Snapzu Earth: April 2015

Thursday 30 April 2015

A Bat's Secret to Flying Like a Boss? Tiny, Tiny Hairs

Scientists show that bats use microscopic hairs on their wings to feel their way through the air.
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Every Breath You Take: State of the Air 2015

Think about this: more than 4 in 10 people in the United States live in counties that have unhealthy levels of either ozone or particle pollution. Now think about this: in the time it took to read that, you probably took 4-5 breaths.
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Train Blown Off Bridge in Extreme Weather

Several shipping containers and railcars were came off the elevated bridge and went crashing to the ground.
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Dead zones — where animals suffocate and die — found in the Atlantic’s open waters

Most dead zones are found along the coast and are a result of chemicals triggering algae blooms.
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Parrot calls for help in 'woman's voice' during house fire

Firefighters in Idaho heard the screams coming from inside a burning house, but couldn't locate the woman making them. Turns out, it was the homeowner's pet parrot.
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Meet Budweiser's littlest Clydesdales

They're known as gentle giants - a breed of horses plucked out of the pastures of Scotland are now world-famous for their beer roots in St. Louis. Get an exclusive look into the world of Budweiser Clydesdales.
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Improving the Map of Nepal

The availability of accurate maps is particularly important in times of emergency to help disaster response teams and aid agencies to effectively manage the teams on the ground. Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (HOT) is a non-profit organization which coordinates the creation and distribution of free mapping resources to support humanitarian relief. Since the devastating earthquake in Nepal HOT has been organizing the response of the Open Street Community to improve the OSM maps of Nepal.
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Senators Approve Bill To Stop EPA From Using ‘Secret Science’

A Senate committee has advanced legislation that would change how the Environmental Protection Agency uses science to craft regulations intended to protect the environment and public health.
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Earth's Mysterious Hum Explained

Even planets can get a bad case of tinnitus, according to a new study that explains Earth's mysterious, never-ending hum. Turns out, ocean waves are the culprit behind these mysterious tremors that make the Earth ring like a bell.
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Starbucks wants you to feel good about drinking up California's precious water

The coffee giant says it's solving the world's water problems—yet it's profiting off the Golden State's dwindling reserves.
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Nepal Earthquake - First hand experience

Stonehenge's tallest stone 'points at winter sunrise'

The tallest stone at Stonehenge points towards the sunrise on the midwinter solstice, according to a new theory from a steward at the site.
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Wednesday 29 April 2015

Canadian Immigrants Interactive Map

This interactive map illustrates the immigrants that are most common in Canada by census division. You’ve certainly heard of Vancouver’s Chinatown. And Montreal could not truly be La Belle Ville without its Little Italy. But how about Toronto’s vibrant Little Jamaica, known for its jerk chicken street BBQs and famous barbershops? Or Laval’s growing Little Lebanon, which is increasingly drawing Arabic-speaking immigrants away from St. Laurent in neighbouring Montreal?
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Didga Dreams BIG!

Didga is back & dreaming BIG! The best of the best stunts/tricks to amaze you with what cats can do! Please adopt, there are many amazing cats like Didga just waiting for a good home.
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Feds Say It's Time To Cut Back On Fluoride In Drinking Water

Excess fluoride consumption is leading to tiny white marks on many people's teeth. It's mainly a cosmetic problem, but one that could be solved by lowering the fluoride in drinking water.
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Kayaking Through the Largest Urban Bat Colony in the World

The world's largest urban bat colony is in a rather peculiar place. Find out which major city houses over a million bats every summe
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Dirty Secrets: 10 Ways to Improve Garden Soil

Elizabeth Murphy is a soil scientist and gardener with a half-acre garden in Oregon that she uses as a laboratory to find new ways to improve soil. Here are her top 10 tips from her book Building Soil.
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Dandelions Should Be the New Kale

Why we should incorporate edible weeds into our diets.
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Tuesday 28 April 2015

Depression Can Physically Alter Your DNA

Depression doesn’t just change your mentality—it also leaves marks on your DNA, report scientists from the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics (WTCHG). The finding was so surprising that the scientists initially met it with skepticism and admit that they required a substantial amount of convincing to believe it was not merely a coincidence.
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First Offshore Wind Farm In The U.S. Kicks Off Construction

Offshore wind is coming to the United States
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The poisoned promises of [New Orlean’s] Agriculture Street

After 22 years, Joan Davis finally received the letter. It arrived in January, informing her how much she would be getting under the terms of a class action lawsuit settlement filed against the city...
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The Dying Sea

There is a place in the California desert where a pipe pokes out from a berm made of broken concrete and delivers freshwater to a dying sea. I stood there recently, on a beach of crumbled barnacles, and watched it gush. The sea was the dull blue of a cataract, surrounded by small volcanoes, bubbling mud pots, and ragged, blank mountains used for bombing practice by the Navy and the Marines. The air smelled sweet and vaguely spoiled, like a dog that has got into something on a hot day.
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'Bizarre' Jurassic dinosaur discovered in remarkable new find

Chilesaurus diegosuarezi belongs to the theropod group of dinosaurs, which includes tyrannosaurs, but was vegetarian and has other curious features
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Antarctica

This movie was shot during our 20 days trip to Antarctica in December 2014 to January 2015. We started from Ushuaia in Argentina and went to Port Williams in Chile, rounded Cape Horn and crossed the Drake Passage towards the Melchior Islands in Antarctica. We spent 16 days in the Antarctic and got to experience the most amazing scenery and wildlife before we returned back to Ushuaia.
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Killer whale trades a sardine for a tasty bird

Stephen Hawking on why everyone must go into space

Humans should go and live in space within the next 1,000 years, or it will die out, Stephen Hawking has warned.
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Climate Deniers to Pope Francis: 'There Is No Global Warming Crisis'

As Pope Francis prepares a historic document to make environmental issues a priority for Catholics, a group of climate-change deniers is trying to convince the pontiff this week that global warming is nothing to worry about.
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Why would an animal lose its brain?

Some extremely simple animals may have got rid of their brains because they simply had no need for one. And this could have been key to their success.
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Increased Human Protections Offered as H5N2 Outbreak Spreads

Hundreds of farm workers exposed to a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu have been offered antiviral medication as a preventative measure in recent days, U.S. public health officials said.
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The Overwhelming Calm of Kyoto’s Buddhist Temples

Jacqueline Hassink’s work often explores public and private spaces absent of a human presence, from the boardrooms of Europe’s largest corporations to the fitting rooms of haute couture designers. Last year, Hassink completed a 10-year series with a focus on the Zen Buddhist temples and gardens found in Kyoto, Japan.
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Powering Your Car With Water: Audi Realizes the Green Dream, Synthesizes Diesel From H20

Maybe EVs aren’t inevitable after all. Audi, together with the German energy company Sunfire, has announced that it is able to synthesize diesel from water and CO2, and that the product can fuel automobiles.
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Before Columbus, was there trade between Asia and New World?

Artifacts unearthed at a 1,000-year-old home in Alaska suggest that East Asians and Native Americans were exchanging goods centuries before Columbus set sail for the New World.
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Monday 27 April 2015

A gentle nudge with a nuke: deflecting Earth-bound asteroids

In 2013, a small asteroid exploded in the atmosphere over Chelyabinsk, Russia. The sonic boom from the event sent more than a thousand people to the hospital, mostly from flying glass from shattered windows. The Chelyabinsk meteor was a relatively small chunk of space rock—asteroid researchers think it was probably about 20 meters (66 feet) across—but exploding over a city made it a noteworthy event. It's probable many similar asteroids hit Earth on a regular basis...
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Just before the earthquake in Basantapur, Nepal

Forget the Ordinary Honeybee; Look at the Beautiful Bees They’re Crowding Out

Any day now, the apple trees on my deck will bloom, bringing with them the first honeybees of spring. It’s a moment I’ll greet with mixed feelings. To which bee-lovers everywhere may respond: How can anyone feel anything but good about honeybees? They’re little gold-and-black life-bringers, booty-waggling symbols of industrious virtue, and now—after a decade of declines in commercial honeybee colonies—subjects of sympathy and concern. We all want to help the bees.
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Sorry, dolphins aren’t uniquely intelligent

Social, playful, and photogenic, dolphins have come to represent intelligence, empathy, and peace. But chickens, for example, also can identify members of their social groups, are capable of social learning, and communicate using a complex set of vocalizations—all traits that have been cited as evidence of dolphins’ superior smarts and sophistication.
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Eight Exotic Annuals to Add Colour to Your Summer Garden

These one-hit wonders are quick to grow, and their flowers add instant drama
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America Needs to Figure Out the Ethics of Gene Editing Now

In an international first, researchers in China have reported doing experiments that involve editing the genome of a human embryo. Ever since scientists developed the ability to cut and splice DNA, they have worried over the safety and ethical implications of applying those techniques to the human genome. Now, though the reported work was preliminary and not completely successful, researchers will have to contend with a challenging set of questions about this newly-opened genetic frontier.
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Hit by Avalanche in Everest Basecamp 25.04.2015

"The ground was shaking from the earthquake and as soon as we saw people running we were running ourselves to save our lives."
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Sunday 26 April 2015

We destroyed the Apple Watch

A drop test and water test prove the Apple Watch can take a good beating.
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Liquid mercury found under Mexican pyramid could lead to king's tomb

An archaeologist has discovered liquid mercury at the end of a tunnel beneath a Mexican pyramid, a finding that could suggest the existence of a king’s tomb or a ritual chamber far below one of the most ancient cities of the Americas. Mexican researcher Sergio Gómez announced on Friday that he had discovered “large quantities” of liquid mercury in a chamber below the Pyramid of the Feathered Serpent, the third largest pyramid of Teotihuacan, the ruined city in central Mexico.
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Cause Behind African Migrant Flood Has Terrifying Implications for the World

The migrant crisis in the Mediterranean is symptomatic of deep dislocation in the Sahel and Sub-Saharan Africa -- dislocation which is exacerbated by climate change.
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12 Foods You Didn’t Know Were Hurting the Planet

This may have you rethinking that grocery list.
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Killer whales are stealing our fish to make extra babies

Some killer whales of the Southern Ocean's Crozet Islands steal fish from longlines and thanks to the extra nutrition are more reproductively successful.
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Saturday 25 April 2015

The Beautiful Tree That's Causing Quite A Stink

Once embraced by cities for its beautiful white flowers, disease resistance and ability to grow just about anywhere, the Callery pear is now considered a nuisance due to its smell and invasive nature.
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The Only Free-Range Herd of Reindeer in Canada

For the past two years, Canadian photographer Nicolas Dory has documented the annual migration of the country’s only free-range herd of reindeer, which consists of about 3,000 animals. After Canada’s caribou population began to decline in the early 1900s, US and Canada partnered together to help the Inuvialuit population of the Mackenzie Delta avoid food shortage. In 1929, 3,440 reindeer were imported to Canada through Alaska from Scandinavia.
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Google apologizes for the Android robot peeing on an Apple logo in Google Maps

In a statement to The Washington Post, Google has apologized for the image of its Android mascot urinating on an Apple logo that was pointed out by Cult of Android earlier today. "We’re sorry for this inappropriate user-created content; we’re working to remove it quickly," Google spokesperson Mara Harris told The Washington Post in a statement. "We also learn from these issues, and we’re constantly improving how we detect, prevent, and handle bad edits," Harris said.
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