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n2doc's JournalRoots grow out of vagina after woman uses potato as contraceptive
After experiencing pain in her abdominal area, the Columbian woman went to a local hospital to get help.
Embarrassed, she told nurses she had put a potato into her vagina two weeks ago, because she was advised it would prevent pregnancy. According to Columbiareports.co, the potato germinated and grew roots. The nurse who attended to the woman found the roots had visibly emerged from her vagina. The potato was eventually removed, non surgically.
Sex education is a taboo subject in the conservative Columbian community after families boycotted classes aimed at informing the youth on such topics.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/lifestyle/2014/10/03/roots-grow-out-of-vagina-after-woman-uses-potato-as-contraceptive
Elephants and rhinos 'could be extinct within two decades' because of ivory poaching
Elephants and rhinos could be extinct within the next two decades, conservation campaigners are warning.
Wildlife campaigners say an estimated 35,000 elephants and 1,000 rhinos are killed each year as demand for ivory and rhino horn drives increasing poaching rates.
This demand means both species could potentially be wiped out within the next 20 years.
The warning comes ahead of marches across the world demanding greater protection for the two species.
The Global March for Elephants and Rhinos kicks off on Saturday, with hundreds of people are set to march through London wearing elephant and rhino masks.
more
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/elephants-and-rhinos-could-be-extinct-within-two-decades-because-of-ivory-poaching-9772736.html
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How Technology Traced HIV to Its Very Beginnings
In the early 1980s, when AIDS deaths began to ripple across the U.S. in force, most people—including healthcare professionals—had never even heard of the virus behind the outbreak. It was a distant infection on African continent. Few predicted it would explode into a pandemic that would baffle scientists into the 21st century.
Now, researchers are piecing together HIV's full origin story: how it went from a simian virus in chimps to a human one that has infected an estimated 75 million people worldwide. In a paper published today in the journal Science, researchers follow the first reported cases of HIV from Cameroon (which previous studies had suggested as the likely place that the virus jumped from chimps to humans) down the Sangha River to Kinshasa, now the capital city of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
"Léopoldville (now Kinshasa) was at the very heart of the development of the pandemic," says Jacques Pépin, an epidemiologist at the University of Sherbrooke in Canada and coauthor on the paper. "That is where the virus was amplified to the extent that it eventually spread from there to the rest of the world."
more
http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/genetics/how-tech-traced-hiv-to-its-beginnings-17270225
MIT Thinks It Has Discovered the 'Perfect' Solar Cell
A new MIT study offers a way out of one of solar power's most vexing problems: the matter of efficiency, and the bare fact that much of the available sunlight in solar power schemes is wasted. The researchers appear to have found the key to perfect solar energy conversion efficiency—or at least something approaching it. It's a new material that can accept light from an very large number of angles and can withstand the very high temperatures needed for a maximally efficient scheme.
Conventional solar cells, the silicon-based sheets used in most consumer-level applications, are far from perfect. Light from the sun arrives here on Earth's surface in a wide variety of forms. These forms—wavelengths, properly—include the visible light that makes up our everyday reality, but also significant chunks of invisible (to us) ultraviolet and infrared light. The current standard for solar cells targets mostly just a set range of visible light.
That makes sense because visible light is the most intense form of light that reaches the Earth's surface. Many other forms, such as microwaves and x-rays, are mostly blocked by the planet's atmosphere, but the full spectrum reaching Earth still extends outward from what's known as the solar cell "band gap." This is the range of frequencies within which a material is able to convert solar energy into electrical energy.
The band gap is a feature of photovoltaic solar cells in particular. This is the scheme in which photons, the carriers of the electromagnetic force, and what we'd usually call "light," collide with atoms in some material. This collision delivers a bunch of extra force to those atoms, which respond by shedding electrons. All those electrons add up to current—electricity. It's an ingenious way to harvest energy, but it's currently not all it could be.
more
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mit-thinks-its-discovered-the-perfect-solar-cell
New Poison Frog Species Evolving Before Our Eyes, Study Says
A poison dart frog from Peru that mimics its neighbors in incredible detail is evolving into a new species, scientists believe.
The mimic frog (Ranitomeya imitator) is the first vertebrate, and only the second known animal, to suggest that mimicry can split populations into separate species, according to a study published recently in Nature Communications. The other animal is a group of Heliconius butterflies, which are also found in South America.
We can’t hold the frog in our hands just yet, though—the new species may not finish evolving for several thousand more years.
Separate geographic populations of R. imitator can look wildly different, depending on the frog species they’re mimicking. In north-central Peru, two R. imitator populations colorfully masquerade as two contrasting poison frog species: The splash-back poison frog (R. variabilis) or red-headed poison frog (R. fantastica). (See more pictures of poison dart frogs.)
In a phenomenon known as Müllerian mimicry, which occurs when two or more poisonous or unpalatable species adopt the same colorful warning signal to predators, one of the R. imitator morphs—called “striped”—takes on the black-and-yellow stripes and marbled aqua legs of R. variables.
more
http://newswatch.nationalgeographic.com/2014/10/02/new-species-evolution-poison-frogs-peru-animals-science/
Curious Baby Owls Investigate a Camera Left Near Their Nest, Cuteness Ensues
Here’s a cute little video that shows what happened when As Goprod set up a camera next to the next of an owl family. After the mother flies away, the little baby owls come out to investigate the mysterious object that showed up out of nowhere.
You can almost see the gears spinning in the owls’ heads as they try to determine whether the camera is friend, foe, or food:
more
http://petapixel.com/2014/09/30/curious-baby-owls-investigate-camera-left-nest-cuteness-ensues/
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