n2doc
n2doc's JournalArctic Reindeer Change the Color of their Eyes for the Long, Dark Winter
There, at the corner of your yard, where the woods creep up and night obscures the seeming safety of suburbia—a pair of glowing eyes hovers … watching … waiting. The hair on the back of your neck stands at attention, your muscles tense, and deep within your brain a thought emerges clear as day. Those eyes are obviously attached to the business end of a ravenous beast—and your life will be over within the minute.
These iridescent orbs are caused by “eyeshine,” light reflected off a thin layer of tissue in the backs of some creatures’ eyes to let them see better at night. Humans lack this tissue, called the tapetum lucidum, and the night vision that comes with it, which is probably why our adrenaline gland is always trying to warn us those eyes belong to a direwolf instead of more likely creatures—like wolf spiders in the grass. Luckily, we’ve invented flashlights and crossbows to compensate. But many animals cannot afford such luxuries—like the Arctic reindeer (Rangifer tarandus), an animal that lives in lands bathed in darkness for months on end. And unlike you and me, wolves are a very real threat to a reindeer.
In summer, Arctic reindeer eyes are a golden hue. In winter, they turn deep blue. So far as researchers know, this seasonal shift is unique. Neither horses, nor house cats, nor any other mammals with tapetum lucidum are known to do this.
When the sun dips below the horizon for two full months of the Norwegian winter, darkness causes the reindeer’s eyes to become near-constantly dilated. We know from glaucoma studies that dilation increases intraocular pressure, or the fluid pressure within the eye. In turn, increased pressure causes the collagen fibers of the tapetum lucidum to scrunch together—changing the wavelength of light it reflects back.
more
http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2013/10/30/arctic_reindeer_change_eye_color_blue_eyes_help_them_see_during_the_long.html
Rare ‘Hybrid’ Solar Eclipse on November 3, 2013: How to See It (East Coast DU'ers take note)
It’s almost upon us. The final eclipse of 2013 occurs this coming weekend on Sunday, November 3rd. This will be the fifth eclipse overall, and the second solar eclipse of 2013. This will also be the only eclipse this year that features a glimpse of totality.
This eclipse is of the rare hybrid variety— that is, it will be an annular eclipse along the very first 15 seconds of its track before transitioning to a total as the Moon’s shadow sweeps just close enough to the Earth to cover the disk of the Sun along the remainder of its track.
How rare are hybrid solar eclipse? Of the 11,898 solar eclipses listed over a 5,000 year span from 1999 BC to 3000 AD in Fred Espenak’s Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses, only 569, or 4.8% are hybrids.
Who can see this eclipse?
People from northern South America, across the U.S. Eastern Seaboard and up through the Canadian Maritimes will see a brief partial solar eclipse finishing up around 30 minutes after local sunrise. The brief annular “ring of fire” portion of the eclipse begins at sunrise just ~1,000 kilometres east of Jacksonville, Florida, as it races eastward across the Atlantic. See our timeline.
Read more: http://www.universetoday.com/105651/rare-hybrid-solar-eclipse-on-november-3-2013-how-to-see-it/
NASA Just Released These Gorgeous X-Ray Photos of Space
Happy Wednesday space fans, NASA just released for your viewing pleasure eight spectacular photos of the universe never-before seen, taken by the agency’s x-ray space telescope.
NASA published the images this week in honor of the incredibly specific American Archive Month, being celebrated by all manner of archivists this October. For its part, the space agency selected a handful of greatest hits from the massive archive of unprocessed celestial images housed at the Chandra X-Ray Observatory.
“These images represent the observations of thousands of objects that are permanently available to the world thanks to Chandra’s archive,” NASA wrote in its announcement.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory is one of the NASA's "Great Observatories," alongside the Hubble Space Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope. Chandra’s space-based telescope has been in orbit space since 1999, capturing the cosmos in X-ray vision. By studying X-ray images, which can detect far more detail than any photos of space taken from Earth, scientists have been able to discover unexplored parts of the universe.
The resulting catalog of thousands of images is freely available to astronomers and lay space enthusiasts alike. It's "one of the legacies of the Chandra mission that will serve both the scientific community and the public for decades to come," wrote NASA. They also look really pretty, as you can see.
more
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/nasa-just-released-these-gorgeous-x-ray-photos-of-space
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/chandra/news/xray-universe-legacy.html#.UnErpxb9W4R
The dark future for American workers is still flipping burgers, not freelancing
It’s easy to fear the specter of an economy where millions of people end up with low-paid freelance gigs through TaskRabbit or oDesk, rather than finding full-time work. After all, Silicon Valley’s arrogance never ends.
+
But even that vision puts a gloss on the real problems with slowly recovering US economy. Today, most unwilling part-timers aren’t freelancing. They’re working in restaurants and retail stores, just like they were before the recession. That’s why the big problem with part-timers isn’t the rise of the freelance economy but the lack of demand in the traditional one.
+
We’re talking about people who are employed part-time but would rather work full-time. (About 18 million Americans work part-time because they want to, about the same today as before the crisis.) Today, 7.5 million people are involuntary part-time workers, a little more than 5% of the workforce. Here’s how the Bureau of Labor Statistics breaks down the two types of part-time workers:
In terms of industries, 1.5 million unwilling part-time workers are at restaurants and hotels; another 1.4 million are at retail stores and distributors; and 1.2 million are in education and health care. Rounding out the top five sectors are 780,000 self-employed workers (where the modern-day valets of TaskRabbit are counted, among freelancers of all kinds) and the 661,000 providers of professional services, everything from lawyers and architects to photographers and veterinarians. Here’s how those five sectors have grown since before the crash:
more
http://qz.com/141097/the-dark-future-for-american-workers-is-still-flipping-burgers-not-freelancing/
There’s something absolutely insane happening in the House of Representatives right now.
To fully appreciate said insanity, we have to take an unpleasant but brief trip down memory lane — back to the darkest days of the 2008 financial crisis. Insurance giant American International Group (AIG) was on the verge of collapse, and the U.S. government stepped in with an $85 billion bailout. The risky behavior that drove AIG to the brink was largely fueled by a financial instrument known as derivatives trading.
In the wake of the financial crisis, many people were less than enthusiastic about the prospect of footing a multi-billion dollar bill every time Wall St. gambled its way into a corner. So, when Congress passed a new set of financial regulations known as Dodd-Frank in 2010, it included a provision that required banks to conduct some forms of derivatives trading in a more isolated way to reduce risk and make government bailouts less likely. Many reform advocates would have preferred much stronger protections, but given the $12.4 million in campaign contributions and $105 million in lobbying expenditures by Wall St. industry groups attempting to influence the law, it was certainly better than nothing.
Now, the House is scheduled to vote on a bill that would roll back these derivative regulations and let banks go back to the same set of rules that let them break the economy in the first place. This brings us to insane part: According to the New York Times, the bill is currently enjoying “broad bipartisan support” in the House. So, why is it that both parties have found a way to agree on a substantive regulatory change at a time when partisan bickering is supposedly making any progress impossible?
It’s certainly not because the public is up in arms about rolling back derivative regulations — most Americans have never heard of derivatives trading, let alone pressured their Member of Congress to deregulate it. No, this is happening for a very different reason: Big bank lobbyists wrote this bill.
more
http://daily.represent.us/theres-something-absolutely-insane-happening-house-right-now/
One of many, many insane things going on in the House. And Senate.
1 of 7 early voters in Dallas County being forced to sign affidavit to verify ID
At least one out of every seven early voters in Dallas County has had to sign an affidavit verifying his or her identity as part of Texas’ new voter ID law.
Though no one in Dallas County has been prevented from voting — or even forced to cast a provisional ballot — because a name discrepancy, officials said women are being especially impacted by the requirements.
And Toni Pippins-Poole, the county’s elections administrator, said the totals through the first five days of early voting for the Nov. 5 election are a conservative estimate of the potential inconvenience.
“I know it’s more,” she said, adding that the totals don’t cover all polling locations. “Not all the reports have come through.”
more
http://trailblazersblog.dallasnews.com/2013/10/1-of-7-early-voters-in-dallas-county-being-forced-to-sign-affidavit-to-verify-id.html/
Insurers Oppose Obamacare Extension as Danger to Profits
Allowing Americans more time to enroll for health coverage under Obamacare may raise premiums and cut into profits, insurers are telling members of Congress in a bid to stop such a move.
Extending the enrollment period would have a “destabilizing effect on insurance markets,” said Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the Washington-based lobbyist group American’s Health Insurance Plans. Allowing younger, healthy Americans to sign up later, as they probably would, means less revenue for insurers counting on those premiums to help defray the cost of sicker customers, threatening industry profits.
“If you can enroll at any point in the year, then you can just wait until you get sick,” Brian Wright, an analyst with Monness Crespi Hardt in New York, said in a telephone interview. “This isn’t the industry crying foul and exaggerating the issue, this is actually one of those issues where there is a well-grounded reason for the concerns.”
It’s a message the industry is taking to Congress after Republicans there, along with at least 10 Democrats, have suggested enrollment be extended beyond its current March 31 deadline because of issues with healthcare.gov, the federal health insurance website that’s been plagued by software miscues.
more
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-10-30/insurers-oppose-obamacare-extension-as-danger-to-profits.html
Fossil fuels divestment campaign is gathering momentum
Bill McKibben
The world has a choice when dealing with climate change. One is to decide it's a problem like any other, which can be dealt with slowly and over time. The other is to recognise it as a crisis, perhaps the unique crisis in human history, which will take rapid, urgent action to overcome.
Science is in the second, scared camp – that's the meaning of the IPCC report issued last month, which showed that our planet is already undergoing climatic shifts far greater than any experienced in human civilisation, with far worse to come.
And those of us urging divestment from fossil fuel stocks are in the second camp too – we recognise that business as usual is quite simply impossible.
In fact, the most important feature of the IPCC report is probably that it adopted the analysis put forward by Carbon Tracker analysts in the UK and divestment activists who started their campaign a year ago in the US. The scientists' report quite explicitly said that most of the coal and oil and gas that the fossil fuel industry has identified and plans to mine or drill must remain in the ground to avoid climate catastrophe.
That in turn is why the fossil fuel industry, when it isn't in outright denial about climate change, falls into the first camp: slow, measured change would be nice. Because then we could pump up all the carbon we've told our shareholders and our banks about. Because then our stock prices will stay nice and high. Because then we won't have to confront reality – otherwise known as physics – for a while longer.
more
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/oct/29/fossil-fuels-divestment-campaign-gather-momentum
Sen. Warren sounds the alarm on irresponsible housing reform
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., outlined five key steps the mortgage market must take to achieve housing finance reform without disrupting the entire system.
While speaking at the Mortgage Banker’s Association 100th Annual Convention and Expo, Sen. Warren made it crystal clear to a massive crowd that reform is 'absolutely necessary.' Yet, she urged Congress to act carefully, saying any hiccup during the creation process will hit middle-class taxpayers the hardest.
"No politics here — we just need to focus on getting housing finance right," the Senator stated.
As a result, Warren has outlined five initiatives that she claims will address moral hazard risk while preserving the good aspects of the pre-crisis housing finance system. She struck a more populist tone by suggesting there's a definite need to scale back the influence of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, replacing them with a privately financed guarantee for whatever entity takes over the enterprises.
The guarantee will be limited and conditioned on private capital occupying significant first loss position — making the 30-year fixed mortgage broadly available.
more
http://www.housingwire.com/articles/27682-sen-warren-sounds-the-alarm-on-irresponsible-housing-reform
Profile Information
Gender: Do not displayMember since: Tue Feb 10, 2004, 01:08 PM
Number of posts: 47,953
