Sometimes it's the page A14 stories -- the ones that never see the light of cable news or take a second life in the blogosphere -- that tell you the most about what happened during any given year. From a naval alliance that could shift the military balance of power on two continents to a troubling security gap in the U.S. passport system to a brand-new way to circle the globe, these are the stories that never got the attention they deserved in 2009 but could dominate the conversation in 2010.
The Northeast Passage Opens for Business
The mythic Northwest Passage still captures imaginations, but this September, two German vessels made history by becoming the first commercial ships to travel from East Asia to Western Europe via the northeast passage between Russia and the Arctic. Ice previously made the route impassable, but thanks to rising global temperatures, it's now a cakewalk. "There was virtually no ice on most of the route," Capt. Valeriy Durov told the BBC. "Twenty years ago, when I worked in the eastern part of the Arctic, I couldn't even imagine something like this."
The significance of this development varies depending on whom you ask. The passage could be a gold mine for the commercial shipping industry, opening up a vastly shorter and cheaper route from Asia to Europe. But for environmentalists, the news is a sign that climate change may be reaching a dangerous tipping point.
Scientists' latest observations suggest that the Arctic might be largely ice-free during the summer within the next decade. The environmental consequences -- increased flooding in coastal regions around the world and extinction of local animal species -- are well known. But the thaw also opens possibilities for geopolitical competition. Russia has literally planted its flag beneath the Arctic ice, staking a claim to newly accessible natural resources, much to the consternation of the other northern states. The newly opened route will also benefit Russia by bringing new business to its eastern ports. With the scramble for the Arctic's riches heating up, even peaceful Canada has been holding war games to prepare for possible military confrontation.
Photo: istockphoto.com
Check the rest by following this link
| Ker Than for National Geographic News |
| June 08, 2009 |
| Under North America's second largest lake, robot-assisted archaeologists may have discovered prehistoric American camps and long "drive lanes" built to guide caribou to their deaths, a new study says (caribou pictures and facts). On what was once dry land, the structures likely date back 10,000 to 7,500 years. At the time, a vast land bridge divided what is now Lake Huron, researchers say (Lake Huron map). Now mussel- and algae-encrusted, the features were uncovered by sonar and underwater robots at depths ranging from 60 to 140 feet (18 to 43 meters). Walk This Way, Caribou One of the structures in the lake, which straddles Michigan and Ontario, Canada, appears to be a line of carefully placed rocks that stretches longer than a football field. The line resembles lanes still used by Arctic caribou hunters, according to the study. "An interesting behavioral trait of caribou is that they follow linear features," said University of Michigan archaeologist John O'Shea, who co-authored the new study, which will be published tomorrow in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "The hunters recognized this, and the drive lanes were a way of casually suggesting, Why don't you walk this way?" (Related: "Fewer Caribou Born as Warming Causes Missed Meals.") The drive lane may have been built by early North American settlers called Paleo-Americans—ancestors of later Native American tribes. The stone line is relatively straight but curves inward at one point. O'Shea thinks the curve may have been a hunting blind, where hunters waited to ambush animals as they approached. In addition to a drive lane, the scientists think they may have spotted camp sights and stacked stones, or cairns, that prehistoric Americans used to attract the caribou's attention. Today Arctic hunters use "cairns to lead the caribou onto the drive lines," O'Shea explained. The hunters "will sometimes attach ribbons to [cairns], and caribou are sufficiently curious that, when they see this, they want to come up and take a look." Huron Mystery to Be Solved This Summer? If the new finding is confirmed, it will be the first direct proof that Paleo-Americans living in the Great Lakes region hunted caribou on large scales like their counterparts farther north, said Michael Shott, a University of Akron anthropologist who was not involved in the study. But Shott is not yet completely convinced the structures are human-made. "The argument is a plausible one," he said. "But there may be natural processes that could produce both the large- and small-scale features." Study co-author O'Shea agreed that processes such as glacial scraping could have produced the rocky lines. The mystery, he said, could be resolved this summer, when scuba divers will examine the lake bottom. |
| © 1996-2008 National Geographic Society. All rights reserved. |
Un changement des "plus significatifs" selon l'analyse du marché de l'armement entre 2004 et 2008. Derrière la Chine (11%) et l'Inde (7%), les Emirats arabes unis (6%) se sont glissés de la sixième à la troisième place des plus grands importateurs d'armes conventionnelles dans un marché mondial en hausse de 21% selon l'Institut international de recherche pour la paix (SIPRI), dont le siège est à Stockholm.
Leurs importations concernent près de 80 avions de combat F-16E américains et une cinquantaine de Mirage-2000-9 français, selon le rapport. Selon cette étude, vu le nombre de commandes passées en 2008 les Emirats continueront d'être un importateur significatif dans les années à venir.
Quant aux Etats-Unis, ils restent le principal exportateur de matériel militaire (31%) devant la Russie (25%) dont les ventes sont en progression de 14% par rapport à la période d'analyse précédente du SIPRI, de 1999-2003. Selon l'étude, plus d'un tiers des exportations américaines (37%) ont été destinées à cette région depuis 2004. Israël a notamment acheté 102 avions F-16I.
Suivis à la troisième place par l'Allemagne (10%), puis par la France (8%) et la Grande-Bretagne (4%), précise l'institut. Concernant, le volume des exportations allemandes augmenté de 70% ces dix dernières années et, dans la même période, sa part dans les exportations mondiales est passée de 7% à 10%.
Par ailleurs, l'institut précise que "l'Iran n'a compté que pour 5% dans les exportations vers le Moyen-Orient", selon le SIPRI. L'Iran n'est que le 27ème importateur, juste devant l'Irak.
"Les dépenses militaires mondiales en 2007 sont estimées à 1339 milliards de dollars - une augmentation en données réelles de 6% par rapport à 2006 et de 45% depuis 1998. Cela correspond à 2,5% du PIB mondial, et à 202 dollars pour chaque habitant du monde. ", selon les chercheurs de l'institut Petter Stålenheim, Catalina Perdomo et Elisabeth Sköns.
latribune.fr
For the crow-like birds known as jackdaws, it's all in the eyes.
The species may be the only animal aside from humans known to understand the role of eyes in seeing and perceiving things, according to a new study.
While humans often use visual clues to communicate, it wasn't known whether other animals share this social ability.
(Related: "Revealed: How We Detect Fear in Others' Eyes.")
Jackdaw eyes, like those of humans, are unusually conspicuous, with dark pupils surrounded by silvery white irises.
The physical similarities hint that jackdaws use their eyes to communicate in the same ways humans do, said study leader Auguste von Bayern, a zoologist currently with the University of Oxford.
"We can communicate a lot via the eyes, and jackdaws do that as well, in my opinion," von Bayern said.
Now her study of hand-reared jackdaws shows that the birds—members of the same family as crows and ravens—can use a human's gaze to tell what that person is looking at.
"They are sensitive to human eyes because they are sensitive to their own species' eyes," von Bayern said.
By contrast, previous studies have shown that other animals regarded as intelligent, such as chimpanzees and dogs, find even their own species' eyes hard to read.
Conflict and Cooperation
Von Bayern conducted the jackdaw experiments while completing her Ph.D. at the University of Cambridge.
In one test, she and colleague Nathan Emery timed how long a jackdaw took to retrieve food if a person was also eyeing the prize.
They found that the birds took longer to retrieve the food if the human was unfamiliar—someone the bird apparently didn't trust.
The birds were equally sensitive to the gaze of a single eye, such as when the person looked at the food in profile or kept one eye closed.
This suggests the jackdaws made the decision to risk conflict solely based on eye motion and not on other cues, such as the direction a potential rival's head was facing.
In a second experiment, the birds were able to interpret a familiar human's altered eye gaze to "cooperate" to find food that was hidden from view.
The study authors add that more tests will be needed to tell if the birds were able to read eye movements based on their natural tendencies or if it is a learned behavior from being raised by humans.
Findings appear this month in the online issue of the journal Current Biology.
The time-honored tradition of the dinner date may be just one more example of evolution at work.
Wild male chimps that share meat with females double their chances of having sex with those females, a new study says. The findings support a long-held hypothesis that food sharing improves male chimpanzees' chances of mating.
Studies had long shown that male chimpanzees shared meat with females, which don't typically hunt. The reason for the meat sharing, however, was a mystery—though perhaps not too tough to guess.
Males observed in the West African nation ofCôte d'Ivoire (Ivory Coast) shared monkey meat with females that exhibited the pink swellings on their rear ends that indicate ovulation and sexual availability. (Related: "Butts, Faces Help Chimps Identify Friends.")
More surprising was that males shared meat with females that didn't have sexual swellings, perhaps in hopes of future success, the researchers say.
The sex "may not necessarily occur immediately—it could occur sometime in the future," said study co-author Cristina M. Gomes, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Germany.
Meat is generally a rare treat for chimps, whose diet consists mainly of fruits and vegetables.
Evolution at Work?
The findings could shed light on our own evolutionary origins, researchers said.
Studies of human hunter-gatherer societies have long shown that skillful hunters have more offspring and wives. But scientists are divided on how, or whether, hunting skills and mating success were connected.
The fact that the chimp males also shared meat with females not in heat could also add new fire to the debate about chimpanzees' cognitive abilities, experts add. That's because the research might suggest that chimps can anticipate future interactions or remember interactions they had in the past.
Findings published April 7 by the journal PLoS ONE.
April 7, 2009—In just a short time, one of the rarest sharks in the world went from swimming in Philippinewaters to simmering in coconut milk.
The 13-foot-long (4-meter-long) megamouth shark (pictured), caught on March 30 by mackerel fishers off the city of Donsol, was only the 41st megamouth shark ever found, according to WWF-Philippines.
Fishers brought the odd creature—which died during its capture—to local project manager Elson Aca of WWF, an international conservation nonprofit.
Aca immediately identified it as a megamouth shark and encouraged the fishers not to eat it.
But the draw of the delicacy was too great: The 1,102-pound (500-kilogram) shark was butchered for a shark-meat dish called kinuout.
"While it is sad that this rare megamouth shark was ultimately lost, the discovery highlights the incredible biodiversity found in the Donsol area and the relatively good health of the ecosystem," Yokelee Lee, WWF-US program officer for the Coral Triangle, said in an email.
The Coral Triangle, which spans Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Solomon Islands, and Timor-Leste (East Timor), is home to the richest concentration of marine life—including iridescent corals—in the world, according to WWF.
"It is essential that we continue working with the government and local community on the sustainable management of Donsol's fisheries resources for the benefit of whale sharks, megamouth sharks, and the local community," Lee said.
The megamouth shark species, discovered in 1976 off Oahu, Hawaii, was so bizarre that scientists had to create a new family and genus to classify it. With its giant mouth but tiny teeth, megamouth, like the whale shark, is a filter feeder that preys on tiny animals and appears to be no danger to humans.
Only 40 megamouth sharks, including 7 in the Philippines, have been found since the initial discovery. The shark is so rare that the International Union for Conservation of Nature lists the megamouth species as "data deficient."
(Related shark pictures: "Rare "Prehistoric" Shark Photographed Alive".)
Scientists who examined Megamouth 41—the Philippine specimen's official name, bestowed by the Florida Museum of Natural History—before it was eaten found facial scars from past run-ins with gill nets. The shark's last meal was shrimp larvae.
Other shark species in Donsol are valued for conservation rather than consumption: The region hosts a successful ecotourism project that allows people to swim with whale sharks, according to WWF.
—Christine Dell'Amore
Articles
Commentaires
