Nicobar Islands Declared As A World Biosphere Reserve By Unesco

The Unesco has designated India's Nicobar Islands as a world biosphere reserve under its Man and the Biosphere Programme.

LONDON: The highly threatened Nicobar islands of India - home to 1,800 animal species and some of the world's most endangered tribes, has now been designated as a world biosphere reserve.
The island is home to the indigenous Shompen people, semi-nomadic hunters living inland and the Nicobarese, who are coastal dwellers dependent on fishing and horticulture.

          The International Coordinating Council of Unesco's Man and the Biosphere Programme (MAB) which is meeting in Paris added 12 sites to the World Network of Biosphere Reserves on Thursday.
        Biosphere Reserves are sites chosen by the MAB programme to experiment with different approaches to the management of terrestrial, marine and coastal resources as well as fresh water.
They also serve as in situ laboratories for sustainable development.
The additions bring the total number of biosphere reserves to 621 in 117 countries.
      Talking about why the Nicobar Islands were chosen, Unesco said, "This island biosphere reserve, covering 103,870 hectares, is characterized by tropical wet evergreen forest. It is home to 200 species of meiofauna in the coastal zone. The 6,381 inhabitants derive a wide variety of biological resources from their environment such as medicinal plants and other non-timber forest products."
      The Ziarat Juniper forest of Pakistan too have been accorded the same status.
     It said "Pakistan's largest Juniper forest is located in this reserve. The juniper forest ecosystem is of inestimable value for biodiversity conservation. It is also of great ecological significance, providing local, regional and global benefits."
China hasn't been left behind.
       The 9,808 hectare Snake Island in the Laotie Mountain of China is home to the Gloydius shedaoensis, an endemic species of the Viperidae family, inscribed on the Chinese list of endangered species since 2004.
The venom of this snake has medicinal properties and hence been recognized by Unesco.
        The site also provides shelter to 307 bird species and ten million birds use it as stopover during migration.
Mont-Viso in France has also been deemed a world biosphere reserve.
        This is a glacial cirque surrounded by river valleys and high altitude lakes with a dry and sunny climate.
Terres de l'Ebre in Catalonia (Spain) is another biosphere reserve covering 367,729 hectares and has a population of 190,000.
Located in the Catalunya region, it includes the delta and watershed of the Ebro River, which is Spain's largest river in terms of volume.
       It has a large number of different ecosystems ranging from inland to coastal areas. The main part of the land is used for cattle. Alternative energy sources such as hydrological, solar and wind power, are being developed in the region, respecting biological conservation and landscape values.
         The other entries include Monteviso Area della Biosfera del Monviso (Italy), Real Sitio de San Ildefonso-El Espinar (Spain), Alakol (Kazakhstan), Gochang (Republic of Korea), Macizo de Cajas (Ecuador) and Marais Audomarois (France).

Arctic Current Flowed Under Deep Freeze Of Last Ice Age

        London:  Many scientists assumed that during the last ice age, when thick ice covered the Arctic, the deep currents below that feed the North Atlantic Ocean and help drive global ocean currents slowed or even stopped.
     But in a new study, researchers show that the deep Arctic Ocean has been churning briskly for the last 35,000 years, through the chill of the last ice age and warmth of modern times, suggesting that at least one arm of the system of global ocean currents that move heat around the planet has behaved similarly under vastly different climates.
 

       "The Arctic Ocean must have been flushed at approximately the same rate it is today regardless of how different things were at the surface," said study co-author Jerry McManus, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
      Researchers reconstructed Arctic circulation through deep time by measuring radioactive trace elements buried in sediments on the Arctic seafloor.

     Uranium eroded from the continents and delivered to the ocean by rivers, decays into sister elements thorium and protactinium. Thorium and protactinium eventually attach to particles falling through the water and wind up in mud at the bottom.
         By comparing expected ratios of thorium and protactinium in those ocean sediments to observed amounts, the authors showed that protactinium was being swept out of the Arctic before it could settle to the ocean bottom. From the amount of missing protactinium, scientists can infer how quickly the overlying water must have been flushed at the time the sediments were accumulating.

       "The water couldn't have been stagnant, because we see the export of protactinium," said the study's lead author, Sharon Hoffmann, a geochemist at Lamont-Doherty.

         The upper part of the modern Arctic Ocean is flushed by North Atlantic currents while the Arctic's deep basins are flushed by salty currents formed during sea ice formation at the surface.
"The study shows that both mechanisms must have been active from the height of glaciation until now," said Robert Newton, an oceanographer at Lamont-Doherty who was not involved in the research.

        "There must have been significant melt-back of sea ice each summer even at the height of the last ice age to have sea ice formation on the shelves each year. This will be a surprise to many Arctic researchers who believe deep water formation shuts down during glaciations," he added.

          The researchers analyzed sediment cores collected during the U.S.-Canada Arctic Ocean Section cruise in 1994, a major Arctic research expedition that involved several Lamont-Doherty scientists. In each location, the cores showed that protactinium has been lower than expected for at least the past 35,000 years. By sampling cores from a range of depths, including the bottom of the Arctic deep basins, the researchers show that even the deepest waters were being flushed out at about the same rate as in the modern Arctic.

            The only deep exit from the Arctic is through Fram Strait, which divides Greenland and Norway's Svalbard islands. The deep waters of the modern Arctic flow into the North Atlantic via the Nordic seas, contributing up to 40 percent of the water that becomes North Atlantic Deep Water-known as the "ocean's lungs" for delivering oxygen and salt to the rest of world's oceans.

The new study was published in Nature.

'Mars Rat' Spied By NASA's Curiosity Rover

Is That A Rat On Mars?

    A photo from the mast camera on NASA’s Curiosity Rover reveals the dusty orange, rock-strewn surface of the Red Planet -- and what starry-eyed enthusiasts claim is a dusty orange rodent hiding among the stones.

The patch of windblown sand and dust downhill from a cluster of dark rocks labeled the "Rocknest" site, where eagle-eyed believers think they've uncovered a "space rat." (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

        The photo, taken Sept. 28, 2012, depicts the “Rocknest” site, where NASA’s rover took a scoopful of sand, tasted it, and determined it was full of weathered basaltic materials -- not unlike Hawaii, the space agency’s scientists said last year.

A zoomed-in view of the "Rocksnest" spot; the patch of rocks in question is seen at the lower-left side. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

An even closer, zoomed-in view of the "Rocksnest" spot; the "rodent" is seen at the top left. 

 (NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS)

No word on how the rodent tasted, however.
   The “creature” was identified on the UFO Sightings Daily website, where its finder, ScottCWaring, held tight to his opinion: That’s one darn cute rodent on Mars.
     “Note its lighter color upper and lower eyelids, its nose and cheek areas, its ear, its front leg and stomach. Looks similar to a squirrel camouflaged in the stones and sand by its colors," he wrote. "Hey, who doesn't love squirrels, right?”


       Others pointed out that the similarity in coloring and position mean it was most likely just a rock, fingering the psychology phenomenon known as pareidolia, a propensity to pick out faces from everyday objects and structures.
        To take advantage of this psychological phenomenon closer to home, designers at Berlin's Informative studio developed an algorithm that scans the surface of the earth with Google Maps, picking out geographical structures that are likely to be construed as having face-like features, science blog iO9 recently pointed out.
Their algorithm found faces in fields, mustaches in mountains, hills with actual eyes.

Perhaps the algorithm should be turned loose on Mars?

The Robot Butler That Can Tend To Your Every Need - Even Predicting When You Want A Beer And Pouring It For You

• The Robot, Developed At Cornell University, Uses Kinect Sensors, 3D Cameras And A Database Of Videos To Work Out What Its Owner Wants
• In Tests, The Robot Correctly Anticipated Its Owner's Needs 82% Of The Time..

        A beer-pouring robot that can read your body movements and anticipate when you want another drink has been developed by American students. 

        Researchers from Cornell University used Microsoft Kinect sensors and 3D cameras to help the robot analyse its surroundings and identify its owner's needs.

      The robot then uses a database of videos showing 120 various household tasks to identify nearby objects, generate a set of possible outcomes and choose which action it should take - without being told.

           As the actions continue, the robot can constantly update and refine its predictions. 

         As well as fetching drinks for thirsty owners, the robot can also work out when its owner is hungry and put food in a microwave, tidy up, make cereal, fetch a toothbrush and toothpaste, open fridge doors and more.

               The Cornell robot uses sensors and a 3D camera to analyse the depth of its surroundings (left). The view seen by the robot in the right-hand picture shows how it anticipates its owner's actions. It compares the actions against a database of household task videos and chooses what it thinks is the most appropriate response. The more actions the robot carries out, the more accurate its decisions become.

The view seen by the robot in the above picture shows how it anticipates its owner's actions.

The Cornell robot uses sensors and a 3D camera to analyse the depth of its surroundings.

          Ashutosh Saxena, Cornell's professor of computer science and co-author of a new study tied to the research: 'We extract the general principles of how people behave.

     'Drinking coffee is a big activity, but there are several parts to it'.The robot builds a 'vocabulary' of such small parts that it can put together in various ways to recognise a variety of big activities.'