DAILY QUICK READ - MAY 30, 2016

Perhaps the pitch for a new horror movie.   

"The Swarm That Ate Haverfordwest"

When Carol Howarth parked her Mitsubishi in the town of Haverfordwest, Wales, to do some shopping, little did she know the mayhem that would ensue.

While she attended to her errands, a swarm of 20,000 bees was drawn to her car. A local man, Tom Moses, saw the buzzing hubbub and concerned that the bees might be poorly handled, called in a team of beekeepers.

With the beekeepers on the job, by the time Howarth returned the situation appeared to be resolved.

But, no. The swarm kept her in their sights and managed to track her down.

"The next day I realized that some of the bees had followed me home,” she said. So she summoned the beekeepers, who arrived ready for rescue.

The bees had a motive.

Rats can't vomit.  

They have been know to induce that response in humans.

Biologically, a rat is unable to vomit because of a powerful and effective gastroesophageal barrier, research shows. This barrier consists of crural sling, the esophageal sphincter, and the intra-abdominal esophagus. Researchers found that the pressure at the two ends of this barrier is greater than the pressure found in the thorax during any phase of the breathing cycle. This pressure, thus, makes it impossible for rats to reflux.

While they do lack the ability to vomit, an integral part of many species’ defence mechanisms against toxins, rats seem to have adapted by strengthening their first line of defence. Researchers note that rats have a very keen sense of smell and taste and will easily avoid foods which might cause a vomiting response in other species. Some speculate that vomiting has become redundant and lost over time because rats seem to avoid dangers at the hand of toxins so well. Alternatively, rats developed a hyper-sensitive food avoidance to compensate for the inability to vomit. It’s clear at the moment which came first.

Evolution is a incredible thing.

GLTFCA 

Conservation is costly and it takes time.  What are we willing to do to save wildlife?  Expanding the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area(GLTFCA) is critical to sustaining wildlife diversity in Southern Africa.

When researcher Kristoffer Everatt spotted a movement in the grass while conducting field work in Banhine National Park in Mozambique in July 2015, he wasn’t sure what it was. Stalking carefully towards the unknown animal, he finally parted the grass to stare into the eyes a beautiful black-maned lion crouched about 4metres away.

“We stared at each other for a few heart-pounding seconds until I took the plunge and bluff charged him! He turned away and ran off growling his displeasure into the bush. He had just killed an aardvark and hadn’t yet begun to eat. I was so pleased to find him there, in south-western Banhine eating wild meat,” shared Everatt.

The 7000 square kilometre park in Mozambique’s northern Gaza Province was proclaimed in 1973. Along with Zinave and Limpopo national parks in Mozambique, Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe and the Kruger National Park in South Africa, it is part of the Greater Limpopo Transfrontier Conservation Area (GLTFCA).

What will it take to restore these parks?

“Funding and plenty of it,” says van Lente. “As Mozambique is one of the poorest nations in the world, there is a lot of competition for funding. As such, “parks like Banhine and Zinave will be dependent on external funding for a long, long time”.

This is kind of a big deal.

Daniel G. Nocera, the Harvard professor who made headlines five years ago when he unveiled an artificial leaf, recently unveiled his latest work: an engineered bacteria that converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into alcohols and biomass. One can be used directly as fuel to power vehicles that run on conventional fuels, while the other can be burned for energy.

According to a Forbes report, a one-liter reactor packed with Ralston e. can capture 500 liters of CO2 per day and produce around 2 kilowatt-hour of energy. Because the fuel is destined to be burned, the captured CO2 is returned back to the atmosphere. Being technically carbon-neutral, the resulting fuel is more environmentally friendly than conventional fuels based on petroleum or corn-derived ethanol which has a questionably positive carbon life cycle.