuals from a population can result in reduced male fighting, shorter calving intervals, and reduced juvenile mortality."

Black rhinos have "the highest combat mortality rates of any mammal," Namibia's Oshili 24 reports. "Approximately 50 percent of males and 30 percent of females die from combat-related injuries."

But, the news site adds, "Many in Namibia opposed the auction." Protests against the hunt came from international groups; demonstrators also picketed the auction held by the Dallas Safari Club.

As Knowlton told CNN, the rhino hunt could have ended in three possible scenarios – including one in which the wrong rhino could be killed:

"If it charges at us and we are already sure it's the right one, we are going to kill it," Knowlton said. "If we aren't sure if it's the right one, we are going to try and get out of the way. If we don't feel like we can get out of the way, we got to kill it."

Knowlton invited CNN to join him on the hunt; the network's Ed Lavandera spent several days with the hunter and a team of trackers, documenting their walk through the bush. A sample:

"The rhino is close. Knowlton's hands firmly grip his high-powered 500 Nitro Express rifle. Moments later, I see a massive flash of gray leap up over the bushes some 50 feet in front of us. It disappears and you can't tell which direction the rhino is running.

"It's jarring to see this close how quickly these massive creatures can move."

The hunting party picked up the rhino's trail near a watering hole early in the morning. When they finally got close to it, the rhino charged – and was shot several times.

"Any time you take an animal's life it's an emotional thing," Knowlton tells CNN.

"I felt like from day one it was something benefiting the black rhino," Knowlton tells Lavandera shortly after the hunt. "Being on this hunt, with the amount of criticism it brought and the amount of praise it brought from both sides, I don't think it could have brought more awareness to the black rhino."

If you're wondering how the 36-year-old Knowlton could afford the steep hunting fee, we're seeing that he's a hunting consultant based in Dallas, as well as a personality on an Outdoor Channel hunting show, Jim Shockey's The Professionals. He's also a son of Lary Knowlton, the co-founder of BASA Resources, which was characterized last year as one of "the top 20 oil producers in the state of Texas." npr

riddle of the day

there is a word. six letters it contains. 

take one away, and twelve is what remains.

answer: dozens

sam adoquei

samadoquei.com

Are You Smarter Than A 15-Year-Old?

Here's a map of a system of roads that links the suburbs within a city. The map shows the travel time in minutes at 7:00 a.m. on each section of road.

Question: Julio lives in Silver, Maria lives in Lincoln and Don lives in Nobel. They want to meet in a suburb on the map. No one wants to travel for more than 15 minutes. Where could they meet?

NATO Diplomats Sing 'We Are The World'

you and the world have changed since you were born

Explore BBC Earth's unique interactive, personalised just to you.

Find out how, since the date of your birth, your life has progressed; including how many times your heart has beaten, and how far you have travelled through space.

Investigate how the world around you has changed since you've been alive; from the amount the sea has risen, and the tectonic plates have moved, to the number of earthquakes and volcanoes that have erupted.

Grasp the impact we've had on the planet in your lifetime; from how much fuel and food we've used to the species we've discovered and endangered.

And see how the BBC was there with you, capturing some of the most amazing wonders of the natural world. bbc

my heart has beaten 1 billion times in my lifetime. 

a fly my age would have a family of 10,544 generations by now.

on mercury i am 116.

there have been 131 major eruptions since i was born. 

swedens gay defense system

The Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) is to deal with encroaching Russian submarines in Swedish waters with a device emitting anti-homophobia Morse code.

The device – officially titled The Singing Sailor Underwater Defence System, but nicknamed the “gay sailor” – is a “subsurface sonar system”, which sends out the message: “This way if you are gay” in an attempt to deter apparently homophobic Russians.

Russia has come under fire since the Putin administration introduced homophobic laws in 2013 banning “propaganda of nontraditional sexual relations”, in a climate of increasing intolerance towards its LGBT population.

The design of the device features a neon, flashing sign of a dancing sailor, naked but for a cap and small white briefs, surrounded by hearts.

“Welcome to Sweden: Gay since 1944” is written in English and Russian, in a reference to the year of decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Scandinavian nation.

Sweden has cut its military budget in recent years but announced in March it would increase spending, as a result of alleged Cold War-style Russian aggression.

An operation involving helicopters, minesweepers and 200 troops was launched last October to search for a suspected rogue Russian submarine in Swedish waters.

Sweden is currently not a member of Nato. And thanks to the gay sailor defence system, it may never have to be. the guardian

marco grassi paintings

http://www.marcograssipainter.com/

Location of Nepal's 7.8 and 7.3 earthquake epicenters

yes, there is a difference between i.e. and e.g.

i.e. is the abbreviation of the Latin phrase ‘id est,’ meaning ‘that is.’

e.g. is the abbreviation of the Latin phrase ‘exempli gratia,’ meaning ‘for example.’

Give women an even chance

1. By Marcia McNutt Editor-in-Chief Science Journals (and former USGS Science Director)

An important part of the mentoring role of academic advisors is writing letters of recommendation for worthy students who are applying for research grants, fellowships, and entrance to elite programs. Such letters often have more impact than grades or test scores at the graduate level, where factors such as initiative, hard work, creativity, independence, problem-solving ability, and teamwork are prized skills. Well-crafted, honest letters help in determining whether a candidate is a good fit. For that reason, I was surprised recently when asked to review 60 proposals from graduate students for small research grants. More than 10% of the applicants had a least one supporting letter containing inappropriate material for the decision at hand. All of the students so affected, unfortunately, were women, and those writing the problematic letters were nearly equally men and women. By describing how these instances appear from the standpoint of a selection committee member, my hope is that the professionalism in recommendation letters will improve.

As examples of the sort of problems, one letter described how the candidate was so good to her elderly mother, yet still enjoyed life, spending time in nature with her husband and her animal friends. Another letter reflected amazement that the candidate managed to balance so efficiently being a student, a scientist, and a mother. Such comments do indeed make impressions on a committee that must select only 1 in 10 for an award from a highly competitive pool. They cannot help but put a candidate at a disadvantage when compared to others who are praised for their self-initiated research projects, interesting uses of coursework to address new scientific problems, or careful background preparation for the research project proposed.

Beyond comments that were simply out of place for the decision at hand, I noted an overall bias in the language used to describe the male candidates versus some of the female candidates. In some letters, women were described as “friendly,” “kind,” “pleasant,” “humble,” and frequently, “nice.” While I am sure they were all of that, those were not necessarily the most relevant characteristics I was looking for in the next generation of scientists to advance the frontiers of discovery. Very different words were used to describe the male candidates (and many of the females as well): “brilliant,” “creative,” “hard-working,” “insightful,” and “showing leadership.”

Studies have documented bias in referees' unblinded reviews of manuscripts for publication, but this was the first time that I noted such a bias in the language used to assess a student's suitability for a research grant—a bias that could carry over to future funding decisions. I suspect that such bias creeps in unintentionally in most cases, but I also understand that gender stereotypes persist and that they have a basis in reality. Women still bear the majority of caregiver burdens for children and elderly parents. But that information does not belong in letters of recommendation. I like to think that I am a nice person. But “nice” never got me a research grant or professional position.

Now is the time to promote women as well as other underrepresented groups in science. The future strength of the global scientific enterprise depends on boosting the influx of diverse and talented researchers into science and engineering fields. Subtle bias, even unintended, in advancing this cohort can be more damaging than outright bias, because it is more difficult to detect and correct. I urge all who write these important letters of recommendation to take a last look before hitting “send” to be sure that what you have written is free of bias.sciencemag.org

Misconceptions About Miscarriage

In fact, between 15 percent and 20 percent of clinically recognized pregnancies end in miscarriage, defined as a pregnancy loss earlier than 20 weeks of gestation. (Pregnancy loss after that point is called a stillbirth.) Miscarriage is actually "by far the most common complication of pregnancy," says Williams. He and his colleagues wanted to find out how widespread some of the mistaken beliefs about miscarriage are.

They asked 1,084 adults about miscarriage and its causes. They also asked the 15 percent of survey respondents who had suffered a miscarriage, or whose partner had, about their experience. The results echoed what he'd seen in his patients: Some 55 percent of all respondents believed that miscarriage occurred in 5 percent or less of all pregnancies.

Chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus cause 60 percent of miscarriages. A handful of other medical conditions are also known to cause miscarriage. Most survey respondents knew that genetic or medical problems were the most common cause of early pregnancy loss. But they also mistakenly believed that other factors could trigger a miscarriage: a stressful event (76 percent); lifting something heavy (64 percent); previous use of contraception like an IUD (28 percent) or birth control pill (22 percent); and even an argument (21 percent). Some 22 percent believed that lifestyle choices, like using drugs, tobacco or alcohol, were the single biggest cause of miscarriages. That's not true. npr