India
eklemetti | September 2, 2009The move is complete (finally) ... so maybe I can settle down a bit, right? Right?
The world's deadliest volcano?
Anyway, a few things I stumbled across this week:
Forbes Traveler.com has a list boldly titled "World's Deadliest Volcanoes", which more or less is a slideshow of nice volcano pictures and some dubious ranking - mostly based on death toll (and cribbing a bit from IAVCEI's "Decade Volcanoes"). Of course, I find it amusing that they made a list of "deadliest volcanoes" and then proceed to tell people (read "tourists") what to do near the so-called "deadly" volcanoes. I suppose it is…
razib | August 19, 2009Americans know that the Ogallala Aquifer is important, and declining. This is much more of an issue in India, Satellites Unlock Secret To Northern India's Vanishing Water:
Using satellite data, UC Irvine and NASA hydrologists have found that groundwater beneath northern India has been receding by as much as 1 foot per year over the past decade - and they believe human consumption is almost entirely to blame.
Here's a map of the population density of India by district:
And now a map of the change in the levels of groundwater (red = decline, blue = increase):
The original letter to Nature,…
razib | July 22, 2009
BMC Evolutionary Biology has a new paper which will be up soon (not on site), Reconstructing Indian-Australian phylogenetic link. ScienceDaily has a preview:
Dr Raghavendra Rao worked with a team of researchers from the Anthropological Survey of India to sequence 966 complete mitochondrial DNA genomes from Indian 'relic populations'. He said, "Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother and so allows us to accurately trace ancestry. We found certain mutations in the DNA sequences of the Indian tribes we sampled that are specific to Australian Aborigines. This shared ancestry suggests…
eklemetti | May 28, 2009Your weekly dose of volcanic activity from the USGS/SI. (a little late thanks to an exciting day of column chemistry).
Some highlights include:
A 3.7 km / 12,000 foot ash plume from Karangetang in Indonesia (great name, eh?)
Lava flows, ash plumes and local ash falls from Slamet in Indonesia.
White and grey ash plumes rises to ~4 km / 13,000 feet from Colima, Mexico.
Blocks up to 2-m across were transported by lahars from Fuego in Guatemala. The volcano also produced ~4.6 km / 14,500 foot ash plumes.
Small ash plume spotted at Barren Island in the Andaman Islands of India.
razib | May 26, 2009Kambiz of Anthropology.net is back. His first offering reports on a new paper on the evidence for leprosy in India 4,000 years ago.
...Lots of hallmarks in human existence occurred during this time period, some being inventions in system of writing, standardized weights and measures, monumental architecture, and trade networks that stretched to Mesopotamia and beyond. While the pathophysiology of leprosy is up in the air, it is not surprising that communicable diseases, even not very contagious ones like leprosy, also blossomed during the rapid sedentarisation of human populations.
Well, I…
bioephemera | April 4, 2009
Aquasaurus
paint, resin, steel
Jitish Kallat, 2008
At first I thought this piece by Indian artist Jitish Kallat was an oil tanker truck, and that it represented some sort of play on "fossil fuels" (and perhaps the morbidity of the behemoth domestic auto companies). But apparently that was my American bias at work.
It's actually a water tanker, entitled Aquasaurus, and it represents the rapid transformation of urban India:
Aquasaurus is a monumental seven-metre long skeletal sculpture of a water-tanker morphing to become prehistoric creature that personifies the radical transformation of…
illconsidered | February 18, 2009In the climate debates, I hear it all the time: why should the US do anything when China and India are the fastest growing and largest emitters of greenhouse gases on the planet? Though I make it a personal policy to never discussion mitigation policies with characters who will not even accept the reality of the problem, the question does, on its own merits, deserve a thoughtful answer.
Clearly, climate disruption due to accumulating greenhouse gases is a global problem and requires a cooperative and global solution. We all share the same planetary atmosphere, and CO2 is a well mixed gas in…
awild | July 31, 2008
Harpegnathos saltator - Jumping Ant
I thought I would have to travel all the way to India (the horror!) to photograph one of the world's most charming insects, the jumping ant Harpegnathos saltator. But I recently learned that myrmecologist Juergen Liebig, a professor at Arizona State University, maintains dozens of captive colonies in his lab in Phoenix. Juergen studies these ants' rather unusual behavior. Unlike most ants that show a clear division between reproductive queens and sterile workers, Harpegnathos workers can mate and produce fertile offspring, leading to soap opera-style…
zooillogix | March 10, 2008After our miniature pigs post last week, an astute Zooillogix reader reminded us that there already are mini-pigs native to India. Weighing only about 10-20lbs, the Pygmy Hog is critically endangered with less than two hundred thought to be left in the wild. Once native to India, Bhutan and Nepal, these little guys were thought extinct from the 1950s-60s, until a small population was discovered. They can now be found only in the northwest Assam region in India.
The pygmy hog is notable as it is the only surviving member of the genus Porcula - which would make an awesome bad horror movie…
zooillogix | June 14, 2007Hey there, ladies. I'm just a lonesome, evolutionary mishap who loves to party.
The Purple frog or Nasikabatrachus sahyadrensis can be described as a "living fossil." These strange creatures split evolutionarily from other frogs nearly 150 million years ago giving them features unique to any amphibian, so unique in fact that they have been put in their own taxonomic family. Purple frogs were officially discovered by scientists in 2003 in the hilly jungles of Western India. Making them particularly difficult to locate is their propensity for burrowing deep in the jungle floor and only…