Evolution World Tour: Wadi Hitan, Egypt || Smithsonian Magazine
Scientists had long suspected that whales were terrestrial mammals that had eased into the ocean over millions of years, gradually losing their four legs. Modern whales, after all, have vestigial hind leg bones. But little in the fossil record illustrated the transition—until Gingerich began excavating Wadi Hitan’s hundreds of whale fossils, finding legs and knees.
Those skeletons “are the Rosetta stones,” says Nick Pyenson, a curator of fossil marine mammals at the National Museum of Natural History. “It’s the first time we could say we know what the hind limbs of these animals look like. And they’re bizarre.” Older specimens of footed whales have since been identified, but Wadi Hitan’s are unmatched in their numbers and state of preservation. The valley—about a three-hour drive from Cairo—is now a Unesco World Heritage site visited by some 14,000 people each year.
Gingerich speculates that whales’ landlubber ancestors were deer- or pig-like scavengers living near the sea. About 55 million years ago, they started spending more time in the water, first eating dead fish along the shore, and then chasing prey in the shallows, and then wading deeper. As they did, some evolved traits that facilitated hunting in water. Over time—since they no longer had to bear their full body weight at sea—they got bigger, their backbones elongating and their rib cages broadening.
Washington, D.C., 1920. “Lanza Motors Co. — Greenwich Village Girls — Metz Master Six.” (via Shorpy)
Art+Com’s Kinetic Sculpture (via Wired)
The State of His Policies || Wall Street Journal
Meantime, as Mr. Obama begins his fourth year in power it’s a good moment to recount the economic record that he’d rather not talk about. The President inherited a deep recession, but in political terms that should have been a blessing. History shows that the deeper the recession, the sharper the recovery, and Mr. Obama was poised to take credit for the economy’s natural recuperative powers. Instead, we’ve had the weakest recovery since the Great Depression and stubbornly high joblessness.
…
The New Yorker magazine this week has posted on its website a 57-page memo that economic adviser Larry Summers wrote to Mr. Obama in December 2008. It lays out nearly his entire agenda for the “stimulus,” reviving housing, the auto bailout and saving the financial industry. If anything, the memo overstates what would be needed to stabilize the financial panic, but nearly all of the stimulus spending priorities that the memo deemed “feasible” made it into law. They simply didn’t work as promised.
The Pelosi Congress also passed ObamaCare, Dodd-Frank, cash for clunkers, the housing tax credit, and much more. The only Obama priority it didn’t pass was cap-and-trade, which was killed by Senate Democrats.
Mr. Obama’s regulators also currently have some 149 major rules underway, which are those that cost more than $100 million. The 112th Congress hasn’t been able to kill a single major rule. The most it has been able to do is extend the Bush tax rates—which helped the economy by avoiding a tax shock—and slow the rate of increase in federal spending. This President has been “obstructed” less than anyone since LBJ.
Mr. Obama clearly has a spring in his step these days, figuring that the public hates Congress and thinks Republicans run it, that the GOP will field a weak presidential candidate, and that he can fool the public into believing only Mitt Romney’s taxes will rise if Mr. Obama wins a second term. He has only one big obstacle: his record.
Opportunity’s Eighth Anniversary View From ‘Greeley Haven’ (False Color) (via NASA)
Opportunity arrives at Greeley Haven – 5th Winter Haven Worksite on Mars || Universe Today
NASA’s seemingly indestructible Opportunity rover has arrived at the breathtaking location where she’ll be working through her unfathomable 5th Martian Winter. The Opportunity Mars Exploration Rover has not only endured, but flourished for 8 years of unending “Exploration & Discovery” on the Red Planet despite having an expected lifetime at landing of just 3 months, way back in January 2004.
Opportunity is parked at a northward facing outcrop dubbed “Greeley Haven” where she can soak up the sun and juice her innards throughout the utterly harsh and Antarctic-like temperatures on tap for the next few months that threaten to kill her each and every Martian day.
Good luck, little rover!
Profit vs. Principle: The Neurobiology of Integrity || Wired
Let your better self rest assured: Dearly held values truly are sacred, and not merely cost-benefit analyses masquerading as nobel intent, concludes a new study on the neurobiology of moral decision-making. Such values are conceived differently, and occur in very different parts of the brain, than utilitarian decisions.
“Why do people do what they do?” said neuroscientist Greg Berns of Emory University. “Asked if they’d kill an innocent human being, most people would say no, but there can be two very different ways of coming to that answer. You could say it would hurt their family, that it would be bad because of the consequences. Or you could take the Ten Commandments view: You just don’t do it. It’s not even a question of going beyond.”
…
When test subjects agreed to sell out, their brains displayed common signatures of activity in regions previously linked to calculating utility. When they refused, activity was concentrated in other parts of their brains: the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, which is known to be involved in processing and understanding abstract rules, and the right temporoparietal junction, which has been implicated in moral judgement.
In short, when people didn’t sell out their principles, it wasn’t because the price wasn’t right. It just seemed wrong. “There’s one bucket of things that are utilitarian, and another bucket of categorical things,” Berns said. “If it’s a sacred value to you, then you can’t even conceive of it in a cost-benefit framework.”
(via The Curious Brain)
“ The light we see from the moon when we look at it at night left its surface just over a second ago; the light we see from the sun left its surface just over eight minutes ago. Some of the stars that make up the constellations we see in the night sky are hundreds of light years away, which means the light we see left them centuries ago…. for me its astonishing that every time you look up at the night sky you are gazing back through time. ”
Dr Griffin
… to the beginning of the universe
(Source: parishiltons, via citrum)
Traversée Apou
Their color faded away
While meaninglessly
I spent my days in this world
And the long rains were falling
Ono no Komachi (Tr. Donald Keene; via artemisdreaming)
Senate Democrats’ 1,000 Days of Debt and Disappointment || Jeff Sessions & Paul Ryan
[Today marks] a sad milestone in the history of the United States Senate: the 1,000th day since Senate Democrats last offered a budget plan to the American people. Senate Democrats abandoned their official duty to prioritize Americans’ hard-earned tax dollars and tackle our nation’s most pressing economic challenges — dealing a painful blow to fiscal progress that may be felt for some time.
…
We remain disappointed in the Senate Democrats’ decision to give up on an essential responsibility of governing, and we sincerely hope 2012 will not mark the third consecutive year that Senate Democrats skip the budget process altogether. Nor will it be credible or acceptable for them to present a phony budget plan that pretends to make changes but in reality merely keeps spending on its current trajectory. Real reforms, real spending control, and a real change in the status quo are the minimum obligations of elected leaders in these times of uncertainty and distress.
Supreme Court Court Rejects Willy-nilly GPS Tracking || Threat Level @ Wired
The Supreme Court said Monday that law enforcement authorities might need a probable-cause warrant from a judge to affix a GPS device to a vehicle and monitor its every move — but the justices did not say that a warrant was needed in all cases.
The convoluted decision in what is arguably the biggest Fourth Amendment case in the computer age, rejected the Obama administration’s position that attaching a GPS device to a vehicle was not a search. The government had told the high court that it could even affix GPS devices on the vehicles of all members of the Supreme Court, without a warrant.
“We hold that the government’s installation of a GPS device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search,’” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the five-justice majority. The majority declined to say whether that search was unreasonable and required a warrant.
All-news WNEW debuts as competitor to WTOP || Washington Post
Starting early Monday, one of WNEW’s most prominent voices will be a familiar one to WTOP’s listeners. The station’s morning traffic reporter is Lisa Baden, who called the drive-time grind every weekday for more than a decade on WTOP until early last year, when the station began using its own employees to report traffic (Baden is under contract to a company called Total Traffic).
Having Baden on board suggests the importance of traffic reporting to news radio, as well as WNEW’s determination to go right to the heart of WTOP’s success.
For decades, WTOP has been uncontested in news radio in Washington, although a few stations (notably public station WAMU-FM and WMAL-AM and FM) offer a hybrid of news and talk programs. The absence of direct competition enabled WTOP, which is heard primarily at 103.5 FM, to grow into the richest radio station in the nation. Its annual revenue was $57.2 million in 2010, according to BIA/Kelsey, a Chantilly research firm.
I have missed Lisa Baden! Will have to give this station a listen.
Once Hidden by Forest, Carvings in Land Attest to Amazon’s Lost World || New York Times
According to stunning archaeological discoveries here in recent years, the earthworks on Mr. Araújo’s land and hundreds like them nearby are much, much older — potentially upending the conventional understanding of the world’s largest tropical rain forest.
The deforestation that has stripped the Amazon since the 1970s has also exposed a long-hidden secret lurking underneath thick rain forest: flawlessly designed geometric shapes spanning hundreds of yards in diameter.
Alceu Ranzi, a Brazilian scholar who helped discover the squares, octagons, circles, rectangles and ovals that make up the land carvings, said these geoglyphs found on deforested land were as significant as the famous Nazca lines, the enigmatic animal symbols visible from the air in southern Peru.
“What impressed me the most about these geoglyphs was their geometric precision, and how they emerged from forest we had all been taught was untouched except by a few nomadic tribes,” said Mr. Ranzi, a paleontologist who first saw the geoglyphs in the 1970s and, years later, surveyed them by plane.
For some scholars of human history in Amazonia, the geoglyphs in the Brazilian state of Acre and other archaeological sites suggest that the forests of the western Amazon, previously considered uninhabitable for sophisticated societies partly because of the quality of their soils, may not have been as “Edenic” as some environmentalists contend.
