A newborn South American Tapir lies next to her mother at the Debrecen Zoo in Debrecen, Hungary. The baby, a female, was born on 15 April after a 13-month gestation. She weighed a little over 6000 grams. Her parents, Sam and Luna, came to the zoo in March 2011 as part of a species conservation program. The baby will be raised together with her parents for almost a year — via ZooBorns
A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.
Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.
The timeline of the activity tracks USA TODAY’s reporting on the military’s information operations
program, which spent hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan — campaigns that have been criticised even within the Pentagon as ineffective and poorly monitored — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Battersby Howat Architects have designed a house in Whistler, BC, Canada — via CONTEMPORIST
The Hamilton Khaki X-Patrol does look very much like a cockpit instrument panel and its ability to convert distances in miles (nautical or statute) and kilometres, heights or altitudes in feet or metres, volumes in gallons and litres, as well as weights in pounds and kilograms simply by using a turning bezel should be enough to delight any ardent number cruncher.
Conversions are simple to make, through unscrewing the easy-to-grip crown at 9 o’clock and positioning an arrow for the first unit of measurement on the outer bezel scale. The appropriate equivalent is then visible on the inner scale. Once the reading is completed, the crown can be pushed back into place and re-screwed to secure it until required again. Three round chronograph discs, gravitating to the left-hand side of the dial keep track of hours, minutes and seconds, operated via push buttons at two o’clock and four o’clock — via Watchuseek
Monday, 16 April marked the one-year anniversary of the first time Busch Gardens guests got to see Kasi an 8-week-old male cheetah cub, and Mtani, a 16-week-old female yellow Labrador puppy, start to strike up a friendship that the park’s animal experts expect to last a lifetime. Now, a year later, they live together full time at the park’s Cheetah Run habitat and even travel together to schools, events and television studios, helping the park’s education team teach the public about the plight of cheetahs in the wild and the importance of Busch Gardens’ conservation efforts. — via ZooBorns
J MAYER H Architects, known for focusing on works that demonstrate the intersection of architecture, communication and new technology, shared with us their House of Justice project. Their building serves as a two storey civic centre for the people in the area, a village with a strong cultural heritage in the Caucasus Mountains — via ArchDaily
Foundations of complex language have been found in colonies of unusual furry animals called hyraxes.
Hyraxes, which resemble rodents but are more closely related to elephants or manatees, often cluck, snort, squeak, tweet and wail songs from the perches of their rocky colonies.
By recording hundreds of the animals’ songs and applying clever mathematics, researchers discovered that differences in note arrangement, or syntax, in hyrax songs vary as the distance increases between colonies — a surprising occurrence of dialect — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Ancient deep sea divers — the nautilus has firmly imprinted itself in the human psyche. This sculpture titled Cephalopod
takes direct inspiration from these amazingly graceful creatures.
This piece marries found object and handmade castings beautifully. It’s body is an old cast iron blower housing; the eyes
are cast bronze (cast from original waxes). The tentacles are forged steel square nails, peeking out from it’s beak
, which are unique cast iron pieces — via Etsy
When is a penny worth $1.15 million? When it is a rare experimental penny minted in 1792.
The unusual coin was auctioned off Thursday at the Renaissance Schaumburg Convention Centre in suburban Chicago.
Officials with Heritage Auctions say Kevin Lipton of Beverly Hills, California, bought the penny on behalf of a group of unnamed investors. The winning bid was $1 million, but the investors also must pay the auction house’s 15 percent commission.
The coin is made from copper and encases a small plug of silver.
The silver was added to make the penny heavier, said Todd Imhof, executive vice president of Heritage Auctions. On one side of the coin, a depiction of Miss Liberty is ringed by the phrase Liberty Parent of Science & Industry
. The back of the coin reads United States of America One Cent
.
After 200 years, we can only account for 14 of these,
said Imhof, who added that the penny was never actually put into circulation — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Taronga Zoo is celebrating the birth of a rare animal, a female Eastern Bongo calf, on 2 April in the early hours. Keepers watching on closed circuit TV cameras were delighted to witness the perfect maternal instincts that first-time mother Djembe showed in cleaning the newborn. The baby suckled within two hours. She’s been named Kiazi, which means sweet potato — via ZooBorns
This is a grade II-listed Charles Evelyn Simmons-designed six-bedroom art deco house in Downage, London NW4 — and it’s up for sale now.
According to the agent’s details (which aren’t exactly in depth), the property was designed by Charles Evelyn Simmons and subsequently built over 1934 and 1935, the exterior still screaming the art deco era (you can see a better image of that exterior here). This is some house, that’s for sure.
That’s a lot of house, but sadly, for a lot of money. In this case, you’ll be looking at something around £1,300,000 if you want to own this place — via WowHaus
I can do it all — via deviantART
A coroner has urged police to review the use of capsicum sprays after an officer sprayed a mentally ill man who had doused himself with accelerant, setting him on fire.
Coroner Jane Hendtlass said James Bloomfield, 53, died after receiving 90 per cent burns to his body — via redwolf.newsvine.com
iiNet today emerged victorious in a landmark High Court victory against a coalition of film and TV studios on the issue of Internet piracy through peer to peer platforms like BitTorrent, in the conclusion of a long-running case which is viewed as the a test for how Australia’s telecommunications industry will deal with the issue in future.
#iitrial appeal dismissed!
wrote iiNet chief executive Michael Malone on Twitter this morning. A statement by the court, available online in PDF format, states:
“Today the High Court dismissed an appeal by a number of film and television companies from a decision of the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia. The High Court held that the respondent, an internet service provider, had not authorised the infringement by its customers of the appellants’ copyright in commercially released films and television programs.
It appears that the full judgement is available online here — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Google’s web spam team’s recent warning to 20,000 webmasters about vulnerabilities on their sites is a drop in the ocean, with the search giant revealing that it is stepping up its plans against malicious sites.
Earlier this week, head of Google’s web spam team Matt Cutts, who is also the author of Google’s SafeSearch family filter, tweeted that Google had sent out 20,000 emails to webmasters who have had their sites compromised. The search giant isn’t required to notify webmasters that their sites are vulnerable; however, as it trawls the web to index sites, it is able to discover which sites have malicious content, and it chooses to notify the sites affected — via redwolf.newsvine.com
A new treatment helped rabbits born with cerebral palsy to regain near-normal mobility, offering hope of a potential breakthrough in treating humans with the incurable disorder, researchers said Wednesday.
The method, part of the growing field of nanomedicine, worked by delivering an anti-inflammatory drug directly into the damaged parts of the brain via tiny tree-like molecules known as dendrimers.
Baby rabbits treated within six hours of birth showed dramatic improvement in the motor function
by the fifth day of life, said lead author Sujatha Kannan of the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development Perinatology Research Branch. The study appears in the U.S. journal Science Translational Medicine — via redwolf.newsvine.com
The polar bear is much older than previously thought, according to new genetic evidence.
DNA studies suggest the Arctic predator split from its ancestor, the brown bear, about 600,000 years ago.
Previous estimates put the polar bear at about 150,000 years old, suggesting the mammal adapted very rapidly to Arctic life.
Conservationists say the new study, published in Science, has implications for bear conservation — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Scientists claim to have invented their own version of Doctor Who’s famous sonic screwdriver.
The Dundee University researchers have created a machine which uses ultrasound to lift and rotate a rubber disc floating in a cylinder of water.
It is said to be the first time ultrasound waves have been used to turn objects rather than simply push them.
The study could help make surgery using ultrasound techniques more precise, the physicists said.
Surgeons use ultrasound to treat a range of conditions without having to cut open a patient — via redwolf.newsvine.com
Threatened by poaching and habitat destruction, this rare subspecies of Leopard got a helping hand from the European Endangered Species Breeding Programme. Of the seventy-seven Sri Lankan Leopards in captivity, sixty-six live in Europe, including these two adorable cubs, born 6 March.
This is the first litter for Leïah, La Palmyre Zoo’s 4 year old Sri Lankan Leopard female. The two babies, now five weeks old, are in perfect health — via ZooBorns
In a village on Teshima, an island lying in the Seto Inland Sea, a vacant house set among the old houses of the village, was converted by architect Koichi Futatsumata from CASE-REAL into a dormitory for seasonal restaurant workers.
Depopulation in the isolated village has left many houses vacant.
The idea was to make the most of a vacant house, as an example of a way to cope with depopulation, a problem for Japan, by making a dormitory for restaurant workers — via Home Design Find
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