Fisherman’s Beach – A Different Kind of Beach in Mazatlan, Mexico

At the bottom of the long fishhook shaped bay that makes up Puerto Viejo Bay in Mazatlan, Mexico lies a different kind of beach. This is not a beach for swimming. Nor is it for sunbathing. In fact, with its hard cobbled sand, grey water, and algae covered rocks, Fisherman’s Beach is not even a particularly pretty beach. Yet is is a beach that’s worth a visit when in Mazatlan, for it is here that fishermen gather before dawn each morning and drag their their brightly painted traditional wooden boats across the sand and into the bay.

Relaxing after a hard day at sea on Pescadero Beach

By noon the fishermen have returned but their work is far from done. Once the boats have been hauled out of the water, nets must be mended, fishing lines untangled, and gear cleaned. This is a self-sufficient, industrious community; it is not uncommon to see fishermen tearing apart huge outboard engines or painting boat bottoms right on the beach. Some take on the duties of fishmonger, cleaning and gutting the day’s catch and laying it out on rough wooden benches for sale to the public. Even the pelicans are eager. They’ve learned the returning fleet means fish guts and other treats, and they boldly congregate around the fishermen, jockeying aggressively for their share of the booty.

Choose what you like from the day's catch

Unlike the rest of Mazatlan’s beaches, Fisherman’s does not have beautiful white sand and clear turquoise water, but it has one distinct advantage over those other picture-book perfect beaches: it offers up the freshest fish in town for astonishingly low prices, and the cultural experience is thrown in for free.

Photo credit: Barbara Weibel

Article by Barbara Weibel of Hole In The Donut Travels

Proposal to Regulate De-Finning of Sharks De-feated | 80beats

Shark_finsIn a victory for East Asian nations that consume sharkfin soup, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) has shot down three of four proposals to protect sharks. Member nations of CITES who gathered in Doha, Qatar, rejected proposals that would have required countries to strictly regulate — but not ban — trade in several species of scalloped hammerhead, oceanic whitetip and spiny dogfish sharks [The New York Times]. Japan also lobbied against the protections, because it strongly opposes extending the convention’s protections to any marine species (including the bluefin tuna that is so beloved by Japan’s sushi connoisseurs).

The only proposal that managed to get through was a proposal from the European Union and the island nation of Palau to protect the porbeagle shark, which is prized for its meat. But even this victory is a shallow one, as the proposal passed by a margin of just one vote, and could be overturned at the conference’s final session on Thursday.

Marine biologists have long warned that hammerhead and whitefin sharks are being overfished, particularly by countries like China where sharkfin soup is a prestigious delicacy. Fishermen harvest the fins and typically throw the sharks back into the sea to die. The rate of species decline in some areas is an astounding 90 percent. Japan led opposition to the four measures, arguing that management of shark populations should be left to regional fisheries groups, not CITES [Sydney Morning Herald].

The current CITES meeting has been seen by some conservation experts as a dispiriting sign that the convention isn’t making its decisions about endangered species based on scientific findings, but is instead bowing to politics and economic interests. “It appears that science no longer matters,” said Elizabeth Griffin of wildlife conservation group Oceana, based in Washington. “CITES is not fulfilling its obligation to protect species threatened by international trade” [Sydney Morning Herald].

Stuart Beck, Palau’s ambassador to the United Nations, neatly summed up the anger felt by conservationists after the shark protections failed, saying in a statement: “I am sure that, properly prepared, bald eagle is delicious. But, as civilized people, we simply do not eat it” [The New York Times].

Related Content:
80beats: Endangered Species Meeting Brings Good News for Elephants, Bad News for Coral
80beats: Bluefin Tuna is Still on the Menu: Trade Ban Fails at International Summit
80beats: DNA Forensics Traces Sharks Killed for Their Fins
80beats: Human Appetite for Sharks Pushes Many Toward Extinction

Image: Wikimedia


Will Watching Videos of the Great Outdoors Make Cows “Happy and Productive”? | Discoblog

russian_cowsSome people play Mozart to unborn babies in hopes of increasing their brain power, or talk to their plants in hopes of making them grow faster, so will subjecting cows to hours of video footage of the verdant Swiss Alps make them more productive?

Well, we don’t know yet. But a Russian farmer has invested the time and the LCD TV’s to find out.

News reports indicate that the farmer has rigged one side of his shed with 40-inch LCD TVs so that one row of cows can watch footage of the Swiss Alps, where the grass is green and the skies are blue. The cows on the other side are afforded no such diversion.

The farmer is monitoring his cattle to see if the TV-watching cows are more “happy and productive.”

TV is great, but you know what might be even greater? Letting the cows out of the shed once in a while to let them get a taste of the real green stuff.

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Image: Gizmodo/Ecorazzi


Study: Massive Lava Flows Allowed Dinosaurs to Conquer the Planet | 80beats

TriassicExEventEarlier this month, a study in the journal Science tried to put to bed for good the question of dinosaur extinction: It was an impact from space, not large-scale volcanic activity, that wiped them out 65 million years ago, the study argued. That’s all well and good for the dinosaur’s end, but what about their beginning?

This week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, paleontologists say they’ve studied the period about 200 million years ago when dinosaurs first came to power, and found that while catastrophic volcanic activity may not explain dinosaur extinction, it could have explained why dinosaurs’ competitors disappeared and the terrible lizards took over the planet.

Around the time of dino emergence, the continents were all locked up in the supercontinent Pangaea. As it pulled apart, researchers say the seismic activity gave rise to hundreds of thousands of years of volcanic activity, creating lava fields on the surface of the Earth the size of the continental United States. For this study, Jessica Whiteside and colleagues surveyed wood remnants, wax from ancient leaves, and whatever else they could extract from the volcanic flow’s remains to reconstruct what was happening in the climate of this period.

The scientists examined how two different isotopes (or forms) of carbon fluctuated during these volcanic eruptions. They found that the “heavy” form of carbon was depleted relative to the “light” form. They say this reflects disturbances in the carbon cycle at this time, including a spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) and aerosols (fine solid particles) [BBC News].

That finding, Whiteside says, reinforces the connection between volcano-induced runaway global warming and the great extinction 200 million years ago, which marks the boundary between the Triassic and Jurassic periods and the ascendancy of the dinosaurs. Before the rise of the dinosaurs, the animal world was dominated by crurotarsans, ancient relatives of modern crocodiles. But as their populations crashed, early therapods, the group of dinosaurs that includes all meat-eating species from Velociraptor to Tyrannosaurus rex, gained ground and thrived [The Guardian].

This leaves at least one burning question, though: If raging volcanoes and lava flows the size of the United States made the planet hot and inhospitable, why did the dinosaurs survive while their competitors vanished? Scientists who study the crurotarsans found that they evolved at a similar rate as dinosaurs, who were not superior except for having evolved slightly more rapidly. The researchers also found that there were more varieties of crurotarsans, who were also more numerous and more adapted than dinosaurs, and thus had greater chances of prospering and ruling on Earth [AFP]. Thus, Whiteside says, it might have been no more than dumb luck that permitted dinosaur survival—and world domination.

Related Content:
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80beats: Forget “The Asteroid”: Could Supervolcanoes Have Killed the Dinosaurs?
80beats: In the Permian Period, Erupting Super-Volcanoes May Have Killed Half the Planet
80beats: Dinosaurs Ruled the World Because They “Got Lucky,” Say Scientists

Image: Jessica H. Whiteside (Site in Nova Scotia, Canada. The end-Triassic layer is in white.)


Robert White

Robert M. White dies at 85; pilot made history with 1962 test flight into space, LA Times

"Robert M. White was a 38-year-old U.S. Air Force major and record-setting test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base in 1962 when he joined the elite ranks of America's four astronauts. But Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard, Virgil Grissom, John Glenn and Scott Carpenter went into space seated atop ballistic missiles and returned in capsules that parachuted onto the ocean."

Robert White, a pilot in 'The Right Stuff,' dies, SF Chronicle

"After his space flight, he was featured on the cover of Life magazine next to the quote, "Boy, That Was a Ride."

For a High-Tech Easter Egg Hunt, Let GPS Be Your Guide | Discoblog

Geocache_near_Špilberk_CastSince our entire lives have moved online and we’re all as wired as someone who has just gulped down ten cups of coffee, why should our Easter egg hunts be old-fashioned? This year, give your egg hunt an upgrade and embark on a high tech search with “geocaching.” Geocaching is a craze sweeping the great outdoors in which people use GPS coordinates to look for hidden treasures.

The organizer gives the participants GPS coordinates of the first stash, or cache. Using a GPS-enabled device, the hunters look for the cache–which could be a simple weatherproof container like a Tupperware box or thermos–hidden somewhere outdoors. A container typically contains a log book for the finder to sign, a few trinkets, and the coordinates for the next stash. This ensures the treasure hunt keeps going on till the seeker finds all the caches. For the Easter variant of geocaching, event organizers are planning to hide the stash coordinates in plastic Easter eggs.

According to enthusiasts, this high-tech treasure hunt is good fun and can also be exhausting, as GPS coordinates only take the hunter to within six to 20 feet of where the treasure is buried. Once the GPS has done its best to get a seeker to the desired location, it’s anyone’s guess which rock or tree hides the cache.

Naturalist Jill Snyder, who is organizing one such geocaching event this Easter, told the Associated Press that these hunts can reveal the searcher’s inner child:

“If you loved looking for Easter eggs as a kid then geocaching definitely is for you…. You approach finding caches in the same way that you would an Easter egg except that you have a GPS to guide you.”

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Image:Wikimedia


Gizmodo on PBS Neeeeewwwwwshour [Announcements]

Gizmodo and actually respectable news program PBS Newshour, together—yes, it's true. Just look at this fancy logo they made, complete with drop shadow. Anyways, I was there to talk about the iPad and where Bing really lives (it's a scary place) as part of a new series they're doing, NewsHour Plus, that's all about science and tech. I was very tired, so pardon the droopiness. But we're pretty excited to be working with NewsHour! More »


LCD TV Weight Could Be Halved Due To Japanese Research [Components]

Japan invented the LCD TV (well, Sharp to be exact), so if anyone was going to decrease the weight of them by half, it'd be their countrymen. A light layer of heat-resistant silicon dioxide on plastic replacing the heavier glass substrates does just the trick according to Japanese chemical company Teijin, who's working with the Yamaguchi University on developing it for commercial use. [The Nikkei via CrunchGear] More »


About the Hydrostatic Test

In the case of a vertical vessel tested horizontally in the shop,the test pressure shall relate to the design pressure adjusted for static head when the unit is in the vertical position.It must be ensured that no part of the vessel will be subject to a higher stress when tested vertically at site in