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Shop now and get Free Value Shipping on most orders over $49 to the contiguous 48 states, DC and to all U.S. Military APO/FPO/DPO addresses.
We want to ensure that making a return is as easy and hassle-free as possible! If for any reason you decide that your purchase just isn't for you, simply return the item within 30 days of receipt and we'll cover the cost of return shipping. Learn more about our Return Policy.
We offer NC Star ASKSD Shell Deflector for AK-47 and SKS at a discount price. We are an Authorized US Distributor for NC Star Riflescope Accessories. All riflescope accessories by NC Star from our online store come with a Full Manufacturer Warranty.
This NC Star ASKSD Shell Deflector was designed to protect your quality NC Star Riflescope from being struck by extracted casings. It weighs only 1.31 oz. so it won't weigh down your rifle and mounts easily on your AK-47 or SKS.
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For a full line of NC Star riflescope accessories and other products by NC Star on sale please visit the NC Star page on our website. For more brand name rifle scope accessories please visit our riflescope accessories store section.
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Serves 4
For the chicken curry
(see right)
4 chicken breasts
1 tin coconut milk
Fish sauce (to taste)
Palm sugar (to taste)
30g Thai apple aubergine (or regular aubergine, skins removed, cubed and fried)
20g pea aubergine (or plain peas)
20g oyster mushroom
40g straw mushroom
12 cherry tomatoes
15g sweet basil leaves
For the green chilli paste
20g fresh green chillies, deseeded
10g peeled garlic
5g fresh turmeric
20g coriander roots
5 large peeled onions
10g chopped galangal
5g ground peppercorns
5g ground cumin
10g ground coriander seeds
Mince the first six chilli paste ingredients in a blender until fine, then add the remaining ingredients.
10g fried shallot
2g lime leaves
2g coriander leaves
5g chive oil
Slice chicken breasts. Set aside. Fry paste until fragrant, add coconut milk, then the chicken. Boil for five minutes.
Add the fish sauce and sugar to taste (in the order of salt, spice and sweet), then the Thai apple aubergine, pea aubergine, mushrooms, cherry tomatoes and sweet basil and boil for two minutes.
Add the garnish. Serve.
Thai rare beef salad with red nahm jim
Ian Pengelley is teaching a masterclass on October 30 at Mango Tree restaurant, London SW1, £65.

subset: commoncrawl


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Rougerie back for France
ESPNscrum Staff
August 16, 2011
Rougerie lined up for the French during the Six Nations but was originally a doubt for the World Cup © Getty Images
France coach Marc Lievremont has opted to make 13 changes for his side's final Rugby World Cup warm-up clash against Ireland in Dublin on Saturday.
Les Bleus claimed a 19-12 victory over the Irish last weekend but Lievremont has opted for change over continuity with winger Alexis Palisson and hooker Dimitri Szarzewski the only players to retain their places.
The wholesale changes include the long-awaited return of Aurelien Rougerie who has recovered from an ankle injury to reclaim a place in the midfield where he will partner Fabrice Estebanez. Soon-to-be Bayonne back Cedric Heyman starts at fullback with Maxime Medard taking the wing berth opposite Palisson.
David Skrela and Morgan Parra form a new-look half-back combination with the former expected to take over the kicking duties from Dimitri Yachvilli who moves onto the bench.
Nicolas Mas is back in the front-row but there is no place for injured duo William Servat or Thomas Domingo with Jean Baptiste Poux stepping into the loose-head berth. Lionel Nallet will captain the side, taking over the duties from Thierry Dusautoir, while Fulgence Ouedraogo, Julien Bonnaire and Louis Picamoles all start in the back-row.
Defending his decision to give all his players the chance to impress, Lievremont said: "It's a warm-up game. We need to play these guys. We're on course for the World Cup and it was out of the question to make 15 players sweat blood and tears and not make the others play. From the moment we chose to play two warm-up games, and I don't regret that choice, everybody had to play."
France: Cedric Heymans (Bayonne); Maxime Medard (Toulouse), Aurelien Rougerie (Clermont), Fabrice Estebanez (Racing-Metro), Alexis Palisson (Brive); David Skrela (Clermont), Morgan Parra (Clermont); Julien Bonnaire (Clermont), Louis Picamoles (Toulouse), Fulgence Ouedraogo (Montpellier); Lionel Nallet (Racing-Metro, capt), Pascal Pape (Stade Francais); Nicolas Mas (Perpignan), Dimitri Szarzewski (Stade Francais), Jean-Baptiste Poux (Toulouse).
Replacements: Guilhem Guirado (Perpignan), Fabien Barcella (Biarritz), Julien Pierre (Clermont), Raphael Lakafia (Biarritz), Dimitri Yachvili (Biarritz), Francois Trinh-Duc (Montpellier), Vincent Clerc (Toulouse), Luc Ducalcon (Castres).
© ESPN Sports Media Ltd.
|Live Scores
'Concussion is not worth the risk'
Concussion, relegation and the mother of all surprises - it's the Monday Maul.
Jones key to Wales World Cup plans
Huw Richards assesses where Wales are after a mixed Six Nations, with front row seats still very much available for the World Cup
Attacking revolution will be fleeting
John Mitchell lapped up the action on 'Sensational Saturday' - but warns not to expect a repeat come Rugby World Cup time later this year
Ireland, England are dangers if ...
Craig Dowd warns England, Ireland and Wales they should play to their strengths rather than those of the All Blacks and the Wallabies


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An extension I have installed on my Magento site overwrites the view.phtml file for the product pages, even on the mobile site. I would like to use the mobile template's view.phtml when viewing from a mobile device.
I've thought of some options to fix the problem, but don't know how to do it, or which method would work best..
- disable the module overriding the template file, only when viewed via a mobile device (make it device-dependent somehow)
- edit the module's layout xml to conditionally override the template files, based on device (not sure if this is possible either)
- ?????
Any ideas? =\


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In a saner time, our political leaders would recognize the difference between discretionary spending and essential investment. They'd also recognize that a key solution to soaring health care costs, the source of so much anxiety about entitlement expenditures, lies in understanding the deeper biology of Alzheimer's, diabetes, Parkinson's, many forms of cancer, and so on. The implications for the long-term effects of cutting NIH funding are disturbing. The immediate pain will be felt by researchers whose grants aren't funded. A far greater anguish will be felt by future generations of patients who will not have access to new and innovative medicines and therapies.
Gollaher, Ph.D., is president and CEO of California Healthcare Institute, which is headquartered in La Jolla and represents more than 275 leading biotechnology, medical device, diagnostics, and pharmaceutical companies, and public and private academic biomedical research organizations.


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Hello there,
I am super excited to show you guys this painting sample we will be holding as a class on Sunday, March 29th at 1 pm.
Introducing the Texture Paste Flower Jar Painting...
Isn't this the most gorgeous painting you have ever seen?!
We are so excited to be having Marilyn teach this class for us. In the class you will be taking a plain white canvas and stroke-by-stroke you will transform it into a beautiful piece of artwork. This month's painting is especially special as you will be using a mixture of acrylic paint and Ranger Texture Paste to create both depth and dimension for your flowers and jar.
Here's a closer look at the flowers. With a simple swipe of a palette knife and a little dab of texture paste you too can create this amazing jar of flowers.
If you are interested in signing up for this class, please click here to be redirected to our online store where you can prepay for the class.
The class cost is $35.
Hope to see you there...I know you will learn a lot of fun painting techniques from Marilyn!


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Education Spotlight:
Graduate Certificate in Children's Mental Health
This online program is designed to provide a rigorous, empirically-based education to individuals in the behavioral health services field who wish to work with agencies and systems that serve children and families with mental health challenges. Students will learn to assist children at different developmental stages, within the contexts in which they live.
In the News … View All
- Positive Behavior Support Efforts Make for Busy Days for Dr. Heather George
- In the past few months, Dr. George's busy days have included some impressive travels and activities aimed at increasing the capacity of school districts to address students with problem behaviors.
- Join the Cycling Fun at the Annual Cycling Out Autism Fundraiser March 28
- The money raised by the Tampa Interbay Rotary Foundation will be donated to educational activities and events that help people impacted by an autism spectrum disorder. The Center for Autism and Related Disabilities and the Applied Behavior Analysis Program at the University of South Florida will be the recipients to continue their work in delivering education, services and supports to individuals and their families.
- Dr. Karen Berkman and the Center for Autism & Related Disabilities at USF Profiled on the Philanthropy Show
- The Philanthropy Show (TM) is an online talk show for nonprofit employees, boards, and donors produced in Tampa Bay with a statewide focus and national reach. Their goal is to connect and inspire philanthropy through three intentions; to educate, uplift and empower the nonprofit community.
- Anti-bullying Efforts Bring Blindside Star Quinton Aaron to CFS
- Quinton Aaron, who quickly rose to fame after his first lead role in the 2009 movie The Blind Side, visited CFS this week as part of his efforts to put a stop to bullying.
- USF Suicide Prevention Guide Profiled by Reuters International News Agency
- The article, School-wide prevention program lowers teen suicide risk, references the Youth Suicide Prevention School-Based Guide. Authors of the guide include CFS faculty Katherine Lazear and Stephen Roggenbaum.
- Amazing Lineup of Plenary Speakers for the 28th Annual Research & Policy Conference!
- Our list of plenary speakers is not complete, but we're off to an exciting start. View our comfirmed speakers for the 2015 Annual Research & Policy Conference on Child, Adolescent and Young Adult Behavioral Health.
- CFS Faculty In the News
- CFS faculty expertise on suicide prevention, unlicensed children's homes, child abuse, anti-bullying, positive behavior support, and youth caregivers. Latest: Dr. Karen Berkman on Asperger's Syndrome and Dr. Elizabeth Perkins on transition to group homes.
Conferences & Special Events
28th Annual Research & Policy Conference on Child, Adolescent, & Young Adult Behavioral Health
March 22 - 25, 2015: Known widely as "The Tampa Conference," this annual gathering of more than 500 researchers, evaluators, policy-makers, administrators, parents, and advocates is sponsored by the Department of Child and Family Studies at the University of South Florida, in partnership with the Children's Mental Health Network, the National Wraparound Initiative, Institute for Translational Research in Adolescent Behavioral Health, and the Institute for Innovation and Implementation at the University of Maryland School of Social Work.


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U-Pick season will start April 3, 2015. Shortly after that the Organics will be ready to pick and will annouce that when we know for sure!!! Come see our new Store front for our U-Pick customers, you can't miss it on the North side of the pond as you drive in. Can't wait to see you at the Farm!!!
Growing Berries.Creating Memories.
863-944-1401 • 5000 Berry Groves Road • Clermont, FL 34714
Next season begins mid-April 2015!
During our picking season you can pick your own blueberries, including our organic varieties, Meadow Lark and Farthing.
Our 2015 U-pick season will be starting April 3, 2015.
Please visit our Facebook page to stay up to date on our farm. We look forward to seeing you in 2015!
Organic and Conventional Production
Unlike many local farms, we have nearly 13 acres of organic blueberries.
Recent Blog Posts
Catch up on the latest news and try some of these recipes and tips.


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Join Or Renew Today
Join or Renew With AARP for Just $16 a Year
- Discounts on travel and everyday savings
- Subscription to AARP The Magazine
- A voice in Washington and in your community
- Free membership for your spouse or partner
En español | Subscribe: RSS Search
Posted: 07/11/2014 by Álvaro Valderrama | Comments
Con el paso de los años no sólo vienen la experiencia y la sabiduría, sino la jubilación, la seguridad social, algunas deficiencias de salud y también algunos apodos o referencias irritantes, especialmente hacia los más viejos entre nosotros. Y es que el problema que para las familias y la sociedad en general suponen las personas de edad avanzada se plantea incluso en lo más elemental: no sabemos ni cómo referirnos a ellas. Tercera edad, personas mayores, viejos, abuelos… Cada expresión …
Posted: 06/11/2014 by Lisa McElroy | Comments
Every now and then, a jury reaches deep into a defendant's pockets to punish it for its reprehensible conduct and to deter others from engaging in similar acts. Such was the case in May, when a Colorado jury awarded 83-year-old James Sharon and his family $3.3 million after finding the nursing home entrusted with his care guilty of negligence. Sharon's injuries included bedsores, skin tears and abrasions, dehydration, malnutrition, and E. coli and urinary tract infections – all because he …
Posted: 05/09/2014 by Steve Mencher | Comments
Here's a sweet, uplifting video that's guaranteed to brighten your day. It features some Chicago-area seniors and young Brazilian students of English, and the long-distance friendships kindled by learning a language. CNA, a Brazilian language school that emphasizes online learning, matches up its young students with older adults in U.S. senior residences in a program called Speaking Exchange. Watching the video, you can see how eagerly the residents of Windsor Park Retirement Community outside Chicago await their turns to talk. …
Posted: 05/08/2014 by Mary C. Hickey | Comments
The tables were stacked high with groceries: pasta, peanut butter, cans of peaches and beans. In front, an assembly line of volunteer workers packed them in brown paper bags and passed them along to be loaded into cartons for delivery to a food bank. "It's fun," said 66-year-old Ronna Davis of Stoughton, Mass., "and it's a way to help people in need." Davis, who had heard about the project on the radio, showed up with her lifelong friend, Esther Kaplan, …
Posted: 04/25/2014 by Lisa McElroy | Comments
Imagine that you've been living for a decade in an apartment building for seniors. You've settled in, made friends and think of it as home. Now imagine that the building suddenly adopts a no-smoking rule and says that if you can't or won't comply with it, you'll have to find someplace else to live. Like it or lump it. As the Cincinnati Enquirer tells the story, that's what happened to Beulah Toombs, a resident of the AHEPA 127 Apartments in …
Posted: 03/20/2014 by Laura Hahn | Comments
Let me first say I love what's going on with Grandma Betty, the Indiana octogenarian turned Instagram star. When Betty was diagnosed with terminal cancer, her great-grandson Zach opened an account (@grandmabetty33) to chronicle her journey. More than 309,000 followers later, what started as a project for friends and family has turned into a worldwide sensation. I just love that the bond between a great-grandmother and her teenage great-grandson, more than 60 years her junior, has inspired an outpouring of …
AARP is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that helps people 50 and older improve the quality of their lives.


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Aetna (AET) is one of the nation's leading diversified health care benefits companies, serving members with information and resources to help them make better informed decisions about their health care. Aetna offers a broad range of traditional and consumer-directed health insurance products and related services, including medical, pharmacy, dental, behavioral health, group life, long-term care and disability plans and medical management capabilities. Our customers include employer groups, individuals, college students, part-time and hourly workers, health plans and government-sponsored plans.
Our goal is to give our customers more information, more choice and more control over what affects them the most -- their health and well-being. To succeed, we need smart, innovative professionals who are willing to join our many sales teams across the nation.
The E.E. Cammack Group School provides a transition from college to your career. It is a highly selective training program that has earned a reputation for producing world-class executives. This intensive program includes classroom and on-the-job learning. In addition, an assigned mentor will support you as you contribute to Aetna's business results.
Aetna is looking for people who want to make a difference. As an Aetna sales professional, you will represent our values and product portfolio to customers and members every day. If you are career-oriented, have strong communication and interpersonal skills and are interested in working with senior decision makers in a dynamic environment, then the E. E. Cammack Group School training program can be a bridge to your future.
Many top Aetna leaders – as well as other industry executives – began their careers at Aetna's Group School. The Group School is a training program designed to prepare you for your role as a member of the Aetna Client Management Team
Aetna's Group School graduates gain:
It all adds up to a rewarding and exciting career opportunity with a company that is second-to-none in the health care and insurance industry.
At Aetna, people with varying life experiences, multiple perspectives, and different ideas are working together to make an impact every day. We take pride in and gain strength from the richness of our multicultural society, and recognize it as key to our continued growth, both as a company and as people. To achieve this mission we:
- Foster a culture of inclusion that grows a diverse talent pool and recognizes and rewards the contributions of every employee while allowing employees to do their best work
Come work in an environment where you are able to contribute openly and be rewarded for delivering results. Discover the Aetna difference every day.
Aetna has been recognized by national organizations and publications for its commitment to diversity, its technology innovations, and for several employment-related accolades.


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Hand picked by the Envato team
Featured Author
HTML5 Templates
Launch your website in no time, with these pre-designed HTML5 templates. Customize with your content.
25 Retina-Ready Mobile UI Kits
For a quicker mobile app design workflow, we have selected an assortment of our best mobile UI kits.
Tuts+ by Envato
Follow this multi stop process and build your first startup with PHP.


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Rab's World: No Fuss / The Dudes of Hazzard This Is Enduro Now!
No Fuss events hosted their first ever gravity enduro event with the help of local legends The Dudes of Hazzard. Rab tells all
No Fuss events hosted their first ever gravity enduro event with the help of local legends The Dudes of Hazzard. Rab tells all
We receive a fair bit of spam here at SingletrackTowers but here's some news about SPAM – the winter challenge that's the perfect counter to a Christmas of excess
It seems to be the week for 2013 enduro news. Here's word from Ash on the 2013 Mavic Trans-Provence with dates and entry details.
2013 is the looking like becoming the Year of the Euro Enduro.
We've just had word of another multi-day event that looks like delivering the goods; the Trans-Savoie.
A report from a weekend of bikes and beer to bring in the autumn in Brizzle
Rab reports from the jungle as the LIMBC race gets underway for real. Lizards, mud and chainsuck…
Even if we're just downhilling in the dark this November
Pre-entries shut but you can still enter on the day for weekend of riding in Ashton Court
Bike demos, celebs and more at the 'Northern mini expo' in North Yorkshire
The UK's newest 'cross challenge/sportive/not-race happened last weekend. Looks like they had fun.
Catch up with the past three days of action with video, pics and words
Not got an account?


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The Wahl® Chromado™ LI+ Cordless Clipper with new lithium ion technology offers high performance. This horse clipper runs on battery for up to 90 minutes and charges full in only 60 minutes. Lightweight and powerful, it runs cool with low vibration and no maintenance. 5-in-1 blade technology adjusts to sizes #9, #10, #15, #30 and #40.
The Roma® Ultimate Grooming Kit has everything you need to groom your horse in one grooming box! Includes: hoof pick, large sponge, sweat scraper, dandy, curry comb, mane comb, braiding bands, hoof oil brush and can, and body brush. Great value!
The Upland Basic Turnout Fly Sheet is a great value! Features a two-buckle front closure, fleece at withers and a soft fine mesh outer. This is a great fly sheet that will help keep the pests at bay.
The Andis® AGC Super 2-Speed™ Horse Clipper is a quiet clipper that's perfect for sensitive horses. For use on ears, muzzle, legs or full-body. Locking hinge keeps blade secure. Two speed motor, in a break-resistant housing that withstands harsh chemicals.
Cosequin® ASU by Nutramax® Laboratories offers equine joint support at professional strength. The #1 recommended joint supplement by veterinarians, Cosequin ASU is a powder that contains avocado/soybean unsaponifiables to protect joint cartilage, plus optimal amounts of glucosamine, low molecular weight chondroitin sulfate and MSM. 1320 gm (80-day supply).
The Rider's International Stretch Micro Mesh Fly Sheet has an improved fit to make your horse even more comfortable and protected from insects, dust and the sun's coat-fading rays. This fly sheet is made of soft, breathable, lightweight mesh with a touch of stretch for ease of movement. Sewn with a contoured cut, it conforms to your horse's shape for the ultimate protection.
Small and lightweight, the Andis® ShowEdge™ Clipper delivers all the power of a heavy-duty horse clipper. Detachable blades swap out quickly without the use of tools. An angled clipper head makes grooming even hard to reach areas easy. Runs cool at 2800 and 3500 SPM.
Ecovet™ Fly Spray for horses is a completely different, chemical-free way to keep pest insects away you're your horse. Active ingredients derived from fatty acids are easier on horses and the humans who handle the spray. EPA-approved, one application of this non-sensitizing fly repellent lasts for two to three days. It won't harm honeybees and has no known resistance. Cannot ship to CA, LA, ME, NY, RI.
Zimecterin® Gold is an FDA-approved horse wormer that protects against 47 species and stages of parasites, including tapeworms. This paste dewormer contains praziquatel and ivermectin. One tube treats 1,250 lbs body weight.
Engineered for durability, this WeatherBeeta Ripshield Plus Detach-A-Neck Fly Sheet helps stop tears so your fly sheet lasts longer. This fly sheet has a removable belly flap and detachable neck for versatility in coverage depending on conditions.
Add shine to your horse's coat, mane and tail with Absorbine® ShowSheen® Hair Polish & Detangler. ShowSheen detangles manes and tails for quick brushing, and it coats hair shafts to reject stains.
Environmentally friendly, and because it doesn't sting, Banixx™ Wound Care has no caustic sensation when applied to the horse's wound. Without an offensive odor the horse has nothing to fear either. No steroids. 32 oz.
Ponytail® Ready To Roll is a leave-in conditioner that makes your horse's hair soft and shiny. With nourishing extracts of alfalfa and carrot, it gently conditions and detangles your horse's mane and tail. Turn your stable into a spa for your equine friend with the smell of eucalyptus, peppermint and lemon.
Himalayan Horse Salt Lick is mined from ancient deposits in the Himalayan Mountains. Full of minerals that your horse needs for a balanced intake of iron, potassium and magnesium. 2.2 lb.
Farnam® Swat Clear Ointment protects wounds against flies. Botanically-derived pyrethrin formula repels and kills house flies, stable flies, face flies and horn flies. Ideal for use on the ears and other sensitive areas. 6 oz.
An equine powder, Cosequin® Optimized with MSM maintains horses' joint health. Contains 7200 mg glucosamine HCL, 1200 mg chondroitin sulfate, 210 mg ascorbic acid, 32 mg manganese, plus 5,000 mg MSM per dose. 1400 gm powder (84-day supply).
EQyss Micro-Tek Equine Spray soothes your horse's irritated skin on contact. This topical antimicrobial treatment for rain rot, scratches, girth itch and ringworm won't sting or harm compromised skin. It's non-toxic, non-steroidal and alcohol-free. Quart.
Arenus® Sore No-More® Liniment delivers the soothing benefits of arnica and other herbs in a witch hazel base. This easy to use horse liniment won't burn skin and may be used under wraps. Gallon.
Arenus® Assure® Guard is a granular, daily digestive aid that provides nutrients to help maintain proper stomach pH to keep your horse's digestive tract normal and healthy. Ingredients include calcium carbonate, probiotics, prebiotics, enzymes, and psyllium. 3.54 lb (45-day).
EquiMax® from Bimeda® is an apple-flavored paste wormer that combines 1.87% ivermectin and 14.03% praziquantel as active ingredients. FDA approved, used to treat many kinds of worms. Each tube treats up to a 1,320 lb horse. Intended for horses four weeks of age and older, including pregnant and lactating mares and breeding stallions.
The WeatherBeeta® Airflow Detach-A-Neck Combo Fly Sheet has more coverage for added protection. Strong polyester mesh is lightweight and allows maximum air flow to help keep your horse stay cool while it protects him from flies. Reduce bites on your horse's neck by adding the detachable neck cover.
The Oster® Turbo A-5® 2-Speed Horse Clipper is powerful, strong and runs cool. With its virtually unbreakable housing, this durable clipper provides long use. Designed to glide through thick hair.
Professional's Choice® Polo Wraps are made of high-quality, double-sided, short pile fleece with the right amount of stretch for easy wrapping. Fun and functional! Set of 4.
Lightweight and compact, the Oster® A6™ Clipper stays cool and offers superior comfort and speed. This horse clipper has vibrating isolators that are centered around the motor to help absorb fatigue-inducing vibration and noise. Runs at 4,400 strokes per minute. Compatible with all A5® detachable blades.
Thrush Buster® is your ultimate thrush treatment. Dissuades re-infection. Toughens the sole and kills all bacteria. Easy to apply. 2 oz.
The Co-Flex Bandage Wrap is a non-irritating pressure bandage. Wraps easily, is light, comfortable and allows skin to breathe. Bandage sticks to itself and not to hair making it easy to wrap and easy to remove.
The WeatherBeeta Kool Coat Airstream Detach-A-Neck Turnout Sheet prevents your horse's coat from fading with 100% UV protection. This turnout sheet keeps your horse cool, clean and protected from insects, too. The strong polyester outer shell has mesh side panels on the neck and barrel to help with airflow.
Clinical strength, 100% herbal and arnica-based, Arenus® Sore No-More® Performance Ultra Liniment is highly effective in providing topical analgesic care. This liniment is free of lobelia and capsaicin, and it can be used before or after exercise, under pads and wraps and overnight. Ideal when your horse experience injury or trauma outside the normal routine.
Improved Absorbine® Flex+Max® health supplement for joints and connective tissue. 100% guaranteed. 5 lb pellets (30-day supply).
Water-based and containing a prallethrin-effective synthetic substitute for natural pyrethrin, Farnam® Bronco E Fly Spray repels and kills a wide range of horse pests. It is economical, yet effective and contains citronella for a pleasant scent. Qt.
The Kensington Protective UV/Fly Sheet offers your horse protection from harmful UV rays and flies. Helps keep your horse cleaner, drier and warmer year-round. Constructed of US-made 1000 x 2000 denier Textilene® mesh that is formulated to withstand fading, fire, mildew, soiling and wear and tear in the most extreme weather conditions.


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Revelers converged on the beaches of Brazil, the skyscrapers of Dubai and New York's Times Square to say good riddance to a turbulent 2014 marred by terror woes, Ebola outbreaks and a horrific series of airline disasters.
PASADENA (AP) - A Southern California cold snap may have a wilting effect on the famous floral floats that cruise through Pasadena on New Year's Day during the annual Rose Parade.
BOSTON (AP) - Prosecutors have asked a judge to allow testimony during Aaron Hernandez's upcoming murder trial from a friend who says the former New England Patriots star owned a gun similar to the one used to kill semi-professional football player Odin Lloyd in 2013.
WASHINGTON (AP) - In the year that will pass before the 2016 campaign for president formally kicks off with the votes in the Iowa Caucus, any number of candidates, donors, political operatives - and people who have nothing to do with American politics - will shape the race for the White House. Here's a look at 10 people (OK, 12 people) who will be worth watching in the next year.
PASADENA (AP) - A blustery winter storm dropped snow on very low elevations across inland Southern California early Wednesday after stranding dozens of motorists on mountain highways.
ECHO SUMMIT (AP) - The winter's first survey of the Sierra Nevada snowpack found more snow than last year at this time, but officials said much more is needed to end the California drought.
The CHP recently identified and noticed an increase of sideshow/street racing activities in Southern California. These events continually draw in participants who create a public safety hazard through their unsafe driving and obstruction of public roadways. As a result of their aggressive driving, assault with deadly weapons, shootings and general disturbances of peace frequently occur in our communities.
The first 50-state report on the latest sign-up season under President Barack Obama's health care law shows that more than 4 million people selected plans for the first time or re-enrolled in what the administration called "an encouraging start."
MOSCOW (AP) - Several thousand people rallied near Red Square on Tuesday to protest the conviction of the top Kremlin critic and his brother, in one of the boldest opposition demonstrations in Russia in years.
WASHINGTON (AP) - House Speaker John Boehner said Tuesday that N.Y. Rep. Michael Grimm made the right decision by resigning from Congress after pleading guilty to tax evasion charges.
JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) - Indonesian officials on Tuesday spotted six bodies from the AirAsia flight that disappeared two days earlier, and recovered three of them, in a painful end to the aviation mystery off the coast of Borneo island.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - A California school district on Monday reversed a basketball tournament ban on T-shirts reading "I Can't Breathe" and said it would allow high school players to wear the shirts during warm-ups as long as they do not cause problems, lawyers said.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Business groups trying to overturn a new California law that bans single-use plastic bags said Monday that they've collected more than enough signatures to put their referendum on the November 2016 ballot.
NEW YORK (AP) - Fiat Chrysler is recalling about 67,000 model year 2006 and 2007 pickups because of a problem that could allow the trucks to be started without the clutch being depressed. Chrysler said one death is associated with the problem.
SURABAYA, Indonesia (AP) - The plane sought permission to climb above threatening clouds. Air traffic control couldn't say yes immediately - there was no room. Six other airliners were crowding the airspace, forcing AirAsia Flight 8501 to remain at a lower altitude.
INDIANAPOLIS (AP) - Indiana Gov. Mike Pence said Tuesday that he wants legislation on his desk by the end of the week to clarify that the state's new religious-freedom law does not allow discrimination against gays and lesbians.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Google is releasing its cheapest Chromebook laptops yet, two versions priced at $149 aimed at undercutting Microsoft's Windows franchise and gaining ground in even more classrooms.
WASHINGTON (AP) - Sarah Dieffenbacher is on a debt strike. She's refusing to make payments on the more than $100,000 in federal and private loans she says she owes for studies at a for-profit college that she now considers so worthless she doesn't include it on her resume.
FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) - Police say two cross-dressing men who crashed into a guarded entrance to the National Security Agency in a stolen car met the vehicle's owner in Baltimore before heading to a hotel to "party."
FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) - A prisoner being treated at a northern Virginia hospital wrestled with a guard and took her gun before escaping in a hospital gown and fleeing in a carjacked vehicle, prompting a hospital lockdown and a massive search, police said.
SACRAMENTO (AP) - Gov. Jerry Brown, Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom and other top elected officials in California acknowledge using personal email accounts to conduct government business, and it's not clear if their private exchanges are retained as public records or subject to disclosure.
LOS ANGELES (AP) - A University of California, Berkeley soccer player who disappeared after a weekend party was killed by a car as he ran across a Los Angeles freeway, police said Monday.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - The wife and adult children of Robin Williams agreed Monday to meet outside court to try to resolve their dispute over a tuxedo he was married in, photographs taken on his 60th birthday and other items belonging to the late actor.
FALL RIVER, Mass. (AP) - The fiancee of former New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez has testified in his murder trial that a box he asked her to get rid of smelled skunky and she thought it contained marijuana.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Two former federal agents were charged with fraud in the theft of digital currency during an investigation into an online black market known as Silk Road that let users buy and sell drugs and other illegal items, authorities said Monday.
MOORE HAVEN, Fla. (AP) - An overloaded church van ran through a stop sign, crossed all four lanes of a dark rural highway and nosedived into a canal, killing eight people and injuring 10 early Monday in southwest Florida, authorities said.
FORT MEADE, Md. (AP) - A firefight erupted Monday when two people in a car tried to ram a National Security Agency gate at Fort Meade, killing at least one person, according to preliminary reports cited by two U.S. officials.
CHICAGO (AP) - An apple a day doesn't necessarily keep the doctor away. That's according to proverb-busting research that found daily apple eaters had just as many doctor visits as those who ate fewer or no apples.
WEST CHESTER, Pa. (AP) - A small plane crash near a southeastern Pennsylvania airport Sunday took the lives of the only two people aboard the aircraft, authorities said.
NEW YORK (AP) - Emergency workers found a second body Sunday in the mass of rubble left behind by an apparent gas explosion three days earlier in Manhattan's East Village, police said.


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patti's vintage hankie pic
pattico_gwOctober 12, 2003
Image link:
OHMYGOSH....lol.....guys that "is" from a magazine....I'm sorry...It's been awhile since I posted it...Can't remember who I posted it for now....but someone wanted to see it.
I have my hankies all printed out but have procrastinated in getting it done....
I like the ideas with the Hankies....I saw a show on simply quilts where they made quilts (pillow cases) and now have been on the look out for hankies. I posted the EPISODE below. I also love the idea you posted...more reasons to collect more...
Here is a link that might be useful: Hankie quilt (HGTV)


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Tru Def Shows His Inner Royalty
By Jeremy Hallock
By James Khubiar
Why You Should Be Excited About Dallas Music
By Observer Staff
Daniel Markham's Pretty Bitchin'
By Kelly Dearmore
Americans Under 30 the Most Cynical Bunch Ever
By Jim Schutze
13 of the Best Female-Fronted Bands in DFW
By Rachel Watts
Your Baseball Season Guide to Pre- and Post-Game Eats...
By Lauren Drewes Daniels
As we were recently reminded, being nominated for a Grammy award means that a band is, you know, good and stuff. At least, that's what Quinn Nagurney, singer-guitarist for the Jay Quinn Band (and former Observer classified sales rep) wrote when he took umbrage with our inclusion of Dave Matthews Band's Under the Table and Dreaming on our list of the worst records of the 1990s ("Take these records, please," January 6). "Under the Table and Dreaming was up for a Grammy you idiot," Nagurney gently informed us, before adding, "It upsets me to know that you still have your job." All apologies, Quinn. We meant to include every Dave Matthews disc on the list, but time and space just weren't available. Maybe next time, buddy. Keeping Nagurney's "band + Grammy nomination = greatness" formula in mind, erstwhile local gals the Dixie Chicks and their latest album Fly are inexplicably up for five Grammy awards, according to the recently announced list of nominees for the 42nd annual edition of the award show. The categories the Chicks are competing in include Album of the Year, Country Album of the Year, and Best Country Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal. Which just proves Grammy nominations are indeed pointless. Seriously, Album of the Year? Please...
As things are always somewhat tentative when local labels are involved, we rarely can say anything for sure when it comes to release schedules. Of course, we usually do anyway, but we probably shouldn't. Still, according to Two Ohm Hop's Philip Croley, discs by Sub Oslo, Yeti, and Mandarin should be available by March, when the label is scheduled to host a showcase at the annual South by Southwest Music Festival in Austin. We haven't heard much about the Sub Oslo or Yeti records, but word is that Mandarin's debut -- featuring singer-guitarist Jayson Wortham, one of the co-owners of Rubber Gloves Rehearsal Studios -- is phenomenal. After seeing the group live, we're pretty sure the description will hold up regardless of when the album hits stores. Then again, we've been known to make a mistake or three from time to time. Not that we'd ever admit it...
Pinkston officially releases its self-titled debut on Last Beat Records with a show at Trees on January 14. But, since the rest of the lineup consists of Legendary Crystal Chandelier, Baboon, and [DARYL], there's more than one reason to show up. Speaking of [DARYL], the group -- singer-guitarist-keyboardist Dylan Silvers, bassist Jeff Parker, guitarist-keyboardist David Wilson, and drummer Spammie -- plans to begin recording its own debut sometime in the near future, possibly aided and abetted by Paper Chase guitarist-producer John Congleton. The group will round out another solid bill on January 20 at Curtain Club, along with Lewis, Lift to Experience, and Red Animal War. Check it out...
A month or so ago -- after witnessing Buck Jones singer-bassist Gabrielle Douglas gracefully fill Rachel Haden's shoes on Weener's cover of a Weezer B-side ("I Just Threw Out the Love of My Dreams") -- we drunkenly apologized to Douglas for being so hard on her band. The next morning, there was some regret, and we still pretty much stand by everything we've written about Buck Jones, but at least one thing we said to Douglas remains true: We didn't wish for the band to call it quits. Sure, there are more than a few groups we wouldn't mind seeing call it a day, and listing them here would simply take too much space. (The short list begins and ends with Hellafied Funk Crew.) But Buck Jones, despite what you may believe, wasn't on the list, though to call us fans of the group would be more than a little hypocritical. The group will play its final show on January 15 at the Curtain Club, with Dachsund and the Deathray Davies. And, more than likely, you can expect to see the members of Buck Jones in various other bands in the near future. See you around, fellas.
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Record number of Latinos voted in US last year
If candidates and voting groups hope to increase Latino turnout, they'll need to adjust to the youth bulge in the Latino population that Lopez said will continue to supply new Latino voters over the next couple of decades.
Maria Teresa Kumar, executive director and founder of VotoLatino, a get-out-the-vote group, said getting more young Latinos to vote will mean targeting them in English but appealing to their sense of family and community.
"We realized a lot of these young people they speak Spanish but they function in an English-dominant world. They speak Spanish with family, Spanglish with their Latino friends and debate in English," she said. "If you send them voting materials in Spanish, they roll their eyes and say this must be for my parents."
Eliseo Medina, president of the Service Employees International Union, said he is confident interest in voting is growing among Latinos because of continued anti-immigrant rhetoric and growing involvement among Hispanics in community and civic affairs.
"I think the challenge is people need information. It's amazing people don't even know where to go vote, what is required and how to go and how to make a decision" on which candidates to support, Medina said, whose union helped start the Mi Familia Vota (My Family Votes), a get-out-the-vote group.
Hoping to tap more of those voters, a coalition of groups is holding citizenship workshops in 16 states and promoting citizenship through radio and television ads.
Pew Hispanic Center's analysis is based on the Census' Current Population Survey and Registration Supplement.
Online: Pew Hispanic Center: http://www.pewhispanic.org
The Associated Press


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STNA Classes
St. Francis Home, Inc. is an Ohio approved facility-based TCEP (training and competency program). Successful completion of the program and State of Ohio nurse aide testing will provide you the status of STNA (State Tested Nurse Aide).
Instructional classes, clinical training and Ohio state testing are all performed on-site at St. Francis Home, Inc.
Current classes will be held April 6 thru April 23, 4PM-10 PM. The last 2 days: 22 & 23 will be the clinical day training from 6:00 am -2:30 pm. Below is the schedule:
STNA Class will be:
April 6th 4pm-10pm
April 7th 4pm-10pm
April 8th 4pm-10pm
April 9th 4pm-10pm
April 13th 4pm-10pm
April 15th 4pm-10pm
April 16th 4pm-10pm
April 17 4pm-10pm
April 20th 4pm-10pm
April 21st 4pm-10pm
April 22nd 6am-2:30pm Clinical day
April 23rd 6am-2:30pm Clinical day
For more information, please call Lisa Lynch or Donna Pryor at (419) 447-2723.
Walk to End Alzheimer's
Nick Vargas from the Alzheimer's Association presented St. Francis Senior Ministries with the award for #1 Corporate Team for fundraising for the 2014 Walk to End Alzheimer's. The St. Francis Senior Ministries team raised over $3,000 for the cause! Nick presented the award to team captain, Kellie Hartsel.
The St. Francis Senior Ministries team for the Walk to End Alzheimer's….Our team raised over $3,000! The walk total was almost $40,000! Thank you to everyone for your support!
National Long Term Care Administrator's Week is March 8-14, 2015. The staff of St. Francis Senior Ministries would like to take this opportunity to thank our Administrator/Executive Director, Jessica Short for all she has done for our ministry. Her hard work and dedication has not gone unnoticed and we are truly grateful for her support. Jessica was presented a card and flowers during a meeting on Thursday. She acknowledged and thanked the staff for their hard work and caring attitudes as well.
Congratulations to Friedman Village at St. Francis Assisted Living and St. Francis Home Assisted Living! Both recently received DEFICIENCY FREE ratings from the State of Ohio!
Employment Opportunities
We're looking for the best
St. Francis Senior Ministries selects employees who have the desire to carry out our mission, vision and values. We provide competitive wages and offer an excellent benefits package for full-time and part-time employees.
Resumes and applications are always welcome. Applications are available at the receptionist's desk in the lobby at St. Francis Home. Receptionist's hours are 7:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.
St. Francis Home is currently looking for STNAs, RNs and someone part-time in the laundry department.
Friedman Village at St. Francis Assisted Living is currently accepting applications for Home Staff. No STNA license needed. If interested, please call 419.443.1445.
Equal Opportunity Employer
|Apply in person, fax or mail a resume to:
|Human Resources Department
St. Francis Home
182 St. Francis Ave.
Tiffin, OH 44883 Telephone: 419.447.2723 Fax: 419.448.1337 E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com
Please feel free to fill out our Employment Application.
St. Francis Campus Community is HAPPY!
The St. Francis Campus really is a HAPPY place to work, live and visit!
Several of our employees, sisters and campus visitors took part in the filming of our "HAPPY" video.
If you liked the first one, then you will love the second one…with a brand new cast of happy people!
We hope that you enjoy watching these videos as much as we enjoyed making them!
"HAPPY" Holidays from our family to yours!


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Hello all,
The Demo fleet will be at McDowell park this weekend Saturday the 15th from 9 am till the afternoon. All bikes and sizes will be there, so come get on our bikes!
Bring a helmet!
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QuadMed is a leading provider of onsite health and wellness solutions for employers of all sizes on a national level.
We have an opening for a FULL TIME Nurse Practitioner to work at our employer health center located in Houston, TX.
The Department of Internal Medicine, Division of Cardiology at University of Texas Medical Branch (UTMB Health), Galveston, Texas, seeks applications from outstanding NPs who wish to work with academic cardiologists to provide the best possible cardiology
Houston is world-renowned for delivering some of the best medical care in the country; and we're looking for exceptional medical professionals in the nation to join our team and help us create healthier communities.
Health to You (H2U) is recruiting two part time permanent nurse practitioners to staff the health center to serve the employees and their dependents of the Pasadena Independent School District.


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Flooding prevents pilgrims from reaching Catholic shrine
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Heavy flooding prompts French officials to close off access to Lourdes, the popular Catholic pilgrimage site where many believe the Virgin Mary appeared to a...
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Signs of the times......mother nature giving us hints.....all the floods, earthquakes, and the way the world is going......
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Shows > Music Video Premieres
Bondax - "Gold" (Official Video)
Click here now to subscribe to Noisey on Yotube.
Bondax's "Gold" is a low-tempo fusion of garage, house and hip-hop that illustrates their honed-to-perfection songwriting and production skills.
Barely out of their teens, Lancaster's George and Adam have carved a unique sound for themselves, and it's a sound that's already won them a host of worldwide admirers; a fact cemented with their debut US tour at the start of December taking in dates through 11 major cities.
Italian Instrumental Rock Trio Stearica Believe that the Revolution Begins At Home
I Humiliated Myself by Busking in London with the Most Annoying Instruments I Could Find
Tour Hard or Tour Home: A Conversation with Pittsburgh Hardcore Scions Eternal Sleep
Meet the Owner of Drake and Justin Bieber's Favorite Tattoo Shop
More From This Show
Cool Runnings Are Running Off to the US But Not Before Dropping a New Video
The Kiwi punks return with a video that should come with a flashing lights warning.
Check the Video For Mzwètwo's Latest Track "Horror"
The Kiwi performer says his music is for those over trap, DJ Mustard and that "soundcloud-internet shit".
Action Bronson - "Easy Rider" (Official Video)
We warned you.
Gas Up the Chopper for the Teaser Video of Action Bronson's "Easy Rider"
Get a sneak peak at Bam Bam's latest video dropping this week.
Up Close and Personal With The Ocean Party. Real Up Close.
The Melbourne band's new video features a bottle opener and pores.
Big Ups - "Justice" (Official Video)
This new track from Big Ups brings to mind 90s alt-funk slackers Cake if John McCrea had been raised on a diet of DC post-hardcore and Minutemen jazz-punk.
Look Back at Some Impending Doom Circa 1994 on Eastlink's Video for "Gina"
The Melbourne punks create an apocalyptic vision based on early PC gaming imagery.


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Charles Schmidt writes: The notion that the state of our gut governs our state of mind dates back more than 100 years. Many 19th- and early 20th-century scientists believed that accumulating wastes in the colon triggered a state of "auto-intoxication," whereby poisons emanating from the gut produced infections that were in turn linked with depression, anxiety and psychosis. Patients were treated with colonic purges and even bowel surgeries until these practices were dismissed as quackery.
The ongoing exploration of the human microbiome promises to bring the link between the gut and the brain into clearer focus. Scientists are increasingly convinced that the vast assemblage of microfauna in our intestines may have a major impact on our state of mind. The gut-brain axis seems to be bidirectional — the brain acts on gastrointestinal and immune functions that help to shape the gut's microbial makeup, and gut microbes make neuroactive compounds, including neurotransmitters and metabolites that also act on the brain. These interactions could occur in various ways: microbial compounds communicate via the vagus nerve, which connects the brain and the digestive tract, and microbially derived metabolites interact with the immune system, which maintains its own communication with the brain. Sven Pettersson, a microbiologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, has recently shown that gut microbes help to control leakage through both the intestinal lining and the blood-brain barrier, which ordinarily protects the brain from potentially harmful agents.
Microbes may have their own evolutionary reasons for communicating with the brain. They need us to be social, says John Cryan, a neuroscientist at University College Cork in Ireland, so that they can spread through the human population. Cryan's research shows that when bred in sterile conditions, germ-free mice lacking in intestinal microbes also lack an ability to recognize other mice with whom they interact. In other studies, disruptions of the microbiome induced mice behavior that mimics human anxiety, depression and even autism. In some cases, scientists restored more normal behavior by treating their test subjects with certain strains of benign bacteria. Nearly all the data so far are limited to mice, but Cryan believes the findings provide fertile ground for developing analogous compounds, which he calls psychobiotics, for humans. "That dietary treatments could be used as either adjunct or sole therapy for mood disorders is not beyond the realm of possibility," he says. [Continue reading…]
Your gut tells your mind, more than you may imagine
The genetic code is less like a blueprint than a first draft
Nessa Carey writes: When President Obama delivered a speech at MIT in 2009, he used a common science metaphor: "We have always been about innovation," he said. "We have always been about discovery. That's in our DNA." Deoxyribonucleic acid, the chemical into which our genes are encoded, has become the metaphor of choice for a whole constellation of ideas about essence and identity. A certain mystique surrounds it. As Evelyn Fox Keller argues in her book The Century of the Gene, the genome is, in the popular imagination at least, the secret of life, the holy grail. It is a master builder, the ultimate computer program, and a modern-day echo of the soul, all wrapped up in one. This fantasy does not sit easily, however, with geneticists who have grown more aware over the last several decades that the relationship between genes and biological traits is much less than certain.
The popular understanding of DNA as a blueprint for organisms, with a one-to-one correspondence between genes and traits (called phenotypes), is the legacy of the early history of genetics. The term "gene" was coined in 1909 to refer to abstract units of inheritance, predating the discovery of DNA by forty years. Biologists came to think of genes like beads on a string that lined up neatly into chromosomes, with each gene determining a single phenotype. But, while some genes do correspond to traits in a straightforward way, as in eye color or blood group, most phenotypes are far more complex, set in motion by many different genes as well as by the environment in which the organism lives.
It turns out that the genetic code is less like a blueprint and more like a movie script, subject to revision and reinterpretation by a director. This process is called epigenetic modification ("epi" meaning "above" or "in addition to"). Just as a script can be altered with crossed-out words, sentences or scenes, epigenetic editing allows entire sections of DNA to be activated or de-activated. Genes can be as finely tuned as actors responding to stage directions to shout, whisper, or cackle. [Continue reading…]
Darwin learned more about evolution from plants than Galapagos Finches
Henry Nicholls writes: When the HMS Beagle dropped anchor on San Cristobal, the easternmost island in the Galapagos archipelago, in September 1835, the ship's naturalist Charles Darwin eagerly went ashore to gather samples of the insects, birds, reptiles, and plants living there. At first, he didn't think much of the arid landscape, which appeared to be "covered by stunted, sun-burnt brushwood…as leafless as our trees during winter" But this did not put him off. By the time the Beagle left these islands some five weeks later, he had amassed a spectacular collection of Galapagos plants.
It is fortunate that he took such trouble. Most popular narratives of Darwin and the Galapagos concentrate on the far more celebrated finches or the giant tortoises. Yet when he finally published On the Origin of Species almost 25 years later, Darwin made no mention of these creatures. In his discussion of the Galapagos, he dwelt almost exclusively on the islands' plants.
By the early 19th century, there was increasing interest in what we now refer to as biogeography, the study of the distribution of species around the globe. Many people still imagined that God had been involved in the creation of species, putting fully formed versions down on Earth that continued to reproduce themselves, dispersing from a divine "center of creation" to occupy their current habitats. To explain how the plants and animals reached far-flung places such as the isolated Galapagos, several naturalists imagined that there had to have been land bridges, long-since subsided, that had once connected them to a continent. But in the wake of the Beagle voyage, the collection of Galapagos plants suggested an alternate scenario.
Even if there had once been a land bridge to the islands, it could not account for the fact that half of the plant species Darwin collected were unique to the Galapagos, and that most of them were particular to just one island. "I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, rising to a nearly equal height, would have been differently tenanted," wrote Darwin in his Journal of Researches. His observations could be best explained if species were not fixed in nature but somehow changed as the seeds traveled to different locations. [Continue reading…]
DNA contains no information
Regan Penaluna writes: When we talk about genes, we often use expressions inherited from a few influential geneticists and evolutionary biologists, including Francis Crick, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins. These expressions depict DNA as a kind of code telling bodies how to form. We speak about genes similarly to how we speak about language, as symbolic and imbued with meaning. There is "gene-editing," and there are "translation tables" for decoding sequences of nucleic acid. When DNA replicates, it is said to "transcribe" itself. We speak about a message — such as, build a tiger! or construct a female! — being communicated between microscopic materials. But this view of DNA has come with a price, argue some thinkers. It is philosophically misguided, they say, and has even led to scientific blunders. Scratch the surface of this idea, and below you'll find a key contradiction.
Since the earliest days of molecular biology, scientists describe genetic material to be unlike all other biological material, because it supposedly carries something that more workaday molecules don't: information. In a 1958 paper, Crick presented his ideas on the importance of proteins for inheritance, and said that they were composed of energy, matter, and information. Watson called DNA the "repository" of information.
Less than a decade later, George Williams, an influential evolutionary biologist, elaborated on this idea. He described genes to have a special status distinct from DNA, and to be the message that the DNA delivers. In a later work, he likened genes to ideas contained in books. A book can be destroyed, but the story inside is not identical to the physical book. "The same information can be recorded by a variety of patterns in many different kinds of material. A message is always coded in some medium, but the medium is really not the message." In his book The Blind Watchmaker, Dawkins gives perhaps the most forthright description of this view: "airborne willow seeds… are, literally, spreading instructions for making themselves… It is raining instructions out there; it's raining programs; it's raining tree-growing, fluff-spreading, algorithms. That is not a metaphor, it is the plain truth. It couldn't be any plainer if it were raining floppy discs."
But do genes truly contain information in the same sense as words, books, or floppy discs? It depends on what we mean by information. If it's the meaning represented by the words, books, or floppy disks, then no. Many philosophers agree that this kind of semantic information requires communication: an agent to create the message and another to interpret it. "Genes don't carry semantic information, though. They weren't made as part of an act of communication. So genes don't literally represent anything, as people sometimes say," explains Peter Godfrey-Smith, a professor of philosophy at CUNY. [Continue reading…]
Crows understand analogies
Scientific American reports: People are fascinated by the intelligence of animals. In fact, cave paintings dating back some 40,000 years suggest that we have long harbored keen interest in animal behavior and cognition. Part of that interest may have been practical: animals can be dangerous, they can be sources of food and clothing, and they can serve as sentries or mousers.
But, another part of that fascination is purely theoretical. Because animals resemble us in form, perhaps they also resemble us in thought. For many philosophers — including René Descartes and John Locke — granting intelligence to animals was a bridge too far. They especially deemed abstract reasoning to be uniquely human and to perfectly distinguish people from "brutes." Why? Because animals do not speak, they must have no thoughts.
Nevertheless, undeterred by such pessimistic pronouncements, informed by Darwin's theory of evolution, and guided by the maxim that "actions speak more loudly than words," researchers today are fashioning powerful behavioral tests that provide nonverbal ways for animals to disclose their intelligence to us. Although animals may not use words, their behavior may serve as a suitable substitute; its study may allow us to jettison the stale convention that thought without language is impossible. [Continue reading…]
Humans and animals — the power and limitations of language
Stassa Edwards writes: In his Apology for Raymond Sebond (1576), Michel de Montaigne ascribed animals' silence to man's own wilful arrogance. The French essayist argued that animals could speak, that they were in possession of rich consciousness, but that man wouldn't condescend to listen. 'It is through the vanity of the same imagination that [man] equates himself with God,' Montaigne wrote, 'that he attributes divine attributes for himself, picks himself out and separates himself from the crowd of other creatures.' Montaigne asked: 'When I play with my cat, who knows if she is making more of a pastime of me than I of her?'
Montaigne's question is as playful as his cat. Apology is not meant to answer the age-old question, but rather to provoke; to tap into an unending inquiry about the reasoning of animals. Perhaps, Montaigne implies, we simply misunderstand the foreign language of animals, and the ignorance is not theirs, but ours.
Montaigne's position was a radical one – the idea the animals could actually speak to humans was decidedly anti-anthropocentric – and when he looked around for like-minded thinkers, he found himself one solitary essayist. But if Montaigne was a 16th century loner, then he could appeal to the Classics. Apology is littered with references to Pliny and a particular appeal to Plato's account of the Golden Age under Saturn. But even there, Montaigne had little to work with. Aristotle had argued that animals lacked logos (meaning, literally, 'word' but also 'reason') and, therefore, had no sense of the philosophical world inhabited and animated by humans. And a few decades after Montaigne, the French philosopher René Descartes delivered the final blow, arguing that the uniqueness of man stems from his ownership of reason, which animals are incapable of possessing, and which grants him dominion over them.
Everyone know what it's like to forget someone's name. It could be the name of a celebrity and the need to remember might be non-existent, and yet, as though finding this name might be an antidote to looming senility, it's hard to let go of such a compulsion until it is satisfied.
From infancy we are taught that success in life requires an unceasing commitment to colonize the world with language. To be lost for words, is to be left out.
Without the ability to speak or understand, we would lose our most vital connection with the rest of humanity.
Montaigne understood that it was a human conceit to imagine that among all creatures, we were the only ones endowed with the capacity to communicate:
Can there be a more formall and better ordained policie, divided into so severall charges and offices, more constantly entertained, and better maintained, than that of Bees? Shall we imagine their so orderly disposing of their actions, and managing of their vocations, have so proportioned and formall a conduct without discourse, reason, and forecast?
What Montaigne logically inferred in the 1500s, science would confirm centuries later.
While Stassa Edwards enumerates the many expressions of a human desire for animals to speak, my sense is that behind this desire there is an intuition about the limitations of language: that our mute companions often see more because they can say less.
We view language as a prism that allows us perceive order in the world and yet this facility in representation is so successful and elegantly structured that most of the time we see the representations much more clearly than we see the world.
Our ability to describe and analyze the world has never been more advanced than it is today and yet for millennia, humans have observed that animals seem to be able to do something that we cannot: anticipate earthquakes.
Perhaps our word-constructed world only holds together on condition that our senses remain dull.
The world we imagine we can describe, quantify, and control, is in truth a world we barely understand.
Birds can hear sounds hundreds of miles away
The Atlantic: In April, a massive thunderstorm unleashed a series of tornadoes that tore through the central and southern United States. The 84 twisters decimated homes and buildings, causing more than $1 billion in damage across 17 states. In the wake of the natural disaster, 35 people lost their lives.
Now, scientists say a peculiar event took place just two days before the storm: Flocks of songbirds fled the area en masse. Many golden-winged warblers had just finished a 1,500-mile migration to Tennessee when they suddenly flew south on a 900-mile exodus to Florida and Cuba. At that time, the storm was somewhere between 250 and 560 miles away. The researchers said that the birds somehow knew about the impending storm.
"At the same time that meteorologists on The Weather Channel were telling us this storm was headed in our direction, the birds were apparently already packing their bags and evacuating the area," Henry Streby, a population ecologist from the University of California, Berkeley, said in a statement. He and his research team had been examining the birds' migratory patterns when they made their discovery.
Initially, the team was studying if warblers, which weigh the same as four dimes, could carry half-gram geo-locators over long distances. After retrieving data from five of the 20 tagged birds, the team noticed the birds were nowhere near the path they'd expected. Why, the researchers wondered, would these tiny birds travel so far from their already-grueling migratory route? Upon further inspection, the scientists found that the dates the birds broke with the pattern coincided with the beginnings of the storm. In a paper reported today in the journal Current Biology, the team suggests that the birds made their "evacuation migration" because their keen sense of hearing alerted them to the incoming natural disaster. [Continue reading…]
What is it like to be a bee?
In the minds of many humans, empathy is the signature of humanity and yet if this empathy extends further and includes non-humans we may be suspected of indulging in anthropomorphism — a sentimental projection of our own feelings into places where similar feelings supposedly cannot exist.
But the concept of anthropomorphism is itself a strange idea since it seems to invalidate what should be one of the most basic assumptions we can reasonably make about living creatures: that without the capacity to suffer, nothing would survive.
Just as the deadening of sensation makes people more susceptible to injury, an inability to feel pain would impede any creature's need to avoid harm.
The seemingly suicidal draw of the moth to a flame is the exception rather than the rule. Moreover the insect is driven by a mistake, not a death wish. It is drawn towards the light, not the heat, oblivious that the two are one.
If humans indulge in projections about the feelings of others — human and non-human — perhaps we more commonly engage in negative projections: choosing to assume that feelings are absent where it would cause us discomfort to be attuned to their presence.
Our inclination is to avoid feeling too much and thus we construct neat enclosures for our concerns.
These enclosures shut out the feelings of strangers and then by extension seal away boundless life from which we have become even more estranged.
Heather Swan writes: It was a warm day in early spring when I had my first long conversation with the entomologist and science studies scholar Sainath Suryanarayanan. We met over a couple of hives I had recently inherited. One was thriving. Piles of dead bees filled the other. Parts of the comb were covered with mould and oozing something that looked like molasses.
Having recently attended a class for hobby beekeepers with Marla Spivak, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota, I was aware of the many different diseases to which bees are susceptible. American foulbrood, which was a mean one, concerned me most. Beekeepers recommended burning all of your equipment if you discovered it in your hives. Some of these bees were alive, but obviously in low spirits, and I didn't want to destroy them unnecessarily. I called Sainath because I thought he could help me with the diagnosis.
Beekeeping, these days, is riddled with risks. New viruses, habitat loss, pesticides and mites all contribute to creating a deadly labyrinth through which nearly every bee must travel. Additionally, in 2004, mysterious bee disappearances began to plague thousands of beekeepers. Seemingly healthy bees started abandoning their homes. This strange disappearing act became known as colony collapse disorder (CCD).
Since then, the world has seen the decline of many other pollinating species, too. Because honeybees and other pollinators are responsible for pollinating at least one-third of all the food we eat, this is a serious problem globally. Diagnosing bee problems is not simple, but some answers are emerging. A ubiquitous class of pesticides called neonicotinoids have been implicated in pollinator decline, which has fuelled conversations among beekeepers, scientists, policy-makers and growers. A beekeeper facing a failing hive now has to consider not only the health of the hive itself, but also the health of the landscape around the hive. Dead bees lead beekeepers down a path of many questions. And some beekeepers have lost so many hives, they feel like giving up.
When we met at my troubled hives, Sainath brought his own hive tool and veil. He had already been down a path of many questions about bee deaths, one that started in his youth with a fascination for observing insects. When he was 14, he began his 'Amateur Entomologist's Record', where he kept taxonomic notes on such things as wing textures, body shapes, colour patterns and behaviours. But the young scientist's approach occasionally slipped to include his exuberance, describing one moment as 'a stupefying experience!' All this led him to study biology and chemistry in college, then to work on the behavioural ecology of paper wasps during his doctoral studies, and eventually to Minnesota to help Spivak investigate the role of pesticides in CCD.
Sainath had spent several years doing lab and field experiments with wasps and bees, but ultimately wanted to shift from traditional practices in entomology to research that included human/insect relationships. It was Sainath who made me wonder about the role of emotion in science – both in the scientists themselves and in the subjects of their experiments. I had always thought of emotion as something excised from science, but this was impossible for some scientists. What was the role of empathy in experimentation? How do we, with our human limitations, understand something as radically different from us as the honeybee? Did bees have feelings, too? If so, what did that mean for the scientist? For the science? [Continue reading…]
How broken sleep can unleash creativity
Karen Emslie writes: It is 4.18am. In the fireplace, where logs burned, there are now orange lumps that will soon be ash. Orion the Hunter is above the hill. Taurus, a sparkling V, is directly overhead, pointing to the Seven Sisters. Sirius, one of Orion's heel dogs, is pumping red-blue-violet, like a galactic disco ball. As the night moves on, the old dog will set into the hill.
It is 4.18am and I am awake. Such early waking is often viewed as a disorder, a glitch in the body's natural rhythm – a sign of depression or anxiety. It is true that when I wake at 4am I have a whirring mind. And, even though I am a happy person, if I lie in the dark my thoughts veer towards worry. I have found it better to get up than to lie in bed teetering on the edge of nocturnal lunacy.
If I write in these small hours, black thoughts become clear and colourful. They form themselves into words and sentences, hook one to the next – like elephants walking trunk to tail. My brain works differently at this time of night; I can only write, I cannot edit. I can only add, I cannot take away. I need my day-brain for finesse. I will work for several hours and then go back to bed.
All humans, animals, insects and birds have clocks inside, biological devices controlled by genes, proteins and molecular cascades. These inner clocks are connected to the ceaseless yet varying cycle of light and dark caused by the rotation and tilt of our planet. They drive primal physiological, neural and behavioural systems according to a roughly 24-hour cycle, otherwise known as our circadian rhythm, affecting our moods, desires, appetites, sleep patterns, and sense of the passage of time.
The Romans, Greeks and Incas woke up without iPhone alarms or digital radio clocks. Nature was their timekeeper: the rise of the sun, the dawn chorus, the needs of the field or livestock. Sundials and hourglasses recorded the passage of time until the 14th century when the first mechanical clocks were erected on churches and monasteries. By the 1800s, mechanical timepieces were widely worn on neck chains, wrists or lapels; appointments could be made and meal- or bed-times set.
Societies built around industrialisation and clock-time brought with them urgency and the concept of being 'on time' or having 'wasted time'. Clock-time became increasingly out of synch with natural time, yet light and dark still dictated our working day and social structures.
Then, in the late 19th century, everything changed. [Continue reading…]
The life cycles of flowers and bees are getting thrown out of balance by climate change
The Guardian reports: Sexual deceit, pressed flowers and Victorian bee collectors are combined in new scientific research which demonstrates for the first time that climate change threatens flower pollination, which underpins much of the world's food production.
The work used museum records stretching back to 1848 to show that the early spider orchid and the miner bee on which it depends for reproduction have become increasingly out of sync as spring temperatures rise due to global warming.
The orchid resembles a female miner bee and exudes the same sex pheromone to seduce the male bee into "pseudocopulation" with the flower, an act which also achieves pollination. The orchids have evolved to flower at the same time as the bee emerges.
But while rising temperatures cause both the orchid and the bee to flower or fly earlier in the spring, the bees are affected much more, which leads to a mismatch.
"We have shown that plants and their pollinators show different responses to climate change and that warming will widen the timeline between bees and flowers emerging," said Dr Karen Robbirt, at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the University of East Anglia (UEA). "If replicated in less specific systems, this could have severe implications for crop productivity."
She said the research, published in Current Biology on Thursday, is "the first clear example, supported by long-term data, of the potential for climate change to disrupt critical [pollination] relationships between species." [Continue reading…]
The complex, varied, ever changing and context-dependent microbiome
Ed Yong writes: In the late 17th century, the Dutch naturalist Anton van Leeuwenhoek looked at his own dental plaque through a microscope and saw a world of tiny cells "very prettily a-moving." He could not have predicted that a few centuries later, the trillions of microbes that share our lives — collectively known as the microbiome — would rank among the hottest areas of biology.
These microscopic partners help us by digesting our food, training our immune systems and crowding out other harmful microbes that could cause disease. In return, everything from the food we eat to the medicines we take can shape our microbial communities — with important implications for our health. Studies have found that changes in our microbiome accompany medical problems from obesity to diabetes to colon cancer.
As these correlations have unfurled, so has the hope that we might fix these ailments by shunting our bugs toward healthier states. The gigantic probiotics industry certainly wants you to think that, although there is little evidence that swallowing a few billion yogurt-borne bacteria has more than a small impact on the trillions in our guts. The booming genre of microbiome diet books — self-help manuals for the bacterial self — peddles a similar line, even though our knowledge of microbe-manipulating menus is still in its infancy.
This quest for a healthy microbiome has led some people to take measures that are far more extreme than simply spooning up yogurt. [Continue reading…]
The biology of deceit
Daniel N Jones writes: It's the friend who betrays you, the lover living a secret life, the job applicant with the fabricated résumé, or the sham sales pitch too good to resist. From the time humans learnt to co‑operate, we also learnt to deceive each other. For deception to be effective, individuals must hide their true intentions. But deception is hardly limited to humans. There is a never-ending arms race between the deceiver and the deceived among most living things. By studying different patterns of deception across the species, we can learn to better defend ourselves from dishonesty in the human world.
My early grasp of human deception came from the work of my adviser, the psychologist Delroy Paulhus at the University of British Columbia in Canada, who studied what he called the dark triad of personality: psychopathy, recognised by callous affect and reckless deceit; narcissism, a sense of grandiose entitlement and self-centered overconfidence; and Machiavellianism, the cynical and strategic manipulation of others.
If you look at the animal world, it's clear that dark traits run through species from high to low. Some predators are fast, mobile and wide-ranging, executing their deceptions on as many others as they can; they resemble human psychopaths. Others are slow, stalking their prey in a specific, strategic (almost Machiavellian) way. Given the parallels between humans and other animals, I began to conceive my Mimicry Deception Theory, which argues that long- and short-term deceptive strategies cut across species, often by mimicking other lifestyles or forms.
Much of the foundational work for this idea comes from the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, who noted that many organisms gain an evolutionary advantage through deception. [Continue reading…]
The healing power of silence
Daniel A. Gross writes: One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous tourist destination. The problem was that Finland was known as a rather quiet country, and since 2008, the Country Brand Delegation had been looking for a national brand that would make some noise.
Over drinks at the Sea Horse, the experts puzzled over the various strengths of their nation. Here was a country with exceptional teachers, an abundance of wild berries and mushrooms, and a vibrant cultural capital the size of Nashville, Tennessee. These things fell a bit short of a compelling national identity. Someone jokingly suggested that nudity could be named a national theme — it would emphasize the honesty of Finns. Someone else, less jokingly, proposed that perhaps quiet wasn't such a bad thing. That got them thinking.
A few months later, the delegation issued a slick "Country Brand Report." It highlighted a host of marketable themes, including Finland's renowned educational system and school of functional design. One key theme was brand new: silence. As the report explained, modern society often seems intolerably loud and busy. "Silence is a resource," it said. It could be marketed just like clean water or wild mushrooms. "In the future, people will be prepared to pay for the experience of silence."
People already do. In a loud world, silence sells. Noise-canceling headphones retail for hundreds of dollars; the cost of some weeklong silent meditation courses can run into the thousands. Finland saw that it was possible to quite literally make something out of nothing.
In 2011, the Finnish Tourist Board released a series of photographs of lone figures in the wilderness, with the caption "Silence, Please." An international "country branding" consultant, Simon Anholt, proposed the playful tagline "No talking, but action." And a Finnish watch company, Rönkkö, launched its own new slogan: "Handmade in Finnish silence."
"We decided, instead of saying that it's really empty and really quiet and nobody is talking about anything here, let's embrace it and make it a good thing," explains Eva Kiviranta, who manages social media for VisitFinland.com.
Silence is a peculiar starting point for a marketing campaign. After all, you can't weigh, record, or export it. You can't eat it, collect it, or give it away. The Finland campaign raises the question of just what the tangible effects of silence really are. Science has begun to pipe up on the subject. In recent years researchers have highlighted the peculiar power of silence to calm our bodies, turn up the volume on our inner thoughts, and attune our connection to the world. Their findings begin where we might expect: with noise.
The word "noise" comes from a Latin root meaning either queasiness or pain. According to the historian Hillel Schwartz, there's even a Mesopotamian legend in which the gods grow so angry at the clamor of earthly humans that they go on a killing spree. (City-dwellers with loud neighbors may empathize, though hopefully not too closely.)
Dislike of noise has produced some of history's most eager advocates of silence, as Schwartz explains in his book Making Noise: From Babel to the Big Bang and Beyond. In 1859, the British nurse and social reformer Florence Nightingale wrote, "Unnecessary noise is the most cruel absence of care that can be inflicted on sick or well." Every careless clatter or banal bit of banter, Nightingale argued, can be a source of alarm, distress, and loss of sleep for recovering patients. She even quoted a lecture that identified "sudden noises" as a cause of death among sick children. [Continue reading…]
Why the symbol of life is a loop not a helix
Jamie Davies writes: Here is a remarkable fact about identical twins: they have the same DNA, and therefore the same 'genetic fingerprint', yet their actual fingerprints (such as they might leave behind on a murder weapon) are different, and can be told apart in standard police observations. Fingerprints are, of course, produced by the pattern of tiny ridges in skin. So, it would appear that certain fine-scale details of our anatomy cannot be determined by a precise 'genetic blueprint'.
It isn't only fine details that seem open to negotiation in this way: anyone who has seen Bonsai cultivation knows how the very genes that would normally build a large tree can instead build a miniature-scale model, given a suitable environment. Bonsai trees aren't completely scaled down, of course: their cells are normal-sized – it's just that each component is made with fewer of them.
In the 1950 and '60s, many children were affected by their mothers taking the drug thalidomide while pregnant, when the drug blocked growth of the internal parts of their limbs. Even though growth of the skin is not directly affected by thalidomide, the very short limbs of affected children were covered by an appropriate amount of skin, not the much larger amount that would be needed to cover a normal limb. The growth of the skin cannot, therefore, just be in response to the command of a hard-wired internal blueprint: something much more adaptive must be going on.
Such observations are not troubling for biological science as such. But they are troubling for a certain picture of how biology works. The symbol for this worldview might be the DNA double helix, its complementary twisting strands evoking other interdependent pairs in life: male and female, form and function, living and non-living. DNA on its own is just a chemical polymer, after all, essential for life but not itself alive. Yet it holds out the promise that we can explain living processes purely in terms of the interactions between simple molecules. [Continue reading…]
Ants are cool but teach us nothing
E.O. Wilson writes: For nearly seven decades, starting in boyhood, I've studied hundreds of kinds of ants around the world, and this qualifies me, I believe, to offer some advice on ways their lives can be applied to ours. I'll start with the question I'm most often asked: "What can I do about the ants in my kitchen?" My response comes from the heart: Watch your step, be careful of little lives. Ants especially like honey, tuna and cookie crumbs. So put down bits of those on the floor, and watch as the first scout finds the bait and reports back to her colony by laying an odor trail. Then, as a little column follows her out to the food, you will see social behavior so strange it might be on another planet. Think of kitchen ants not as pests or bugs, but as your personal guest superorganism.
Another question I hear a lot is, "What can we learn of moral value from the ants?" Here again I will answer definitively: nothing. Nothing at all can be learned from ants that our species should even consider imitating. For one thing, all working ants are female. Males are bred and appear in the nest only once a year, and then only briefly. They are pitiful creatures with wings, huge eyes, small brains and genitalia that make up a large portion of their rear body segment. They have only one function in life: to inseminate the virgin queens during the nuptial season. They are built to be robot flying sexual missiles. Upon mating or doing their best to mate, they are programmed to die within hours, usually as victims of predators.
Many kinds of ants eat their dead — and their injured, too. You may have seen ant workers retrieve nestmates that you have mangled or killed underfoot (accidentally, I hope), thinking it battlefield heroism. The purpose, alas, is more sinister. [Continue reading…]
Evolution's random paths lead to one place
Quanta Magazine: In his fourth-floor lab at Harvard University, Michael Desai has created hundreds of identical worlds in order to watch evolution at work. Each of his meticulously controlled environments is home to a separate strain of baker's yeast. Every 12 hours, Desai's robot assistants pluck out the fastest-growing yeast in each world — selecting the fittest to live on — and discard the rest. Desai then monitors the strains as they evolve over the course of 500 generations. His experiment, which other scientists say is unprecedented in scale, seeks to gain insight into a question that has long bedeviled biologists: If we could start the world over again, would life evolve the same way?
Many biologists argue that it would not, that chance mutations early in the evolutionary journey of a species will profoundly influence its fate. "If you replay the tape of life, you might have one initial mutation that takes you in a totally different direction," Desai said, paraphrasing an idea first put forth by the biologist Stephen Jay Gould in the 1980s.
Desai's yeast cells call this belief into question. According to results published in Science in June, all of Desai's yeast varieties arrived at roughly the same evolutionary endpoint (as measured by their ability to grow under specific lab conditions) regardless of which precise genetic path each strain took. It's as if 100 New York City taxis agreed to take separate highways in a race to the Pacific Ocean, and 50 hours later they all converged at the Santa Monica pier.
The findings also suggest a disconnect between evolution at the genetic level and at the level of the whole organism. [Continue reading…]
The thermodynamic theory of ecology
Quanta Magazine: The Western Ghats in India rise like a wall between the Arabian Sea and the heart of the subcontinent to the east. The 1,000-mile-long chain of coastal mountains is dense with lush rainforest and grasslands, and each year, clouds bearing monsoon rains blow in from the southwest and break against the mountains' flanks, unloading water that helps make them hospitable to numerous spectacular and endangered species. The Western Ghats are one of the most biodiverse places on the planet. They were also the first testing ground of an unusual new theory in ecology that applies insights from physics to the study of the environment.
John Harte, a professor of ecology at the University of California, Berkeley, has a wry, wizened face and green eyes that light up when he describes his latest work. He has developed what he calls the maximum entropy (MaxEnt) theory of ecology, which may offer a solution to a long-standing problem in ecology: how to calculate the total number of species in an ecosystem, as well as other important numbers, based on extremely limited information — which is all that ecologists, no matter how many years they spend in the field, ever have. Five years ago, the Ghats convinced him that what he thought was possible from back-of-the-envelope calculations could work in the real world. He and his colleagues will soon publish the results of a study that estimates the number of insect and tree species living in a tropical forest in Panama. The paper will also suggest how MaxEnt could give species estimates in the Amazon, a swath of more than 2 million square miles of land that is notoriously difficult to survey.
John Harte thinks it is possible to predict the behavior of ecosystems using just a few key attributes. His method ignores nature's small-grained complexities, which makes many ecologists skeptical of the project.
If the MaxEnt theory of ecology can give good estimates in a wide variety of scenarios, it could help answer the many questions that revolve around how species are spread across the landscape, such as how many would be lost if a forest were cleared, how to design wildlife preserves that keep species intact, or how many rarely seen species might be hiding in a given area. Perhaps more importantly, the theory hints at a unified way of thinking about ecology — as a system that can be described with just a few variables, with all the complexity of life built on top. [Continue reading…]
True Darwinism is all about chance
Noah Berlatsky writes: Chance is an uncomfortable thing. So Curtis Johnson argues in Darwin's Dice: The Idea of Chance in the Thought of Charles Darwin, and he makes a compelling case. The central controversy, and the central innovation, in Darwin's work is not the theory of natural selection itself, according to Johnson, but Darwin's more basic, and more innovative, turn to randomness as a way to explain natural phenomena. This application of randomness was so controversial, Johnson argues, that Darwin tried to cover it up, replacing words like "accident" and "chance" with terms like "spontaneous variation" in later editions of his work. Nonetheless, the terminological shift was cosmetic: Randomness remained, and still remains, the disturbing center of Darwin's theories.
Johnson, a political theorist at Lewis & Clark College, explains that there are two basic kinds of chance in Darwin's thought. The first—most familiar and least disconcerting—is chance as probability. According to the theory of natural selection, individuals with advantageous adaptations are most likely to survive. A giraffe with a longer neck has a better shot of reaching those lofty leaves and living to munch another day; a polar bear blessed with a warmer coat has a higher probability of surviving a frigid winter than one with less hair. The long-necked giraffe may not always win—it may, for example, be pulverized by a meteor before it can pass on its long-necked genes. But over time, the odds will go its way. There is randomness here, but it is controlled and predictable: It works in accordance with a rule. Natural selection makes sense.
The second kind of chance in Darwin's work, though, is more mysterious. For natural selection to work, you need to have a range of traits to select among. That range is provided by individual variation, the fact that two different animals (whether giraffe or bear) are different from each other. Some giraffes have longer necks than others. Some bears have thicker fur than others. Why should this be? Darwin's answer was chance. [Continue reading…]


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