Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Paris bookstore disappear

The booksellers has been a staple of Parisian culture for centuries, known as a go-to supply exhausted or unusual reading material - but their life is threatened.

An office with a view

One of the most important monuments of Paris are the famous bookshops: booksellers who sell their products every day along the River Seine. Bargaining dates to 1400, the booksellers have been known for centuries as a go-to source for reading material exhausted or rare among locals and travelers who come here to find titles like in Vagrant author Colette biting and controversial or the first edition of the French comic strip The Mischievous Lili, from the early 1900s and has never been reissued. The cultivation of about 20 vendors at the turn of the 17th century, there are now about 240 booksellers in Paris. Their traditional green wooden boxes that dot both banks of the Seine, the Musée d'Orsay in the Arab World Institute, with the highest concentration is at the entrance of the Latin Quarter, home of the famous Sorbonne University. (Credit: Nick Kozak)

The traveller challenge (Credit: Credit: Nick Kozak)

The traveller challenge

But even with 240 vendors lining the banks, competition does not come often in close positions. The 'booksellers biggest challenge over the past 20 years has been the proliferation of e-readers and Internet access, reducing sales of books and make materials outside the print easier to find. To offset declining sales, many have resorted to booksellers supplement their income with memories, which are technically permitted under the regulations of the city that allows the sale of commercial products from four green boxes is assigned to each vendor. But the movement did not sit well with some of the Items population, triggering a debate between suppliers in about what can and can not sell - and it will change a tradition that has been a staple of the Parisian culture. (Credit: Nick Kozak)

The price of growth (Credit: Credit: Nick Kozak)

Price growth

At the end of 1980, Jean-Pierre Mathias left his job as professor of philosophy to become a bookseller. "When I came to my store, I started selling my old books ... I liked the idea of following the philosophy here without having to be a teacher," he said. Mathias only sells books and engravings; He refused to comply with the increasing number of foreign tourists selling souvenirs. "For me, a book will always be a book, and people who love books continue to buy them. The theater did not disappear with the beginning of the film, "he says with a big smile (Credit: Nick Kozak).

From comics to keychains (Credit: Credit: Nick Kozak)

From comics to keychains

Robert Francis was selling comics in his shop for over 35 years. At first, he said, people came to him, if you were looking for a particular comic story. If you do not, then they do online would. Now it is the opposite: they only come if they can not find online. To compensate, Robert memorabilia collection - including ubiquitous statues Eiffel Tower - has increased in recent years. As residents still come to buy a book or two, he said most of his customers are abroad and are more likely to buy his memories of his comics, which are mainly written in French. (Credit: Nick Kozak)

A job with benefits (Credit: Credit: Nick Kozak)

A job with benefits

Items Each is required to maintain their boxes, but beyond that, the work has a lot of freedom. Merchants can set their own hours of light (the stalls are locked once the sun sets); choose the reading material they want to sell; and spend the day enjoying the best views of Paris. Yet many booksellers believe that the city should do more to support tradition as lower sales. One suggestion is that the sellers of electricity installed so it can expand its hours of the night. (Credit: Nick Kozak)

Standing strong (Credit: Credit: Nick Kozak)

Standing strong

Bernard Carver entered the business of selling rare books, 20 years after the arrival of Lebanon without much money. Soon he began living on the streets, he said, and chose comfort in books instead of alcohol. Passion, it binds with certain booksellers. To sell their products, he said, you must be familiar with, boasting that he read everything on your shelf. But even that did not stop the decline in sales, and expressed his anger to the proliferation of sold trinkets. Some marketers have even added folding tables in front of their stalls to expand its collection of memories - a tactic not covered by the regulations of the city. (Credit: Nick Kozak)

A creative solution (Credit: Credit: Nick Kozak)

A creative solution

Many booksellers selling trinkets made in China, including the Eiffel Tower key chains and mugs I love Paris. One of the young traders, George Roman, chose instead to sell antique prints ads created by him and his father, and paintings by students of the prestigious Ecole des Beaux-Arts, conveniently located just behind his store. Therefore, he said, he can sell souvenirs that are made both in France and linked to local culture - a solution, perhaps, taking the best of both worlds. (Credit: Nick Kozak

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Hippos, bears and lions run wild after flood hits zoo in Georgia

(Image: Beso Gulashvili/Georgian Prime Minister's Press Service/EPA)

No you're not seeing things, that really is a hippo strolling down the road. After a major flood in Tbilisi, Georgia, on Sunday, which killed 12 people, several parts of the city zoo were destroyed, allowing animals to escape and take to the streets. Three zoo workers were among the dead.

The hippo was later shot with a tranquiliser dart while several other runaways were killed because of safety concerns, including six wolves, a boar, a tiger, a lion and a hyena.

City authorities were on the lookout for 32 predators. Many monkeys and a few lions were reported missing.

(Image: Beso Gulashvili/Georgian Prime Minister's Press Service/EPA)

A bear was spotted balancing on a windowsill (see picture, above). It was among eight bears that took to the streets after their enclosure was demolished. Rescuers in an inflatable boat gathered below to try to help the animal.

Residents were asked not to leave their homes, but there have been no reports of animal attacks so far. Police have been using helicopters, as well as searching the city on foot, to hunt down the escapees.

The flood occurred after strong winds and heavy rain hit the city, causing the Vere river to overflow. Models are predicting that extreme floods will increase dramatically in the coming decades because of climate change.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

Polar bear caught eating dolphins and freezing the leftovers

(Image: © Samuel Blanc / www.sblanc.com)

They're two of the world's most loved animals - but there's little love between them.

Jon Aars of the Norwegian Polar Institute and his colleagues have made the first ever observations of polar bears eating white-beaked dolphins that had ventured too far north – in fact, they saw this happen several times last year.

The first incident was in late April 2014. Collecting data in Svalbard, Norway, Aars's team stumbled across a bear with two dead white-beaked dolphins, a species no one had ever seen the bears preying upon before.

"We think the bear killed them, [using] a similar technique as killing seals," says Aars. He thinks it probably caught the two dolphins when, trapped below the sea ice, they found a small hole and surfaced for air.

The bear, pictured below, had already eaten most of the first dolphin but couldn't finish all of its catch in one sitting. So it made use of the natural freezer, storing a second dolphin – still largely intact – under the snow for a later snack, presumably.

(Image: Jon Aars/Norwegian Polar Institute)

Hiding leftover food is a rare behaviour in polar bears. "We think he caught the second dolphin because he could, and then had extra food later," says Aars.

Subsequently, the team came across at least five other polar bears feeding on dead dolphins in the same area.

"We were surprised as dolphins have not been reported in that area before," says Aars. The explanation could be that the Svalbard waters were unusually warm at the time, and that a pod of dolphins had become trapped there when strong northerly winds had pushed them out of open water and in among the ice.

Ian Stirling of the University of Alberta in Canada is not surprised that the bears decided to feast on dolphin meat: polar bears are known to be opportunistic predators, and have been recorded eating many different animals.

"They will eat any marine mammal given a chance," he says. "The bigger surprise was that the dolphins were entrapped before they could migrate south for the winter."

As the climate warms, Stirling believes the sight of polar bears tucking into weird meals could become more common. Polar bears are "willing to take and use anything possible when available", he says.

Journal reference: Polar Research, DOI: 10.3402/polar.v34.26612

19th-century champagne haul shows seabed is perfect wine cooler

"Animal notes" and "wet hair" were the terms used to describe 170-year-old champagne hauled up from the bottom of the Baltic Sea in 2010. We now have chemical confirmation that the wine had aged well, but the mystery over how it got there is even murkier.

When the 163 bottles were recovered from 50 metres beneath the waves, seals on the corks showed that the wine had come from champagne houses Veuve Clicquot, Ponsardin, Heidsieck and Juglar (renamed Jacquesson & Fils in 1829). They were estimated to be between 170 and 180 years old.

Three of the Veuve Clicquot bottles were tasted by oenologists – on first opening they described the champagne as "sometimes cheesy", with "animal notes" and elements of "wet hair".

Swirling the champagne around in a glass to oxygenate it softened the flavours, which were then deemed to be grilled, spicy, smoky and leathery with fruity and floral notes.

Philippe Jeandet of the University of Reims Champagne-Ardenne, France, and his colleagues later got their hands on 2-millilitre samples from each bottle, which they ran through a detailed chemical analysis. This showed that the wine had been aged in wooden barrels, probably for six to eight months. That's consistent with documents left behind by Madame Clicquot, and different from the vineyard's modern practice of making its champagne in steel containers.

Mysterious destination

Traces of copper and iron came either from iron nails in the wooden barrels or iron instruments used during the winemaking, but did not spoil the wine.

The location of the bottles suggested they were on their way from Germany to Russia when they sank, sometime during the early 1800s. Russians at the time liked their bubbly very sweet – Madame Clicquot's notes mention that it was common practice in Russia to have a small bowl of sugar on the table to spoon into their wine. To cater to this market Clicquot made special extra-sweet batches for them.

So, if the Baltic bottles had been intended for Russia, they should have contained extra sugar. Jeandet and his colleagues found that while they were sweeter than modern bottles, they were nowhere near sweet enough for that market. They think they must have been destined for German tables, but admit that makes it difficult to explain why their ship was sailing through the northern Baltic.

"Overall, our analysis confirms that this champagne has kept the intrinsic characteristics of what a champagne is," says Jeandet. "This is fantastic, to observe that after 200 years of ageing at bottom of the sea."

Expensive taste

The conditions that the bottles were preserved in – complete darkness and a constant temperature between 2 ºC and 4 ºC – were ideal for wine ageing, he adds.

"Considering that these champagnes had been aged underwater for 170 years, they were amazingly well preserved," says Patrick McGovern, who studies the history of food and alcohol production at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. "[They are] testimony to human innovation in producing fermented beverages, which were central to human cultures around the world."

To commemorate the find, last year Veuve Clicquot sank 300 bottles and 50 magnums of champagne near where the 170-year-old bottles were found, inside a specially designed cage.

Jeandet says the experiment is mostly a marketing ploy. "I'm sure it will not change the taste of the wine but people will be proud to put it on their table and say, 'ho! You know this bottle has spent six years under the sea'. I know there are a lot of people ready to pay a lot of money for these bottles."

The 170-year-old champagne bottles are some of the oldest ever to have been tasted. In 2009, Perrier-Jouet opened an 1825 vintage from its cellars: at the time of tasting it was 184 years old and still tasted fine, with notes of truffles and caramel.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1500783112

Correction, 21 April 2015: When this article was first published on 20 April 2015, the title prematurely aged the Champagne by a century. This has now been corrected.

Carbon dioxide could be turned into a huge underground battery

What if we transformed carbon dioxide from being a waste product into being a huge battery to help even out our energy supply? We could make carbon storage pay off, while solving problems of intermittent energy supply from renewables.

So say Tom Buscheck from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and his colleagues who presented a design for this type of energy storage at the European Geosciences Union general assembly last week in Vienna, Austria.

Their design would be able to store the excess energy produced by renewable and conventional power sources when demand is low and, at the same time, lock up the major cause of global warming – carbon dioxide.

Carbon capture and storage has been slow to develop, in part because it is an extra cost for energy producers that provides little direct pay-off. "There's no business case to do it," says Jim Underschultz from the University of Queensland in Australia.

"CCS hasn't been utilised because no one has come up with a viable use for that storage," says Buscheck. But if stored CO₂ could be used to hold surplus energy, it may give such technology the economic boost it needs.

"The only way you can decarbonise the fossil-fuel energy systems is if you can devise an approach where the economics makes sense," says Buscheck, who thinks their design, which is funded by the Geothermal Technologies Office at the US Department of Energy, does just that.

Supercritical storage

Buscheck's team proposes storing that excess energy in two forms: pressure and heat. Excess electricity would power a pump that injects supercritical CO₂ – a hybrid state of liquid and gas – into underground brine in sedimentary rocks between 1 and 5 kilometres below the surface. Supercritical CO₂ can drive turbines much more efficiently than steam and can take a lot of squeezing and heating – improving its capacity to store energy.

Another set of pipes tap into the brine in the sedimentary rocks. As the CO₂ is pumped in, it will displace some brine, which is collected at the surface. Surplus energy can also be used to heat the brine and circulate it down into the deep rocks, which are able to store the heat effectively.

When the heated brine comes into contact with the CO₂, it causes it to expand, thereby increasing the pressure of the stored CO₂. The heat energy can be gathered by allowing the CO₂ to depressurise, spinning supercritical CO₂ turbines, which are 50 per cent more efficient than the steam equivalent. The team's modelling suggests that the system could regather up to 96 per cent of the heat stored.

Their approach could help solve a major problem with renewables: intermittent power. Solar and wind can fail to produce power when there is high demand. Similarly, sometimes they produce plenty of energy when demand is lower, and in this case, sources like nuclear, coal and older gas power stations can produce energy at a loss, or simply waste the heat they produce, never turning it into electricity.

The massive batteries that would be required to store the excess are still expensive and not very effective. Storing the energy by using it to pump water uphill – a current state of the art – can also waste a quarter of the energy in the process.

Getting bigger and better

"There is no doubt in my mind that we need to consider hybrid technologies of the sort proposed here," says Peter Cook from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He says the proposal takes a lot of existing ideas and integrates them in a new way, meaning that most of the technology is already proven.

But while this could contribute to reducing atmospheric carbon dioxide, it is unlikely to become a major carbon sink, says Cook.

One site could only store about 8 million tonnes of CO₂ each year for 30 years – about the same amount as produced in one big coal-fired power station, says Buscheck, whose group is now looking for power companies to partner with on a pilot project.

Whether it is possible to scale-up the design remains to be seen, say Cook and Undershultz. Given its complexity, Undershultz says that costs and inefficiencies could add up as they scale it up. And Stuart Haszeldine from the University of Edinburgh, UK, says it would require a really good knowledge of geology to ensure carbon is sealed and does not escape.

Correction 21 April 2015: When this article was first published on 20 April 2015, the depth at which supercritical CO₂ would be stored was wrong. This has now been corrected.

Virus hiding in our genome protects early human embryos

We may owe our survival and complexity to a stowaway virus that springs to life in the very first cells of human embryos. Not only does the virus seem to protect embryos from other viruses, but it also assists genes when the groundwork is under way for the body plan of a new human.

The finding backs the controversial idea that viruses which took up residence in our DNA millions of years ago may be playing the role of puppet master, quietly influencing our existence and evolution. "We are creatures controlled by viruses," says Luis Villarreal of the University of California at Irvine.

Retroviruses insert their genetic material into the cells of their human or animal host. At first, this causes disease and death. Over time, however, the host evolves resistance to the virus, allowing any DNA that has embedded itself into sperm or egg cells to be passed down to the next generation. The virus is now known as an endogenous retrovirus or ERV – a permanent fixture in the host's genome.

Silent protector

About 9 per cent of our genome is thought to have come about this way. Until recently, these viral relics were largely dismissed as inactive "junk" that ceased to have any impact on their host many thousands of years ago. The discovery that HERVK, the most recent ERV to make itself at home in our DNA – probably around 200,000 years ago – is active in human embryos challenges that notion.

Joanna Wysocka and her colleagues at Stanford University in California made the unexpected find while they were analysing gene activity in 3-day-old human embryos, which are bundles of eight cells. Besides DNA from the parents, they found genetic material from HERVK. "The cells were full of viral protein products, some of which had assembled to form viral-like particles," says Wysocka.

Further experiments revealed that the virus appears to produce a protein that prevents other viruses penetrating the embryo, suggesting it protects the embryo from dangerous circulating viruses, such as influenza. It also seems to play a crucial role in the genetic activity of the embryonic cells, helping to genetic instructions to the cellular protein factories.

Biological dark matter

Tantalisingly, the stowaway virus might even provide clues to what makes us different from chimpanzees and other non-human primates. Some researchers have previously argued that ERVs may play a key role in how species diverge from each other, by activating different body plans and gene networks that may give one individual an edge over other members of the species.

Wysocka's work backs up this idea, says Patrick Forterre of the Pasteur Institute in Paris. "It shows that the protein products of a relatively 'recent' retrovirus integration are present very early on in the embryo, and could be involved in some critical developmental programmes." The observation that ERVs could also protect the embryo against infection also makes a lot of sense, he says Forterre. "It's as if retroviruses are competing with each other via their human host."

Despite being ubiquitous, viruses are often called the dark matter of biology as their influence frequently goes unnoticed. If DNA is a jungle, then the viruses are the animals and plants that live and adapt within it, says Villarreal, who in 2001 showed that the presence of a viral gene is essential for the formation of the human placenta. "DNA is the habitat, and the viruses are the inhabitants," he says. The most influential viruses are those, like HERVK, that have inserted themselves permanently into our DNA and can be passed on to the next generation.

These viruses have the genetic tools to refashion the hosts' genes, influencing which are active and when, and with which other genes they interact. This means they have the ability to reshape the physical characteristics of their hosts, says Villarreal. "It's a massive dynamic pool of colonising genomes."

Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature14308

Transcribing tricks ushers in the golden age of juggling

Video: Jugglers use mathematics to create new tricks

Circus Geeks: Beta Testing, Udderbelly at Southbank Centre, London, Tuesday 26 May 2015–Sunday 21 Jun 2015

In a gigantic upside-down purple cow – a tent that houses Udderbelly, an annual 8-week festival of comedy, circus and family entertainment on London's Southbank – Jon Udry stands on stage, empty-handed and perfectly still, juggling nothing whatsoever.

"This is very a useful technique," insists his partner-in-crime, Arron Sparks. You'll see when we come to do three-ball patterns later on."

This impromptu juggling class from the company Circus Geeks is probably not the most useful I've ever seen, but it promises to be the funniest. Their Beta Testing is a juggling show, TED talk and Royal Society lecture, rolled into one, and between the gags it does actually deliver on its promise, revealing the science and mathematics underpinning the modern juggling scene.

Juggling has probably been around since a bunch of primates let go of their branches and wondered what to do with their hands. And yet this venerable entertainment is being transformed out of all recognition by recent technology.

Online video has made a huge difference: "When I started," Sparks says, "there were bootleg VHS cassette tapes going round of all the old Soviet jugglers performing their classic 7-minute routines. It was all you ever saw of them, and we'd pass the tapes from hand to hand as we all tried to replicate this incredibly hard juggling. Now, thanks to the internet, moves can spread much more easily. You never come across just one video: inevitably seven kids have already posted their own versions and explorations of what you've just seen. It's probably a golden era of juggling at the moment."

Write and remember

Another key technology is notation. Bizarrely, for an activity so mathematical and so rhythmical, no one seems to have even proposed that routines should be written down before the juggler Dave Storer started noodling around with musical notation in 1978.

Three years later the American cryptographer Claude Shannon (widely considered the father of information theory) began writing an article called "Scientific Aspects of Juggling" for Scientific American, but he never finished it.

A coherent and simple way to note down and communicate juggling routines was finally discovered in 1985, not once but twice. Undergraduates Bruce Tiemann and Bengt Magnusson at the California Institute of Technology turned some notes by Paul Klimek of the University of California, Santa Cruz, into a working system they called Siteswap. At the same time in Cambridge, UK, mathematicians Mike Day, Colin Wright, and Adam Chalcraft hit upon an identical scheme.

Siteswap is a way of transcribing juggling patterns in numbers. "Things get interesting when you combine new numbers together," Sparks says. "The number 531, for example, describes a pattern where one ball is being re-thrown every five beats and one ball is being re-thrown every three beats and one ball is being thrown every one beat. And we can combine all these different techniques to create new juggling patterns."

Give me a 63141

Novel patterns have been discovered just by experimenting with the notation. Edward Carstens of the University of Missouri in Columbia has developed a version of Siteswap called MHN (multiple hand notation), which codifies tricks performed by any number of jugglers in unison.

"It's a really easy way to communicate juggling patterns," Sparks enthuses. "You can say to someone across the other side of the world, 'Can you do 63141 in flats with the juggling clubs?' and they can understand you straight away."

The arrival of Siteswap notation saw juggling flourish as a mathematical and physical pastime in colleges and universities worldwide. The wonder is that no one thought of it before.

Today the ability to codify, communicate and repeat human movements is an essential tool in the entertainment industry: games, films and TV all rely on it. But as this timeline on figuring out how we move reveals, the way we move has proved the very devil to write down.

Zoologger: Decorator crabs accessorise to avoid being eaten

Zoologger is our weekly column highlighting extraordinary animals – and occasionally other organisms – from around the world

Love the, er, hair extensions (Image: Birgitte Wilms/Minden Pictures/Corbis)

Species: Decorator crabs (superfamily Majoidea)
Habitat: Shallow waters worldwide

If there's one thing we have in common with these crabs, it's our keen sense of fashion. Many of us love to don new clothes, wear jewellery or get tattoos and piercings.

So it is with the decorator crabs. About three-quarters of over 900 species of crab in the family Majoidea decorate themselves, making them perhaps nature's most fashion-conscious animal.

Although not the only animals known to decorate themselves, the crabs are the most well-researched group, according to a study reviewing such behaviours.

They improvise accessories using whatever is around, grabbing items such as seaweed, corals and sponges, and sticking them on their shells. Everything stays in place thanks to the hooked hairs, called setae, which line their shells and act like Velcro.

Blending in

But while we adorn ourselves to be noticed, crabs do it for the opposite reason: the decorations often provide camouflage against predators like fish and octopuses. Against the proper background, a decorator crab can blend in perfectly.

"The nice thing about being a decorator is that wherever you go, you can pull off the old decoration and stick on something new and quickly adapt yourself to whatever environment surrounds you," says John J. Stachowicz, an ecologist at the University of California, Davis. "If you're a slow-moving, roving animal, being able to quickly adopt the coloration or background of wherever you are is likely very adaptive."

For instance, the yellowline arrow crab (Stenorhynchus seticornis) tears a piece of seaweed in its claws and then chews it to make it rougher and more likely to catch on its shell. It backs up the camouflage by remaining still during the day and freezing when predators approach.

Repellent dress sense

Other decorator crabs are picky: any old outfit won't do. They go for materials that are chemically noxious or otherwise repugnant to predators.

"They are selecting decorations that make them toxic or bad to eat," says Stachowicz.

The long-legged spider crab (Macropodia rostrata) and the longnose spider crab (Libinia dubia), for example, cover their shells with toxic seaweed. Stachowicz says you can trick these crabs into donning just about anything if you extract a chemical that fish find repellent from their preferred seaweed and paint it on to materials that they normally don't use.

Yet others adorn themselves with stinging sea anemones. Predators might be able to detect the crabs, but will avoid attacking them.

Like all crustaceans, decorator crabs must shed their shells in order to grow, but they will often recycle their decorations after they moult. Carefully removing all the seaweed, anemones, sponges and other accessories from their old shell, they attach them to the new one when it hardens.

But some species outgrow the urge to accessorise altogether, possibly because they have fewer predators once they reach a certain size.

Journal reference: Royal Society Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2015.0325

Colossal squid vs huge toothfish – clash of the deep-sea titans

Would make some epic calamari (Image: New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries)

You wouldn't want to get caught between these two sea monsters. This pair of massive deep-water foes are waging war in Antarctic waters, and it's eat or be eaten.

Given it weighs up to half a tonne and measures more than 2.5 metres in length without taking into account its long tentacles, we know surprisingly little about the colossal squid.

It was first identified in 1925 based on remains found in the stomach of a sperm whale. But other than it being whale food and living in the deep seas of Antarctica, "literally nothing is known about the colossal squid," says Vladimir Laptikhovsky of the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science in Suffolk, UK.

Now Laptikhovsky and his team have revealed one of the squid's secrets – they seem to have a taste for the Antarctic toothfish, another deep-water giant.

The squid's nemesis (Image: Rob Robbins/USAP)

Like the colossal squid, the Antarctic toothfish is a predator that usually lives in eternal darkness, somewhere between 1 and 2 kilometres below the ocean surface. They can grow up to 2 metres in length and can live to be 40 years old. "It is a voracious predator that feeds on different fish, squid and shrimps," says Laptikhovsky.

Colossal squid have occasionally been observed attacking and feeding on Antarctic toothfish as they were being hauled in by fishers. Now Laptikhovsky and his colleagues have shown that, far from this being a rare occurrence, colossal squid regularly attack Antarctic toothfish.

They examined more than 8000 toothfish caught by fishing vessels between 2011 and 2014. The team found that 71 toothfish showed clear signs of colossal squid attack – scratches made by the squid's suckers and hooks, and deeper wounds gouged by its beak.

"You should see the other guy" (Image: A.V.Remeslo)

"Taking into account the size of adult squid, the toothfish probably is its most common prey species, because no other deep-sea fish of similar size are available around the Antarctic," says Laptikhovsky.

But the toothfish do seem to get their revenge. The team also found the remains of colossal squid arms, tentacles, beaks and bodies inside the stomachs of 57 toothfish.

Because Antarctic toothfish are about half the size of an adult colossal squid, Laptikhovsky says they probably only attack juvenile, old or wounded squid.

Treat for a toothfish (Image: A.V.Remeslo)

"Prior to these findings, there was little solid evidence of what colossal squid might eat," says Kat Bolstad of the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand.

She is also searching for clues about the squid's mysterious life. Over the past 11 years Bolstad has examined four large squid and several smaller specimens. "We actually have a set of colossal gut contents from a 2014 specimen that we are planning to analyse over the next couple of months, so that may also help us fill in a few puzzle pieces," she says.

Colossal and chewy

It is thanks to the colossal squid's deep-sea feud that we now know what these creatures taste like – Laptikhovsky once had the chance to sample a tentacle that was stuck to a toothfish after a failed attack.

"The piece of tentacle was boiled and I tried it without using any spice or sauce to get an impression of the taste," says Laptikhovsky. "It was okay, better than the widely fished jumbo squid. I would say it tasted like a shortfin squid, a bit chewier because of the size."

Journal reference: Journal of Natural History, DOI: 10.1080/00222933.2015.1040477

Wind turbines with owl wings could silently make extra energy

Fly like the wind (Image: Christopher Ousdal/Alamy)

Moving silently through the air is not just for the birds. Wind farms inspired by the stealthy flight of owls could generate more energy without annoying those who live nearby, say researchers.

Turbines create emissions-free electricity by using the wind to turn propeller-like blades around a rotor. But conservationists are concerned about the effects of their noise on terrestrial and marine life, and people who live near turbines demand quiet operation too.

Now Nigel Peake of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues have turned to owls for inspiration. Owls are famously silent predators, able to surprise their prey thanks to sound-dampening wings.

Peake looked at two features that make their wings silent. Evenly spaced bristles along the width of the wings break up sound waves as an owl flies, preventing them from building up and producing noise. At the same time, a canopy of downy feathers reduces air pressure on the wings' surface, providing a dampening effect. "These features are absolutely unique to owls," says Peake.

Taking flight

Next, the team made its own wings by taking an aerofoil and adding a number of fins that trail across and off the edge of the surface. The fins replicate the owl's evenly spaced bristles, and also disrupt surface pressure on the aerofoil, reducing the sound waves it produces.

When the researchers tested the wings in a wind tunnel, they found that noise reduction worked best when the fins were close together, spaced 1 millimetre apart across the aerofoil.

The best-performing fins cut noise by a factor of 10 compared with finless aerofoils. The team will present the work at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics conference in Dallas, Texas, later this month.

As well as making them quieter, attaching fins to wind turbines might even help them to generate more energy.

"Many wind turbines are artificially braked so that they don't make too much noise," says Peake. With this technology, the turbines could run faster without getting louder. The fins do produce extra drag on wings, but more rapid spinning would outweigh any energy lost, says Peake. His team is now working with a turbine manufacturer to test the idea.

Sunday, June 14, 2015

5 Questions to Ask Before Choosing a Travel Agent

While internet booking motors have made it simpler for voyagers to purchase their own particular flights or lodging rooms, travel specialists still offer a level of administration and skill not offered by a pursuit bot. "When you book on the web, the booking motor or site just comprehends what information you data," brings up Chuck Flagg, proprietor of a Cruise Holidays office in Canton, Georgia. "They don't comprehend what is really critical to and your gang. It doesn't know whether you are a 60-something who still likes to move it up with local people at the club or in the event that you are OK being around children." Travel specialists likewise may have exceptional livens or evaluating not accessible to the overall population.

Here are a few inquiries that can help you pick the right travel specialists for your needs.

Have you gone to my destination? Whether you're making a trip to Paris or Puerto Rico, inquire as to whether your specialists has been there (and provided that this is true, how as of late?). While manuals and sites offer bunches of point of interest on a given destination, they don't generally measure up to being there in individual. "Book information or internet preparing courses by suppliers is entirely unexpected from encountering it firsthand," Flagg says. Lisa Griswold, co-proprietor of the Atlanta-based Pixie Vacations, who represents considerable authority in arranging Disney get-aways, concurs, including that "you don't know how superb a Disney voyage is until you've encountered one: the delight, the tender loving care, the little additional items, the character association."
What is your reaction time? On the off chance that sitting tight a few days for a reaction to a messaged inquiry is going to make you on edge, ask potential operators when they're accessible and how rapidly you ought to expect a reaction. "A few operators are low maintenance specialists, and they work in the nighttimes," Griswold says. "Some are accessible amid the school day. Others do this full time. It's unquestionably shrewd to see whether your calendar can organize with what your specialists can give."

What administrations do you offer? Specialists give differing levels of administration. Some will just book inns and flights and abandon you to fill in alternate points of interest, so in case you're expecting help with supper reservations or ground transportation, inquire as to whether he can deal with those. "A decent specialists is going to help you with any points of interest that you need," Griswold says. "We offer schedule arranging down to what rides they plan to go on, which stops to go in which days and direction that with their suppers."

Do you have any confirmations or accreditation? Flagg recommends getting some information about preparing or confirmations to get a vibe for the specialists' skill. For example, in case you're occupying a journey, you could search out an operators guaranteed through the Cruise Lines International Association. Griswold includes that you additionally can ask how regularly the specialists goes to classes to stay current in the business.

What charges would it be advisable for me to anticipate? A few specialists charge a level expense or an hourly expense for travel counseling, while others acquire commission from the air transport or lodging booked. "Get some information about charges, whether there are occupying expenses or any sort of retraction expenses," Griswold says. "There are some high rates out there, and a few organizations would prefer not to converse with you unless you're willing to submit."

Obviously, while you get some information about the specialists' experience and strategies, she may be testing you also. This can be a decent sign, as Flagg proposes searching for a specialists who asks "why" questions. "This is something online will never ask," he says. "Why would you like to take this excursion? Why did you pick a Disney journey? Did the nourishment offerings settle on this some piece of your choice?" Once a specialists inspires your answers, she will be better prepared to tailor the outing to you and your gang.