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Submission + - Lawmaker Asks Reddit for Ideas on Website Seizures (itworld.com)

Submitted by
itwbennett
itwbennett writes: "U.S. Representative Zoe Lofgren has turned to Reddit's 'Internet policy experts and free speech warriors' for help 'crowdsourcing a legislative proposal' to address the U.S. government's practice of seizing websites for alleged copyright infringement. As of 5 p.m. Monday there were 40 responses to Lofgren's Reddit post."
Idle

Submission + - Apes suffer mid-life crisis too (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: Humans are not alone in experiencing a mid-life crisis — great apes suffer the same, according to new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A new study of over 500 great apes found that well-being patterns in primates are similar to those experience by humans. This doesn't mean that middle age apes seek out the sportiest trees or hit-on younger apes inappropriately, but rather that their well-being starts high in youth, dips in middle age, and rises again in old age.
Idle

Submission + - In time for Halloween: 9 new tarantula species discovered (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: If you suffer from acute arachnophobia, this is the perfect Halloween discovery for you: a spider expert has discovered nine new species of arboreal tarantulas in the Brazil. Although tarantula diversity is highest in the Amazon rainforest, the new species are all found in lesser-known Brazilian ecosystems like the Atlantic Forest and the cerrado.
Science

Submission + - Unusual discovery of new African monkey species (mongabay.com) 1

Submitted by rhettb
rhettb writes: In a remote and largely unexplored rainforest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), researchers have made an astounding discovery: a new monkey species. The new primate, which is name the lesula and described in a paper in the journal PLoS ONE, was first noticed by scientist and explorer, John Hart, in 2007. The discovery of a new primate species is rare nowadays. In fact, the lesula is only the second newly discovered monkey in Africa in the past 28 years.
Idle

Submission + - Venezuelan poodle moth becomes Internet sensation (mongabay.com)

Submitted by rhettb
rhettb writes: A white moth from Venezuela that bears a striking resemblance to a poodle has become an Internet sensation, after cryptozoologist Karl Shuker posted about the bizarre-looking species on his blog. Photographed in 2009 in Venezulea's Canaima National Park in the Gran Sabana region by zoologist Arthur Anker from Kyrgyzstan, the white, cuddly-looking moth with massive black eyes has yet to be identified and could be a species still unknown to science.
Science

Submission + - Bird uses hurricane winds to accelerate flight speed to 100 MPH (mongabay.com) 1

Submitted by terrancem
terrancem writes: Migrating Whimbrels — a type of shorebird — may struggle for hours against winds when trying to cross the Caribbean during hurricane season but get a huge boost as they fly out of storms, report researchers from the Center for Conservation Biology in Williamsburg, Virginia. Ahead of a large tropical storm last year scientists attached satellite transmitters to one female Whimbrel. The American Bird Conservancy explains what they found: "She took 27 hours averaging just 9 mph to fly non-stop through the storm to get to the center; then she flew at an average of almost 100 mph for 1.5 hours out the back end, using the power of the storm to 'slingshot' her towards land."
Biotech

Submission + - Lance Armstrong and the Science of Drug Testing 1

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "As the media reports that that seven-time Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong says he will no longer fight doping charges by the US Anti-Doping Agency which will strip him of his titles and ban him from competitive cycling for life, Tracee Hamilton writes that the Lance Armstrong vs. U.S. Anti-Doping Agency fight is a tough one in which to take a side, because to believe USADA means suspending belief in the science of drug testing. "If you take personalities out of the equation, you’re left with pee in a cup and blood in a syringe," writes Hamilton. "Armstrong never failed a drug test. He was tested in competition, out of competition. He was tested at the Olympics, at the Tour de France, at dozens if not hundreds of other events. And he never failed a test." Instead Travis Tygart, chief executive officer of the USADA, gathered a group of people who swear they saw Armstrong doping. "If the results can be discarded in favor of testimony, then let’s go right to the testimony phase and quit horsing around with blood and urine." There has been no trial, no due process, but in the minds of many, that testimony outweighs the results of hundreds of drug tests. "I don’t know if Armstrong did the things he’s accused of doing, and neither do you," concludes Hamilton adding that it can't work both ways. "Either a drug test is the standard, or it isn’t.""
Education

Submission + - Iran to Ban Women from Science and Engineering Classes (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by jasper160
jasper160 writes: An August 20th, 2012 announcement from Iran places restrictions on female university students. Iran will be cutting 77 fields of study from the female curriculum, making them male-only fields. Science and engineering are among those affected by the decree. The announcement came soon after the release of statistics showing that women were graduating in far higher numbers than men from Iranian universities and were scoring overall better than men, especially in the sciences.

Senior clerics in Iran's theocratic regime have become concerned about the social side-effects of rising educational standards among women.
Idle

Submission + - Rare 'penis snake' exposed in Brazil with new dam (mongabay.com)

Submitted by terrancem
terrancem writes: A creature discovered by engineers building a dam in the Amazon is a type of caecilian, a limbless amphibian that resembles an earthworm or as some are noting, part of the male anatomy. The animal was discovered while draining a portion of the Madeira River — a major tributary of the Amazon — for a controversial hydroelectric project. Six individuals were found according to biologist Julian Tupan, who identified the species as Atretochoana eiselti. Little else is known about the species.
Idle

Submission + - Scientists name 7000th amphibian, up from 4000 in 1987 (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: The number of amphibians described by scientists now exceeds 7,000, or roughly 3,000 more than were known just 25 years ago. A big boost to the effort has come from AmphibiaWeb, a project has sought to document every one of Earth's living frogs, salamanders, newts, and caecilians. But while new species are being discovered, others are disappearing — at least 150 species have gone extinct since the early 1980s.
Idle

Submission + - Jaguar vs sea turtle (mongabay.com)

Submitted by Damien1972
Damien1972 writes: At first, an encounter between a jaguar and a green sea turtle seems improbable, even ridiculous, but the two species do come into fatal contact every few years. Despite the surprising nature of such encounters, this behavior has been little studied. Now, a new study in Costa Rica's Tortuguero National Park has documented five years of jaguar attacks on marine turtles—and finds these encounters are not only more common than expected, but on the rise.
Businesses

Submission + - MS will remove OEM 'crapware' for $99 (zdnet.com)

Submitted by
walterbyrd
walterbyrd writes: "Microsoft even offers up numbers to show how detrimental this OEM-installed crapware is to your system. Microsoft claims that Signature systems start up 39 percent faster, go into sleep mode 23 percent faster, and resume from sleep a whopping 51 percent faster compared to their crapware-ladened counterparts. (A "Signature" system is one without crapware). But now, Microsoft will offer customers the opportunity to give their Windows 7 PC the Signature treatment by bringing it to a Microsoft Store and paying $99, according to the Wall Street Journal."

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