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Audio: 165-Million-Year-Old Cricket Song Comes Back to Life
Fossils of A. musicus wings and illustrations of its wing ridges. Images: Gu et al./PNAS
A cricket song last heard 165 million years ago has been played again.
To reconstruct the sound, paleontologists compared microscopic wing structures of fossil Archaboilus musicus, a Jurassic ancestor of modern crickets, to contemporary wings. Crickets sing — or, technically, “stridulate” — by rubbing together the ridged edges of their wings.
From noises generated by modern features, the researchers could extrapolate what A. musicus sounded like. (To listen, play the file below.) Theirs was a powerful song, almost certainly used to attract mates.
“The low-frequency musical song of A. musicus was well-adapted to communication in the lightly cluttered environment of the mid-Jurassic forest produced by coniferous trees and giant ferns,” wrote the researchers, led by Jun-Jie Gu of China’s Capital Normal University, in a Feb. 7 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. “Reptilian, amphibian, and mammalian insectivores could have also heard A. musicus’ song.”
What does the song tell us? To the researchers, it suggests that cricket songs are ancient, rather than a recent evolutionary innovation, and hints at the sonic richness of the Jurassic world.
The cricket’s song is not, however, the oldest noise in the world. That honor goes to the sound of our universe’s birth.
Image & audio: 1) The fossil wings of A. musicus. (Gu et al./PNAS) 2) The sound of A. musicus. (Gu et al./PNAS)
How NASA Makes Those Incredible High-Res Images of Earth
Image: NASA/NOAA
In recent weeks, a pair of high-resolution images of the Earth has captivated the public. Taken by the Suomi NPP satellite, these pictures portray our planet’s incredible beauty with 8,000- by 8,000-pixel and 11,500- by 11,500-pixel detail.
How were these highly detailed images created? The satellite flies 512 miles above the Earth, but the images appear as if they were taken from a much higher perspective: an altitude of 1,242 for the first image and 7,918 miles for the second. This little trick was accomplished by stitching together data from several orbits, creating an image that appears to be “pulled back.”
NASA launched the 4,600-pound Suomi in October to remotely sense variations in the Earth’s oceans, continents, and atmosphere and get a better understanding of climate change. It passes directly from pole to pole 14 times a day, imaging 1,865-mile swaths of our planet with each trip.
On board Suomi, the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) instrument takes pictures in red, green, and blue wavelengths. For the whole-Earth images, those wavelengths were combined to create a natural color photograph. It is not an exact representation of what an observer sitting in space would see, because particles in the atmosphere scatter short wavelengths of light, and our planet would actually appear more blue-tinged. The photos more accurately portray how the oceans and continents appear from the ground.
Oceanographer Norman Kuring, who compiled the two pictures, said the original image, showing North and Central America, was made as a favor to project scientist James Gleason who was looking for an ocean color image to show in a presentation. Word got out of the striking picture and NASA officials released it on Jan. 25, resulting in 3 million people viewing it in one week.
With the popularity of this first image and requests from the public for another perspective, the agency produced a second image on Feb. 3 showing Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.
The photos follow in the footsteps of NASA’s other great Earth images. The original Blue Marble — one of the most famous pictures of all time — was captured by the crew of Apollo 17 from a distance of 28,000 miles. Since 2002, the agency has stitched together up to 10,000 satellite images to produce other incredible detailed images. One of the most recent, from 2007, had a mind-boggling resolution of 86,400 pixels by 43,200 pixels.
Such pictures have proved time and time again to be among the most-viewed and best-loved NASA photos. What accounts for their enduring popularity?
“My guess is that people know that this is the only place we have to live. When they see an image showing these beautiful blues and greens, it speaks to them,” said Kuring. “This is our home.”
Why Is Microsoft Hush, Hush on Google's Search Plus Your World?
Google has received significant public reprimand for their "a little more Google for everyone" Google+ powered Search Plus Your World. Twitter was outraged. Facebook was disappointed. Microsoft was…wait, why isn’t Microsoft saying anything?
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Yahoo Adds Apps Search: So What?
Only a few days after killing off ten mobile apps, Yahoo unveiled an Apps search tab.
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Adobe's Kevin Cochrane Talks ReOrg, Customer Experience in 2012
In November of last year, Adobe did a pretty serious restructure, making the decision to focus on Digital Marketing and Digital Media. More than a few people might have wondered what exactly was going on. But when you take the time to consider what Adobe did, you realize they were following their own advice: focus on the customer.
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What Super Bowl Commercials Can Teach About Integrated Mobile Marketing
It’s the morning after. Regardless of who you were cheering for in last night’s Super Bowl or what you think about the commercials shown during the game, it’s clear that media is changing how advertisers are marketing and to whom they market.
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Apple Releases Slightly Less Evil Version of iBooks Author EULA
Apple has had a change of heart from its “we own your iBook content henceforth and forever and you’re going to like it” policy. Shortly after Apple published its iBooks Author EULA, a legion of technical journalists and copyright analysts digitally chastised the software giant as evil for locking authors into an agreement that would restrict them to selling content created with iBooks Author in Apple’s iBookstore.
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Ivorians defend coach's approach
Dynamics CRM Goes Mobile, Extends Social Capabilities
CRM is nothing really unless it can adapt to business users’ changing marketplace. Microsoft, since the release of Dynamics CRM online last year, committed itself to providing agile CRM and preparing companies for the release by flagging changes 90 days in advance. It has now flagged that it is making Dynamics CRM mobile.
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Knowledge Management Meets Social Business: KM is Dead, Long Live KM!
Have I mentioned recently how much I truly hate the term "social business"?
Maybe hate is a bit strong, and it’s really not the term, but the way it is used. However, as I was struggling to finalize my contribution to this month’s Social Business theme, I was saved by a fellow author’s article: Knowledge Management in 2012: Probably Dead by Roan Young (@roanyoung).
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Russian Drill Penetrates 14-Million-Year-Old Antarctic Lake
Update: Russian news agency Ria Novosti has reported that the team penetrated Lake Vostok on Feb. 5, 2012. According to the report, the researchers stopped drilling at a depth of 3,768 meters as they reached the surface of the sub-glacial lake.
After 20 years of drilling, a team of Russian researchers is close to breaching the prehistoric Lake Vostok, which has been trapped deep beneath Antarctica for the last 14 million years.
Vostok is the largest in a sub-glacial web of more than 200 lakes that are hidden 4 kilometers beneath the ice. Some of the lakes formed when the continent was much warmer and still connected to Australia.
The lakes are rich in oxygen (making them oligotrophic), with levels of the element some 50 times higher than what would be found in your typical freshwater lake. The high gas concentration is thought to be because of the enormous weight and pressure of the continental ice cap.
If life exists in Vostok, it will have to be an extremophile — a life form that has adapted to survive in extreme environments. The organism would have to withstand high pressure, constant cold, low nutrient input, high oxygen concentration and an absence of sunlight.
The conditions in Lake Vostok are thought to be similar to the conditions on Jupiter’s moon Europa and Saturn’s tiny moon Enceladus. In June, NASA probe Cassini found the best evidence yet for a massive saltwater reservoir beneath the icy surface of Enceladus. This all means that finding life in the inhospitable depths of Vostok would strengthen the case for life in the outer solar system.
Back on planet Earth, the team at Vostok are running short on time. Antarctica’s summer will soon end and the researchers need to leave their remote base while they still can. Temperatures will drop as low as -80 degrees Celsius, grounding planes and trapping the team.
They missed their chance last year. “Time is short, however. It’s possible that the drillers won’t be able to reach the water before the end of the current Antarctic summer, and they’ll need to wait another year before the process can continue,” we wrote in January 2011. The drill halted in February.
Meanwhile, Russian engineers are planning to venture into the lake itself, with swimming robots. In the Antarctic summer of 2012 to 2013, they plan to send a robot into the lake to collect water samples and sediments from the bottom. An environmental assessment of the plan will be submitted at the Antarctic Treaty’s consultative meeting in May 2012.
Image: NSF
Source: Wired.co.uk
Readdle App Gives Tablets Pen-Based Productivity Boost
At CES this year, one major trend is the shifting tablet scope toward pen computing. This term once sent shudders down the spine of any product development team, as "Pen Computing" was equated with handwriting recognition and that was spelled doom for early products such as the Apple Newton that used a pen, not touch, as the primary input. Now iPad Apps software maker Readdle wants to move back to the pen with its release of the new Remarks software that targets handwriting capture, note taking and PDF annotation.
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