Scintilla

I have a deep and rather personal interest in earthquake and volcano prediction. This comes from spending most of my youth within a few kilometers of an active fault line and less than 100km from a volcano that has, in the past, left a layer of ash over most of the surface of the Earth. In fact, events in just the last year (nevermind the last decade) have convinced me that accurate earthquake and volcano prediction would probably be a bigger lifesaver than any other single scientific development. So it was with interest that I read a recent Nature paper reporting that scientists might have been misinterpreting some aftershocks as earthquakes, leading them to overestimate the risk on some faults and underestimate the risk on others.

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, November 3 Two studies in PNAS focused on the wildlife and landscape of East Africa. In the first, researchers looked back in history to Kenya’s infamous man-eating lions, which reportedly devoured 135 railroad laborers in 1898. The two lions were eventually shot, killed, stuffed, and shipped to Chicago’s Field Museum for display–which allowed researchers to analyze samples of the lions’ bones and fur. By comparing the isotopes present in the man-eating lions to those found in other lions, humans, wildebeest, and buffalo, the researchers could precisely determine the lions’ diet. The results brought the body count down considerably: The scientists estimate that one of the lions ate 24 people, while the other gobbled up 11. The second study looked ahead, and predicted that Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest peak in Africa, could lose its distinctive ice cap by 2022 due to global warming.

Polymorphic Butterfly Reveals the Missing Link in Ecological Speciation. 2009. N. L. Chamberlain, et al. Science 326: 847-850.Scientists find a population of butterflies that appears to be splitting into 2 species.Polymorphic mimicry in Heliconius cydno alithea in western Ecuador, where the white form mimics the white species Heliconius sapho and the yellow form mimics the yellow species Heliconius eleuchia. Credit: M. Kronforst & K. KunteResearchers have investigated the relationship between diverging color patterns in Heliconius butterflies and the long-term divergence of populations into new and distinct species.Heliconius butterflies display incredible color pattern variation across Central and South America, with closely related species usually sporting different colors. In Costa Rica, for example, the two most closely related species differ in color: One species is white and the other is yellow.

Judging by two news spurts this week, sprinters who worry that some lower-leg amputee, maybe even a double amputee, will sproing past on strapped-on hardware at the next meet and have the Americans with Disabilities Act or sports regulators or others to protect his or her advantage, they should relax. That is, relax and look down at their own feet to see if they have the natural equipment to go exceedingly fast and do it soon after a gun goes off. On the prosthetics front, a study published Wednesday in Biology Letters concluded, after tests of the force that intact legs and shorter ones aided with spring-like blades exert on the ground, found no advantage for those wearing the latest running hardware. One imagines that engineers eventually may come up with something that outdoes people with entirely self-grown limbs, but so far not so, so it says here. Stories: