Science

An amazing glow-in-the-dark cockroach, a harp-shaped carnivorous sponge and the smallest vertebrate on Earth are just three of the newly discovered top 10 species selected by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. A global committee of taxonomists—scientists responsible for species exploration and classification—announced its list of top 10 species from 2012 today, May 23.

A major new report from 25 wildlife organisations, assessing the state of Britain's Nature, is warning that many species of wildlife are facing extinction in the UK unless urgent action is taken.

I did a big run on Saturday morning. On Saturday afternoon, I stuffed my face, had a welcome beer after a training dry spell, and felt glorious. Sunday morning I spent in bed, reading the New York Times in a puddle of pure contentment. Sunday night, I went to an epic dinner and felt the opposite of hangry. Then Monday came. I hid from my kids in the bathroom, I cried when I dropped my mom off at the airport, I almost fired off several barely-civilized email responses (luckily, my phone died before I could hit send). In the afternoon, I yelled at my older son when he picked one too many blueberries on our way home and then I collapsed on the couch with a pillow over my face. What happened to my post-run halo? This seemed like something more than coming down from runner’s high—a high that’s not completely understood.  I imagine the run left me with a healthy dose of endogenous opiods, and even my body’s own cannabanoids—but a two-day high seems a little excessive, and so does such a gnarly withdrawal period. So I turned to my favorite diagnostician, Dr. Internet, and discovered two delightful new words for my possible condition. One: Post-Event Let-Down, or PELD.  Psychologist Jack Lesyk writes that this slump can happen to anyone with a goal: a politician, an athlete, a cap-and-gowned student who may be, at this very moment, listening to her commencement address. After a big event, the goal that organized your life suddenly vanishes, he says. Maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise that a void lurks on the far side of achievement. The word I like even better is schmung. Coined (as far as I can tell) by a Chicago-based endurance athlete, schmung seems like a good description of the way I feel—foggy and grumpy and, well, kind of a schmuck to those around me. (Although this definition of schmung might not have caught on yet.) Whatever you call it, some say low as lasts for several weeks after the event. Common advice: give yourself permission to take it easy, using the time you spent training (studying, glad-handing) for your event to spend time with family and friends and pursue neglected activities. Planning future events can also make the calendar seem like less of a gaping maw. My husband, who’s suffered through several of these races (and the even-more-challenging houseful of schmung afterward), reminded me what I said when we rolled into the race parking lot early Saturday morning. It was still dark, and I was nervous. Music blared through the campground; there was a bonfire, a race director dressed like a mariachi, and a handle of Jack Daniel’s on the registration table. “I said something?” I asked him today on the phone. “You don’t remember?” He laughed. “You said, ‘This is fun, this is fun, this is fun.’” ** Images by Flickr usera Sam Webster (top) and Anna Loverus (bottom)

A very cold spring has left some lakes slow to thaw. But that doesn't mean global warming as vanished, sadly. Continue reading ?

Installation is under way of an expanded monitoring system for Iceland's volcanoes, which it is hoped will give the world more warning of the next big eruption.

Mature specimen of Rhapydionina deserta, from Loeblich & Tappan (1964). Calcareous foraminiferans have been featured on this site before: planktic floaters, living stars, microscopic jelly moulds and gigantic reef-formers. All these forms have belonged to the group of calcareous forams known as the rotaliids. Today's subject is another group of forams, the Rhapydionininae, belonging to a different calcareous group, the Miliolida. Miliolids may have shell walls made of calcite like the rotaliids, but differ in the wall structure: while the walls of rotaliids are glass-like and porous, those of miliolids are structured like porcelain. Phylogenetic studies of forams have not placed the miliolids close to the rotaliids, and the two groups seem to have evolved their secreted shells independently (Sen Gupta 2002). Rhapydionina liburnica, from Loeblich & Tappan (1964). The Rhapydionininae were defined by Loeblich & Tappan (1964) as a group of miliolids with a conical test composed of broad chambers stacked one on top of another (the overall shape being kind of like a fan or an ice-cream cone), with each of these chambers subdivided by internal septa into multiple chamberlets (the difference between a 'chamber' and a 'chamberlet' being that the latter are not completely divided from each other by the walls). The opening of the test took the form of a sieve-like array of pores at the top end. However, subsequent researchers have discovered that Loeblich & Tappan's definition was inadequate. Rhapydioninines start life growing as a flat spiral, with growth becoming linearised at maturity. However, it turns out that not all Rhapydionininae become linear; some retain their juvenile coiling into maturity (Vicedo et al. 2011). At least some species are believed to have both a linear megalospheric form and a coiled microspheric form. To explain, forams can be divided between microspheric forms, in which the first chambers of a new test are much smaller, and megalospheric forms with larger initial chambers. In those relatively few forams whose life cycles have been studied in detail, these two forms correspond to an alternation of generations, with a mostly microspheric asexually-reproducing generation giving rise to the generally megalospheric sexually-reproducing phase. Loeblich & Tappan's (1964) concept of rhapydionines, therefore, would have potentially placed members of a single species into separate families. Diagram of internal structure of two adult chambers of Cuvillierinella, from Vicedo et al. (2011). Key to abbreviations: ap f = apertural face, c chl = cortical chamberlets, flo = floor, m chl = medullar chamberlet, prp = preseptal space, rpi = residual pillars, s = septum, sl = septulum. Rhapydionines are best known as fossils, with a definite range from the Upper Cretaceous to the mid-Eocene (Loeblich & Tappan 1984). Believe it or not, whether there are still rhapydioninines in the world is something of an open question. Loeblich & Tappan (1964) listed two Recent genera in the Rhapydionininae, each represented by only a single known specimen. Ripacubana conica was originally described from sand deposits in Cuba; however, Loeblich & Tappan (1964) suggested that Ripacubana may actually represent what has been referred to as a 'zombie taxon'. Some of you may be familiar with the palaeontological concept of a 'Lazarus taxon', where a species disappears from the fossil record only to reappear at a later date. What has actually happened in these cases is that the species had only become locally extinct, but survived in some other locality that has not been preserved, subsequently recolonising its old range. A 'zombie taxon', however, is one that has genuinely become extinct at the earlier date, but its fossilised remains have since been transported into a younger sediment deposit, giving the impression that it survived later than it did*. In the case of Ripacubana, it is difficult to know just how long a foram shell b

L.A. mayor's race: It's Eric Garcetti by wide margin

Existing research shows that bicyclists who wear helmets have an 88 percent lower risk of brain injury, but researchers at Boston Children's Hospital found that simply having bicycle helmet laws in place showed a 20 percent decrease in deaths and injuries for children younger than 16 who were in bicycle-motor vehicle collisions.

An amazing glow-in-the-dark cockroach, a harp-shaped carnivorous sponge and the smallest vertebrate on Earth are just three of the newly discovered top 10 species selected by the International Institute for Species Exploration at Arizona State University. A global committee of taxonomists -- scientists responsible for species exploration and classification -- announced its list of top 10 species from 2012 today, May 23.

sciencehabit writes "Physicists have long known that quantum mechanics allows for a subtle connection between quantum particles called entanglement, in which measuring one particle can instantly set the otherwise uncertain condition, or 'state,' of another particle—even if it's light years away. Now, experimenters in Israel have shown that they can entangle two photons that don't even exist at the same time. Anton Zeilinger, a physicist at the University of Vienna, says that the experiment demonstrates just how slippery the concepts of quantum mechanics are. 'It's really neat because it shows more or less that quantum events are outside our everyday notions of space and time.'" Read more of this story at Slashdot.