LucasLaursen.com

When Chickens Attack

LL — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:01:18 +0000

Robotics engineer Stephen Roberts was taking his lunch at Somerville College at the University of Oxford, in England, when the conversation turned to chicken. It wasn’t the food, though. His dining companion was animal welfare specialist Marian Dawkins, and she thought that the pattern-recognition technology Roberts was explaining might help identify misbehaving hens.

Laying hens aren’t ordinarily antisocial, but under the stress of incarceration, they are known to peck one another, sometimes to death. It usually starts with a couple of chickens and can spread quickly. Once a bird starts to peck, others follow suit. For poultry farmers, the behavior is costly and difficult to deter. Many farmers resort to clipping the chickens’ beaks, but some countries ban the practice on humanitarian grounds. Environmental adjustments, such as dimming the lights or improving foraging material, can prevent attacks, but those work only if farmers know which hens need the changes, and each adjustment has its costs.

See the rest of this news story on Spectrum’s website [html] or as it appeared in print [pdf].

Iceland’s Monster Bares Its Heart

LL — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 21:00:30 +0000

This past spring’s eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland was a nightmare for travelers, but it gave scientists in Europe unprecedented access to a complex eruption right in their backyard. Old workhorses of volcanology–seismometers and GPS sensors, which detect movement of the ground–first picked up Eyjafjallajökull’s stirrings in early January. (For the record: The name is pronounced “AY-yah-fyah-lah-YOH-kuul.”) But when the volcano turned volatile in mid-April, scientists took to the skies, enlisting specially equipped planes to study the eruption and its effects on the overlying glacier. Synthetic aperture radar allowed the researchers to watch through thick steam and ash as heat released from the volcano melted the 650-foot-thick ice at its summit. The result was like pouring water into a pan of hot oil, making the eruption even more explosive. And geologist Björn Oddsson, a graduate researcher at the University of Iceland, reports that the temperature data gleaned from infrared monitors so far will help scientists calculate the volcano’s overall energy flow, which may yield insight into the dynamics that produced the eruption’s unusually fine, far-reaching ash plume.

Meanwhile, on the ground, earth scientists from the National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology in Italy are taking aim at the volcano with spectrometers, which measure the types and amounts of gases spewing from its mouth. Previous studies of other volcanoes have revealed a change in gas composition prior to an eruption that could serve as an early detection mechanism. But the comprehensive study of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, with “all of the data in one pot,” Oddsson says, will give scientists an unprecedented opportunity to improve their understanding of how volcanoes work and apply it to other sites.

See this news item as it appeared in Discover Magazine [pdf].

When hasty headlines fail to shake a family tree

LL — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 09:53:30 +0000

When a new species comes to light, its effect on the arrangement of its family tree might be better measured by statistics than by headlines. In a study of primates and flightless dinosaurs, researchers at Bristol University, UK, have found that the likelihood of any given find shaking up the family tree depends on how complete that tree was to begin with.

“What we’ve done is look at the two most intensively studied groups,” Tarver says, and highlighted differences between the relatively stable catarrhine family tree, and the less certain family history of the dinosaurs. He says that statistical analysis could help to indicate which areas in a given family tree are already well-sampled and which might yet reveal more influential finds.

See the rest of this news story on Nature News [html] [pdf]