TarsTarkas.NET Blog

We got frogs with retractable claws now. Just think about that! These frogs have the potential to make a cool horror film, and it can be scientifically accurate! SciFi Channel, take note. This is another example of how there are many cool things still out there waiting to be discovered. And then exploited by mad scientists like I, for I am currently working on a way to incorporate these giant clawed frogs into an army to use to take over swampland worldwide. Then I will sell the swampland in bogus real estate deals, making millions! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

Make Way for Superfrog

By Lauren Cahoon
ScienceNOW Daily News
28 May 2008
X-Men fans rejoice: Wolverine has come to life, as a frog. When the comic book warrior faces a fight, metallic blades spring forth from his hand. A new study concludes that certain African frogs are similarly equipped, having sharp, claw-shaped bones that pierce through their own fingertips when the animal is threatened.

More than 100 years ago, scientists observed the mysterious bony appendages in museum specimens of the Arthroleptidae frog family, but they had no idea what to make of them. Some speculated that the protrusions were an artifact of the preservation process. Harvard University biologists David Blackburn decided to solve the mystery once and for all after having the frequent misfortune of being injured by the amphibians while doing field research in Cameroon. “The frogs will start kicking and drag these claws against your skin,” he says. “I’ve gotten bloody scratches from them many a time.”

Due to strict government regulations on removing live animals from Cameroon, Blackburn’s team had to do their anatomical studies on preserved museum specimens. In addition to the talon-shaped finger bones others had seen, the researchers found a small bony nodule nestled in the tissue just beyond the frog’s fingertip. When sheathed, each claw is anchored to the nodule with tough strands of collagen, but, as Blackburn had discovered firsthand, when the frog is grabbed or attacked, the frog breaks the nodule connection and forces its sharpened bones through the skin.

This bizarre skeletal feature is found in only 12 species within the Arthroleptidae family,

Popularity: 26% [?]

Damn aliens are all a bunch of jerks. All they want is to rape out planet, hunt our people, and eat our brains. It’s always a cookbook! And now, someone is claiming to have actual video evidence of an alien. An alien looking through a window. Damn alien Peeping Toms! That’s is, all aliens should be killed. I’ll take a loss of Mr. Spock, Alf, and ET to take out the ID4 aliens, Predator, Alien Aliens, Greys, Reptoids, and all those other jerks. Aliens suck, suffer not the aliens to live. It’s the only way to save the planet.

Alien Video To Be Revealed To Media Tomorrow, Man Claims

The Rocky Mountain News is reporting that tomorrow the world might actually see who else is out there. A man, named Jeff Peckman, claims he will reveal video of live alien to the news media Friday. Brace yourselves. Below are some key excerpts from the story:

A video that purportedly shows a living, breathing space alien will be shown to the news media Friday in Denver.

“It shows an extraterrestrial’s head popping up outside of a window at night, looking in the window, that’s visible through an infrared camera,” he said. The alien is about 4 feet tall and can be seen blinking, Peckman said earlier this month.

An instructor at the Colorado Film School in Denver scrutinized the video “very carefully” and determined it was authentic, Peckman said.

Popularity: 12% [?]

Just when you thought SciFi Channel had run out of animals to use in their movies, we get a giant peccary. As someone who has a hobby making large versions of animals, I am ashamed that I did not think to create a giant peccary, and now it bites me in the butt. So now I will make up for lost time, and hunt down some of these creatures to use in growth experiments, thus making these giant peccaries look like dwarves compared to what I will cook up! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!

New Species Of Peccary — Pig-like Animal — Discovered In Amazon Region

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2007) — Dutch biologist Marc van Roosmalen has discovered a new species of peccary, a member of the pig family, in the basin of the Rio Aripuanã in the south-eastern Amazon region. The divergence time from the already known peccary species (the time which has passed since the evolutionary division) has been set at one to 1.2 million years.

This species has been christened giant peccary (Pecari maximus) by the researchers on account of its size. The holotype of the species can be found in the museum of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas da Amazônia (INPA) in Manaus. The giant peccary was known by the local Tupi Indians as Caitetú Mundè, which means ‘great peccary which lives in pairs’.

Peccaries belong to the pig family from the New World (Tayassuidae). Until recently, the species consisted of three types: the collared peccary, the white-lipped peccary and the Chaccoan peccary. In his contacts with local hunters in area of the Rio Aripuanã basin, Van Roosmalen came across three hides of a species of peccary which he had encountered several times in the local jungle, and which differed strongly from the collared peccary which was also indigenous to the area.

The measurements of the body and the skull confirmed that the new species is larger than the other peccary species. The giant peccary has comparatively longer legs and its fur markings are also completely different. The skull sizes of the giant peccary also appear to differ from the other species. Genetic analysis indicates a divergence time with the collared and white-lipped peccary of between one and 1.2 million years. The giant peccary occurs sympatrically with the white-lipped and collared species, in other words they are found in the same region.

The new species also exhibits very different behaviour from its family members, the white-lipped and collared peccaries. These species are found in large to very large groups (even up to hundreds of individual animals in the case of the white-lipped peccary), while the giant peccary is only found in pairs or in small family groups with one or two offspring. The other peccary types root in the ground for seeds and roots.

The giant peccary eats mainly fruit and exhibits little or no rooting behaviour. The habitat of the giant peccary is limited to terra firme, dry wooded areas, in a small region of the basin of the Rio Aripuanã. The researchers therefore expect the giant peccary population to be small, and they recommend that this new species should be placed on the Red List of threatened species of the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN).

Popularity: 24% [?]

It’s not just hospitals that have antibiotic resistant bacteria, now seabirds are getting in on the action! Maybe if seagulls weren’t so damn greedy all the time they wouldn’t be eating all sorts of bad crap. But they do. In addition to eating up things loaded with antibiotics, seabirds are also eating lots of plastic debris, as the ocean is rapidly becoming a swirling mass of plastic particles. I totally have nothing to do with that, and neither does my plastic debris factories operating out of Vietnam and Cambodia! Just keep Captain Planet off my back. And what the Hell kind of power is “love”? How lame can you get?

High Degree Of Antibiotic Resistance Found In Wild Arctic Birds

ScienceDaily (Jan. 15, 2008) — Swedish researchers report that birds captured in the hyperboreal tundra, in connection with the tundra expedition “Beringia 2005,” were carriers of antibiotics-resistant bacteria. These findings indicate that resistance to antibiotics has spread into nature, which is an alarming prospect for future health care.

The scientists took samples from 97 birds in northeastern Siberia, northern Alaska, and northern Greenland. These samples were cultivated directly in special laboratories that the researchers had installed onboard the icebreaker Oden and were further analyzed at the microbiological laboratory at the Central Hospital in Växjö, Sweden.

“We were extremely surprised,” says Björn Olsen, professor of infectious diseases at Uppsala University and at the Laboratory for Zoonosis Research at the University of Kalmar.

“We took samples from birds living far out on the tundra and had no contact with people. This further confirms that resistance to antibiotics has become a global phenomenon and that virtually no region of the earth, with the possible exception of the Antarctic, is unaffected.”

The researchers’ hypothesis is that immigrating birds have passed through regions in Southeast Asia, for example, where there is a great deal of antibiotics pressure and carried with them the resistant bacteria to the tundra.

“We already knew that birds in the Western world can be carriers of bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics, but it’s alarming to find that these bacteria exist among birds out on the tundra,” says Jonas Bonnedahl, a physician infectious specializing in infectious diseases in Kalmar and one of those participating in the expedition.

“Our findings show that resistance to antibiotics is not limited to society and hospitals but is now spreading into the wild. Escalating resistance to antibiotics over the last few years has crystallized into one of the greatest threats to well-functioning health care in the future.”

This research is published in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases.

Adapted from materials provided by Uppsala University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Popularity: 22% [?]

Seriously, shut up about dinosaur cloning. Unless you got some dinosaur DNA lying around, this is not applicable in the slightest. But thanks for the plug for the Jurassic Park book at the end, for those people who want to read a bad novel from hack political sellout. Speaking of movies, how come there isn’t many Thylacine films? The only one I know about is Howling 3: The Marsupials. Thylacines are just ripe for exploitation in a SciFi Channel-type film. Tasmanian Tiger Terror! Six teenagers are pursued by Tasmanian Devils only to find that they are not the only danger in the Outback jungle. Starring Dean Cain and some random chick from Buffy.

Extinct Tasmanian tiger gene brought back to life: scientists

by Lawrence Bartlett Tue May 20, 3:14 AM ET

SYDNEY (AFP) - Scientists said Tuesday they had “resurrected” a gene from the extinct Tasmanian tiger by implanting it in a mouse, raising the future possibility of bringing animals such as dinosaurs back to life.

In what they describe as a world first, researchers from Australian and US universities extracted a gene from a preserved specimen of the doglike marsupial — formally known as a thylacine — and revived it in a mouse embryo.

“This is the first time that DNA from an extinct species has been used to induce a functional response in another living organism,” said research leader Andrew Pask of the University of Melbourne.

The announcement was hailed here as raising the possibility of recreating extinct animals.

Mike Archer, dean of science at the University of New South Wales who led an attempt to clone the thylacine when he was director of the Australian Museum, called it “one very significant step in that direction.”

“I’m personally convinced this is going to happen,” he told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. “I’ve got another group working on another extinct Australian animal and we think this is highly probable.”

Pask told AFP in a telephone interview that while recreating extinct animals might be possible one day, it could not be done with the technique his team used on the Tasmanian tiger.

“We can look at the function of one gene within that animal. Most animals have about 30,000 genes,” he said.

“We hope that with advances in techniques that maybe one day that might be possible, but certainly as science stands at the moment, we are not able to do that, unfortunately.

“We’ve now created a technique people can use to look at the function of DNA from any extinct species, so you could use it from mammoth or Neanderthal man or even dinosaurs if there’s some intact DNA there.”

The last known Tasmanian tiger, which took its name from the Australian island and the stripes on its back, died in captivity in the Hobart Zoo in 1936, having been hunted to extinction in the wild in the early 1900s.

Some thylacine pups and adult tissues were preserved in alcohol, however, and the research team used specimens from the Museum Victoria in Melbourne.

“The research team isolated DNA from 100-year-old ethanol-fixed specimens,” the scientists said in a statement.

“After authenticating this DNA as truly thylacine, it was inserted into mouse embryos and its function examined.

“The thylacine DNA was resurrected, showing a function in the developing mouse cartilage, which will later form the bone.”

The results were due to be published in the international scientific journal PLoS ONE on Tuesday.

“This research has enormous potential for many applications including the development of new biomedicines and gaining a better understanding of the biology of extinct animals,” said co-researcher Richard Behringer of the University of Texas.

At a time when extinction rates are increasing the discovery is critical, said senior author Marilyn Renfree of the University of Melbourne.

“For those species that have already become extinct, our method shows that access to their genetic biodiversity may not be completely lost,” she said.

But Renfree also cautioned that the recreation of extinct animals was not the aim of the research.

“Maybe one day this might be possible but it won’t happen in my lifetime,” she told AFP. “It might happen in my children’s lifetime, but there’s so many steps we need to achieve before you could actually make this work.”

The prospect of bringing extinct animals back to life caught the public imagination after Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film “Jurassic Park,” based on the novel of the same name by Michael Crichton.

In that story, dinosaurs are cloned from genetic material found in mosquitoes that had sucked their blood before becoming preserved in amber. The dinosaurs then wreak havoc.

Popularity: 26% [?]

Scientists find an ancient parrot named Mopsitta tanta and can’t resist making Monty Python references. And neither can the story author. Sigh… anyway, this ancient parrot dating back 55 million years is an exciting find, because how often do you hear about ancient parrots? Especially parrots in temperate areas. The closest thing is probably the Carolina Parakeet, and that thing is dead as a Dodo. Except for the pair I cloned and keep in the barn, with the breeding Dodo colony. But I digress… Enjoy the picture, the story, but not the jokes the lame writer explains.

Parrot Fossil 55 Million Years Old Discovered In Scandinavia

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2008) — Palaeontologists have discovered fossil remains in Scandinavia of parrots dating back 55 million years. Reported May 14 in the journal Palaeontology, the fossils indicate that parrots once flew wild over what is now Norway and Denmark.

Parrots today live only in the tropics and southern hemisphere, but this new research suggests that they first evolved in the North, much earlier than had been thought.

The fossil parrot was discovered on the Isle of Mors in the northwest of Denmark – far from where you’d normally expect to find a parrot. It’s a new species, officially named ‘Mopsitta tanta’. However, already its nick-name is the ‘Danish Blue Parrot’, a term derived from a famous comedy sketch about a ‘Norwegian Blue Parrot’ in the 1970s BBC television programme ‘Monty Python’.

The article goes on to explain the Monty Python Show for a long time. Seriously, a LOOOOOONG time. Science writers suck.

Popularity: 23% [?]

The HGTV of ecology happened as the Earth was reworked into a new ecosystem. Yes, I know Flip That House! is a TLC show, but HGTV just has the better programming. Color Splash, Design on a Dime, Decorating Cents, Designed to Sell, all better than TLC’s mess of crap. Back to topic, the ecosystem at the Permian-Triassic Extinction period was totally reworked as new species showed up, replacing those lost, and the environment was altered. That is some cool evilness right there, wiping out a whole ecosystem only to replace it with your own nasty creations. Expect a repeat soon once I get the last of the nasties finished in the lab! MuHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! It will be a new dawn on Planet Earth, soon Planet Mobusu!

Ecosystem Remodelling Among Vertebrates During The Permian-Triassic Extinction

ScienceDaily (Nov. 9, 2004) — The biggest mass extinction of all time happened 251 million years ago, at the Permian-Triassic boundary. Virtually all of life was wiped out, but the pattern of how life was killed off on land has been mysterious until now. A team from Bristol University and Saratov University, Russia, have now laid the evidence bare.

The Bristol and Russian researchers have documented the event in Russia after looking at 675 specimens of amphibians and reptiles from 289 areas spanning 13 successive geological time zones in the South Urals basin. The study will be reported in Nature Thursday, November 4.

The mass extinction at the Permian-Triassic boundary is accepted as the most profound loss of life on record. Records indicate a loss of 50 per cent of animal groups or more, in both sea and on land, with a loss of 80 to 96 per cent of species. Local and regional-scale studies of marine specimen confirm the loss, but the terrestrial record has been harder to analyse in such close detail.

There was a profound loss of animal groups, and simplification of ecosystems, with the loss of small fish eaters and insect eaters, medium and large herbivores and large carnivores. Plant life also changed, from high rates of turnover through the Late Permian period to greater stability at low diversity through the Early Triassic period. Even after 15 million years of ecosystem rebuilding, some groups were still absent—small fish eaters, small insect eaters, large herbivores and top carnivores.

The end-Permian mass extinction is now thought to have been caused by gigantic volcanic eruptions, which triggered a runaway greenhouse effect and nearly put an end to life on earth.

Mike Benton, Professor of Vertebrate Palaeontology and Head of the Department of Earth Sciences at Bristol University, said: “At the end of the Permian there was a high turnover in animal families on land however these were largely destroyed by the Permian-Triassic extinction. However, after that the animal groups recovered slowly and diversity gradually increased.”

Ecosystem remodelling among vertebrates at the Permian–Triassic boundary in Russia, M J Benton, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol and V P Tverdokhlebov and M V Surkov, Geological Institute of Saratov State University, Russia. Nature, 4 November 2004.

Adapted from materials provided by University Of Bristol.

Popularity: 23% [?]

Another day, another cool new animal manipulating ray for me to test out! This time, I’ve been zapping whales, trying to get them to become common sites in the world’s rivers. My Whale Relocation Ray is nearing completion, and the Alpha Test was conducted. This one managed to make the news as well, but again they only have part of the story. Just wait until the Beta Test, where whales will be walking in downtown New York!

Link

Dead whale found in river, scientists puzzled
Young beluga was hundreds of miles from ocean

Friday, June 16, 2006; Posted: 1:39 p.m. EDT (17:39 GMT)

ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) — Scientists are mystified by the carcass of a young beluga whale found in a river in central Alaska, nearly 1,000 miles from its natural ocean habitat.

The first guess is the 8-foot-long whale, which often feed on fish in estuaries and the mouths of rivers, swam away from the ocean in search of food.

“What are the alternatives?” asked Link Olson, a curator at the University of Alaska Museum of the North.

It was highly unlikely that someone was perpetrating a hoax along a remote section of river with a whale carcass, he said.

“If you were ever close to a dead marine mammal, even for a few hours, you would know why no one in their right mind would do that.”

Canoeists found the whale June 9 on the Tanana River about 40 miles southwest of Fairbanks.

Sylvia Brunner, a marine mammals researcher at the museum in Fairbanks, identified the decomposing carcass and oversaw its recovery on Wednesday.

The “bloated, black thing on the beach” was about 12 feet from the river’s edge, she said.

It could have died in the river last fall and frozen during the winter, Brunner said. On the other hand, the whale could have entered the river this spring seeking fish heading for the ocean.

“When you get a carcass like that, there are a lot of unanswered questions,” she said.

The carcass was taken to the museum, where it will be “cleaned and prepared as a full skull and skeleton and we will preserve tissue samples,” Olson said.

Belugas are toothed whales and belong to the same group as sperm whales, killer whales, dolphins, and porpoises, according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

Popularity: 15% [?]