[PHOTO] Car in motion

Car in motion, a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

The pleasantly bourgeois Beetle made its way past this visually attractive corner in the upper-middle-class neighbourhood by St. Clair West and Oakwood.so well, the moment deserved to be preserved. Or so I thought.

[LINK] "Waste Slime Turns Jellyfish Into Ecological Vampires"

I had been hoping that lemurbouy's repeated claims of the imminent takeover of the oceans by jellyfish was a joke, but, alas. Wired Science's Brandon Keim explained the mechanism.

That waste is useful is one of the animal kingdom’s cardinal principles. One creature’s discards are another’s dinner, and so continues the circle of life. But jellyfish, it would seem, bend the rule.

Their waste is generally inedible, food mostly for a few odd species of bacteria that live just long enough to emit a whiff of CO2, then sink. All that nutrition and energy vanishes with barely a trace.

During a jellyfish bloom, food webs may thus be plucked and rearranged, configured to feed jellies that in turn feed almost nothing. Whether this represents the future of Earth’s oceans depends on whom you ask, but it’s an interesting phenomenon in itself.

“Jellyfish are consuming more or less everything that’s present in the food web,” said Robert Condon, a Virginia Institute of Marine Science and co-author of a jellyfish-impact study published June 7 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “They’re eating a lot of the food web, and turning it into gelatinous biomass. They’re essentially stealing a lot of the energy, then putting it away.”

[. . .]

In what may be the most comprehensive jellyfish study to date, Condon’s group spent nearly four years gathering data from Chesapeake Bay on Mnemiopsis leidyi and Chrysaora quinquecirrha, two species that have caused trouble elsewhere and are considered representative of jellyfish habits worldwide.

The researchers counted them at sea, measured the nutrients in surrounding water, and calculated the composition of nearby bacterial communities. In the lab, they observed how bacteria in seawater reacted to jellyfish, and tracked chemicals flowing through their aquariums.

They found that jellyfish, like many other marine species, excrete organic compounds as bodily wastes and as slime that covers their bodies. But whereas the excretions of other species are consumed by bacteria that form important parts of oceanic food webs, jellyfish excretions nourish gammaproteobacteria, a class of microbes that little else in the ocean likes to eat, and that produces little of further biological use.

“Lots of marine creatures make this dissolved organic matter that bacteria use to live. But the point of this paper is that the organic matter produced by jellies doesn’t make it back up the food web,” said study co-author Deborah Steinberg, also a Virginia Institute of Marine Science biologist. “When jellies are around, they’re shunting this energy into a form that’s just not very usable. They’re just shunting energy away from the rest of the food web.”

Under normal conditions, gammaproteobacteria are rare. During jellyfish blooms, they may become ubiquitous. And though many questions remain unanswered — perhaps jellyfish and gammaproteobacteria end up as food in the open ocean, beyond the confines of this study — the implications are stark. Given time and numbers, jellyfish might be able to suck an ecosystem dry, converting its bounty to short-lived bacteria.

[LINK] "PQ turmoil: Sovereignty needs a crisis"

This Toronto Star editorial about the massive turmoil in the separatist Parti Québécois, falling so soon after the decimation of its federal partner party the Bloc Québécois, is quite right to point out that modern Québec separatism may be about to shift form rapidly--popularity, too, I might suggest.

Two years ago, former Parti Québécois premier Jacques Parizeau urged Quebec separatists to create “winning conditions” for independence by provoking the rest of Canada with demands for more powers over culture, language, immigration and the like. A federalist backlash would sour Quebecers on Confederation, he reasoned.

“To bring about sovereignty, there has to be a crisis,” he argued.

Now, in an irony that can’t be lost on Liberal Premier Jean Charest’s federalist forces, PQ hardliners are using that same blow-up-the-landscape strategy on their own leader. They’ve created a crisis to force PQ Leader Pauline Marois to take a harder stance on separatism than she and most Quebec voters are comfortable with.

How else to explain why the PQ would tear itself to pieces over a hockey arena, of all things, when it stands a good chance of unseating the Liberals in the next election? Despite her solid lead in the polls, and 93-per-cent approval from the PQ rank and file just two months ago, Marois is suddenly faced with a caucus revolt that includes a call for her to resign. The timing is bizarre. So is the pretext.

Prominent Parizeau acolytes bolted the caucus this week, allegedly because Marois tried to score a few points with Quebec City hockey fans by aligning her caucus behind a controversial deal that Quebec City struck with the media giant Quebecor to manage a proposed $400 million arena and bring pro hockey back to the city. The defectors included Lisette Lapointe (Parizeau’s wife), Louise Beaudoin (a former Parizeau cabinet minister) and well-known actor Pierre Curzi. They griped about Marois’ attempt to push through a PQ private member’s bill that was designed to shield the deal from court challenges, without first consulting her caucus.

Marois has admitted her heavy-handed blunder. But the rebellion points to a deeper malaise. PQ hardliners complain that Marois is more “obsessed with power” than with promoting separatism. Her “populist” stance on the arena proves she’ll do whatever it takes to get elected, they say. That includes soft-pedalling separatism. That’s her real sin in their eyes.

[. . .]

All this may prove to be an unintended gift to the Liberals. Most Quebecers have no stomach for another referendum. They just want good governance. And the PQ has more than Charest to worry about. Two other political movements hope to gnaw at the PQ’s nationalist base. On the left, there’s Amir Khadir’s Québec Solidaire. And on the right, François Legault’s Coalition pour l’avenir du Québec. If the nationalist vote splits, the Liberals stand to gain.

Former PQ premier Bernard Landry has likened the anti-Marois revolt to “electroshock.” It’s a sharp reminder that the PQ wasn’t created to govern Quebec as a province, but to lead it to independence, he says. Maybe so. But this particular shock has left the party stunned and staggering. This crisis looks more like an accident scene.

[LINK] "How common are Earth-Moon planetary systems?"

The likelihood that Earth-like planets might have comparatively large moons--our own Moonm would be a planet if it orbited the Sun independently--may be much higher than expected,nowhere near a million-to-one event, as this paper by Elser et al. (found via PhysOrg.org) describes.

The Earth's comparatively massive moon, formed via a giant impact on the proto-Earth, has played an important role in the development of life on our planet, both in the history and strength of the ocean tides and in stabilizing the chaotic spin of our planet. Here we show that massive moons orbiting terrestrial planets are not rare. A large set of simulations by Morishima et al., 2010, where Earth-like planets in the habitable zone form, provides the raw simulation data for our study. We use limits on the collision parameters that may guarantee the formation of a circumplanetary disk after a protoplanet collision that could form a satellite and study the collision history and the long term evolution of the satellites qualitatively. In addition, we estimate and quantify the uncertainties in each step of our study. We find that giant impacts with the required energy and orbital parameters for producing a binary planetary system do occur with more than 1 in 12 terrestrial planets hosting a massive moon, with a low-end estimate of 1 in 45 and a high-end estimate of 1 in 4.

[LINK] "Crows and parrots – brainy birds, but in different ways"

Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science has an interesting blog post up about the ways in which intelligence can differ between species. To illustrate this principle, Yong describes an experimenter who decided to see how individuals of two smart bird species would solve a problem.

[The scientist] presented five New Caledonian crows and six keas with the same set-up – a puzzle box with food, balanced on a central pole. If the birds could knock the food off the pole, it would roll down a sloped platform into their grasp. There were four ways of doing this: they could pull a string tied to the food; they could open a window and stick their head into the box; they could roll a marble down a chute to knock the food off; or, they could push the food off with a stick. Two of these solutions – the marble and the stick – involved tools, and the others didn’t.

The birds could approach the task in any way they liked. And every time they learned one of the four tricks, Auersperg closed it off, forcing them to find a different solution.

She found that at least one bird of each species – Uek and Kermit – discovered all four techniques, which shows that they’re certainly capable of doing so. But the similarities ended there.

Keas are notoriously inquisitive and attracted to new things. In its native New Zealand, it uses it beak to explore (and destroy) everything from nests to picnic baskets to windshield wipers. All of Auersperg’s keas immediately (and violently) explored all four openings in the box, pulling, tearing, scratching and probing at them. “They seemed to approach the apparatus in a playful, toddler-like manner,” she says. Most of them tried to overturn the box, which Auersperg had to nail to the floor. One of them, Luke, even broke the Plexiglas.

As a result of their gung-ho investigations, they picked up the four solutions to the puzzle far quicker than the crows did. After their first session, they had already discovered at least two or three, and when each one was blocked, they moved onto the next one with great speed.

In stark contrast to the keas, New Caledonian crows shirk from novelty. Rather than rushing in beaks first, they explored the box by sight before giving it some tentative pecks. One of them never even went near it. As such, it took them longer to pick up the different solutions.

But the crows had an edge – they’re natural tool users. In the wild, they manufacture their own tools to “fish” for insect grubs buried within decaying logs. In captivity, they’ve chosen the right tool for different jobs, combined different tools together, and improvised from unusual materials like wire hangers. Keas, however, aren’t natural tool users and their beaks are too curved to wield sticks with grace.

It’s not surprising then, that the crows were more adept than the keas at using the sticks to reach their food. All the crows managed it; of the keas, only Kermit did so with his complicated technique. The crows’ fondness for sticks didn’t always work to their favour. They would often try to poke the window with their sticks, while the keas soon learned to pull them open using handles. Even when [New Caledonian crew] Uek did lift the window, she still prodded at the food with her stick when she could have just stuck her head through.

The consequences of all this? We've got more proof that intelligence isn't a single homogeneous thing across all species, and that "intelligence" isn't the only thing going by far in relation to problem-solving.

This means that it’s hard to say anything about general skills such as problem-solving, memory or self-awareness based on an animal’s performance at a specific task. It’s important to use a battery of tests, such as the four “solutions” to Auesperg’s puzzle box. Even then, an animal’s performance may depend more on its attitude to novelty, motivation or body shape than its mental abilities.

Auersperg’s study is a breath of fresh air. It appreciates that “intelligence” looks very different from species to species based on their evolutionary context. Rather than simply ranking her birds against one another, she catalogued the differences between them and looked at why those differences exist. These are more interesting questions than the bland one of which one’s “better”.

[LINK] "Ancient world dictionary finished — after 90 years"

Language Hat was one source of several pointing to the news that a project 90 years taing ninety years to be completed, a dictionary of the Assyrian language of the ancient Middle East, had finally been completed.

It was a monumental project with modest beginnings: a small group of scholars and some index cards. The plan was to explore a long-dead language that would reveal an ancient world of chariots and concubines, royal decrees and diaries - and omens that came from the heavens and sheep livers.

The year: 1921. The place: The University of Chicago. The project: Assembling an Assyrian dictionary based on words recorded on clay or stone tablets unearthed from ruins in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Turkey, written in a language that hadn't been uttered for more than 2,000 years. The scholars knew the project would take a long time. No one quite expected how very long.

Decades passed. The team grew. Scholars arrived from Vienna, Paris, Copenhagen, Jerusalem, Berlin, Helsinki, Baghdad and London, joining others from the U.S. and Canada. One generation gave way to the next, one century faded into the next. Some signed on early in their careers; they were still toiling away at retirement. The work was slow, sometimes frustrating and decidedly low-tech: Typewriters. Mimeograph machines. And index cards. Eventually, nearly 2 million of them.

And now, 90 years later, a finale. The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary is now officially complete - 21 volumes of Akkadian, a Semitic language (with several dialects, including Assyrian) that endured for 2,500 years. The project is more encyclopedia than glossary, offering a window into the ancient society of Mesopotamia, now modern-day Iraq, through every conceivable form of writing: love letters, recipes, tax records, medical prescriptions, astronomical observations, religious texts, contracts, epics, poems and more.

Why is there a need for a dictionary of a language last written around A.D. 100 that only a small number of scholars worldwide know of? Gil Stein, director of the university's Oriental Institute (the dictionary's home), has a ready answer:

"The Assyrian Dictionary gives us the key into the world's first urban civilization," he says. "Virtually everything that we take for granted ... has its origins in Mesopotamia, whether it's the origins of cities, of state societies, the invention of the wheel, the way we measure time, and most important the invention of writing.

"If we ever want to understand our roots," Stein adds, "we have to understand this first great civilization."

The translated cuneiform texts - originally written with wedged-shaped characters - reveal a culture where people expressed joy, anxiety and disappointment about the same events they do today: a child's birth, bad harvests, money troubles, boastful leaders.

"A lot of what you see is absolutely recognizable - people expressing fear and anger, expressing love, asking for love," says Matthew Stolper, a University of Chicago professor who worked on the project on and off over three decades. "There are inscriptions from kings that tell you how great they are, and inscriptions from others who tell you those guys weren't so great. ... There's also lot of ancient versions of `your check is in the mail.' And there's a common phrase in old Babylonian letters that literally means `don't worry about a thing.'"

[LINK] "The vanishing sovereignty of Greece"

Eric Reguly's latest Globe and Mail column is another exploring the theme touched upon last week of the European response to Greek insolvency paralleling the West Germany response around 1990 to East German insolvency, with the insolvent entity losing its economic sovereignty as a prelude to incorporation into a larger polity. The parallel isn't that close--a Greek nation exists in a way that an East German certainly does not--but the likelihood of a shift in sovereign power upwards and away seems pretty strong.

Greece is the birthplace of democracy. As a result of the financial crisis, it might become the first European Union country to, in effect, give up democracy as the debt crisis morphs into a political crisis.

We all know that Greece has already become a client state of the so-called Troika – the EU, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank. The first two supplied €110-billion ($157-billion) in bailout loans to Athens a year ago and are preparing a second bailout package, worth perhaps €60-billion, as Greece teeters on the brink of bankruptcy. For its part, the ECB loaded up on Greek bonds and supplied liquidity to Greek banks.

In other words, Greece’s economic sovereignty has already vanished. Unless Greece does what the Troika wants it to do to get its financial house in order, it will collapse and become Cuba by the Aegean. If the government does regain control of its finances, economic sovereignty and the national pride that goes with it will be restored.

Or maybe not, because the euro zone debt crisis has handed the EU and the ECB a golden opportunity to create a supranational government. Actually, “government” might be the wrong word, because it implies that it is democratically elected. Better to call it a supranational bureaucracy that assumes it has the power of an elected government.

Ever-expanding power has always been the dream of the technocrats in Brussels and it is apparently the new dream of the ECB. Jean-Claude Trichet, president of the ECB, said as much earlier this month, when he accepted the Charlemagne Prize for European unity at a ceremony in Aachen, Germany.

He suggested the creation of a euro zone finance ministry, which in itself does not seem outrageous, depending on the degree of power it is allowed to exert over the national finance ministries. If a common currency and a common central bank (the ECB) already exist, why not a central finance ministry?

But he didn’t stop there. He suggested that euro zone “authorities” might be given the right “to veto some national economic policy decisions” in countries, like Greece, that prove incapable of living within their means. The veto could apply to “major fiscal spending items and elements essential for a country’s competitiveness.”

Then came the most ominous paragraph in his speech: “We can see before our eyes that membership in the EU, and even more so of EMU [European monetary union] introduces a new understanding of the way sovereignty is exerted. Interdependence means that countries de facto do not have complete internal authority. They can experience crises caused entirely by the unsound economic policies of others.”

[. . .]

The bailouts of Greece, Ireland and Portugal obviously changed the rules of the sovereignty game. If taxpayers in wealthy EU countries were shipping bailout loot to clapped-out economies, they gained the right to impose conditions, notably spending reductions required to crunch budget deficits.

But it’s going way beyond that in Greece’s case. The Troika is demanding a €50-billion privatization program. After dithering for a year, the government of George Papandreou finally capitulated and the first sale of a state asset (a 10-per-cent stake in phone company OTE) got under way this week. Athens is under pressure to hand the entire privatization process to an independent body, one that presumably would be controlled from afar by the Troika. There is also talk that Athens will lose direct control of tax collection, because government tax collectors are letting too much revenue slip away. Where will the control grab end?

Might all this lead to the creation, finally, of a European state? And what will the Greeks think of becoming this state's first new subjects? (Not so much "citzens", since a citizenry is fundamentally political, not economic.)

Thoughts?