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How Social Media Is Changing Disaster Response

When Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast in 2005, Facebook was the new kid on the block. There was no Twitter for news updates, and the iPhone was not yet on the scene.

By the time Hurricane Sandy slammed the eastern seaboard last year, social media had become an integral part of disaster response, filling the void in areas where cell phone service was lost while millions of Americans looked to resources including Twitter and Facebook to keep informed, locate loved ones, notify authorities and express support. Gone are the days of one-way communication where only official sources provide bulletins on disaster news.

Researchers have now started publishing data on the use of social media in disasters, and lawmakers and security experts have begun to assess how emergency management can best adapt. “The convergence of social networks and mobile has thrown the old response playbook out the window,” Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, told the House Subcommittee on Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Communications on June 4.

The new playbook will not do away with the emergency broadcast system and other government efforts. Rather, it will incorporate new data from researchers, federal agencies and nonprofits that have begun to reveal the exact penetration of social media in disasters.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) wrote in its 2013 National Preparedness report last week that during and immediately following Hurricane Sandy, “users sent more than 20 million Sandy-related Twitter posts, or “tweets,” despite the loss of cell phone service during the peak of the storm.” New Jersey’s largest utility company, PSE&G, said at the subcommittee hearing that during Sandy they staffed up their Twitter feeds and used them to send word about the daily locations of their giant tents and generators. “At one point during the storm, we sent so many tweets to alert customers, we exceeded the [number] of tweets allowed per day,” PSE&G’S Jorge Cardenas, vice president of asset management and centralized services, told the subcommittee.

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Saudi Silence on Deadly MERS Virus Outbreak Frustrates World Health Experts

Over the next few weeks officials at the World Health Organization (WHO) face a tough and politically charged call. The Muslim month of fasting, Ramadan, begins July 9 and could draw as many as two million people from around the globe to the holy sites of Saudi Arabia in a pilgrimage called umrah. But a new disease, called Middle Eastern respiratory syndrome, or MERS, could threaten them.

Infectious disease control at mass gatherings is always a challenge, but this year even more so. Saudi Arabia is currently waging battle with MERS, yet it has released only the barest of details that scientists or public health officials could use to try to prevent its spread within Saudi Arabia or around the globe. In early May Saudi officials startled the world by announcing 13 new cases over the course of a few days. Since the start of May there have been 38 new cases worldwide—31 of them in Saudi Arabia—and 20 of the victims have died. With virtually no clues to draw on about where the virus lives in nature and how people contract it, WHO is trying to figure out what guidance to give those pilgrims, and the countries they will return to, about how to avoid infection and the international dissemination of a devastating new illness.

MERS triggers severe pneumonia and kidney failure in some cases. It is a cousin of SARS, severe acute respiratory syndrome, which broke out in mainland China in late 2002, spread from there to Hong Kong in 2003, and was then transported in the lungs of international travelers to Singapore, Hanoi, Toronto and other cities. Health officials do not want to pull out the big hammers used during the SARS outbreak, such as WHO travel advisories that urged the world’s citizens to avoid infected hubs such as Hong Kong and Toronto. On the other hand, no one wants umrah and the even largerhajj pilgrimage that will follow in October to trigger a pandemic.

The new virus was first isolated in June 2012. But its existence came to the world’s attention only weeks before last October’s hajj, when an Egyptian infectious diseases specialist who had been working in Saudi Arabia’s second largest city, Jeddah, reported that he had treated a man who died from an infection caused by a new coronavirus. Whether MERS has or can gain the capacity for sustained person-to-person spread is unknown. Kamran Khan, an infectious diseases physician who researches global flight patterns as a means of predicting disease spread, has had a worried eye on the Muslim religious calendar for some time. “We still don't have a good idea where this (virus) is coming from, so taking measures to mitigate risks are constrained,” says Khan, who works at the Saint Michael’s Hospital Keenan Research Center in Toronto

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New Telescope Strategy Could Resolve Dark Matter Mystery

An intriguing hint of a certain type of gamma-ray light at the center of the Milky Way might be a product of elusive dark matter — or it might not be. For the past several years, scientists have debated whether the light is really there, and what it means. Now, researchers are petitioning the management team of NASA's Fermi Gamma-Ray Space Telescope, the observatory that saw the light, to change its observing strategy to determine once and for all whether the signal really exists.

However, even if there are extra gamma-ray photons coming from the center of the galaxy, scientists are a ways from knowing whether the photons were made by dark matter.

Theories suggest some mysterious form of matter that can't be seen or touched is rife throughout the universe, making its presence known only through its gravitational pull. The leading theory behind this dark matter posits that it's made of a new kind of fundamental particle called a WIMP (weakly interacting massive particle). [Graphic: Dark Matter Explained]

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Begy Gomez

Becky G was born on March 2, 1997, in the city of Inglewood in southern California to Mexican parents. She also has two younger brothers named Frankie and Alex, and had two bestfriends (Shinaed Simpson and Jasmyn Fisher-Ryner). In her remix cover of the Jennifer Lopez hit "Jenny From the Block", aptly titled "becky From the Block", becky raps about much of her life story. Becky attended Oaks Elementary, which was located close to the Inglewood Cemetery. Becky G states her family had a tough life growing up. They lived in her Grandfather's garage.
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1. Block it-Click To Download
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Europe Reforms Its Fisheries

The breakthrough came at around 3 a.m. on 30 May in Brussels,

after a marathon negotiating session: the European Union (EU) finally agreed to end overfishing in its troubled waters.

Fisheries scientists say that the deal, which is expected to be approved before the end of the year, could allow fish stocks to recover to their previous bountiful levels, after being driven down by years of overfishing. But short-term restrictions are likely to bring unemployment to some fishermen.

“There is bound to be some short-termpain,” says Michel Kaiser, who studies fisheries at Bangor University, UK. “This reform has come about because there was a groundswell of realization that what we had before couldn’t go on.”

The deal places scientific advice at center-stage in determining catch limits, as the EU commits to fishing at healthy levels by 2015 “where possible” and by 2020 otherwise. New rules will also be phased in to reduce ecologically damaging ‘discards’ — the practice of throwing fish caught in the pursuit of other species back into the sea, with the vast majority dying in the process.

For years, scientists have warned that more fish were being caught than was sustainable, owing to a flawed ‘Common Fisheries Policy’ (CFP), which governs commercial fishing in European waters. Government ministers set higher catch limits for cod, haddock and some other species than scientists considered wise (see ‘A waning haul’). The latest agreement, which has been several years in the making, is backed by the three arms of European government: the commission, parliament and council. Parliament had been pushing for a thorough reform of the CFP to put catches in line with what science says is sustainable, whereas the council — made up of ministers from EU member states — had been less amenable to radical change.

Environmentalists are generally pleased with the deal’s main thrust: a commitment to fishing at maximum sustainable yield (MSY), the largest catch of a particular species that can be taken indefinitely without harming the main population. Scientists have two measures for MSY, obtained using mathematical models created with data from catches by commercial and research vessels: the overall biomass of a species needed to maintain MSY (B_MSY) and the annual amount of fish taken from that species that will still allow the species to reach B_MSY (F_MSY). Fishing at a higher level than F_MSYmeans the fishing is unsustainable in the long term. Environmentalists prefer B_MSY toF_MSY as a target, because reaching the former would show that a stock has actually recovered, whereas fishing in line with the latter indicates that a stock is on the road to recovery.

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Temporal Cloak Erases Data from History

If you’ve ever wanted to edit an event from your history, then help may soon be at hand. Electrical engineers have used lasers to create a cloak that can hide communications in a 'time hole', so that it seems as if they were never sent. The method, published today in Nature, is the first that can cloak data streams sent at the rapid rates typically seen in telecommunications systems. It opens the door to ultra-secure transmission schemes, and may also provide a way to better shield information from noise corruption. 

In 2010, Martin McCall, an optical physicist at Imperial College London, and his colleagues proposed that it may be possible to create temporal cloaks that carve out short windows in time during which operations can be carried out unnoticed. Their work built on the principles behind invisibility cloaks, which hide objects in space by channeling light rays around them. When viewed from a distance, the light appears to have teaveled along a straight line, without having hit any intervening object.

Similarly, McCall and colleagues suggested that by pulling light waves apart in time, and then compressing them back together, it should be possible to create 'time pockets' in which to cloak events. In theory, this could enable “a whole new level of security” for data transmission along optical fibers, says Joseph Lukens, an electrical engineer at Purdue University in Indiana, and lead author of the latest study. “It doesn't just prevent eavesdroppers from reading your data — they wouldn’t even know there was any data there to hack.”

Last year, a team led by Alexander Gaeta, an optical physicist at Cornell University in laser pulses. But the time windows opened up too rarely to be able to hide data coming in at telecommunication rates. 

Ithaca, New York, built the first working temporal cloak by manipulating

Splitting light
To speed up the cloaking rate, Lukens and his colleagues exploited a wave phenomenon that was first discovered by British inventor Henry Fox Talbot in 1836. When a light wave passes through a series of parallel slits called a diffraction grating, it splits apart. The rays emanating from the slits combine on the other side to create an intricate interference pattern of peaks and troughs. Talbot discovered that this pattern repeats at regular intervals, creating what is now known as a Talbot carpet. There is also a temporal version of this effect in which you manipulate light over time to generate regular periods with zero light intensity, says Lukens. Data can be then be hidden in these holes in time.  

Lukens' team created its Talbot carpet in time by passing laser light through a 'phase modulator', a waveguide that also had an oscillating electrical voltage applied to it. As the voltage varied, the speed at which the light teaveled through the waveguide was altered, splitting the light into its constituent frequencies and knocking these out of step. As predicted, at regular time intervals, the separate frequencies recombined destructively to generate time holes. Lukens’ team then used a second round of phase modulation to compress the energy further, expanding the duration of the time windows to 36 picoseconds (or 36 trillionths of a second). 

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Oldest Primate Skeleton Unveiled

The near-complete fossil of a tiny creature unearthed in China in 2002 has bolstered the idea that the anthropoid group of primates — whose modern-day members include monkeys, apes and humans — had appeared by at least 55 million years ago. The fossil primate does not belong to that lineage, however: it is thought to be the earliest-discovered ancestor of small tree-dwelling primates called tarsiers, showing that even at this early time, the tarsier and anthropoid groups had split apart.

The slender-limbed, long-tailed primate,described today in Nature, was about the size of today’s pygmy mouse lemur and would have weighed between 20 and 30 grams, the researchers estimate. The mammal sports an odd blend of features, with its skull, teeth and limb bones having proportions resembling those of tarsiers, but its heel and foot bones more like anthropoids. “This mosaic of features hasn’t been seen before in any living or fossil primate,” says study author Christopher Beard, a paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

By analyzing almost 1,200 morphological aspects of the fossil and comparing them to those of 156 other extant and extinct mammals, the team put the ancient primate near the base of the tarsier family tree. Dubbed Archicebus achilles, the creature’s genus name roughly translates as 'original long-tailed monkey', whereas the species name is a wry nod to the creature’s anthropoid-like heel bone.

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Summer Blockbuster: A Black Hole Swallows a Cloud

 Astronomers have seen it coming. Starting this summer—possibly this month—a large cloud of gas and dust and perhaps a star will begin to ricochet through the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, the home of a supermassive black hole. The ensuing celestial fireworks should reveal much about the mysterious central core of the galaxy, a region kept shrouded in darkness by dust and distance.
Scientists have long wondered why the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, unlike the black holes at the center of other large galaxies, is perplexingly quiet. It doesn't seem to be gobbling up matter at nearly the rate we would expect.
Unfortunately, the interesting region around the black hole is just too small for our telescopes to resolve from so far away. (Think of painting the Mona Lisa on a thumbtack, launching it to the moon, then trying to make out her smile.) Our blurry view makes it hard to understand why it is not flaring with energy as it sucks in gas with the gravitational force of four million suns. This observational frustration is why the incoming cloud is so exciting. “If you watch a meteor go through the atmosphere of Earth, it burns up by friction,” says Eliot Quataert, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We're hoping to see something similar—how the cloud interacts with all the other gas spiraling into the black hole.” The cloud will act like a probe, and astronomers will spend years interpreting its readout: a giant cosmic flare.
Researchers are also hoping to sort out exactly where the cloud came from. Some have suggested that two clumps of gas may have collided near the galaxy's center, draining away the momentum that kept them in orbit. Others think the cloud might be a dim, young solar system, the dust not yet petrified into planetary form, the star obscured by gas.

No matter where the unlucky cloud originated from, its fate is sealed: within a few years it will be sucked past the event horizon of the black hole, its existence obliterated. But astronomers will be studying its long farewell, using every kind of telescope available to them. Perhaps the cloud isn't so unlucky after all, suggests Stefan Gillessen, a member of the team that first discovered the cloud in 2011. “It's unlucky in the sense that it will be destroyed,” he quips, “but lucky in the sense that it becomes famous.


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Summer Blockbuster: A Black Hole Swallows a Cloud

 Astronomers have seen it coming. Starting this summer—possibly this month—a large cloud of gas and dust and perhaps a star will begin to ricochet through the dead center of the Milky Way galaxy, the home of a supermassive black hole. The ensuing celestial fireworks should reveal much about the mysterious central core of the galaxy, a region kept shrouded in darkness by dust and distance.
Scientists have long wondered why the black hole at the center of the Milky Way, unlike the black holes at the center of other large galaxies, is perplexingly quiet. It doesn't seem to be gobbling up matter at nearly the rate we would expect.
Unfortunately, the interesting region around the black hole is just too small for our telescopes to resolve from so far away. (Think of painting the Mona Lisa on a thumbtack, launching it to the moon, then trying to make out her smile.) Our blurry view makes it hard to understand why it is not flaring with energy as it sucks in gas with the gravitational force of four million suns. This observational frustration is why the incoming cloud is so exciting. “If you watch a meteor go through the atmosphere of Earth, it burns up by friction,” says Eliot Quataert, an astrophysicist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We're hoping to see something similar—how the cloud interacts with all the other gas spiraling into the black hole.” The cloud will act like a probe, and astronomers will spend years interpreting its readout: a giant cosmic flare.
Researchers are also hoping to sort out exactly where the cloud came from. Some have suggested that two clumps of gas may have collided near the galaxy's center, draining away the momentum that kept them in orbit. Others think the cloud might be a dim, young solar system, the dust not yet petrified into planetary form, the star obscured by gas.

No matter where the unlucky cloud originated from, its fate is sealed: within a few years it will be sucked past the event horizon of the black hole, its existence obliterated. But astronomers will be studying its long farewell, using every kind of telescope available to them. Perhaps the cloud isn't so unlucky after all, suggests Stefan Gillessen, a member of the team that first discovered the cloud in 2011. “It's unlucky in the sense that it will be destroyed,” he quips, “but lucky in the sense that it becomes famous.

The Wheels Come Off Kepler Planet-Finding Mission

 NASA’s Kepler spacecraft is not only the most prolific exoplanet detector ever; it is — or was — a marvel of engineering. Its 1.4-meter mirror funnels starlight to a 95-megapixel camera, capable of discerning dips in brightness as small as 10 parts per million — clues to the mini-eclipses caused by an exoplanet crossing the star’s face. Yet on 14 May, the US$600-million craft was derailed by the failure of one of its only moving parts — a roughly $200,000 device akin to a child’s gyroscope.
Mission scientists knew that the craft was vulnerable. Kepler is equipped with four metal reaction wheels — motors that, when spun up in one direction, cause the spacecraft to turn in the other. At least three are needed for the craft to remain stable, and one had failed last July. “We recognized that the wheels had a rather chequered history,” says William Borucki, a space scientist at NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, and principal investigator of the Kepler mission. When the second wheel stopped turning — probably because of a problem with its ball bearings or housing, say NASA scientists — Kepler put itself into safe mode, pending a repair that many say is unlikely to happen.
Spinning at 1,000–4,000 revolutions per minute, reaction wheels fine-tune a spacecraft’s orientation, exerting precise torques through careful control of their speed. Even before Kepler launched in 2009, the mission team was painfully aware of problems from a host of virtually identical reaction wheels made by the same manufacturer and installed on several other spacecraft.
Reactions wheels of this type failed, or were deemed too unreliable to be used, on NASA’s Far Ultraviolet Spectroscopic Explorer in 2001 and Japan’s Hayabusa mission in 2004 and 2005. NASA’s Thermosphere, Ionosphere, Mesosphere Energetics and Dynamics (TIMED) satellite experienced a single reaction wheel failure in 2007, and the agency’s Dawn mission suffered two failures, in 2010 and 2012.
Most of these malfunctions occurred well before Kepler’s launch, but the failure on TIMED created a critical mass of concern, recalls John Troeltzsch, Kepler program manager for Ball Aerospace in Boulder, Colorado, which built the craft for NASA. “We first really realized how serious it was at the end of 2007,” he says.
By then, Kepler was ready for launch. Options such as overhauling the entire reaction-wheel system or adding another set of back-ups were deemed too costly and would have meant years of further delays for a mission that had already been postponed twice.
But the team wanted to take one last look. In early 2008, Troeltzsch and his colleagues took all four wheels out of the spacecraft and sent them back to the manufacturer, Ithaco Space Systems in Ithaca, New York, for re-inspection. Changes were made, including replacing the ball bearings, which had already shown signs of pitting, says Charles Sobeck, Kepler’s deputy project manager at Ames. Troeltzsch says, “The assessment was that the changes would prevent the recurrence of the types of problems that had happened before.” Through a spokesman, Ithaco owner UTC Aerospace Systems declined to respond to questions about how the company had tried to fix the wheels, referring the questions back to NASA.

Borucki notes that, at the time, potential problems with the reaction wheels seemed less of an issue because the mission was supposed to last for only 3.5 years. That was how long it was expected to take for Kepler to achieve its main goal: surveying a group of about 150,000 Sun-like stars up to 920 parsecs (3,000 light years) away to determine how common Earth-sized planets in Earth-like orbits are in the Galaxy.

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Faint Portraits of First Galaxies Shed Light on Cosmic Dawn

 For one sleepless week in early September 2009, Garth Illingworth and his team had the early Universe all to themselves. At NASA's request, Illingworth, Rychard Bouwens and Pascal Oesch had just spent the previous week staring into their computer screens at the University of California, Santa Cruz, scanning through hundreds of black-and-white portraits of faint galaxies recorded in a multi-day time exposure by a newly installed infrared camera on the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA simply wanted the three astronomers to preview the images and make sure that the camera was working correctly, before the agency released the data more widely.
But Illingworth, Bouwens and Oesch were hoping that they would find more — that at least some of those smudges of light would prove to be among the first galaxies to form in the Universe, less than 1 billion years after the Big Bang. Even a faint glimpse of such objects could provide fresh insights into some of the biggest questions in cosmology, ranging from the nature of the first stars to the tumultuous beginnings of galaxy formation.
That week, the astronomers began to focus on two dozen tiny candidate images — each so dim and grainy that they might easily be noise in the camera's digital sensors. But as their analysis proceeded, it became clear that these patches of light had the right color, appearing only in the camera's reddest filters — exactly what would be expected of newborn galaxies seen at a very great distance and very high redshift. And when the three colleagues started digitally adding together exposures of each candidate, says Illingworth, “suddenly there they were” — fuzzy, but undeniable images of galaxies. “That week in September was one of the most exciting times of my career!”

By the week's end, he, Bouwens and Oesch had posted two draft papers to the arXiv preprint server, detailing their first-ever collection of more than 20 galaxies from the age of galaxy formation, some 13 billion years ago, when the cosmos was only 600 million to 800 million years old. Since then, other researchers have made further observations of the same small patch of sky, known as the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field (HUDF), and four other larger regions. They have expanded that initial roster to some 1,400 young galaxies, from the same era.


 The data from this growing catalogue are already hinting at a still-unseen time — an infant Universe thronged with countless small galaxies and lit by primordial stars so massive that they burned out and blew up in a cosmic eye-blink. And a new generation of instruments promises to bring that era into clear view. They include the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) of radio telescopes in Chile, which is already beginning such observations; and Hubble's successor, the infrared James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which is set for launch in late 2018.
It's a heady time for early-Universe astronomers, says cosmologist Avi Loeb of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. “We're looking at our origins,” he says. “The first galaxies were the building blocks of the Milky Way, and the desire to understand them is a search for our roots.”

Deep background
Over the past few decades, observers have developed a general storyline describing how galaxies formed (see 'Dawn's early light'). Astronomers know, for example, that the raw material was a hot, ionized plasma of hydrogen and helium that emerged from the Big Bang, then rapidly cooled as the Universe expanded. Once its temperature had fallen far enough, about 370,000 years after the Big Bang, protons and electrons combined to make neutral atoms and created a light-absorbing haze that plunged the Universe into a cosmic 'dark ages'.
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New Physics Complications Lend Support to Multiverse Hypothesis

 On an overcast afternoon in late April, physics professors and students crowded into a wood-paneled lecture hall at Columbia University for a talk by Nima Arkani-Hamed, a high-profile theorist visiting from the Institute for Advanced Study in nearby Princeton, N.J. With his dark, shoulder-length hair shoved behind his ears, Arkani-Hamed laid out the dual, seemingly contradictory implications of recent experimental results at the Large Hadron Collider in Europe.

“The universe is inevitable,” he declared. “The universe is impossible.”
The spectacular discovery of the Higgs boson in July 2012 confirmed a nearly 50-year-old theory of how elementary particles acquire mass, which enables them to form big structures such as galaxies and humans. “The fact that it was seen more or less where we expected to find it is a triumph for experiment, it’s a triumph for theory, and it’s an indication that physics works,” Arkani-Hamed told the crowd.
However, in order for the Higgs boson to make sense with the mass (or equivalent energy) it was determined to have, the LHC needed to find a swarm of other particles, too. None turned up.
With the discovery of only one particle, the LHC experiments deepened a profound problem in physics that had been brewing for decades. Modern equations seem to capture reality with breathtaking accuracy, correctly predicting the values of many constants of nature and the existence of particles like the Higgs. Yet a few constants — including the mass of the Higgs boson — are exponentially different from what these trusted laws indicate they should be, in ways that would rule out any chance of life, unless the universe is shaped by inexplicable fine-tunings and cancellations.
In peril is the notion of “naturalness,” Albert Einstein’s dream that the laws of nature are sublimely beautiful, inevitable and self-contained. Without it, physicists face the harsh prospect that those laws are just an arbitrary, messy outcome of random fluctuations in the fabric of space and time.
The LHC will resume smashing protons in 2015 in a last-ditch search for answers. But in papers, talks and interviews, Arkani-Hamed and many other top physicists are already confronting the possibility that the universe might be unnatural. (There is wide disagreement, however, about what it would take to prove it.)
“Ten or 20 years ago, I was a firm believer in naturalness,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute, where Einstein taught from 1933 until his death in 1955. “Now I’m not so sure. My hope is there’s still something we haven’t thought about, some other mechanism that would explain all these things. But I don’t see what it could be.”
Physicists reason that if the universe is unnatural, with extremely unlikely fundamental constants that make life possible, then an enormous number of universes must exist for our improbable case to have been realized. Otherwise, why should we be so lucky? Unnaturalness would give a huge lift to the multiverse hypothesis, which holds that our universe is one bubble in an infinite and inaccessible foam. According to a popular but polarizing framework called string theory, the number of possible types of universes that can bubble up in a multiverse is around 10^500. In a few of them, chance cancellations would produce the strange constants we observe.

In such a picture, not everything about this universe is inevitable, rendering it unpredictable. Edward Witten, a string theorist at the Institute, said by email, “I would be happy personally if the multiverse interpretation is not correct, in part because it potentially limits our ability to understand the laws of physics. But none of us were consulted when the universe was created.
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Lizards and the language of colour changehttp://adf.ly/Q0Fvh

Devi Stuart-Fox is an evolutionary biologist at the University of Melbourne who has spent the past decade investigating colour change in lizards. She’s now leading an international team of researchers in an investigation into how they achieve colour change, why they do it, and what it costs them. I had a chat to her about what she’s discovered, and what she hopes to discover, about the incredibly complex language of colour change in nature.

Your research showed that the primary use of colour change in chameleons isn’t camouflage. What is it?

There are a lot of species of chameleon, and some have really advanced capacities for colour change, and in others it’s really very limited. So the big question was, why has this ability evolved to such a remarkable degree in some species and not in others?

What we were able to show is the species that do change colour the most actually have the most conspicuous social displays. So there’s been selection for them to use these really bright, flashy colours in their communication and social displays, therefore there was selection on their ability to change colour. We suggested that the ability to change colour evolved for that reason, rather than simply for camouflage. Because why change colours, why not just be very camouflaged against your backgrounds?

We were wondering whether the ability to change colour could be related to the number of different backgrounds they would need to match, or the particular habitat they are found in. We found that there is no relationship, so that’s why we said it hasn’t been driven by camouflage. They obviously use it for camouflage – they match very well – but it’s a limited range of colours they have to match. Whereas in their social displays when they change colours, they’ve got pinks and oranges, greens and blues, and a wide range of ultraviolet colours that are visible to chameleons but not to us.

Do bearded dragons use colour change in a similar way?

Females use colour to signal whether they’ll accept courtship or aggressively reject male advances, and the males use it in territorial displays and also in courtship displays to female. We don’t know what specific colours mean, in some cases dark colours can be a symbol of submission, but in other cases, like the black beard in [Central bearded dragon] males, it’s a symbol of dominance. So different colours mean different things in different contexts.

It’s interesting that the female dragons have developed a specific mechanism based on a colour signal to ward off the males.
I’m particularly interested in precisely that. I’ve been studying it in the Lake Eyre dragons – they occur only in the Lake Eyre salt pan, which is the most barren habitat you could be in. Usually it’s the males that are a brighter version of the females, but in this species both sexes are really well matched to their backgrounds, and in the breeding season, the females develop really bright patches of orange on their bellies. What was in the literature before was that these patches develop when the females are rejecting the males, but what we showed was that the patches developed when they’re receptive, and the males see the orange on the female’s throat and absolutely harass them.
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Lizards and the language of colour change

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