Through a blanket of fog, it was a vision of death. Darryl Virostko, the big-wave surfer known as Flea, was taking what witnesses described as the worst-looking wipeout they ever saw. It was a gloomy day at Maverick's last week, and a handful of riders were meeting the challenge of their lives.
The most-seasoned Maverick's surfers have seen some epic disasters in their time. Jay Moriarity, who met his death years later while free-diving, took a well-publicized wipeout in 1994, just four days before the drowning of Hawaiian superstar Mark Foo. A Santa Cruz surfer named Neil Matthies took a fall on a giant peak in 1998 and was held under so long that a second wave passed over him before he came to the surface - about 45 seconds later, more than 100 yards inside the spot of impact.
Flea's wipeout, though, entered an entirely new realm. That Tuesday, the waves were so big that paddle-surfing, the style featured in the upcoming Maverick's competition, was out of the question. This was strictly for tow-surfing - the act of being whipped into a wave at high speed, water-ski style, by a partner aboard a personal watercraft. Grant Washburn, the Maverick's standout who has meticulously chronicled every swell during the last 15 years, said some of the wave faces approached 80 feet in height.
"Probably the biggest day ever surfed at Maverick's," said Washburn. "A couple of other days are in the ballpark. But what really stood out was the performance level. Guys were turning, carving, snapping off the top, getting barreled like never before."
The same day marked the death of a surfer at Ghost Trees in Monterey.
Peter Davi, the 45-year-old Monterey surfer who died that same Tuesday at Ghost Trees, the notoriously dangerous spot near Pebble Beach. As much respect as Davi had earned through years of experience around the world, no one could fathom the idea of him trying to paddle-surf Ghost Trees - which had served up the biggest waves ever ridden there - instead of finding a tow partner.
Video of the day at Maverick's can be found at surfline and is some of the nuttiest stuff I have ever seen.
Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan blames President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney for efforts to mislead the public about the role of White House aides in leaking the identity of a CIA operative.
In an excerpt from his forthcoming book, McClellan recounts the 2003 news conference in which he told reporters that aides Karl Rove and I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby were "not involved" in the leak involving operative Valerie Plame.
"There was one problem. It was not true," McClellan writes, according to a brief excerpt released Tuesday. "I had unknowingly passed along false information. And five of the highest-ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."
The 390-million-year-old specimen was found in a German quarry, the journal Biology Letters reports.
The creature, which has been named Jaekelopterus rhenaniae, would have paddled in a river or swamp.
The size of the beast suggests that spiders, insects, crabs and similar creatures were much larger in the past than previously thought, the team says.
The claw itself measures 46cm - indicating its owner would have been longer even than the average-sized human.
Creepy, Slimy And Just Plain Weird
Mike Rowe looks back at some of the creepies slimiest and downright weirdest citizens on the animal kingdom
Ultimately, of course, Judge John Jones ruled that intelligent design is grounded in theology rather than science, and thereby would be unconstitutional to teach in public schools. He was subsequently subjected to death threats. After the town’s voters ousted the school committee members who had tried to introduce intelligent design, Pat Robertson issued a warning: "I'd like to say to the good citizens of Dover: If there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to God. You just rejected him from your city."Go read for the details.
In watching the documentary, I was struck by the parallels between the Dover story and movement conservatism generally. The selling of “intelligent design,” and the idea itself, has much in common with Social Security privatization, supply-side economics, the invasion of Iraq, school vouchers, and other half-baked causes that the right has relentlessly been pushing in recent decades.
Perdue won't be the first governor to hold a call for public prayer during the epic drought gripping the Southeast. Alabama Gov. Bob Riley issued a proclamation declaring a week in July as ''Days of Prayer for Rain'' to ''humbly ask for His blessings and to hold us steady in times of difficulty.''
The loudest opposition to Perdue's move has come from the Atlanta Freethought Society, a secular group that is expecting about a dozen of its 125 members to protest at the vigil.
''The governor can pray when he wants to,'' said Ed Buckner, who is organizing the protest. ''What he can't do is lead prayers in the name of the people of Georgia.''
A press release from the Governors office today unveiled a contest for 3rd, 4th and 5th graders to develop a water conservation plan for their community. The contest winner will receive $2000 to implement the plan in their area.Photo by Flickr user digitalens used under a Creative Commons license
Sending a boom across the bay, the offspring of Indonesia's fabled Krakatau volcano is unleashing another mighty eruption, blasting smoke and red-hot rocks hundreds of feet into the sky.
Even on its quiet side, the black sand on the now forbidden island is so hot that a visitor can only briefly set foot on it.
You could see the oil in the water," McNertney said later. "This little duck bird was just stranded in the sand. The tide would come in and hit him, and he'd try to scramble. It was terrible. I felt I had to bring him in."
McNertney's friend, Maaike Snoep, 31, heated some water on a Coleman stove she had brought in the back of a van, and the two began trying to clean oil off the bird.
"It was all over his face, mouth and eyes," McNertney said. "We tried to get it off his beak and his eyes first, but it was just covered with oil. It was disgusting."
The seabirds, many of them recent arrivals after their annual winter migration, became the innocent victims of the aftermath of Wednesday's accident, when a container ship struck the Bay Bridge. The damaged ship spilled thousands of gallons of bunker fuel, which drifted across the San Francisco Bay to the Marin County shoreline and finally out the Golden Gate, soiling beaches along the coast.
Bird and animal lovers rushed to the beaches to help with the cleanup Thursday, only to find that there was little they could do without proper equipment.
Photo by Flickr user savethebay used under a Creative Commons license
But that doesn't mean Yellowstone is about to go the way of Mount St. Helens.
"There's no evidence of an imminent eruption or hydrothermal explosion," said Robert Smith, a geophysics professor at the University of Utah who co-authored the study.
...
Yellowstone is situated on a giant, geologically active feature known as a supervolcano.
"It's hundreds of times bigger than Mount St. Helens," Smith said, referring to the active volcano in Washington State.
Much of the park sits in a caldera, or crater, some 40 miles (70 kilometers) across, which formed when the cone of the massive volcano collapsed in a titanic eruption 640,000 years ago.
The mangrove rivulus, also known as the mangrove killifish, is native to the Americas and is about two inches (five centimeters) long.Killifish photo by Flickr user swordw used under a Creative Commons license.
The fish has long been studied for its many unique features.
It's the only vertebrate known to naturally self-fertilize, for example. In some populations, it can become a hermaphrodite, developing both male and female parts simultaneously, to produce clones of itself.
The animal can also live out of water for up to 66 days, Taylor said, and is one of very few fish species that spend their entire lives in mangrove swamps. Most fish move in and out of the areas as water sources dwindle.
Taylor and his team had previously found that when small pools of water dried up, the rivulus settled into crab burrows. But even those disappear during extreme dry spells.
This is an indefensible movie in certain ways, but I enjoyed it anyway. It would have profited from Orwell’s dictum about saints being judged guilty until proven innocent: Sean Penn basically treats Christopher McCandless as the questing would-be holy man he clearly took himself to be, while the other side of the story – about a reckless, charismatic kid who smashed up countless lives while chasing down his bliss, and whose pathetic death was a more-or-less inevitable consequence of his own foolhardiness – slips out involuntarily, between the sweeping landscape shots and Eddie Vedder songs.And Brian Beutler responds with:
I think this misses quite a bit. At the beginning of the film, we meet a guy who we might well confuse for an idealist and a renegade. But that sense doesn't last long. By mid-movie, when he's had a chance to reflect upon his actions, to meet and ignore the advice of older people who have cast doubt upon his plans and questioned his motives, he seems arrogant and spoiled--on the sort of quest only the son or daughter of rich parents could ever feasibly embark upon. And when it's too late, after we learn about the events in his past that supposedly drove him over the edge, he seems like a deeply confused obsessive. It might be fair to say that, by the end, his character has taken shape by packing on details that make him look less like Thoreau, and more like Don Quixote, or perhaps Ahab, but without the white whale.I am going to have to lean more towards Ross with this one. It only took a few minutes into the movie for me to remember that I hated the protagonist when I had read the Krakauer book a decade ago. I was in Alaksa near the area where McCandless died a few years afterwards and he was still the laughing stock of the town. That portion of the story was only touched on in the first few minutes of the film and then McCandless was portrayed as quite a sympathetic character.
British scientific team discovered the 405-year-old clam, named after the Chinese dynasty and not the former Liberal Democrat leader, at the bottom of the ocean, and hope its longevity will reveal the secrets of ageing.I think it is doubtful that this clam will lead to anti-ageing breakthroughs for people as our life cycles are quite different, but you never know what little molecular clues it could unlock.
So significant is the find that Help The Aged have awarded a £40,000 grant to the team to investigate how the molusc, born when Queen Elizabeth I was on the throne and William Shakespeare was writing The Merry Wives of Windsor, has survived over the centuries.
The record-breaking shellfish, 31 years older than the previous oldest animal, another clam, was caught last year when scientists from the Bangor University School of Ocean Sciences were dredging the seabed north of Iceland.
The "Arctica islandica" was among a haul of 3,000 empty shells and 34 live molluscs taken to the laboratory.
Unfortunately, by the time its true age had been established Ming was already dead. But the scientists aged the 3.4in clam from its shell which like trees has a layer or ring of growth for every year that the animal has been alive.
The long and the short of it is that Global Warming alarmists were wrong again. They correctly predicted that the Amazon rain forest would get drier. What they didn’t predict is that it would get greener as it got drier. It seems rainforest growth is limited by sunlight. As it experienced a drought in 2005 the clouds dissipated a little, more sunlight got through, and productivity increased.
The White House scolded the Federal Emergency Management Agency on Friday for staging a phony news conference about assistance to victims of wildfires in southern California.
The agency — much maligned for its sluggish response to Hurricane Katrina over two years ago — arranged to have FEMA employees play the part of independent reporters Tuesday and ask questions of Vice Adm. Harvey E. Johnson, the agency's deputy director.
The questions were predictably soft and gratuitous.
"I'm very happy with FEMA's response," Johnson said in reply to one query from an agency employee.
White House press secretary Dana Perino said it was not appropriate that the questions were posed by agency staffers instead of reporters. FEMA was responsible for the "error in judgment," she said, adding that the White House did not know about it beforehand and did not condone it.
"FEMA has issued an apology, saying that they had an error in judgment when they were attempting to get out a lot of information to reporters, who were asking for answers to a variety of questions in regard to the wildfires in California," Perino said. "It's not something I would have condoned. And they — I'm sure — will not do it again."
She said the agency was just trying to provide information to the public, through the press, because there were so many questions.
Tuesday, while “wildfires raged” in California, FEMA staged a live press conference at which agency staffers posed as journalists and asked softball questions. One of those staffers, Director of External Affairs John “Pat” Philbin, has now resigned. He has instead landed an “amazing opportunity” to head public affairs at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The discovery increases the possibility that the heavily spotted cats can be rescued from the brink of extinction.Photo of non-Iberian lynx by Flickr user Andreas Solberg used under a Creative Commons license.
The newfound population appears to roam private estates in the Castile la Mancha Province of central Spain, according to the international conservation group WWF.
The two other known populations occupy isolated portions of Andalusia in southern Spain.
WWF announced the discovery on Tuesday after local newspapers corroborated evidence of the cats' existence. The animals have been caught on film.
"We are excited and amazed by this discovery," Luis Suárez, head of the organization's species program in Madrid, said in a statement.
Information on the discovery comes from the local government, Suárez said in a telephone interview. But the cats may have originally been seen by private landowners who wish to remain out of the spotlight.
Only between 100 and 150 Iberian lynx remain, including the new population, Suárez said. The World Conservation Union lists the species as "critically endangered," meaning it faces "an extremely high risk of extinction in the wild."
Given his statements sad is not the right word. But bizarre certainly and a weird coda to the career behind one of the great discoveries of the 20th Century: DNA. James Watson, who along with Francis Crick discovered DNA, the core building block and information transmitter of life on earth, has been forced to retire as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island. This, of course, comes after last week when Watson told an interviewer that he is not optimistic about the future of Africa since, he believes, Africans have a lower average intelligence than whites.
The California National Guard is only at 50% readiness to respond to natural disasters such as a major earthquake or major wildfires, thanks to the Iraq War. California warned the federal government in May of the shortfall, but apparently it fell on deaf ears.Now, as 14 major wildfires rage across the state, those earlier warnings are materializing. While California currently has approximately 1,500 Guardsmen serving in Iraq, the strains on the disaster response teams are compounded by the missing personnel and equipment.Our thoughts are with our many friends and family that have been hopefully only temporarily displaced
Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) said, “Right now we are down 50 percent in terms of our National Guard equipment because they’re all in Iraq. The equipment — half of the equipment, so we really will need help.” California Lieutenant Gov. John Garamendi (D) said on Harball yesterday, “What we really need are those firefighters, we need the equipment, we need, frankly, we need those troops back from Iraq.”
When asked about California’s concerns of depleted equipment caused by the Iraq war, White House spokesman Dana Perino said yesterday, “I haven’t heard that specifically.”
There is a floating island of plastic garbage larger than Texas floating between the California coast and Hawaii. First I had ever heard of this and it is quite disgusting.In reality, the rogue bag would float into a sewer, follow the storm drain to the ocean, then make its way to the so-called Great Pacific Garbage Patch - a heap of debris floating in the Pacific that's twice the size of Texas, according to marine biologists.
The enormous stew of trash - which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers - floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man's land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
...
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is particularly dangerous for birds and marine life, said Warner Chabot, vice president of the Ocean Conservancy, an environmental group.
Sea turtles mistake clear plastic bags for jellyfish. Birds swoop down and swallow indigestible shards of plastic. The petroleum-based plastics take decades to break down, and as long as they float on the ocean's surface, they can appear as feeding grounds.
"These animals die because the plastic eventually fills their stomachs," Chabot said. "It doesn't pass, and they literally starve to death."
An unknown animal created the fossilized prints seen above while strolling along the muddy bottom of a nearly dry riverbed.
The tracks were found in the same region of New Brunswick, Canada, where the oldest-known reptile skeletons were unearthed 150 years ago.
But the ancient footprints are preserved in sediments that lay more than half a mile (nearly a kilometer) deeper than those 315-million-year-old bones—which suggests they were made by an animal that lived one to three million years earlier.
Fatted Calf of San Francisco, Ca. You can buy their meat at the Berkeley Farmer's Market and at the Ferry Building Farmer's Market in San Francisco. Seriously though Taylor makes the best sausages you will have ever tasted. I recommend the Merguez and the uncased Chorizo for breakfast. The Crepinettes are also to die for. And Mmmmmm Bacon.
In describing the pollination of California almonds it's hard not to slip into superlatives: 80 percent of world almond production takes place in California, and almonds have become the country's most valuable horticultural export. In 2004, more than a billion dollars worth of California almonds were sent into the global marketplace, double the revenues from the state's wine exports. The California Almond Board has pledged to make almonds "the healthiest specialty crop in the world," pouring research money into studies that bolster enthusiastic nutritional claims about heart health and cancer prevention. But the work of pollinating this vast string of orchards - 600,000 acres between Red Bluff (Tehama County) and Bakersfield, a job that must take place over 22 days - is more than the local bees can handle. It requires importation of more than half of the all the honey bees in the United States.
Tests showed the bird had 10 times the safe amount of lead in its bloodstream after it was caught in central California last month. Only about 300 California condors remain in the world.Meanwhile private areas such as the Tejon Ranch in Kern county have gone ahead and imposed self-regulatory bans.
Efforts to conserve the California condor got a huge boost last week from the Tejon Ranch Company, California's largest private landowner and operator of the state's largest private hunting program.Take action!
The Tejon Ranch Company announced that it will discontinue the use of lead ammunition on its 270,000 acre privately-owned ranch which is located in the heart of condor country in southern California's Kern County. The lead-free ammunition requirement will apply to any hunting on Tejon Ranch after January 1, 2008, and apply to the more than 1,800 hunters that come to the ranch each year to hunt deer, elk, antelope, wild pigs, wild turkey and other game.
Please call the governor right away today at (916) 445-2841 and urge him to sign A.B. 821 into law and protect the California condor.
Calling the governor's office is easy. If you press (1) for English, you can then press (2) to "voice your opinion on an Assembly bill." Finally, press (0) to speak with a representative staff member. Simply tell the staff member that you want Governor Schwarzenenegger to sign A.B. 821 into law to protect California condors.
Photo by Flickr user ekai used under a Creative Commons license.
SWOT is a coalition of worldwide conservationists offering a solution to the lack of a centralized resource for global sea turtle data. This powerful network of partners, collectively known as the “SWOT Team,” has volunteered to annually assess the status of the world’s seven sea turtle species, the threats they face and the wide range of efforts that endeavor to conserve them.
The SWOT Team is dedicated to its collective vision – that of a permanent global network of specialists working to accelerate the conservation of sea turtles and their habitats, pooling and synthesizing data, and openly sharing the information to audiences who can make a difference. Together we have developed a unique global database to which sea turtle conservationists can contribute and compare their data to conservation practices in other areas of the world and collectively map it using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology.
Each year, results of these data and updates on conservation projects across the globe will be published in an international journal, the SWOT Report, that will encapsulate the current status of sea turtle populations worldwide; identify gaps in research and priorities; and provide recommendations for advancing both sea turtle and general marine conservation.
Republican presidential candidate John McCain said the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, announced Friday, should have gone to someone else other than former Vice President Al Gore.
"I would have liked to see that prize go to the Buddhist monks who are suffering and dying in Burma," McCain said after a speech this morning in Davenport.
The president learned about it this morning," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto, who is travelling with Bush in Florida. "Of course he's happy for Vice President Gore and happy for the international panel on climate change scientists who also shared the peace prize."Photo mash-up from photos by Flickr user marcn and kellyandapril used under a derivative Creative Commons license.
"Obviously, it's an important recognition and we're sure the vice president is thrilled," added Fratto, who said he did not know of plans for Bush to make a congratulatory call to Gore.
Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) share the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. They were awarded for "their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change."STATEMENT FROM FORMER VICE PRESIDENT AL GORE
Friday, October 12, 2007
I am deeply honored to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. This award is even more meaningful because I have the honor of sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change--the world’s pre-eminent scientific body devoted to improving our understanding of the climate crisis--a group whose members have worked tirelessly and selflessly for many years. We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity. It is also our greatest opportunity to lift global consciousness to a higher level.
My wife, Tipper, and I will donate 100 percent of the proceeds of the award to the Alliance for Climate Protection, a bipartisan non-profit organization that is devoted to changing public opinion in the U.S. and around the world about the urgency of solving the climate crisis.
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to U.S. citizens Mario R. Capecchi and Oliver Smithies and Sir Martin J. Evans of Britain for their work on gene targeting.They were honored for a technique called gene targeting, which lets scientists inactivate or modify particular genes in mice. That in turn lets them study how those genes affect health and disease.
To use this technique, researchers introduce a genetic change into mouse embryonic stem cells. These cells are then injected into mouse embryos. The mice born from these embryos are bred with others to produce offspring with altered genes.
In a bizarre mishap that conservationists describe as "heartbreaking," an estimated 10,000 wildebeest have drowned while attempting to cross Kenya's Mara River during an annual migration.
The deaths, which occurred over the course of several days last week, are said to account for about one percent of the total species population.
The drownings created a grotesque wildlife pileup, after part of the migrating herd tried to ford the Mara at "a particularly treacherous crossing point," according to Terilyn Lemaire, a conservation worker with the Mara Conservancy who witnessed the incident. (See a photo gallery of the mass drowning.)
The first animals into the river failed to cross and drowned, while others continued to stampede into the water behind them
Albino Bat. Cannot remember which species it was, but it was not Diclidurus albus, the ghost bat, but was in fact a true albino. Taken on Bastimentos Island.
Ensatina eschscholtzii eschscholtzii - Monterey Ensatina taken in Garrapata State Park 2006.
The dinosaurs, portrayed as horse-size in the movie Jurassic Park, were actually not much bigger than a modern-day turkey.
"If people saw this animal now, they would think it's a really strange-looking bird," said study lead author Alan Turner, a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and a graduate student at Columbia University.
"Instead of the more reptilian-looking versions that Steven Spielberg used in Jurassic Park, these would be much fluffier, much [more] feathery animals with what looks like wings on their forearms."
Raised Knobs
Turner and colleagues examined a velociraptor fossil in Mongolia's Gobi Desert and found the forearm had regularly spaced bumps that would have held the quills of secondary feathers.
The velociraptor fossil was found in 1998, buried in 80-million-year-old sandstone deposits.
Say Goodbye to Fly Fishing
As water temperatures continue to rise, researchers say rainbow trout, "already at the southern limits” of their temperature ranges in the Appalachian mountains, could disappear there over the next century. [Softpedia]
Say Goodbye to Pinot Noir
The reason you adore pinot noir is that it comes from a notoriously temperamental thin-skinned grape that thrives in cool climates. Warmer temperatures are already damaging the pinots from Oregon, “baking away” the grape’s berry flavors. [Bloomberg]
Say Goodbye to That Snorkeling Vacation
The elkhorn coral which used to line the floor of the Caribbean are nearly gone, “victims of pollution, warmer water and acidification from the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide seeping into oceans.” [Denver Post]
Say Goodbye to That Tropical Island Vacation
Indonesia's environment minister announced this year that scientific studies estimate about 2,000 of the country's lush tropical islands could disappear by 2030 due to rising sea levels. [ABC News]
Say Goodbye to Guacamole
Scientists from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory predict hotter temps will cause a 40 percent drop in California’s avocado production over the next 40 years. [Lawrence Livermore National Lab]
Loki showing off a Ball Python
Carlos giving the answers to all those questions
North American Wood Turtles looking out at the exhibit hall.
President Bush may like to be seen as a swaggering tough guy with a penchant for manly outdoor pursuits, but in a new book one of his closest allies has said he is afraid of horses.
George W Bush saddles up,
but where is the horse?
Vicente Fox, the former president of Mexico, derided his political friend as a "windshield cowboy" – a cowboy who prefers to drive – and "the cockiest guy I have ever met in my life".
He recalled a meeting in Mexico shortly after both men had been elected when Mr Fox offered Mr Bush a ride on a "big palomino" horse.
Mr Fox, who left office in December, recalled Mr Bush "backing away" from the animal.
''A horse lover can always tell when others don't share our passion," he said, according to the Washington Post.
Mr Bush has spoken of his fondness for shooting doves and cutting brush on his Crawford ranch in Texas, which he bought in 1999.
The property reportedly has no horses and only five cattle.
Snake collector Matt Wilkinson of Portland grabbed a 20-inch rattler from the highway near Maupin, and three weeks later, to impress his ex-girlfriend, he stuck the serpent in his mouth.
He was soon near death with a swollen tongue that blocked his throat. Trauma doctors at the Oregon Health and Science University saved his life.
"You can assume alcohol was involved," he said. Actually, not just beer. It was something he called a "mixture of stupid stuff."
The earliest evidence yet of modern ears in terrestrial vertebrates has been discovered in reptile fossils from central Russia, paleontologists say.Photo by Flickr user cwulmer used under a Creative Commons license.
The animals may have been among the first nocturnal vertebrates, using their advanced hearing and large eyes to communicate with each other and hunt insect prey at night.
This would have given them a niche during a time when Earth was crowded with animals.
The reptiles lived 260 million years ago, during the Permian period, which lasted from 299 to 251 million years ago.
That's about 50 million years earlier than modern ears were thought to have developed in terrestrial vertebrates.
