407. Brazil Confirms Existence of Uncontacted Tribe in Amazon

Uncontacted Indians' houses, Javari Valley, Brazil
© Peetsa/Arquivo CGIIRC-Funai

By Associated Press, The Huffington Post, June 23, 2011 

RIO DE JANEIRO-- The Brazilian government confirmed this week the existence of an uncontacted tribe in a southwestern area of the Amazon rain forest.

Three large clearings in the area had been identified by satellite, but the population's existence was only verified after airplane expeditions in April gathered more data, the National Indian Foundation said in a news release Monday.

The government agency, known by its Portuguese acronym Funai, uses airplanes to avoid disrupting isolated groups. Brazil has a policy of not contacting such tribes but working to prevent the invasion of their land to preserve their autonomy. Funai estimates 68 isolated populations live in the Amazon.

The most recently identified tribe, estimated at around 200 individuals, live in four large, straw-roofed buildings and grow corn, bananas, peanuts and other crops. According to Funai, preliminary observation indicates the population likely belongs to the pano language group, which extends from the Brazilian Amazon into the Peruvian and Bolivian jungle.

The community is near the border with Peru in the massive Vale do Javari reservation, which is nearly the size of Portugal and is home to at least 14 uncontacted tribes.

"The work of identifying and protecting isolated groups is part of Brazilian public policy," said the Funai coordinator for Vale do Javari, Fabricio Amorim, in a statement. "To confirm something like this takes years of methodical work."

The region has a constellation of uncontacted peoples considered the largest in the world, said Amorim. In addition to the 14 known groups, Funai has identified through satellite images or land excursions up to eight more tribes.

That adds up to a population of about 2,000 individuals in the reservation, Amorim said.

Their culture, and even their survival, is threatened by illegal fishing, hunting, logging and mining in the area, along with deforestation by farmers, missionary activity and drug trafficking along Brazil's borders, Amorim said.

Oil exploration in the Peruvian Amazon could also destabilize the region, he said.

In spite of the threats, most of Brazil's indigenous groups maintain their languages and traditions.

Many have long fought for control of land in which they've traditionally lived on. They won legal rights to reclaim that territory in Brazil's 1988 constitution, which declared that all indigenous ancestral lands be demarcated and turned over to tribes within five years.

So far, 11 percent of Brazilian territory and nearly 22 percent of the Amazon has been turned over to such groups.

406. A Cheap Imitation Is Sometimes Best

Credit: Stano Pekár

Almost. Phrurolithus spiders (right) 

are imperfect mimics of Lasius ants (inset).

By Elsa Youngsteadt, Science Now, June 21, 2011

The animal kingdom is full of fakes: tasty butterflies that look like toxic ones, harmless flies that look like bees, and spiders that look like ants, to name a few. It's all a big ploy to avoid being eaten. Some species sport less-convincing disguises than others, and the existence of these obvious fakes is a puzzle.

Intuitively, natural selection should drive all mimics toward "increasing perfection," to better deceive their predators, says Thomas Sherratt, an evolutionary ecologist at Carleton University in Ottawa. "There shouldn't be any imperfect mimics out there." But sloppy mimics abound, and theorists have tried to explain them. They may confuse predators by looking simultaneously delicious and dangerous, for example. Or maybe they evolve to resemble several distasteful species at once, averaging the appearance of all of them rather than copying one precisely.

Tricks! An ant-hunting spider normally eats ants such as this Aphaenogaster species. Although it also springs for the imperfect ant mimic Liophrurillus flavitarsus, the latter proves harder to catch.

All of these explanations "take a very simplistic view," says Stano Pekár, an arachnologist at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. They assume that mimics evolve to avoid only one category of predators: sharp-eyed hunters that really hate the bad-tasting "originals." In fact, Pekár says, other predators could push mimics to evolve different evasive strategies, keeping their disguises forever flawed.

Pekár had this idea while studying three species of European spiders, each of which looks like a different kind of ant. The spiders run alongside the ants in their foraging trails and resemble the insects in size and color. They even hold two of their eight legs in front of them like antennae. At first, the spiders fooled Pekár. But he quickly learned to spot them among the scurrying ants: The spiders have shorter bodies, run in quicker bursts, and bob their rear ends up and down when they pause.

Pekár says the mimicry probably helps the spiders avoid becoming lunch. Many animals steer clear of ants because they're often spiny and bad-tasting, he notes, and one alarmed ant can rouse hundreds of its colony members to a biting, stinging defense. But there's a catch: Some predators like eating ants. Where those species are common, being too much like an ant might get a mimic into trouble.

To test the idea that the spiders' incomplete disguises might result from trying to outwit disparate types of predators, Pekár and his team brought a menagerie of ants and spiders into the lab. They staged one-on-one confrontations between predators and prey in petri dish arenas. The results confirmed that, despite their imperfections, the mimics are pretty good at tricking ant-hating predators. Two species of spiders that ordinarily hunt other spiders, and did so successfully in the lab, killed less than one-fifth of the ant mimics.

But, as the researchers predicted, a really good ant costume could also be a liability. The best of the three mimics, Micaria sociabilis, fell prey to ant-hunting spiders in nearly half of the trials—about five times more often than did the two sloppier mimics. The ant-hunters hesitated to attack mimics in the first place, and when they did, the bad mimics ran away faster.

Ultimately, the precision of a mimic's disguise will depend on the mix of predators in its environment, Pekár and his team conclude in the July issue of The American Naturalist. An exposed habitat with lots of sharp-eyed, ant-hating predators will push mimics toward a more perfect masquerade. But hunters that specialize on ants or have poor vision could spur the evolution of other traits, such as fast running, at the expense of exact mimicry.

"It's a nice idea," says Rainer Foelix, an arachnologist at the Naturama natural history museum in Aarau, Switzerland. But he isn't sure how important the effect will turn out to be in nature. The lab results suggest that one group of spiders could reward mimicry whereas the other penalizes it, but it's not yet clear how important those particular spiders are to the mimics in their natural habitat—especially compared with other predators such as birds.

Still, the very notion that multiple predators could shape mimicry is "exciting," Sherratt says. "It's a new idea for why imperfect mimicry can exist." Sherratt studies hoverflies, a group of flies that resemble bees and wasps to various degrees. His results support a different explanation, namely, that the sloppy mimics evolve to copy several bees at once and don't match any of them perfectly. But he says that Pekár's multiple-predator hypothesis might play a role too. "It's really given us something to think about."

405. The Mental Hazards of City Living

Stress from city life may affect the brain adversely.

By Greg Miller, Science Now, June 22, 2011

City dwellers worldwide enjoy several advantages over their rural compatriots, including, on average, better job prospects and better access to food and health care (not to mention nightlife). At the same time, city living can be stressful, and studies have found that mental health problems, such as schizophrenia, depression, and anxiety disorders, are more common in urbanites. Now, researchers have taken a crack at understanding this connection by looking for differences in how the brains of people from urban and rural environments react to certain kinds of stress.

Psychiatrist Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg and collaborators at the Central Institute of Mental Health and the University of Heidelberg Medical Faculty in Mannheim, Germany, have previously used brain-imaging methods to search for abnormalities in the brains of people with genetic risk factors for mental illness. In the new study, Meyer-Lindenberg says, the group wanted to apply the same approach to environmental risk factors, which can be even more powerful than genetic factors. "Urbanicity ... has a much higher associated risk than any gene," he says. "The idea was to take people with that risk factor and see if there's anything different in their brains."

In an initial study, the researchers placed ads in local newspapers to recruit 32 healthy German adults from cities (with more than 100,000 inhabitants), towns (with more than 10,000 inhabitants), or rural areas. Inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, which monitors brain activity, a subject worked on difficult arithmetic problems while a fake "performance monitor" indicated a dismal success rate compared with other subjects. Then the researchers ramped up the stress. Meyer-Lindenberg explains: "We would call them in between runs and say, 'We notice this seems to be very hard for you, but please understand these experiments are very expensive, so if you could just try to at least be above the bottom quarter, we'd really appreciate it.' " Measurements of the subjects' heart rates, blood pressure, and stress hormone levels indicated that the stress was indeed getting to them.

The fMRI scans showed that volunteers who currently lived in a city exhibited greater activation in the amygdala than did rural denizens during social stress. Previous studies have suggested that the amygdala, among other roles, evaluates social threats and is overactive in people with anxiety disorders. People who'd been raised in a city, regardless of their current home, showed a different pattern: more activation in the perigenual anterior cingulate cortex (pACC), another region thought to be involved in emotion and social processing, and implicated in some studies on schizophrenia. To Meyer-Lindenberg, the findings suggest that the pACC may be susceptible to lasting effects from the environment early in life, whereas the amygdala is more sensitive to one's current situation.

Two follow-up experiments with new groups of volunteers and different tasks inside the scanner reinforced these findings, suggesting that the bigger the city someone currently lives in, the more amygdala activity he or she exhibits during social stress. And the more time spent in a city as a child, the more the pACC revs up, the team reports online today in Nature.

Meyer-Lindenberg suspects that city living actually causes these differences in brain activity. He acknowledges that the data so far can't prove that, but he notes that his team found no correlations between brain activity and several measures of subjects' mood and personality, or with demographic factors, such as education and income.

"I like the idea of going from population studies into the lab to test mechanisms," says John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist at the University of Chicago in Illinois. He's not yet convinced that the German team has ruled out alternative explanations for their findings, but he thinks the idea that city living increases the risk of mental illness by altering the brain's sensitivity to social stress is worth following up on. Cacioppo says he'd like to see future studies delve into specifically what kinds of social stress in urban environments are potentially harmful. Being mocked by a scientist isn't a daily occurrence for many city dwellers, he notes, but feelings of loneliness and exclusion (or on the other hand, overcrowding), or perceptions of discrimination, powerlessness, or low status, might be.

404. ‘Safety Myth’ Left Japan Ripe for Nuclear Crisis

In Shika, Japan, a nuclear plant's visitor hall promotes nuclear
power with “Alice in Wonderland” characters.

By Norimitsu Onishi, The New York Times, June 24, 2011

SHIKA, Japan — Near a nuclear power plant facing the Sea of Japan, a series of exhibitions in a large public relations building here extols the virtues of the energy source with some help from “Alice in Wonderland.”

 “It’s terrible, just terrible,” the White Rabbit says in the first exhibit. “We’re running out of energy, Alice.”

A Dodo robot figure, swiveling to address Alice and the visitors to the building, declares that there is an “ace” form of energy called nuclear power. It is clean, safe and renewable if you reprocess uranium and plutonium, the Dodo says.

“Wow, you can even do that!” Alice says of nuclear power. “You could say that it’s optimal for resource-poor Japan!”

Over several decades, Japan’s nuclear establishment has devoted vast resources to persuade the Japanese public of the safety and necessity of nuclear power. Plant operators built lavish, fantasy-filled public relations buildings that became tourist attractions. Bureaucrats spun elaborate advertising campaigns through a multitude of organizations established solely to advertise the safety of nuclear plants. Politicians pushed through the adoption of government-mandated school textbooks with friendly views of nuclear power.

The result was the widespread adoption of the belief — called the “safety myth” — that Japan’s nuclear power plants were absolutely safe. Japan single-mindedly pursued nuclear power even as Western nations distanced themselves from it.

The belief helps explains why in the only nation to have been attacked with atomic bombs, the Japanese acceptance of nuclear power was so strong that the accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl barely registered. Even with the crisis at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, the reaction against nuclear power has been much stronger in Europe and the United States than in Japan itself.

As the Japanese continue to search for answers to the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, some are digging deep into the national psyche and examining a national propensity to embrace a belief now widely seen as irrational. Because of this widespread belief in Japanese plants’ absolute safety, plant operators and nuclear regulators failed to adopt proper safety measures and advances in technology, like emergency robots, experts and government officials acknowledge.

“In Japan, we have something called the ‘safety myth,’ ” Banri Kaieda, who runs the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, which oversees the nuclear industry, said at a news conference at an International Atomic Energy Agency meeting in Vienna on Monday. “It’s a fact that there was an unreasonable overconfidence in the technology of Japan’s nuclear power generation.”

As a result, he said, the nuclear industry’s “thinking about safety had a poor foundation.”

Japan’s government has concentrated its propaganda and educational efforts on creating such national beliefs in the past, most notably during World War II. The push for nuclear power underpinned postwar Japan’s focus on economic growth and its dream of greater energy independence. But as the carefully fostered belief in nuclear safety has dissipated in the three months after the March 11 disaster, Japanese are increasingly blaming the nuclear establishment for Fukushima. In a politically apathetic country, tens of thousands have regularly held protests against nuclear power. Young Japanese have used social media to organize and publicize demonstrations that have been virtually ignored by major newspapers and television networks.

A song, “It Was Always a Lie,” has become an anthem at the protests and a vehicle for Japanese anger on the Internet. Its author, a famous singer named Kazuyoshi Saito, wrote it by changing the lyrics of a love ballad, “I Always Liked You,” that he composed last year for a commercial for Shiseido, the cosmetics giant. Mr. Saito’s performance of the song, surreptitiously uploaded on YouTube and other sites, has gone viral.

“If you walk across this country, you’ll find 54 nuclear reactors/School textbooks and commercials told us they were safe,” the song goes.

“It was always a lie, it’s been exposed after all/It was really a lie that nuclear power is safe.”

Caught Unprepared

In the days after a giant tsunami knocked out Fukushima Daiichi’s cooling system, the prime minister’s office and the Tokyo Electric Power Company, or Tepco, the plant’s operator, wrestled over whether to inject cooling seawater into the reactor buildings to prevent catastrophic meltdowns, and then over how to do it.

With radiation levels too high for workers to approach the reactors, the Japanese authorities floundered. They sent police trucks mounted with water cannons — equipment designed to disperse rioters — to spray water into the reactor buildings. Military helicopters flew over the buildings, dropping water that was scattered off course by strong winds, in a “performance, a kind of circus” that was aimed more at reassuring an increasingly alarmed Japanese population and American government, said Kenichi Matsumoto, an aide to Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

What became clear was that Japan lacked some of the basic hardware to respond to a nuclear crisis and, after initial resistance, had to look abroad for help. For a country proud of its technology, the low point occurred on March 31 when it had to use a 203-foot-long water pump — shipped from China, an export market for Japanese nuclear technology — to inject 90 tons of fresh water into the No. 1 reactor building. But perhaps more than anything else, the absence of one particular technology was deeply puzzling: emergency robots.

Japan, after all, is the world’s leader in robotics. It has the world’s largest force of mechanized workers. Its humanoid robots can walk and run on two feet, sing and dance, and even play the violin. But where were the emergency robots at Fukushima?

The answer is that the operators and nuclear regulators, believing that accidents would never occur, steadfastly opposed the introduction of what they regarded as unnecessary technology.

“The plant operators said that robots, which would premise an accident, were not needed,” said Hiroyuki Yoshikawa, 77, an engineer and a former president of the University of Tokyo, Japan’s most prestigious academic institution. “Instead, introducing them would inspire fear, they said. That’s why they said that robots couldn’t be introduced.”

Even before the accident at Three Mile Island in 1979, Mr. Yoshikawa, a robotics expert, and other researchers began building emergency robots capable of responding to a nuclear accident, eventually producing a prototype called Mooty. The robots were resistant to high levels of radiation and capable of surmounting mounds of rubble.

But the robots never made it into production, forcing Japan, in the aftermath of Fukushima, to rely on an emergency shipment of robots from iRobot, a company in Bedford, Mass., more famous for manufacturing the Roomba vacuum. On Friday, Tepco deployed the first Japanese-made robot, which was retrofitted recently to handle nuclear accidents, but workers had to retrieve it after it malfunctioned.

The rejection of robots, Mr. Yoshikawa said, was part of the industry’s overall reluctance to improve maintenance and invest in new technologies.

“That’s why the safety myth wasn’t just an empty slogan,” said Mr. Yoshikawa, now the director general of the Center for Research and Development Strategy at the Japan Science and Technology Agency. “It was a kind of mind-set that rejected progress through the introduction of new technology.”

Entering a New Age

The deliberate effort to rally Japanese behind nuclear power can be traced to the beginning of the atomic age, scholars and experts say.

In August 1945, Yasuhiro Nakasone, a young naval officer who would become one of postwar Japan’s most powerful prime ministers, was stationed in western Japan.

“I saw the nuclear mushroom cloud over Hiroshima,” Mr. Nakasone wrote in an essay in the 1960s. “At that moment, I sensed that the next age was the nuclear age.”

For many Japanese like Mr. Nakasone, nuclear power became a holy grail — a way for Japan, whose lack of oil and other natural resources had led to World War II and defeat, to become more energy independent. The mastery of nuclear power would also open the possibility of eventually developing nuclear weapons, a subject that Japan secretly studied when Mr. Nakasone was defense minister in 1970.

It was precisely because of nuclear power’s possible link to nuclear arms and its close ties to the United States that left-leaning politicians, academics and intellectuals became fierce opponents. As a countermeasure, proponents of nuclear power stressed its absolute safety, so that each side struck extreme positions, a standoff that lasts to this day.

The nuclear establishment — led by Tepco among the utilities and the Ministry of Economy — spent hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising and educational programs emphasizing the safety of nuclear plants. The ministry’s division responsible for nuclear power has budgeted $12 million this year for those programs, said Takanobu Sugimoto, a division spokesman. Mr. Sugimoto said he “regretted” that the ministry might have “stressed only” the plants’ safety.

The government and the utilities encouraged the creation of many organizations that propagated the message of safety. One of the oldest, the Japan Atomic Energy Relations Organization, receives 40 percent of its financing from two ministries that oversee nuclear power and 60 percent from Japan’s plant operators. In addition to producing information promoting nuclear power, the organization sends nuclear power experts to speak at secondary schools and colleges, at no cost.

Mitsuhiro Yokote, 67, the executive managing director of the organization and a former nuclear engineer at the Kansai Electric Power Company, acknowledged that the experts conveyed the message that nuclear plants were absolutely safe. Mr. Yokote said he “regretted” that his organization had contributed to the safety myth.

In a country where people tend to reflexively trust the government, assurances about the safety of Japan’s plants were enough to reassure even those at greatest risk. In Oma, a fishing town in northern Japan where a plant is currently under construction, Chernobyl made no impression on local residents considering the plant back in the 1980s.

“What could we do but believe what the government told us?” said Masaru Takahashi, 67, a member of a fishing union in Oma. “We were told that they were absolutely safe.”

A Public Relations Drive

After Chernobyl, the nuclear establishment made sure that Japanese kept believing in safety.

The plant operators built or renovated the public relations buildings — called “P.R. buildings” — attached to their plants. Before Chernobyl, the buildings were simple facilities intended to appeal to “adult men interested in technical matters,” said Noriya Sumihara, an anthropologist at Tenri University who has researched the facilities. Male guides wearing industrial uniforms took visitors around exhibits consisting mostly of wall panels.

But after Chernobyl, the facilities were transformed into elaborate theme parks geared toward young mothers, the group that research showed was most worried about nuclear plants and radiation, Mr. Sumihara said. Women of childbearing age, whose presence alone was meant to reassure the visitors, were hired as guides.

In Higashidori, a town in northern Japan, one of the country’s newest P.R. buildings is built on the theme of Tonttu, a forest with resident dwarfs. The buildings also holds events with anime characters to attract children and young parents, said Yoshiki Oikawa, a spokesman for the Tohoku Electric Power Company, which manages the site with Tepco.

Here in Shika, more than 100,000 guests last year visited the P.R. building where Alice discovers the wonders of nuclear power. The Caterpillar reassures Alice about radiation and the Cheshire Cat helps her learn about the energy source. Instead of going down a rabbit hole, Alice shrinks after eating a candy and enters a 1:25 scale model of the Shika nuclear plant nearby.

Since the Fukushima disaster, visitors have started questioning the safety of nuclear power, said Asuka Honda, 27, a guide here. Many were pregnant women worried about the effects of radiation on their unborn children. But the presence of Ms. Honda and other guides, mostly women in their late 20s, seemed to reassure them.

The nuclear establishment also made sure that government-mandated school textbooks underemphasized information that could cast doubt on the safety of nuclear power. In Parliament, the campaign was led by Tokio Kano, a Tepco vice president who became a lawmaker in 1998. Mr. Kano, who declined to be interviewed for this article, returned to Tepco as an adviser after retiring from Parliament last year.

In 2004, under the influence of Mr. Kano and other proponents of nuclear power, education officials ordered revisions to textbooks before endorsing them. In one junior high school social studies textbook, a reference to the growing antinuclear movement in Europe was deleted. In another, a reference to Chernobyl was relegated to a footnote.

The effect could be seen in opinion polls that even after Fukushima have indicated that young Japanese are the strongest proponents of nuclear power.

The nuclear establishment itself came to believe its own safety myth and “became entangled in its own net,” said Hitoshi Yoshioka, an author of a book on the history of Japan’s nuclear power and a member of a panel established by the prime minister to investigate the causes of the Fukushima disaster.

He said that helped explain why, at Fukushima, Tepco failed to carry out emergency measures in case of a complete loss of power, which is what happened when the tsunami hit in March. Others have said that the nuclear establishment’s embrace of the safety myth also makes it possible to understand what, in hindsight, was the most glaring hole in the safety measures at Japan’s nuclear plants. In the country that gave the world the word tsunami, few measures were taken at Fukushima Daiichi or elsewhere to protect plants against the giant waves. Neither the Dodo nor the Caterpillar makes any mention of tsunamis to Alice.

403. Avian Architecture

A cape weaver building its intricate nest

By Henry Fountain, The New York Times, June 20, 2011

I live in a nice clapboard house and work in a gleaming steel-and-glass skyscraper, but after reading “Avian Architecture: How Birds Design, Engineer and Build” I feel cheated. I’ll never get to enjoy the comforts of the nest of a long-tailed tit.

As Peter Goodfellow, the book’s author, points out, the dome-shaped nest is one of the most beautiful and skillful constructions in the animal kingdom. The average one contains a couple of hundred sprigs of moss and several thousand lichen flakes, woven together with purloined spider silk and lined with feathers. A nice place for a nap, if you are six inches long.

“It’s an amazing creation,” Mr. Goodfellow, who has had the pleasure of watching long-tailed tits nest in his garden in Plymouth, England, said in a telephone interview. “What’s doubly astonishing is that they use it just once.”

Mr. Goodfellow is a retired teacher of English language and literature and a lifelong bird-watcher, although he takes his bird-watching only so far. “I’ve never actually gotten into the work of the scientist, who might well watch for a whole day or week while a bird makes a nest,” he said. “I’ve never had that deep science bent that’s made me sit down to do that sort of thing. I enjoy the reading and the writing.”

He first had the idea to write about nests 35 years ago, and the result was a book called “Birds as Builders.” This time, Mr. Goodfellow adds “designer” and “engineer” to the job description, and that does not seem at all like a stretch.

Nest designs fit into about 10 broad categories, and “Avian Architecture” provides what it calls “case studies” of each, with photographs and detailed drawings of construction techniques.

There are minimalist approaches like scrape nests — the small depression that the piping plover makes on a beach, for example — and hole nests like those that the red-cockaded woodpecker, a species found in the southeastern United States, drills into pine trees. (The exuded sap coats the tree surface around the hole, trapping snakes and other potential predators.) Aquatic nests of grebes and other freshwater birds are only slightly more complex, often made just by piling up vegetation until it forms a floating mass. Mound nests, made on land, are also often simple piles of mud, leaves or rocks.

Far more elaborate are the familiar cup and dome nests, and the less familiar hanging nests, that grace trees worldwide. These are where birds’ engineering skills shine. The song thrush, for example, a common European bird, begins building her (in many species, the female does the work) cup nest with a foundation of sturdy twigs, then adds moss and dried grass to form a crude cup, which is lined with wood pulp and mud and decorated on the outside with moss and leaves for camouflage. The Baltimore oriole weaves its nest of plant fibers, vine strips and hair from two or more attachment points on a tree branch. And that long-tailed tit uses the spider silk in Velcro-like fashion, detaching it from the lichen and moss and then reattaching to expand the nest if it has a larger brood.

Those examples, and the many more included in “Avian Architecture,” make the book a good gift for anyone who has doubts about Darwin. While evolution is seldom mentioned explicitly, it pervades this book both in broad ways (the sheer diversity of nest types, even among related species) and in specific ways (camouflaged eggs in nests where they lie in view of predators; white eggs in nests where they are out of sight).

Brood-keeping is the reason for most nests’ existence. “It’s been created to be the family home,” Mr. Goodfellow said. “That’s true whether it’s just a scrape in the sand or the beautiful little feathery, mossy cup of the hummingbird.” In most cases they are not love nests; mating occurs elsewhere.

The elaborate structures built by bowerbirds are an exception. Mr. Goodfellow devotes a chapter to these fascinating birds, relatives of the catbirds, which are found in Australia and New Guinea. They build structures of grass or sticks on the ground, often aligned east to west, and decorate them with leaves, stones or other objects. In the case of the satin bowerbird, most of the objects are in shades of blue, and can include bits of plastic or ribbon.

The structures are unusual, as is the fact that it is the male that builds and decorates them. And unlike most birds, which seem to have an innate ability to build a perfect nest first time, every time, there is evidence that bowerbirds build better bowers as the years pass by.

Then again, as “Avian Architecture” points out, these bowers are not really nests at all. They are courtship displays, designed to signal to females that the builder would make a good mate.

And once the female makes her choice and mates with the male of her liking, what happens?

“She goes off and makes a proper little cup nest to raise the young,” Mr. Goodfellow said.

402. Mariela Castro Praises Holland's Sex Education Model

Mariela Castro

By Radio Netherlands, June 17, 2011

Speaking at the 20th World Congress for Sexual Health held in the Scottish city of Glasgow, Ms Castro praised Holland’s sex education, including Love Matters, Radio Netherlands Worldwide’s website that informs young people on sex and sexual health in a clear and simple way.

It is a model that can and should be exported to other countries, says Ms Castro, who heads Cuba’s National Centre for Sex Education (CENESEX). “It’s being developed in many countries now, in some with greater success than others, but in Holland it has been used continually, which is what we want to do in Cuba.”

Contraceptives and condoms


Dutch sex education promotes the use of contraceptives and condoms. Combined with sex education, which is offered at most schools, this model, United Nations figures show, has led to some of the world’s lowest rates in teenage pregnancies, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions. In addition, youths in Holland tend to have their first sexual encounters at an older age than teenagers in countries where sex is taboo.

Ms Castro hopes to study Holland’s sex education model at first hand in the near future as part of her efforts to introduce changes in Cuba. “Our talks with our health ministry are progressing, but things with the education ministry are slower.”

Raúl Castro: father and confidant


Ms Castro hints that Cuba’s Communist Party may soon be ready to recognise gay and lesbian rights, even though her father has cautioned her that the time may not yet be ripe.

“I’ll be frank with you. My father, with all his experience in outlining strategies, and getting them implemented, has told me one first has to create the right conditions—and Cuban society lacks them in many areas. When the Revolution declared itself socialist after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, people took up arms to defend it, hardly knowing what socialism was exactly. It seems a contradiction, but what I’m trying to say it that in this macho culture we’ve made a lot of progress regarding women’s rights. So I’d tell my father: why don’t we do the same thing with these issues? But he’d say: look, some things have such deeps roots in our culture, that you’ll face a lot of resistance unless you sort out some other things first. That’s why it’s necessary to wait until the party conference in January and make progress informing the population with the help of the media. That way we’ll get things ready in order to get a good result.”

Cuba’s media


Sex education, experts say, has three pillars: home, school and the media. Officially instituted in 1976, in practice Cuba’s sex education wasn’t introduced until 1996. It is still suffering from a number of contradictions, Ms Castro warns.

“Cuban families trust a lot what children are told at school,” she says. “We began marking days against homophobia in 2008, and now people are beginning to tell their children. They didn’t in the past, thinking we were only telling them how to avoid pregnancies, or telling them about infections and biological issues. But all that is proving complicated because the national media are not helping.”

However, at the last Communist Party Congress, held in April, President Raúl Castro launched a harsh attack on Cuba’s media. Thanks to that, Ms Castro believes, the media reported on the latest day against homophobia.

Homophobia


As the head of CENESEX, Ms Castro has made the fight against homophobia in Cuba a personal struggle, giving countless talks and interviews. “Prejudices are still deeply rooted, in our culture and in our history as a nation. Finding new elements that can change the reality of such views is very hard. What I try to do is to dismantle prejudices and offer elements that allow another perspective on the sexual reality of human beings. Making progress in these elements, especially in those of gender and equal women’s rights, has helped us make progress in respecting sexual diversity and gender identity.”

High abortion rates


One of Cuba’s main problems is the high rate of unwanted teenage pregnancies. “I defend a woman’s right to make decisions regarding her body, and if women were revanchist and vindictive, they should propose to introduce laws that force men to undergo a vasectomy after they turn 50, so they won’t have children left and right when they’re too old, which is extremely irresponsible. An abortion is a matter between a man and a woman, and men should be taught to be responsible.”

Cuba has no abortion law but since 1965 abortions have been offered as a free public health care service, which led to a significant drop in the number of deaths resulting from clandestine abortions.

A key role in institutionalising abortion and promoting women’s rights was played by the former president of the Federation of Cuban Women, the late Vilma Espín—Ms Castro’s mother.

401. IPSO: Multiple Ocean Stresses Threaten "Globally Significant" Marine Extinction

By International Programme on the State of the Ocean, June 20, 2011 


A high-level international workshop convened by International Programme on State of the Ocean (IPSO) met at the University of Oxford earlier this year. It was the first inter-disciplinary international meeting of marine scientists of its kind and was designed to consider the cumulative impact of multiple stressors on the ocean, including warming, acidification, and overfishing.

The 3 day workshop, co-sponsored by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), looked at the latest science across different disciplines.

The 27 participants from 18 organisations in 6 countries produced a grave assessment of current threats — and a stark conclusion about future risks to marine and human life if the current trajectory of damage continues: that the world's ocean is at high risk of entering a phase of extinction of marine species unprecedented in human history.

Delegates called for urgent and unequivocal action to halt further declines in ocean health. (click for press release)

The report summary (released 21 June 2011) outlines the main findings and recommendations. The full report will be released at a later date.

Title: Rogers, A.D. & Laffoley, D.d'A. 2011. International Earth system expert workshop on ocean stresses and impacts. Summary report. IPSO Oxford, 18 pp. For a full list of participants, please see table at the end of the long version.

Report Summary: long version / shorter version.

The report is also accompanied by four case studies, which look in more detail at some of the workshop's main findings.

Case Study 1: The potentially deadly trio of factors — warming, acidification and anoxia — affecting today's oceans, by Professor Jelle Bijma, Marine Biogeosciences, Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research. Watch his explanation, beginning with the growing problem of anoxia, or dead zones, in the ocean.

In Brief: Most, if not all, of the five global mass extinctions in Earth's history carry the fingerprints of the main symptoms of global carbon perturbations (global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia or lack of oxygen; e.g. Veron, 2008).

It is these three factors — the 'deadly trio' — which are present in the ocean today. In fact, the current carbon perturbation is unprecedented in the Earth's history because of the high rate and speed of change. Acidification is occurring faster than in the past 55 million years, and with the added man-made stressors of overfishing and pollution, undermining ocean resilience.

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Case Study 2: End of paradise: Coral reefs facing multiple attacks, by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg , Director, Global Change Institute, University of Queensland

In Brief: What the multi-disciplinary approach of the IPSO workshop made clear for the first time was the multiple threats reefs are facing, that are now acting together to have a greater impact than if they were occurring on their own.

This suggests that existing scientific projections of how coral reefs will respond to global warming have been highly conservative and must now be modified.

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Case Study 3: Pollution and Marine Species: new challenges of an old problem by Professor Tom Hutchinson, Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science (CEFAS)

In Brief: Continued releases and slow breakdown rates mean that legacy chemical pollution ( such as from DDT) remains a major concern. However, concerns have been raised recently over a wide range of novel chemicals now being found in marine ecosystems or suspected to be harmful to marine life. High-profile examples include brominated flame retardants, fluorinated compounds, pharmaceuticals and synthetic musks used in detergents and personal care products.

Some of these chemicals have been located recently in the Canadian Arctic seas, and some are known to be endocrine disrupters or can damage immune systems. Marine litter and plastics are also of major concern, and there is evidence that certain plastics can transport other harmful chemicals in the marine environment.

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Case Study 4: Vanishing Resource: The Tale of the Chinese Bahaba by Dr William Cheung, Lecturer in Marine Ecosystem Services, School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia

In Brief: Scientists at the IPSO meeting agreed that overfishing is exerting an intolerable pressure on ecosystems already under attack by the effects of acidification and warming, and other largely man-made ocean problems. A recent study showed that 63% of the assessed fish stocks worldwide are over-exploited or depleted and over half of them require further reduction of fishing, in order to recover.

The near extinction of a fish called Chinese bahaba (Bahaba taipingensis) is one of the many examples that highlight how overfishing threatens marine biodiversity. It has taken less than seventy years for this giant fish to become critically endangered after it was first described by scientists in the 1930s.

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Other contributors to the IPSO/IUCN workshop:

Professor Dan Laffoley, Senior Advisor at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature cemphasises the vital role of the ocean for humans and the deadly combination of stressors at play.

Professor Charles Sheppard, Warwick University gives further perspective to the extinction threat facing coral reefs — and stresses that the knock-on effects are already being felt on land.

Professor Chris Reid, Marine Institute, University of Plymouth and Sir Alister Hardy Foundation for Ocean Science highlights the speed of change which has been greater than most scientists prediced even in worst case scenarios.

Click here to view a debate at the Frontline Club, London from May 2011 in which Dr Alex Rogers and other marine experts discuss the crisis affecting the global ocean, chaired by the Guardian's environment correspondent Fiona Harvey.