Islands in the dream

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Pastoral paradise: Mundoo Island farmer Colin Grundy is happy he has drought proofed his fourth generation farm at the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia. Source: WeeklyTimesNow

Unique: Two pelicans at Mundoo Island watched by Angus cattle. Picture: Brake Mark Source: The Weekly Times

NOT many farmers can boast frontage to the Murray River and the Southern Ocean.

But Colin and Sally Grundy are not your average farmers.

Were the last farming property on the Murray where the river meets the sea, Colin said.

Were the largest commercial farming enterprise in the area and because were spread over four islands, we approach the property like a cattle station.

Said Sally: Were between 2800 and 3200ha, but weve never actually sat down to work it out, but Id say roughly 3000ha. Our land area varies with the tide, wind, erosion and lease tenure.

Welcome to Mundoo Island on the tip of South Australias magnificent Coorong a farming enterprise named for the largest of the four islands, on which the Grundys graze 500 Angus breeding cattle and 275 Dorper sheep.

Accessed by Hindmarsh Islands bridge, and then a restricted barrage to Mundoo, their relative isolation means they also run farm tourism tours and camping.

Yet as spectacular as the surrounding half-fresh, half-salt water environment is, and as pioneering and remarkable as the propertys history has been, the Grundy story is a bittersweet one.

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Islands in the dream

Future Islands Show New Dance Moves on 'Jimmy Kimmel': Watch

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Back in March, Future Islands and their charismatic frontman Samuel T. Herring set the blogosphere ablaze with their spirited, dance-infused "Late Show with David Letterman" performance. After that rendition of "Seasons (Waiting on You)" earned the praise of the veteran host and went viral, it's no surprise "Jimmy Kimmel Live" came calling for round two -- watch the performance from Monday night (May 5):

The synth-pop quartet played two more cuts from their excellent new album "Singles," "Spirit" and "Doves." Both came accompanied with new dance moves and pep talks from Herring.

Future Islands Talks Coldplay & Foo Fighters Love and Hitting Coachella Stage

"This song's about digging deep down inside of yourself to find that little bit of flame," Herring says while gesticulating to the crowd, about to dive into "Spirit." "It's always burning even when you're hurtin' real bad. And bringing that up to the surface, that's your spirit, baby. You gotta nurture it. You gotta share it with yourself and the people around you. Make everything better."

Their other performance, "Doves," came with a plethora of new dance moves from Herring, who manages to toe the line between creepy and charming. There was some booty-shakin' and some pelvic motion. During the choruses, he got the crowd to hop along in rhythmic unison, and like his first viral performance, there was plenty of chest-grabbing and crowd-pointing.

"Singles" debuted at No. 40 on the Billboard 200 albums chart last month. After Future Islands kicks off an European tour in London on Wednesday night, the band will return to North America for a string of dates beginning in August.

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Future Islands Show New Dance Moves on 'Jimmy Kimmel': Watch

Paradise found on islands of giants

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ILOILOS HIDDEN PARADISE Cabugao Gamay is the most photographed islet on Islas de Gigantes for its rock formations, white beach and clear waters. NESTOR P. BURGOS JR./INQUIRER VISAYAS

The Inquirer is running a series of articles on the countrys tourism crown jewelssomehow uncut but equally sparkling and surprising as the usual vacation haunts. The articles will appear three times a week during the summer months. Please send us your own hot go-to discoveries to summer by. Text 0917-8177586 for details.Ed.

CARLES, IloiloDespite its name, travelers wont find any giant in this group of islands in northern Iloilo.

According to folklore, Islas de Gigantes got its name from the inhabitants who once roamed the islands and were about nine feet tall. The folk belief is seemingly supported by the sight of large wooden coffins found on the island that some locals say were used by the early settlers.

But more than the mythical stories, Gigantes Islands has drawn an increasing number of travelers with its isolated and pristine white-sand beaches and coves, crystal-clear waters, majestic rock formations, storied caves and other attractions.

It has been described as Iloilos hidden paradise getaway even as its fame continues to grow in recent years.

During the recent Holy Week, some 500 tourists flocked to Gigantes Norte, the main jump-off point in exploring the islands. The number represented a leap from the hundred or so visitors in previous years.

10 islands

Most of the tourists had to stay in tents because there were not enough rooms to accommodate them, according to Josephine Decano, resort manager of Gigantes Hideaway, one of seven resorts on the islands.

There has been a marked increase in the number of guests, mostly because of accounts from those who have been here, Decano said.

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Paradise found on islands of giants

Endangered Galapagos Finches Self-Fumigate To Rid Nests Of Deadly Parasite

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The same birds that inspired Charles Darwins theory of evolution by natural selection are weaving cotton balls soaked in pesticide into their nests to drive out the blood-sucking larvae of the Philornis downsi fly.

According to a new study, published Monday in the journal Current Biology by University of Utah researchers, the deadly fly was introduced to the Galpagos Islands on ships from mainland Ecuador during the 1990s. While the adult flies are harmless, larvae deposited into finch nests kill baby finches.

"This parasite is not historically found in the Galapagos Islands and, therefore, Darwin's finches have not had enough time to evolve defenses against the parasites," Dale Clayton, a University of Utah biology professor and senior author of a study, told Reuters. "In some years, 100 percent of nestlings die as a direct result of the parasites. It is critical to find a way to control the parasites in order to help the birds.

Researchers say the parasites have affected almost all of the 14 species of Darwins finches, two of which are endangered.

A new method of killing the flies involves leaving cotton treated with a mild solution of permethrin the same stuff sold over-the-counter to combat head lice and scabies near the birds nesting sites. The birds tore away pieces of the treated cotton with their beaks and incorporated them into their nests, killing the fly maggots and leaving the birds unharmed.

The finches had essentially self-fumigated their homes.

After they collected 26 active finch nests, researchers discovered that half of them contained the treated cotton. Nests that had cotton in them also had half as many deadly maggots present.

Our method of self-fumigation is a simple and immediate solution that can help Darwin's finches combat this devastating parasite, Sarah Knutie, a researcher with the University of Utah, said in a statement. Many animals cannot defend themselves against such parasites. Therefore, the animals need our help in developing effective ways to protect them.

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Endangered Galapagos Finches Self-Fumigate To Rid Nests Of Deadly Parasite

How have changing sea-levels influenced evolution on the Galapagos Islands?

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The Galapagos Islands have an iconic status in the history of evolutionary study, now new research shows that the islands' own geological past may have influenced the evolution of the chain's native species.

Writing in the Journal of Biogeography, Jason Ali and Jonathan Aitchison explore how fluctuating sea level changes over thousands of years impacted the island chain's ecology. They estimate that when the sea retreated, most recently 20,000 years ago, the water would have been 144m below its current level.

As a result, Santa Cruz, the island in the center of the archipelago, would have expanded, enveloping many of the smaller islands, while creating a series of shallow 'land bridges' between the volcanic outcroppings. Such bridges explain the range and diversity of the islands' species, such as snakes, geckos and iguanas, which appear landlocked to modern eyes.

"As soon as I saw that that half the islands in the archipelago were sat on a single, shallow, submarine platform, I realized that the implications for biology could be significant," said Dr. Ali. "My geological knowledge told me that sea-level falls must have regularly re-connected the islands, and that this must have profoundly shaped the landlocked biota's distribution, and very likely its composition."

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How have changing sea-levels influenced evolution on the Galapagos Islands?

Great news for visitors driving in the Cook Islands

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May 6 2014

Media release from Cook Islands Tourism Corporation in NZ

Great news for visitors driving in the Cook Islands

Visitors from New Zealand, Australia, USA, Canada, UK and the EU can now drive in the Cook Islands using their own licences.

Previously visitors had to obtain a local licence from the Police National Headquarters in Rarotonga. Effective immediately, the new law allows visitors aged over 16 to drive the class of motor vehicle they are entitled to drive in their home country for up to six months.

However, this means that people wishing to ride a motorbike or scooter who are not licenced to do so in their home country, still need to obtain a local licence in Rarotonga.

Graeme West, General Manager of Cook Islands Tourism Corporation in New Zealand, said the welcome change was a direct response to visitor feedback and recognised that the Cook Islands road rules are very similar to those in its main visitor markets.

Many people hire a car to explore the stunning beaches around the lagoon, the inland villages and tropical gardens, said Mr West. Having to first obtain a local licence was frustrating for some people, especially returning visitors and we knowthey will really welcome this change.

Note: Visitors whose licences are written in a language other than English will need an accurate translation.

ENDS

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Great news for visitors driving in the Cook Islands

Dogs pick up directions from human voices

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When every call of "Spot, come!" sends your dog running in the opposite direction, it's easy to be cynical about how well canines listen. But a new study shows dogs and even puppies are capable of understanding subtle and indirect cues in human voices, a finding with implications for how dogs came to be deeply attuned to human behavior.

The study found that dogs of all shapes and sizes could home in on a treat based entirely on the direction in which a hidden human was speaking. Human babies can do the same, but our clever cousins the chimpanzees can't, according to a 2012 study.

"The message of this study is not that chimps are stupid and dogs are smart," says lead study author Federico Rossano of Germany's Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. "What it tells us is that dogs pay special attention to communicative signals from humans. ? That's a sign of how connected we are."

The new findings are "fascinating," says Evan MacLean of Duke University's Canine Cognition Center but also "surprising ? because it's a very subtle cue. When I was reading the paper, I was wondering, 'Gosh, can I do this?' " Scientists have long known that dogs are extraordinarily sensitive to visually based social cues from humans, but this is the first evidence they're sensitive to auditory cues, MacLean says.

Rossano and his colleagues had two criteria for their experimental subjects: They had to be comfortable being left with strangers, and they had to be food-motivated. Dogs ranging from Jack Russell terriers to German shepherds watched as an experimenter held up a piece of kibble and said, "Pay attention!" The experimenter ducked behind a barrier, surreptitiously placed the food in one of two black boxes and moved the boxes so the dog could see them.

Then came the crucial test. The hidden experimenter sat close to the empty box but faced the box holding the food and called, "Oh look, look there, this is great!" Instead of heading for the box close to the source of the voice, the dogs trotted over to the food-laden box the experimenter was speaking toward. So the animals seemed to understand that the human was talking about one of the boxes, rather than summoning the dog to the food, and the dogs interpreted the direction of speech to figure out the location of the box with the treat.

Adult dogs did well at this task, but puppies only 8 to 14 weeks old did even better ?? if they had spent plenty of time with people. Puppies that had lived mostly with their litter mates, on the other hand, flubbed the test. These results show that dogs need some kind of learning ?? perhaps in the form of socialization with people - to pick up the clues embedded in a human voice, Rossano says. The ability of such young dogs to do so well suggests dogs have a genetic predisposition to focus on humans and the signals they convey, the researchers say in this week's issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

"In the debate that says, 'It's all about socialization' or 'It's all about genetics,' the answer, as always, is somewhere in the middle," Rossano says.

The results support the idea that socialization is key, agrees cognitive psychologist Monique Udell of Oregon State University. But she says she doesn't think the study helps confirm that dogs are genetically tuned to follow every twitch of the human face, every syllable of human speech. Perhaps dogs are simply superior at reading communicative cues of all kinds, not just those of humans, Udell says.

It's possible that the dogs just made a beeline for the box where the sound was loudest, says dm Miklsi, head of the Family Dog Project at Hungary's Etvs Lornd University. Rossano responds that from the dogs' vantage point, the volume of sound barely differed from one end of the barrier to the other, and it's unlikely the dogs would immediately learn to associate a louder sound with food. He says he thinks the canines use other clues encoded in the sound to figure out where the speaker directs her words. That orientation acts like a finger pointing to the food.

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Dogs pick up directions from human voices

Health care reform lowered death rates in Mass., study finds

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Providing greater access to health insurance led to a decline in deaths, according to a new study of Massachusetts' health care reform law.

Massachusetts passed comprehensive health care reform in 2006, providing a model for the Affordable Care Act -- dubbed by some as "Obamacare." In the four years after the law took effect in Massachusetts, deaths from all causes dropped nearly 3 percent compared with similar counties in states without health reform, the study found.

Researchers estimate that the Massachusetts law prevented 320 deaths a year. That works out to one life saved for every 830 people who gained insurance.

The study, published in the May 6 issue of the Annals of Internal Medicine also noted a 4.5 percent decline in deaths from preventable and treatable conditions, such as cancer, infections and heart disease.

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Massachusetts differs in many ways from the nation as a whole. But in a larger expansion of coverage, "there is a very real likelihood that you're going to help people live longer," said Dr. Benjamin Sommers, assistant professor of health policy and economics at Harvard School of Public Health and the study's lead author.

Much like Obamacare, the Massachusetts health care reform law expanded Medicaid, subsidized private health plans and created an individual mandate to hold people accountable for getting health coverage. The reforms took effect in 2006 and 2007, several years before President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act into law in 2010.

Using data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sommers and colleagues examined changes in death rates for adults, ages 20 to 64, before and after the state enacted health reform, and compared them with the experience in similar counties in states that had not enacted health reform.

The largest gains in life occurred in counties with high poverty and higher rates of uninsured adults before health care reform.

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Health care reform lowered death rates in Mass., study finds

Deaths decline after Massachusetts health care reform

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Massachusetts' near-universal health coverage has resulted in reduced death rates in the state, particularly lowering the death rates among people with diseases, such as stroke and cancer, who benefit from timely health care, a new study has found.

During the four years after Massachusetts instituted a health care overhaul in 2006, death rates in the state decreased by about 3 percent, meaning there were eight fewer deaths than expected for every 100,000 people in the state, whereas rates didn't change over that time period in similar populations in states that didn't expand health coverage.

When the researchers looked at deaths only related to conditions that are more preventable or treatable with timely care for example, heart disease, stroke, cancer and infections they found the death rate decreased 4.5 percent over the four-year period.

The researchers estimated the coverage expansion saved one life per year for every 830 people who gained insurance, according to the study published May 5 in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

"Given that Massachusetts' health reform was, in many ways, the model for the Affordable Care Act, it is critical to understand the law's potential implications for population health," said study researcher Benjamin Sommers, assistant professor of health policy and economics at Harvard School of Public Health.

The Massachusetts' health care reform provided researchers a rather unique opportunity to study the effects of health insurance on health and mortality. It's been hard to figure out whether uninsured people have higher death rates because of barriers to health care, or because they tend to be on average sicker, have lower income and engage in more risky health behaviors such as smoking than insured individuals, Sommers said.

"So here, we take advantage of this natural experiment of Massachusetts doing something very different with its health care system than any other state, and we find there are significant effects on mortality," he said.

The researchers also found that changes in mortality rates were larger in Massachusetts' counties with lower household incomes and higher percentages of uninsured people compared with wealthier counties.

Better access to health care likely reduces death by allowing people to get the care they need once they're sick, as well as preventive care and chronic disease management, the researchers said in the study.

"We found that when [the] state expanded its health insurance, it led to decreases in cross barriers to care, and people were more likely to say that they had a usual source of care or primary care provider," Sommers said. "They were more likely to have doctor visits in the last year, and they described their health overall as being better."

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READER SUBMITTED: Evergreen Health Care Center Receives Five Star Rating

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Gregory Palmer, Johnson Memorial Medical Center Statewide

7:10 p.m. EDT, May 6, 2014

There are 229 nursing home and rehabilitation facilities in Connecticut. Fewer than 10 percent have a 5-star rating. This rating is determined by the outcomes of health inspections, nursing staff care, and nine different physical and clinical quality measures. To receive a 5-star rating from the Centers of Medicare/Medicaid, a nursing home and recovery center must exceed the quality requirements for health inspections, provide comprehensive care to patients individually, and surpass each of the nine quality measures.

Evergreen Health Care Center is part of the Johnson Memorial Medical Center (JMMC), and partner of Saint Francis Care health system. JMMC is a non-profit parent company of Johnson Memorial Hospital, Evergreen Health Care Center, and Home & Community Health Services. JMMC provides a continuum of health care services to those living and working in north central Connecticut and western Massachusetts. For more information, visit http://www.jmmc.com.

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READER SUBMITTED: Evergreen Health Care Center Receives Five Star Rating

Aluminum NES costs as much as the Xbox One, probably has better games

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Can you really put a price on nostalgia? What if its really, really pretty nostalgia?

A company called Analogue Interactive is looking to make the original Nintendo Entertainment System cool again with a modern aluminum chassis makeover. Its called the Analogue Nt, and this lovely piece of retro futurism can be yours for just $499. Sure, you couldget an Xbox One for that price, but how are you supposed to play Duck Hunt on that?

The casing looks nothing like the boxy NES or the original Famicom unit, but the inside is all Nintendo. Unlike some other solutions that rely on software emulation or hardware tricks to play NES games, The Analgoue Nt packs the exact same Ricoh 20A3 and 2C02 microprocessors. The company didnt somehow make more of these 30 year-old 8-bit microprocessors it harvested them from old Famicom systems that were collecting dust.

This hardware swap likely has something to do with the high cost, but it also ensures compatibility with all the games and peripherals ever produced for the NES. It even works with the bizarre Famicom Computer Disk System, and even more rare Famicom 3D System. Yet, somehow Nintendo still went on to make the Virtual Boy.

The Analogue Interactive store is accepting pre-orders right now for the Analogue Nt, but the $499 price tag is only the beginning. You can have different color aluminum cases for an additional $49. Then theres the RGB to HDMI upscaling adapter (another $49). Need some controllers? Analogue Interactive will sell you new, unused NES controllers for $49, or a refurbished NES/Famicom controller for $29. At the end of the day, you could spend quite a hefty sum on this slice of nostalgia. Its expected to ship this summer.

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Aluminum NES costs as much as the Xbox One, probably has better games