The Morningwood News

The Seattle Times
By Craig Welch
Seattle Times environment reporter

Bird researcher Dale Whaitiri was on an island off southern New Zealand examining the stomach contents of a baby seabird when an electronic device the size of a grain of rice spilled from the bird’s gullet.

The monitoring tag had been planted years before in a juvenile steelhead — on the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest. But this chick was too young to fly — let alone eat fish.

The discovery has launched a tale of scientific intrigue spanning 7,700 miles across the Pacific Ocean. How did the tag wind up in a fat, flightless bird about to be eaten by Maori tribesmen? And of the millions of seabirds — called sooty shearwaters, or “titi” by the Maoris — how did Whaitiri manage to poke this one’s belly?

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By Lisa M. Krieger
The Mercury News

Fourteen rare earth metals used in Stanford University research are suddenly a lot rarer.

In a crime that has mystified campus scientists and police, ingots of holmium, lanthanum, cerium, praseodymium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium and other metals have disappeared from a physics lab, stalling important research into the creation of materials with unusual magnetic and electronic properties.

“Whoever took them knew their periodic table,” said physicist Ian Fisher, who discovered the metals missing from his cabinet, where elements are neatly lined up in alphabetical order. “They didn’t just swipe A through E.”

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The Mercury News
MediaNews

Titania the Titan,” an endangered plant at the UC Botanical Garden, is about to burst forth with its rare and smelly, signature blossom. The stench has earned the plant and other titan arums the nickname `corpse plant.’

Paul Licht, director of the garden, says that based on the early stages of the blossoming, the plant may be bigger than “Trudy the Titan,” which bloomed in July 2005 and stood close to 6-1/2 feet tall with a bloom that measured 3 feet across.

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Orlando Sentinel
By Robyn Shelton

NASA allowed astronauts who had been drinking to fly on two occasions, despite warnings from flight surgeons that they presented a safety risk, according to a published report Thursday.

Aviation Week & Space Technology described the allegations on its Web site after obtaining a copy of a report NASA plans to release today. The findings are contained in a review of astronaut health-care issues undertaken after former astronaut Lisa Nowak was charged with attacking another woman in Orlando in February.

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The Arizona Daily Star
The Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The wonderland of Yellowstone National Park has yielded a new marvel — an unusual bacterium that converts light to energy.

The discovery was made in a hot spring at the park where colorful mats of microbes drift in the warmth.

“This thing was just bizarre,” David M. Ward, a professor of microbial studies at Montana State University, said of the bacterium.

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Fox News
Associated Press

SAN FRANCISCO — Scientists announced Monday the discovery of a rare — and stinky — orchid species that flourishes only in the wet meadows of a beloved portion of Yosemite National Park.

Botanist Alison Colwell said the species’ minute, tennis-ball yellow flowers weren’t what first led her to it, but rather the smell of sweaty feet that the Yosemite bog-orchid emits to attract pollinators.

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The Register, UK
By Lucy Sherriff

Not science, not likely to be science

The government has announced that it will publish guidance for schools on how creationism and intelligent design relate to science teaching, and has reiterated that it sees no place for either on the science curriculum.

It has also defined “Intelligent Design”, the idea that life is too complex to have arisen without the guiding hand of a greater intelligence, as a religion, along with “creationism”.

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Discovery News
By Jennifer Viegas

Human-sized, muscular penguins with enormous beaks thrived in sunny Peru 36 million years ago, according to a paper published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Standing at 5 feet tall, Icadyptes salasi was preceded in Peru by yet another newly identified penguin species, Perudyptes devriesi, which lived there 42 million years ago and was about the same size (3 feet tall) as modern king penguins.

Since both were among the world’s earliest known penguins, they represent an evolutionary stage somewhere between flying, winged birds and the waddling, flippered penguins of today.

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The Wall Street Journal
By  JEFFREY A. TRACHTENBERG

Summer beach-reading season is just beginning, and already several books have broken out from the pack, such as Walter Isaacson’s biography of Albert Einstein, and Conn and Hal Iggulden’s “The Dangerous Book for Boys.”

But the biggest surprise is a blazing attack on God and religion that is flying off bookshelves, even in the Bible Belt. “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” by Christopher Hitchens, wasn’t expected to be a blockbuster. Its publisher, Twelve, a fledgling imprint owned by France’s Lagardère SCA, initially printed a modest 40,000 copies. Today, seven weeks after the book went on sale, there are 296,000 copies in print. Demand has been so strong that booksellers and wholesalers were unable to get copies a short time after it hit stores, creating what the publishing industry calls a “dark week.” One experienced publishing veteran suggests that Mr. Hitchens will likely earn more than $1 million on this book.

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jacksonville.com
The Times-Union
By David Hunt

Booty from the sunken ship off Key West is estimated at $1 million.

Jacksonville native is at the helm of a treasure-hunting group that returned to shore Thursday in Key West with an estimated $1 million in 400-year-old Spanish artifacts.

“I’m still pinching myself because people have been hunting their whole lives and never found anything like this,” said Keith Webb, 52, president of Blue Water Ventures Key West.

Webb is a 1973 Englewood High School graduate who has homes in the Keys and in Eagle Harbor in Clay County. His professional background is in finance and development. He said he turned treasure-hunting from a hobby into a 15-employee business several years ago.

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Discovery News
Jennifer Viegas

One thousand years before the cartoon character Mickey Mouse was even a glint in Walt Disney’s eye, a French artist created a bronze brooch that looks remarkably like the famous rodent, according to archaeologists at Sweden’s Lund Historical Museum, which houses the recent find.

The object, dated to 900 A..D., was excavated at a site called Uppåkra in southern Sweden.

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International Herald Tribune
By Richard Goldstein

Don Herbert, who unlocked the wonders of science for youngsters of the 1950s and 1960s in the United States as television’s Mr. Wizard, died on Tuesday at his home in the Bell Canyon section of Los Angeles. He was 89.

The cause was bone cancer, his son-in-law Tom Nikosey told The Associated Press in confirming the death.

Herbert held no advanced degree in science, he used household items in his TV lab, and his assistants were boys and girls. But he became an influential showman-teacher on his half-hour “Watch Mr. Wizard” programs, which ran on the NBC network from 1951 to 1965. Millions of youngsters may have been captivated by Howdy Doody and the Lone Ranger, but many were also conducting science experiments at home, emulating Mr. Wizard.

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