Katie Stone Perez brims over with excitement when talking about Xbox games. All Xbox games. Today the senior program manager for Microsoft’s independent developer program, ID@Xbox, is particularly enthused about “The Hole Story,” a new game about a budding young archaeologist named Wendy who digs in her backyard and discovers a portal to a strange land. (more…)
Deep inside Great Mountain Forest, in the northwest corner of the state, Yale geophysicist Maureen Long kneels down in a grassy clearing to see how her seismology station fared over the long winter. (more…)
Math simulations support theory of ‘socially enforced nepotism’
It’s easy to understand why natural selection favors people who help close kin at their own expense: It can increase the odds the family’s genes are passed to future generations. But why assist distant relatives? Mathematical simulations by a University of Utah anthropologist suggest “socially enforced nepotism” encourages helping far-flung kin. (more…)
Großer Elefantenzensus in Afrika: Zahl der Savannenelefanten bricht um 30 Prozent ein / WWF fordert entschiedenen Kampf gegen Wildtier-Mafia
Die Zahl der afrikanischen Savannenelefanten ist in den letzten Jahren um fast ein Drittel zurückgegangen. Das ist das Ergebnis einer großen Elefantenzählung (Great Elephant Census, GEC), die in 18 afrikanischen Ländern durchgeführt wurde. Danach nahmen die Populationen der Dickhäuter zwischen 2007 und 2014 von knapp einer halben Million auf rund 350.000 Tiere ab. „Der Zensus zeigt uns schwarz auf weiß, wie dramatisch es um Afrikas Elefanten bestellt ist. Um jährlich acht Prozent gehen die Bestände derzeit zurück, aus vielen Regionen könnten Elefanten in naher Zukunft verschwunden sein“, warnt Brit Reichelt-Zolho, Afrika-Referentin beim WWF. (more…)
This was an extraordinarily ‘exciting’ week for alien hunters. Russian radio telescope Ratan-600 said to have registered a strong radio signal possibly from a star HD 164595 which is about 94 light-years away from Earth. (more…)
Scientists working for WCS’s (Wildlife Conservation Society) New York Aquarium and the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) now have an “ear” for the New York region’s biggest “voices and singers”— the whales of New York Bight. (more…)
ARMONK, N.Y. – 01 Sep 2016: Almost every company is using the cloud, but not for everything, finds a new IBM study. Seventy-eight percent of respondents say their cloud initiatives are coordinated or fully integrated, compared to just 34 percent in 2012. And, among high performing organizations, that number climbs to 83 percent. At the same time, nearly half of workloads — 45 percent — are expected to remain on-premises with dedicated servers. (more…)
Death and mourning were largely considered private matters in the 20th century, with the public remembrances common in previous eras replaced by intimate gatherings behind closed doors in funeral parlors and family homes. (more…)
