Darren Straight’s Blog

What a cool little fish!

Researchers have found the smallest known fish on record in the peat swamps of the Indonesian island of Sumatra.

Individuals of the Paedocypris genus can be just 7.9mm long at maturity, scientists write in a journal published by the UK’s Royal Society.

But they warn long-term prospects for the fish are poor, because of rapid destruction of Indonesian peat swamps.

The fish have to survive in extreme habitats - pools of acid water in a tropical forest swamp.

Food is scarce but the Paedocypris - smaller than other fish by a few tenths of a millimetre - can sustain their small bodies grazing on plankton near the bottom of the water.

Human threat

To keep their size down, the fish have abandoned many of the attributes of adulthood - a characteristic hinted at in their name.

Their brain, for example, lacks bony protection and the females have room to carry just a few eggs.

The males have a little clasp underneath that might help them fertilize eggs individually.

Being so small, the fish can live through even extreme drought, by seeking refuge in the last puddles of the swamp; but they are now threatened by humans.

Widespread forest destruction, drainage of the peat swamps for palm oil plantations and persistent fires are destroying their habitat.

Science may have discovered Paedocypris just in time - but many of their miniature relatives may already have been wiped out.

Source: BBC Article

I can’t believe I was up London yesterday and missed the whale, though what can I say, I’m very sad to hear it died, I really do love animals, and it’s a real shame when they die like this!

An expert is carrying out a post-mortem examination on a whale which died after becoming stranded in the River Thames.
Despite a seven hour rescue attempt, the 18ft (5m) northern bottle-nosed whale died on a barge which was trying to take it back to deep waters.

The mammal suffered breathing problems and muscle spasms when it convulsed and died on Saturday evening.

Paul Jepson, from the Zoological Society of London, hopes to find out why the animal became lost on Friday.

Thousands of onlookers lined the river to watch as the mammal was put on a special pontoon at Battersea Bridge and then onto a barge on Saturday.

Plan scaled down

Millions more around the world then watched the doomed rescue attempt on television.

The whale was being taken to Shivering Sands off the north Kent coast, where rescuers had hoped to release it back into the sea.

This plan had already been scaled down from an earlier one to transfer it to an “ocean-going vessel” and take it to deep water off the south coast.

Earlier, naturalist and television presenter Terry Nutkins said the rescue operation was the wrong thing to do and that the animal needed space.

He told BBC Radio Five Live: “It wouldn’t know what was happening, it was surrounded by boats… it would have been absolutely terrified as well as being stressed.

“It was kept… like a goldfish in a bowl. So, it doesn’t surprise me that it’s died.”

However, he later concluded he had “no doubts” the rescue operation had been the best way to try to save the whale.

Tony Woodley, a director of the British Divers Marine Life Rescue (BDMLR) group said that despite the sad outcome, the decision to move the whale - costing the group about £100,000 - was correct and they had given it their “best shot”.

He said: “The organisation was under extreme pressure from other experts and the media and it is our opinion that we did the right thing for the whale.

“We believe that if the whale would have been left how it was then it would have just slowly died and we don’t think that was the acceptable option to take.

“We always knew that it was going to be risky. We did everything that we could and I am afraid that this time it was not a success.”

He denied suggestions that the noise made by boats as the whale lay in the Thames caused its eventual death.

Pod spotted

A spokeswoman for the Zoological Society of London said Mr Jepson was among the best qualified to carry out the post-mortem examination given his previous research work on stranded marine mammals.

It will be carried out at Gravesend in Kent where the whale was unloaded and take about six hours.

She added the results of the tests would be known on Wednesday or Thursday.

The whale, which could weigh about four tonnes, was first spotted at on Friday morning.

There were reports of a pod of whales in the Thames estuary earlier in the week, and it was possible the whale had become separated from this group.

It was the first sighting of the endangered species in the Thames since records began in 1913.

BBC Article

I was just reading this article on unexplained-mysteries.com and just had to post about it here, it’s very intersting and I think I have to agree with everything that it says!

How far can your mind go? 
By Frank B. Glover , Posted on 01.01.06 
Within the realm of reality everyone has a reason to believe in anything. What you yourself find that you lack belief in could be related to your lack of knowledge in the subject. For many of us we write off the possibilities of truth because we were raised to only believe in what our parents brought us up to believe in.
The growing knowledge base that is sweeping the world called the Internet has opened up this lack of education for many of us. But once again you have to be a little smarter than the average bear to know what is fact or fiction just like on the streets. You have the daily newspaper that prints 99% fact and you also have the tabloids that print anything anyone says.

For instance Bigfoot I never gave much of even a second thought to that idea. It seemed mainly to me just fiction. However thumbing channels the other night I came upon a bigfoot special. The one man talking when I found the special was talking about molds made from footprints. It turned out he was a specialist in the field of examining molds. He said he had his doubts a few years back because 99 out of 100 molds he examined were fake. But he went on to tell how one was very real that it had prints in the mold of like fingerprints. And that after finding that one mold he had to start wondering but then a few years later another one of a different size but of the same creature was found on the other side of the country. And it also had these fingerprints and now he was a firm believe in the fact of a large primate undiscovered creature roaming the United States forest.

After watching that and thinking about things for a moment you have to kinda sit back and just go “Wow!” I mean here I am about 40 and Bigfoot might be for real? Well that’s what it sounds like to me. But hey my father was real baffled over the Titanic being lost at sea and he died in 1986 and it was found a few years later.

My father was also very interested in the pyramids and he said many times that things would be found in years to come that would blow the top off what we humans have always believed in. And things have been found not only in the pyramids but all over the world that people are attempting to figure out.

I have wondered for years why governments from all over the world are sending out probes to space looking for life when we still have not found all the life on this planet. But then you have to ask yourself what has the government found that we don’t know about on this planet that could be pointing them in that direction.

History does have a way of repeating itself. And that will be spoken about more than once by many people in your life. Objects have been found on earth that predate man and these objects I would call modern technology. Technology that should not have been on earth at that time. Some things as simple as a gold chain in coal taken from deep in the earth. Coal takes millions of years to form. Tools like a steel ax or an iron pot also found in coal. We were not here then so explain that ???. Don’t feel bad no one else can but if the objects were found what about the remains of who used those items?. Can bone from that long ago be broken down by the earth? Yes it can but what about the dinosaurs?. We have bones from them correct? Well these items of modern technology are carbon dated long before the dinosaurs. So what does that mean?. That means the earth made coal out of anything of low carbon. Flesh & Bone would not have survived the transition. But solid metal objects did not get broke down. And that also means history is repeating itself and we are not the first advanced civilization to ever be here. We might be 2nd or 3rd or maybe 4th or even 5th who knows for sure.

But one thing is for sure we are not the first. Earth holds thousands of unsolved mysteries. And we can not just blow them off they are very real. This world is a strange place that’s for sure and it’s our only home. But we become bound by history to not only restore it but to protect it and with that we will be unable to find the answers we need as quickly. And this I believe in, Why destroy a structure that has stood for thousands of years just to dig below it for clues? We could destroy other clues that we may not have the technology today to find. And then years from now our children would be saying why were they so stupid.

We have so much of this planet to explore and sift threw. For instance crop circles fact or fiction? That is a hard one after you dig around in case files for two years. About 75% seem man made while the other 25% no one could have made in one night not even 100 people could have made it in one night. And then we have a UFO sighting fact or fiction? Well read the files of reports made by our own government. A few of them had as many as 25 witnesses now how do you write that off as a made up story? A few even had police officers as witnesses to it.

Source: unexplained-mysteries.com

It looks like they might have finally found the Beagle 2 probe on Mars!

The scientist behind the British Beagle 2 mission to the Red Planet says the craft may have been found in pictures of the Martian surface.

Colin Pillinger says the images suggest the mission very nearly worked, but Beagle somehow failed to contact Earth.

He thinks the craft may have hit the ground too hard - as the atmosphere was thinner than usual because of dust storms in that region of Mars.

This may have damaged onboard instruments, preventing the call home.

The Beagle 2 lead scientist has been painstakingly studying images of the landing site in search of his spacecraft ever since it was lost on Christmas Day two years ago.

Now, he says, specially processed pictures from the camera on the US space agency’s (Nasa) Mars Global Surveyor spacecraft show that it came down in a crater close to the planned landing site.

Life search

The robotic laboratory was designed to search Mars for signs of past or present life. The last contact was an image of Beagle taken by its mothership, the Mars Express orbiter, on 19 December 2003.

The £45m lander was scheduled to put down in a near-equatorial region of the planet known as Isidis Planitia. But despite many attempts to locate it - using overflying spacecraft and Earth-based telescopes - no sign of it, not even any wreckage, has been detected.

Professor Pillinger accepts the sceptics will say Beagle 2 is too small to be seen from space.

And when taken in isolation, each of the “objects” in the crater bowl could be explained by other phenomena. But, he argues, it is unlikely to be mere coincidence that so many unusual features are to be found “within 20m of each other”.

“We’ve had the pessimists round saying ‘we’ve already seen something like that’. But they haven’t seen them all together,” he told the BBC.

Crater bounce

Based on the features found in the crater, members of the Beagle 2 team have reconstructed what might have happened to Beagle as it touched down on the Red Planet.

“There is a lot of disturbance in this crater, particularly a big patch on the north crater wall which we think is the primary impact site,” Professor Pillinger explains.

“There are then other features around the crater consistent with the airbags bouncing around and finally falling down into the middle. Then, when you cut the lace, the airbags fall apart giving three very symmetrical triangles.”

Four roughly circular features to the right of the ‘airbags’ could conceivably be Beagle’s unfolded solar panels.

Professor Pillinger claims the images show Beagle 2 came very close to being the first spacecraft to mount a concerted search for life on the Martian surface.

And so, he says, it would have been common sense for British and European governments to have backed another attempt.

Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, which will photograph Mars in unprecedented detail once it reaches the planet next year, could confirm the tentative identification.

Source: BBC

This is an amazing story. This girl is 12 years old but she still looks like a 12 month old, her body is still the same psyically and mentally as it was when she was still an infant! Watch the video and see for yourself.

Digg.com
News article with video.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how and when will the world end!

Will it be by a massive up-rise in different cultures which creates panic and mayhem throughout our world or will it just be global warning or maybe even something far more sinister like the world will end on the 11/11/11.

Well one think is for sure it’s not going to happen any time soon but that didn’t stop me from doing some research on it and to check out the amount of predictions people have made.

I believe some could be true, but some are weird and well some are just plain stupid!

But anyway it was worth looking around see what everybody thinks, here’s some great links to sites with predictions on how the world will end:
http://www.religioustolerance.org/end_wrld.htm
http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101010625/story.html

Check this intersting article out!

A newfound ancient sea creature looks to be part crocodile, part T. rex, and 100 percent terrifying.

The 13-foot long beast, Dakosaurus andiniensis, had a massive 18-inch-long jaw with interlocking 4-inch teeth. It is a long-lost relative of the crocodile yet it had fins.

A digital rendering of the creature reveals the sort of thing typically reserved for horror movies.

The sheer strangness of the Dakosaurus andiniensis, found in South America and announced today, led its discoverers to call it Godzilla after the huge, amphibious, dinosaur-like movie icon.

“This species was very unusual, because other marine crocodiles that were around at the same time had very delicate features – long, skinny snouts and needle-like teeth for catching small fish and mollusks,” said Ohio State University researcher Diego Pol, who determined the crocodile lineage. “But this croc was just the opposite. It had a short snout, and large teeth with serrated edges. It was definitely a predator of large sea creatures.”

The fossils were found in Patagonia, in an area that was once a deep tropical bay attached to the Pacific Ocean, by paleontologists Zulma Gasparini and Luis Spalletti of the National University of La Plata in Argentina.

The finding is detailed in the Nov. 11 issue of the journal Science.

Diego Pol / Ohio State University
The fossilized skull of Dakosaurus andiniensis measures approximately 2.5 feet long.
——————————————————————————–

There were many types of crocodiles around 135 million years ago, when Dakosaurus andiniensis roamed the sea. None were as big, however. And none had such a short, stout snout or so few teeth.

“This is the most remarkable change in the size and shape of the teeth and snout in the history of marine crocs,” Pol said.

Based on the size of its teeth, the beast dubbed Godzilla probably fed on other sea-going reptiles and big prey rather than fish, the researchers said.

Source: MSNBC

Look’s like NASA is getting ready for the Asteriod by drawing up plans to deflect it, but dont get worried yet as NASA still has until 2029 to try and deflect the asteriod!

NASA has outlined plans for dealing with an asteroid a quarter of a mile wide that astronomers believe is on a near-collision course with Earth. The agency says there is no need at present to dispatch a radio transponder to the asteroid, but adds that it will be keeping a close eye on the rock’s progress through the solar system.

Stargate fans will no doubt delight in the knowledge that the asteroid, which used to be known as 2004MN4, has now been dubbed 99942 Apophis.

If the current estimates are correct, the asteroid will miss our planet by just tens of thousands of miles, some time in 2029. While this is plenty of distance in everyday terms, in astronomical terms, it is a very near miss.

In addition, the proximity of the pass is likely to be such that the gravitational interaction between the asteroid and the Earth could alter the rock’s projected orbit, making it more likely to hit us seven years later in 2036.

If it did hit, the damage would be substantial, but not deadly on a global scale. If it hit a city, there wouldn’t be much urban life left, and if it landed in the sea, it would trigger a potentially destructive tsunami.

The space agency says that if the asteroid still appears to be threatening Earth by 2013, it will start work on a mission to visit Apophis with a probe in 2019. This would be followed by an attempt to deflect the asteroid some time between 2024 and 2028.

It also estimates that planning and executing a deflection mission would only take seven years from start to finish, rather then the 12 suggested by the B612 Foundation. This would make it unnecessary to mark the asteroid with a transponder before 2021, when a decision on deflection would have to be made, because by then scientists should have a far more accurate idea of the path Apophis is going to take.

The Deep Impact mission would serve as a model for the deflection attempt mission, although presumably the impactor would be considerably more massive than Deep Impact’s 300kg chunk of copper.

NASA’s plans were made public by the B612 Foundation, a group agitating for more action from governments on the threat from near-earth-objects. In June this year it asked NASA whether Apophis needed to be tagged with a transponder, and what NASA would do if the asteroid did turn out to pose a serious threat to Earth.

The B612 Foundation says that while it welcome’s NASA’s response to its questions, if it hadn’t raised the question “the current understanding of the Apophis circumstances might not have developed. This is not an acceptable scenario”. ®

Check this high resolution pic out of how the earth looked in winter 2004.

Link

DigitalGlobe, which provides satellite imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps, has announced it will launch two new imagery satellites in 2006 and 2008.

Commercial satellital imaging company DigitalGlobe has announced that it will launch two new high resolution satellites in the next three years.

DigitalGlobe announced details of the company’s next generation of imaging systems, WorldView I and WorldView II. WorldView I, combined with QuickBird, will enable DigitalGlobe to have the two highest resolution commercial imaging satellites on-orbit for at least a year before any comparable system is launched. By 2008, DigitalGlobe’s constellation of high-resolution satellites will be unprecedented in the commercial satellite imaging industry, enabling commercial and government customers around the globe to access a broad selection of geospatial information products from a single source.

WorldView I, scheduled to launch no later than 2006, will be the most agile satellite ever flown commercially. The high-capacity, panchromatic imaging system features half-meter resolution imagery. With an average revisit time of 1.7 days and a swath width of 16 kilometers, WorldView I will be capable of collecting up to 500,000 square kilometers (200,000 sq. mi.) per day of half-meter imagery. WorldView I will also be capable of directly downlinking imagery to customer locations. The satellite will be equipped with state-of-the-art geo-location accuracy capability and will exhibit stunning agility with rapid targeting and efficient in-track stereo collection.

WorldView II is planned to launch no later than 2008. Operating at an altitude of 770 kilometers, WorldView II will enable DigitalGlobe to offer half-meter panchromatic resolution and 1.8- meter multispectral resolution. The WorldView II system will allow DigitalGlobe to substantially expand its imagery product offerings to both commercial and international customers with a more commercially desirable, higher performance product.

This news is important for many people, as DigitalGlobe is one of the data providers for Google Earth and Google Maps. These two new cameras will give better resolution to photographs and will allow the satellites with a little bit less resolution to move on to less mapped spots, giving a better coverage of countryside and smaller cities.

Article at Konquest Online