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November 23rd, 2009: Tomorrow I'll be doing an 'Ask Me Anything' on Reddit! If you've got a Reddit account (and they only take 20 seconds to sign up for) then you can ask me a question and I will do my best to answer them all. So if you have any burning questions about what it's like being this guy with a website then tomorrow is your chance to ask them!!
– Ryan |
Monday, November 23, 2009
leafy greens the way brother lifeisrandom intended
Sunday, November 8, 2009
A new discovery in the Hawaiian web of life
This fact has been reestablished in the past week with the announcement of the discovery of a series of closely related moths on three islands of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands—moths that have been evolving in the Islands for 30 million years.
(Image: The eight new species of moths from the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. Source: NOAA.)
The moths are new to science, but this kind of connectivity is not.
In the wet forests of the Island, the alani or melicope species are an example. The various species are clearly related, even to an untrained eye. They tend to have large waxy leaves that form a fat oval. They tend to be leggy. Small, delicate flowers.
They are very much the same in many ways. And different.
A Kaua'i species, mokihana, has the famous anise scent, which the other species lack. The four-parted seed pods are tightly closed in some species, but the seed cases spread out like petals on a bloom in others.
There are the cave spiders, hunting spiders with less-developed eyes on the older islands than on the younger ones.
And forest birds with different colors and food preferences on different islands, but otherwise clearly closely related.
On and on. Cousins of a Molokai bug live on Kaua'i alongside bird cousins, plant cousins and so forth.
Perhaps what's most surprising about the new moths is that they have survived long enough to be found, not that they ever existed.
Reseachers Patrick Schmitz and Daniel Rubinoff announced their find in the journal Zootaxa: eight new members of the moth genus Hyposmocoma, all found within islands of the Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument.
The genus Hyposmocoma is unique to Hawai'i, but the group is well represented here, with more than 300 species, most of them on the major islands, and one previously known from the northwestern islands—from Necker or Mokumanamana. Some species are from the wet forest, some from aquatic habitats, and the new finds suggest that species have also evolved to handle very arid habitats of the low northwestern islands.
A monument press release included these quotations:
“This is a great snapshot of species endemism, one that indicates how species have evolved on islands throughout the whole archipelago over time,” said Rubinoff. “We are continuing our research now, but it is possible that the ancient ancestor of the now uniquely Hawaiian Hyposmocoma moths may have landed on a young Northwestern Hawaiian Island and evolved over millions of years into several lineages, which hopped down the island chain, spawning a diversity of species.”
“Although only a few of the lineages that were once on the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are still holding on there now, these tiny atolls, in a former life, were the crucibles of one of the most diverse groups on the current High Islands. The species we described from the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are the descendents of those original, and likely ancient, Hyposmocoma lineages and they have hung on, adapting over time to the islands’ current severe dry conditions. They are the survivors.”
“I am certain more species are waiting to be discovered in the Monument, since we’ve found hard evidence of their caterpillars and know them to be unique,” said Rubinoff. “We also know that Gardner Pinnacles has at least one endemic species and possibly more, but we just haven’t been able to get there yet to document it.”
Among the ways these creatures are distinguished from each other, besides their unique wing coloring, is that their larval cases have very different shapes.
The new species are:
• Hyposmocoma laysanensis, named after and found only on Laysan Island
• Hyposmocoma ekemamao, a larger species found only on Laysan Island and named for its purselike case (eke in Hawaiian) and the island’s remoteness (mamao in Hawaiian)
• Hyposmocoma opuumaloo, found only on Mokumanamana and named from the Hawaiian opu‘u, cone, and malo‘o, dry, referring to its cone-shaped case and the island’s dry habitat (most cone-cased species in the Main Hawaiian Islands are aquatic)
• Hyposmocoma mokumana, found on Mokumanamana and named for the island
• Hyposmocoma nihoa, found on Nihoa and named for the island
• Hyposmocoma kikokolu, found on Nihoa and named from the Hawaiian kiko, spot, and kolu, three, referring to the three spots on its forewing
• Hyposmocoma menehune, found on Nihoa and named for the nocturnal Hawaiian legendary menehune
• Hyposmocoma papahanau, found on Nihoa and named after Papahanaumokuakea
© Jan TenBruggencate 2009
Friday, August 14, 2009
Unanimous court backs Hawaii in ceded lands case (March 31, 2009)
A unanimous Supreme Court held today that the state of Hawaii could sell 1.2 million acres of state land without resolving prior claims to that land by native Hawaiians. More...
"First Results From the Allen Telescope Array
There's no word from ET (yet), but the array has provided some useful data that could help solve one the great mysteries about star formation.

The Allen
Telescope Array, located a few hundred miles north of San Francisco, is one of
the world's most unusual and innovative radio telescopes. The facility began
operating in 2007 with an array of 42 dishes. When completed, it will consist
of 350 dishes, each six meters in diameter. This design provides the array with
a huge angle of view of 2.5 degrees, some 17 times larger than its nearest
rival. It is also able to monitor simultaneously an unprecedented range of
radio frequencies from 0.5 to 11.2 gigahertz.
The facility is a
joint operation between the SETI Institute in Mountain View and the University
of California, Berkeley, which determines where to point the array. Its large
angle of view means that wherever the array is pointed, several stars of
interest to the SETI Institute can be studied.
Today, the team posted
an interesting update of its first results and progress towards its various
scientific goals.
The highlight is images
of the movement of atomic hydrogen clouds in the intergalactic space between
nearby galaxies, which could help solve one of the big mysteries of star
formation.
Many galaxies do
not appear to contain enough gas to sustain star formation in the way
astronomers expect. That's a puzzle, but atomic hydrogen may be the solution.
Astronomers do not include levels of atomic hydrogen gas in their calculations,
because the gas is found largely in intergalactic regions where star formation
does not take place.
The Allen array
team is looking for evidence that atomic hydrogen clouds are drawn into star-forming
regions of galaxies where they contribute to stellar formation.
That's
interesting stuff and it may yield fascinating results in the near future.
But no word yet
on any broadcasts from ET.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0908.1175: The Allen Telescope Array: The First Widefield, Panchromatic, Snapshot Radio Camera