Whales Help Explain the Evolutionary Mystery of Menopause – WIRED

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There's a rare human trait that doesn't often make it into debates about what makes our species unique: menopause. Humans are among just a handful of species where females stop reproducing decades before the end of their lifespan. In evolutionary terms, menopause is intriguing: how could it be advantageous for reproductive ability to end before an individual's life is over?

One possible answer: the power of the grandma's guidance and aid to her grandchildren. A paper in PNAS reports evidence that supports this explanation, showing that killer whale grandmas who have stopped reproducing do a better job of helping their grandchildren to survive than grandmothers who are still having babies of their own.

Its Not All About the Babies

The engine of evolution is offspring. In simple terms, the more babies you have that survive, the more your genes are passed on, and the better the chance of the long-term survival of those genes.

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This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Cond Nast.

But there are other ways to improve the long-term survival of your genes, and that's where evolution gets a little bit more complicated than just brute-force reproduction. If you invest in your siblings' children, or your children's children, you also improve the survival of the genes you share with them. Like every other survival problem that a species must overcomefood, safety, finding a matethe dynamics of natural selection generate different solutions to the question of how to propagate your genes.

The "grandmother hypothesis" suggests that grandmas play a crucial role in the survival of their grandchildren, which obviously gives the grandmas' own genes a boost. But that doesn't explain why humansalong with killer whales, short-finned pilot whales, belugas, and narwhalsstop reproducing with decades left to live. Wouldn't it be better to just keep having babies of your own and help your grandchildren? Possibly not: in certain species, with certain family dynamics, evolutionary models show that it's more worthwhile for grandmas to invest all their resources in their grandchildren, rather than compete with their own daughters.

There's evidence from humans to support this: the grandchildren of post-reproductive grandmas get a survival boost. But there hasn't been any direct evidence of a post-reproductive grandma benefit in other species that have menopauselike killer whales. Similarly to humans, female killer whales stop reproducing around their late 30s or early 40s but can continue to live for decades after that point. Do killer whales also give their grandkids a boost?

Grandma Has Tricks Up Her Sleeve

Like humans, killer whales live in intensely social family groups. Also like humans, young killer whales need help finding food even after they've been weaned. This means an important role for grandmothers, who can share food with their grandchildren and also impart their decades of accumulated experience and wisdom by guiding their families to historically successful feeding spots.

To test whether post-reproductive killer whale grandmas improve the survival of their offspring, a group of researchers collected data on killer whale populations off the coast of Washington state and British Columbia. They tracked the interactions between hundreds of individual whales, recording births and deaths and controlling for the all-important environmental factor of salmon abundance.

Just like humans, whales can become grandmothers while they're still having babies themselves. Because they were interested in the effects of menopause, the researchers wanted to compare the effects of grandma whales that had stopped reproducing to those that were still having their own offspring.

The results showed that grandma whales played a significant role in the survival of their grandchildren. Survival rates dropped sharply for whales that had recently lost a grandmothereven adult whales of 15 or 20 years old. And this effect was more marked when the grandmother was no longer reproducing herself. It was also more extreme when salmon abundance was lower, suggesting that the ecological knowledge of grandmother killer whales is a crucial resource for their families.

Less Competition

This result ties in well with previous evidence on menopause in killer whales, which found that menopause meant a reduction in competition for resources between grandmas and their daughters.

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Whales Help Explain the Evolutionary Mystery of Menopause - WIRED

The Evolution of The Lil Smokies – Flathead Beacon

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A few days before his show in Whitefish, dobro player and vocalist Andy Dunnigan of the Montana bluegrass band, The Lil Smokies, traveled across international borders from Vancouver, Canada, a place hes recently started calling home base.

The rest of the band arrived in waves from Oklahoma, Seattle and Missoula to converge together in Whitefish and play a dynamic, triple-header at the Great Northern Bar in Dunnigans hometown.

After performing 160 captivating shows nationwide in the past year, the band was burnt out from traveling. In 10 years of playing bluegrass, The Lil Smokies gradually realized they dont need to live in the same place to be a successful band, and its helped relieve some stress.

In addition to their tour, the five-piece band converged last year to create their new album, Tornillo, named after the small town in Texas where it was recorded.

The recording process differed from the groups previous album, Changing Shades, recorded at SnowGhost Music in Whitefish. For nine days, the band members lived at the studio in Tornillo. They slept there, ate huevos rancheros every morning and immersed themselves in their music in the small town outside of El Paso. The dobro, guitar, fiddle, bass and banjo were their focus.

Because it was so immersive, we had a lot of time to tinker, Dunnigan said.

Before The Lil Smokies arrived in Tornillo, they were fried. In the last few years, theyve grown from a local Montana band into a well-known presence in the bluegrass world. Tornillo brought them back together after years of success, traveling and stress.

It was a very unifying experience, he said.

The recording came at a time of evolution for the The Lil Smokies. Since starting out as a bluegrass garage band playing keggers in their hometown of Missoula, their lyrics have grown deeper and the members more versatile.

Each member has brought a different nuance, Dunnigan said. Were all a little more conscious of space and not as fast and furious as we were. I think thats a sign of an evolved musician. Let the space between the notes prosper.

Tornillo opened the doors they needed to grow musically. The experience allowed them to experiment and impacted them so much they named their album after it.

Before The Lil Smokies were recording albums and playing 160 gigs a year, the band formed during their years at the University of Montana in Missoula. It all started in 2009 when Dunnigan brought along his dobro to a house party, jamming into the night with other like-minded musicians.

We shared a catalog of interest, he said.

From there, they grew as a local Missoula favorite and began playing small gigs in town. It wasnt until they won a band competition at the Northwest String Summit in 2013 and another at Telluride Bluegrass Festival in 2015 that their success skyrocketed. Dunnigan says that was the catalyst that ushered the band onto the road.

Although two members left the group once they started getting big, the newest members, Matthew Rieger or Rev and Jake Simpson, joined three years ago and maintained the Montana vibe.

While they have evolved into a nationwide bluegrass staple, nothing compares to playing in their home state of Montana, Dunnigan said. After the hustle and bustle of the big cities they visit on tour, the band is always excited to come home.

I love the slow pace and the friendliness of Whitefish and Missoula, Dunnigan said. Thats foreign to a lot of places.

Dunnigan says he likes to finish tours in Montana because of the sense of homecoming. Following months on the road, the band is warmed up and ready to showcase their music at home, he said.

The Lil Smokies sometimes make it to play in Billings but always hit Bozeman, Missoula and Whitefish on their tours.

Missoula, Whitefish and Bozeman is the Holy Trinity for us, he said.

A final weekend in Whitefish and a New Years Eve celebration at The Wilma in Missoula is becoming an annual tradition.

Its nice to have these staple events to look forward to every year, Dunnigan said.

The Lil Smokies will finish their tour in Whitefish at the Under The Big Sky Festival on July 18 and 19.

To order The Lil Smokies new album, Tornillo, visit http://www.thelilsmokies.com.

maggie@flatheadbeacon.com

If you enjoy stories like this one, please consider joining the Flathead Beacon Editors Club. For as little as $5 per month, Editors Club members support independent local journalism and earn a pipeline to Beacon journalists. Members also gain access to http://www.beaconeditorsclub.com, where they will find exclusive content like deep dives into our biggest stories and a behind-the-scenes look at our newsroom.Join Now

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These Vaginas Evolved to Fight the Penis, Not Accommodate It – VICE

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Evolutionary biologist Patty Brennan had watched a lot of birds have sex. But in 2002, in Costa Rica, she saw something she never had before: a bird penis.

Most male birds don't have penises. They mate using an opening called a cloacaderived from the Latin word for sewer. It's a cavity inside a bird's anus that's a one-stop shop for the digestive, urinary, and reproductive tracts. When birds mate, the male and female cloaca touch. The male releases sperm, and it enters the females body. It's referred to, somewhat romantically, as a "cloacal kiss."

Brennan was observing a pair of Great tinamousbrown, chicken-like birds with small heads that live in the Costa Rican forest. Instead of just the subtle and brief cloacal kiss, the male bird grabbed the female by the neck. Then, the two birds started walking around still attached, as if they were fused together. When they separated, she saw a white, tentacle-looking organ hanging from his body.

"This was unlike anything I had ever seen," she said. "I was like, is this a penis?" (According to biologist Richard Prum, the tinamous penis had been seen and described by Victorian anatomists, but the appendage was forgotten to science. Her sighting was probably the first-ever observation of the tinamou penis in action," he wrote in a 2017 book.)

That unexpected bird penis launched Brennan, now an assistant professor of biological sciences at Mount Holyoke College, into a career of studying the weird and wonderful variations of genitalia in the natural world. But unlike many scientists before her who had noticed the dizzying variety of penises out there, Brennan began to ask: What about the vaginas? A long-standing misconception in evolutionary biology was that penises were incredibly diverse, but vaginas were not. In the past two decades, biologists, like Brennan, have been finding otherwise.

While doing so, they've been uncovering how gender biases might have played a role in obscuring vaginal variety, and how excluding vaginas from the study of genital evolution led to gaping holes in our understanding of why genitals look and behave the way they do. Only by examining how male and female parts evolve together can we see how sometimes, strange genitals are a result of sexual conflicteach sex trying to get the upper hand to control the reproductive act to best suit their needs. That's what Brennan learned, not through bird penises alone, but also through the vaginas with which they interact.

After her encounter in Costa Rica, Brennan wanted to continue studying bird genitalia. She shifted her focus to ducks, a more accessible subject than tinamous. At a duck farm in California's Central Valley in 2009, she captured some duck penises in action. (These ducks had been trained to ejaculate into small glass bottles for artificial insemination.)

You might remember what she and Prum discovered because, for a short while, the duck penis went viral online. Brennan found that the penises unfurl out of a duck's body at lengths of around 5 to 7 inchessome duck penises can be almost as long as the male's body. And they were spiraled, like a fleshy cavatappi pasta noodle. Male ducks forced these long corkscrew penises onto females. The internet was horrified, and also, enthralled.

In the history of people (and scientists) marveling at genitalia in nature, this is where it often stops: Look at this weird penis! In 1979, Science published a paper on the penis of the damselfly. As Dutch evolutionary biologist, Menno Schilthuizen, wrote in his book, Nature's Nether Regions, this minuscule penis carried a miniature spoon that, during mating, cleaned out the females vagina, scooping out any remaining sperm from previous males. It was an eye-opener as well as a sperm-scooper.

This finding opened biologists' eyes to the fact that even tiny creatures had strange penises. The chicken flea's penis is rolled up in its body like a coiled spring. Other insects have musical penises, where males rub them against ribbed parts of their bodies to emit loud noises. Black widow spiders have penis tips that break off to block other males sperm from entering a female. It was somewhat of an evolutionary mystery: Why were penises so different from one another if they had the same evolutionary purposeto deliver sperm to a female's eggs?

The lock and key theory was one potential explanation, proposed in the mid 19th century. It said that male genitals were like a key, and for each key there needed to be a corresponding lock (the vagina). If the key doesnt fit into the lock, mating couldn't take place. Essentially, penises varied to keep different species from mating with one another. Another guess was sexual selectionthat females detected some particular feature of the male genitalia and used it to choose a mate, pushing the male's penis evolution in bizarre off-shoots.

Still, the focus remained on male genitalia and how it was changing and evolving, even in more recent texts on genital evolution, like important work from scientist William Eberhard on sexual selection. Brennan wrote in a 2016 paper that while Eberhard noted female choice was important in shaping male genital features, he concluded that female genitalia are relatively uniform while male genitalia are diverse.

"It created this idea, from my reading of the literature later on, that the females were somehow boring," Brennan said. "We need to look at the males, because thats where all the action is.

As a result, most of the research on genital evolution has focused on males. Nearly two times as many studies have looked at male genitals compared to females. In 2014, evolutionary biologist and gender researcher Malin Ah-King and her colleagues looked at 364 studies published over the last two decades, and found that 49 percent of them only looked at male genitals, compared to 8 percent that looked only at females, and 44 percent that looked at both.

Even the language that researchers use to describe male and female genitals has differed. A study found that active words like "coercion" are used for males, while more passive words like "avoidance" or "resistance," are provided for females. As Ah-King and her co-authors wrote: Too often, the female is assumed to be an invariant container within which all this presumed scooping, hooking, and plunging occurs.

When Brennan first saw the duck penis, though, she immediately considered the duck vagina. I looked at their penis and next question was, 'wow these penises are so big. So what do the vaginas look like?' Surprisingly, no one had investigated that before, she told me. To her, it was an obvious question. As she told science writer Carl Zimmer for a New York Times article: You cant have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.

When she dissected some female ducks, "I could not believe it, she said. The differences in the vagina of a duck compared to the vagina of a chicken or a finch or quail was like the difference between night and day.

What Brennan found was a vagina like a labyrinth. Yes, duck penises were spiraledbut duck vaginas were too, in the opposite direction. Rather than finding a vagina that had evolved to fit this weird penisa garage that fit the carthe duck vagina indicated a less cooperative history.

Given that duck mating was often forced, Brennan and her colleagues hypothesized that the vagina had co-evolved to actively resist the males. The ducks vagina is swirled in a clockwise coil, so the males can only completely penetrate her with their counter-clockwise penis if she chooses to relax her vaginal muscles. Even though female ducks can't stop the male ducks from forcing themselves on them, they can control if the male could successfully inseminatereclaiming some reproductive autonomy.

Brennan and her colleagues looked at other species where the males took part in forced copulation, and then at the corresponding females. In ducks and geese, they found that when male birds forced sex on the females, females also had complicated vaginas. In species where theres no forced copulation, then the females have a regular, tube-looking vagina," Brennan said.

It also meant that the duck penis size and shape wasn't solely a result of males competing with other males, or females making a choice between malesit was the female and male ducks' competition driving the evolution.

This is the core tenet of sexual conflict: Males and females dont always agree about the best way to mate. For males, mating with a large number of females is the ideal way for them to procreate. For females, who are often left with the care of the offspring, as well as giving birth and pregnancy, being selective about reproduction is her best bet for creating progeny that will survive. This creates a conflict, where the males are going for quantity and the females, for quality.

Lets say a male animal evolves a penis hook, which allows him to latch onto a female. Even if that hook hurts the female, or gives her an infection, if it benefits the male by allowing him to reproduce more, the genes for that hook will be passed to the next generation. That puts the female a step behind, so evolution might next select for females that can defend themselves against the hook, and evolve thicker walls in their vagina. (Something very similar has happened in sharks.) This is a way of understanding the evolution of genitals as a kind of conversation, even if a contentious and competitive one. And this perspective is providing new understanding for a whole host of creatures.

The males evolve these weird penises and females evolve their convoluted vaginas in response, Brennan said. This is a lot more widespread than what we had originally realized. It's just, we have to go out there and look.

Take the earwig, an insect with a male reproductive organ called a virga. The virga has a fringe-like tip that can brush away sperm from any male that mated with a female before him. Looking at the male genitals only tells one half of the story, because the females have receptacles in their bodies to store sperm that lie just out of reach of the virga. It may seem that the males are controlling the sperm, but the females have the upper hand. As science writer Ed Yong wrote: The male can scrape away all he wants; the female decides whether to keep or jettison her sperm.

Dolphins have a complex series of vaginal folds that researchers once assumed were there to keep sea water from getting inside the female reproductive tract. Theyre realizing now how intricate their vaginas are, partly by making the effort to look closer at them. In 2017, biologist Dara Orbach made silicone molds of the dolphin vagina "revealing complex folds and spirals," the New Scientist reported. Brennan said it's now thought that those folds are actually barriers to male's penises.

Paying more attention to vaginas can help explain strange mating behavior too: In water striders, bugs that live and walk on water, the females evolved a genital shield, which can block any males that try to force them into mating. That led the males to adopt new "courting" techniques. "The males have started tapping the surface of the water while mounted on a female; the resulting ripples attract fish, and since the female is under the male, she's more likely than him to become a meal," according to post on Nature's blog. "Females can avoid this grisly end by giving in to the male's intimidation and mating with him.

Without knowing that the females have a genital shield, researchers' understanding of such behavior would be incomplete. It allows us to understand all of these bizarre morphologies and behaviors that we see in the context of, essentially, an arms race, said Teri Orr, a evolutionary ecologist at The University of Utah.

Spiders are another of Orrs favorites, because they can have around a dozen different pockets in them for manipulating spermsome are for receiving sperm, or moving it around. Orr frequently studies bats, and said they will store sperm for a full year in the reproductive tract. Leaf cutter ants can store sperm for around ten years.

Female chickens can eject about 80 percent of sperm from undesirable mates. Female guppies can hold onto sperm tooone study found that one in four guppies in Trinidad and Tobago were fathered by males that had been dead for 10 months. By doing so, females could wait to reproduce at favorable times of the year.

Theyre able to keep those sperm until its a good time of year for them to become pregnant, and then carry out that pregnancy and have babies when theres food available for them, Orr said. To me, that is absolutely mind-blowing. A lot of it is almost science fiction, what these species are able to do."

It also shows how the female anatomy is anything but passive. Outside of sperm storage, the vagina is awash with muscles that control contractions and movementits as mobile as the digestive tract is, Orr said. These muscles can play a part in moving the sperm where they want it to go. We didnt know what until about a decade ago, she said. And even then, its only in cattle, horses, mice and humans that its been studied. Thats such a small part of the diversity thats out there.

In 2005, more than 200 scientists met in London at The Royal Society for a meeting titled Sexual conflict: a new paradigm? Brennan said that since then, she feels the field is moving to include vaginas, and that several of the most recent papers on genital evolution acknowledge the fact that female genitals have been overlooked. But Orr said that when she presents her work at conferences, it can still feel like its regarded as out there" or niche. It hasnt reached mainstream science yet, she said. I think its going to take a little while until its fully embraced and not just a noveltybut normal biology.

It's not as if Brennan wants the research to flip and only focus on femalesthe point is that you need both pieces of the puzzle. Ive been very adamant that when youre looking at genitalia, you cant just look at the female or the male alone," she said. "You need to look at both because of that mechanical fit. I could commit the opposite sin, in a way. I could just go look at a bunch of females and never look at the males. Thats not going to tell me much.

She hopes that the field of genital evolution become more well-rounded, and also that the public will recognize its value. When Brennan's work on duck genitalia went public, conservatives latched onto it as a waste of government money (like a lot of academic research, it was partly funded by the National Science Foundation), acquiring the moniker #DuckPenisGate. Fox News put up a poll on their site where readers could vote if the research was a worthwhile use of taxpayer money, and 89 percent voted it was not. Brennan and her co-author Prum had to write articles defending the research.

The thing about basic science, Brennan said, is that you never know when a seemingly obscure discovery in nature is going to lead to an application for humans. So could secrets to our evolutionary past (and sexual conflicts) be hidden in our genital shapes? It's true that humans also have weird penises awash with unsolved questions, Brennan said. They are disproportionately wide given our body size and MRI studies of people having sex show that the shape of the male and female genitalia can change during intercourse, for reasons that are not completely understood.

Humans don't have penile spines, unlike many of our close primate relatives. Humans have also lost the baculum, a little bone inside of the penis of many animals, like bats, rodents, and primates. We have no idea what it does, Orr said. Its buried in tons of soft tissue and so its not interacting with the female, so its quite mysterious." Even less understood is the tiny little bone some animals have inside of the clitoris which humans didn't retain.

But more often, translation from basic science will come from where you least expect it. One obvious example is how the immune system of a bacteria was developed into a revolutionary gene editing techniqueCRISPR/Cas9.

In the realm of genital evolution: duck penises grow and shrink every season, which means there are probably stem cells in the penis that allow for that growth each year. If researchers could learn what those cells are and how they work, they could have all sorts of medical or cosmetic applications. Could we actually grow penile cells that might become a treatment someday? Its perfectly possible," Brennan said.

Many of the stages where pregnancy fails in humans are the same ones where bats are able to intervene and store fertilized eggs or sperm. By looking closer at those processes, it might lead to ideas for aiding issues in human or reproduction or endocrinology, Orr said.

Hypospadias is a birth defect leading to a malformed urethra; one in every 200 boys is born with some type of hypospadias. For people with such developmental problems, or others, like malformation of the uterus, research into genitals that are naturally bifurcated could lead to an understanding of what causes those hiccups, and how to fix them.

Even if those animal-human translations aren't right around the corner, the field of genital evolution has already offered something else: Recognizing the value in seeing how gender biases and language can divert research to ignore crucial elements. Anthropologist Emily Martin's 1991 essay The Egg and the Sperm highlighted how the (often incorrect) descriptions of human sperm and eggs reflected stereotypical male and female roles. It's a reminder that it could happen again, and to examine what social constructs are currently inseminating scientific research.

And Brennan wonders if the response to her research doesn't betray how touchy and judgemental people still are about genitalia, especially vaginas. It's almost as if there was something a little perverse with that line of questioning or that particular type of research," she said. "I happen to think that we actually need to understand a lot more about sex and sexual interactions than less.

She views genitals just like any other organs. If you think about our other organs: livers, kidneys, hearts, or brainsthere's much less variation and excitement. It's a rare window into what evolution can do. Genitalia are critical biological organs to be studying, she said. Im still surprised that we know as little as we seem to know. Evolutionarily, this is where the rubber meets the road.

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Breakthrough in Understanding Evolution Mitochondrial Division Conserved Across Species – SciTechDaily

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Cellular origin is well explained by the endosymbiotic theory, which famously states that higher organisms called eukaryotes have evolved from more primitive single-celled organisms called prokaryotes. This theory also explains that mitochondriaenergy-producing factories of the cellare actually derived from prokaryotic bacteria, as part of a process called endosymbiosis. Biologists believe that their common ancestry is why the structure of mitochondria is conserved in eukaryotes, meaning that it is very similar across different speciesfrom the simplest to most complex organisms. Now, it is known that as cells divide, so do mitochondria, but exactly how mitochondrial division takes place remains a mystery. Is it possible that mitochondria across different multicellular organismsowing to their shared ancestrydivide in an identical manner? Considering that mitochondria are involved in some of the most crucial processes in the cell, including the maintenance of cellular metabolism, finding the answer to exactly how they replicate could spur further advancements in cell biology research.

In a new study published in Communications Biology on December 20, 2019, a group of scientists at Tokyo University of Science, led by Prof Sachihiro Matsunaga, wanted to find answers related to the origin of mitochondrial division. For their research, Prof Matsunaga and his team chose to study a type of red algathe simplest form of a eukaryote, containing only one mitochondrion. Specifically, they wanted to observe whether the machinery involved in mitochondrial replication is conserved across different species and, if so, why. Talking about the motivation for this study, Prof Matsunaga says, Mitochondria are important to cellular processes, as they supply energy for vital activities. It is established that cell division is accompanied by mitochondrial division; however, many points regarding its molecular mechanism are unclear.

This exciting new research describes how mitochondrial replication is similar in the simplest to most complex organisms, shedding light on its origin. Credit: Tokyo University of Science

The scientists first focused on an enzyme called Aurora kinase, which is known to activate several proteins involved in cell division by phosphorylating them (a well-known process in which phosphate groups are added to proteins to regulate their functions). By using techniques such as immunoblotting and kinase assays, they showed that the Aurora kinase in red algae phosphorylates a protein called dynamin, which is involved in mitochondrial division. Excited about these findings, Prof Matsunaga and his team wanted to take their research to the next level by identifying the exact sites where Aurora kinase phosphorylates dynamin, and using mass spectrometric experiments, they succeeded in identifying four such sites. Prof Matsunaga says, When we looked for proteins phosphorylated by Aurora kinase, we were surprised to find dynamin, a protein that constricts mitochondria and promotes mitochondrial division.

Having gained a little more insight into how mitochondria divide in red algae, the scientists then wondered if the process could be similar in more evolved eukaryotes, such as humans. Prof Matsunaga and his team then used a human version of Aurora kinase to see if it phosphorylates human dynaminand just as they predicted, it did. This led them to conclude that the process by which mitochondria replicate is very similar in different eukaryotic organisms. Prof Matsunaga elaborates on the findings by saying, Using biochemical in vitro assays, we showed that Aurora kinase phosphorylates dynamin in human cells. In other words, it was found that the mechanism by which Aurora kinase phosphorylates dynamin in the mitochondrion is preserved from primitive algae to humans.

Scientists have long pondered over the idea of mitochondrial division being conserved in eukaryotes. This study is the first to show not only the role of a new enzyme in mitochondrial replication but also that this process is similar in both algae and humans, hinting towards the fact that their common ancestry might have something to do with this. Prof Matsunaga concludes by talking about the potential implications of this study, Since the mitochondrial fission system found in primitive algae may be preserved in all living organisms including humans, the development of this method can make it easier to manipulate cellular activities of various organisms, as and when required.

As it turns out, we have much more in common with other species than we thought, and part of the evidence lies in our mitochondria!

Reference: Cyanidioschyzon merolae aurora kinase phosphorylates evolutionarily conserved sites on its target to regulate mitochondrial division by Shoichi Kato, Erika Okamura, Tomoko M. Matsunaga, Minami Nakayama, Yuki Kawanishi, Takako Ichinose, Atsuko H. Iwane, Takuya Sakamoto, Yuuta Imoto, Mio Ohnuma, Yuko Nomura, Hirofumi Nakagami, Haruko Kuroiwa, Tsuneyoshi Kuroiwa and Sachihiro Matsunaga, 20 December 2019, Communications Biology.DOI: 10.1038/s42003-019-0714-x

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Mary Cariola announces evolution of the organization’s name and identity – WXXI News

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The Mary Cariola Childrens Center is announcing a name change as the organization works to evolve its brand.

The non-profit, which provides education and other services for people with disabilities will now be known as Mary Cariola Center, Transforming Lives of People with Disabilities.

President and CEO Karen Zandi says the change reflects the fact that the organization also provides services to adults in residential and community services programs.

Some of that has evolved because of the changes at the state level and individuals who we serve that have multiple and complex disabilities are really pretty challenge and need some individualized plans. So they tend to stay with us until were able to secure other services for them, Zandi explained.

Zandi says Mary Cariola has been serving adults as well as children for some time now.

"Once someone is over 21 talking about them as a child is really disrespectful and therefore deserving the respect that adulthood brings. So the individuals over 21 that we were serving, we didnt want to keep calling them kids," Zandi said.

Mary Cariola, based on Elmwood Avenue in Rochester, serves nearly 500 students from ages 3 to 21 in an 11-county region.

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Mary Cariola announces evolution of the organization's name and identity - WXXI News

The Evolution of Language, by Kinnary Patankar, Henrietta Barnett School – This is Local London

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From peng to bants, modern slang has taken on a life of its own. It has even been referred to as its own language, incomprehensible to the adult members of society. English has evolved throughout the country to result in an entirely new set of vocabulary with its own new and distinct definitions. This evolution of language has been happening for millennia, and will certainly continue to occur. From Latin to Old English to slang, humans have refined their methods of communication to involve today over 170,000 words, and across the globe thousands of languages have emerged and developed too. However this begs the question: how did language come to exist in the first place?

It is almost unanimously agreed that it all began with the grunts and noises of cavemen sitting around a fire, not unlike the communication we see today in pack animals such as wolves. The need for language arose from the need for communication; humans have always been social animals and not only crave but require co-operation among a group in order to survive. This line of thinking has resulted in a theory of how language evolved: natural selection. It is known that our brain size is significantly larger than that of our predecessors, and therefore this allowed more complex cognitive function to occur, including language. The humans better able to communicate with each other could find water faster, hunt more successfully, utilise tools together to build shelter. Therefore they outcompeted those unable to do so, and as our brains evolved, as did our language until eventually it comprised of modern day complex constructions such as tense markers, relative clauses and complement clauses. One of the most fascinating aspects of this is that even a young child can learn to speak simply by listening!

This process of language evolution may have begun from simply a grunt to signify that a deer is nearby. However gradually a protolanguage that was made up of rudimentary phrases may have developed, involving stringing multiple words together, such as deer ahead. This phrase contains only two words but is vastly more effective than simple deer as it details its proximity to the hunters. In fact this type of protolanguage can be seen in two-year olds and in the initial efforts of adults attempting to learn a new language. Therefore this theory is very plausible.

On the other hand some argue that language is a result of exaptation: an adaptation being used for something that was not its original purpose, or in very simplified terms, it was a side-effect of other evolutionary advancements in the human brain. These scientists argue that as natural selection favoured adaptations more directly advantageous in the brain such as the abilities of tool making and rule learning, the areas that developed to enhance these functions just so happened to also advance the ability of being able to use language. These two theories are not mutually exclusive, though. They may have occurred in conjunction with each other, allowing humans to begin to use language.

However it is difficult to even agree on what was the beginning of language. Some consider the proto-language, which was used by the Homo habilis, the first language. Conversely others credit it to the Homo erectus. Many even claim that the first language surfaced much later, with the earliest groups of Homo sapiens. Tracking the evolution of language is also incredibly difficult, as it has no physical manifestation, although some fossil records are used to track the shape of the vocal tract (the mouth, tongue and throat). Before around 100,000 years ago, the vocal tracts did not allow the range of sounds and movements of the mouth used in speech today. However this does not mean language started then, as earlier language may have developed without the use of certain vowel sounds and consonants.

Another route scientists are taking is studying other primates, particularly apes methods of communication to perhaps see what had happened to our own species in the very early stages of the development of language. However teaching apes the human language has produced intriguing but only rudimentary results. Ultimately, we are the only organisms with this complex and highly effective method of communication: an ability so unique and demanding such rigorous intellect that it very well may have played a crucial role in humans occupying the role they do today in the natural world. So perhaps the next time you make use of a slang word, perhaps give some thought to how that word came to be in the first place!

By Kinnary Patankar

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The Evolution of Language, by Kinnary Patankar, Henrietta Barnett School - This is Local London

‘Titanfall’ to ‘Star Wars’ to VR realism, the evolution of Respawn games – Los Angeles Times

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If anything should put Vince Zampella at ease, one would assume it would be the topic of video game warfare. Zampella, one of the most recognizable figures of the modern gaming era, is after all responsible for much video game carnage.

With his Respawn Entertainment, hes been an architect of sci-fi shooter Titanfall. Previously, with Infinity Ward, he helped define the Call of Duty franchise before an acrimonious split with Activision. Even earlier, with the studio 2015, he contributed to the Medal of Honor franchise, which often features front-line battle action. And yet five minutes into an interview Zampella is struggling to hold back tears as he recalls a visit to Arlington National Cemetery.

What sparked the memory was a seemingly straightforward question about Respawns reboot of Medal of Honor, a release that will essentially take Zampella back to his roots. Had to start with this one, he says, briefly burying his face in his hands.

Its not just that the stakes for the upcoming Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond are higher than when he worked on the 2002 editions of the series the company, after all, is working in virtual reality, where the challenge of palatable video game killing is upped when the participant is in a surprisingly convincing, full-scale virtual expanse.

Rather, Respawn, in reviving the long-dormant Medal of Honor franchise, has several ambitious ideas for adding heft to interactive entertainment. One of them is to intermix very real World War II stories with gameplay, alternating tense, sweat-inducing missions one in which well infiltrate a Nazi palace to steal and burn documents with documentary footage of war veterans retelling and revisiting WWII stories and sites. One such film follows an American veteran in his 90s as he returns to the European battlefield where his friend fell. We watch as he shares hugs and stories with the family that now lives on the grounds, and cameras follow as he leads us to how and where he found his compatriot.

Zampella knows the power of these scenes, having accompanied filmmakers on some of the trips. I took my son with me, who was 18 at the time, and we were at Arlington Cemetery on Gold Star Mothers Day, which is for mothers who lost their children in service. Seeing kids who were my sons age ...

Zampella begins to trail off as his eyes start to water, but he wont be fully derailed. His somewhat guarded personality soon takes over to push back any potential tears and get back to a discussion of what turned out to be Respawns most expansive year. In February, the Chatsworth-based studio surprise-released the instantly popular free-to-play game Apex Legends, which has been sampled by more than 70 million players. Then in November the studio issued Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, a return for the space opera franchise to the narrative-driven home video game console, and arguably the least divisive, mass-marketed Star Wars product unleashed this year.

Earlier in 2019 Zampella predicted that Fallen Order, under the direction of Stig Asmussen (God of War III), would begin to remold Respawn developers long typecast as multiplayer shooter guys into interactive storytellers. Now hes ready to look beyond Respawn, the studio he founded in 2010 with Jason West which was acquired in 2017 by Electronic Arts. In 2020 Zampella will also lead the L.A.-based offices of another Electronic Arts-owned studio, DICE.

DICE was founded in Stockholm in the early 1990s and is home to games such as Battlefield, Mirrors Edge and Star Wars: Battlefront. But Electronic Arts characterizes its L.A.-based outpost as long dedicated to support for DICEs core products. Under Zampella, there are plans to expand and launch an original, as-yet-unrevealed game. The company will remain separate from Respawn and, Zampella says, likely will drop the DICE name.

We will probably rebrand, Zampella says. We want to give it a new image. We want people to say, This is a destination you can go and make new content. I think theyve kind of gotten the branding that they are the support studio for DICE Stockholm. I think rebranding is important for showing people, Hey! Come work here. Were going to do some amazing things.

The studio, he stresses, will be separate from DICE Stockholm and separate from Respawn.

Says Zampella, We do talk a lot, and the more we interact and learn from and teach each other, the better well be. So theres interaction, but as far as the games, theyre their own studio.

The move is being overseen by Laura Miele, who about 18 months ago took over as Electronic Arts chief studios officer. At a time when major console makers such as Sony and Microsoft are readying new systems for release in late 2020, and streaming and subscription services are providing more avenues to discover games, Miele says she is focused on broadening the Electronic Arts portfolio.

I think under Vinces leadership the expectation is to have them work on and create a game on their own, Miele says. And I genuinely believe that he is going to help guide them creatively. Hes going to help them further fortify and build out their talent and their team. I think were going to have a really strong studio out of our Los Angeles location. They can go from a support team to a full stand-alone studio to create a new game offering.

Chad Grenier, left, Stig Asmussen and Peter Hirschmann, heads of studio at Respawn Entertainment.

(Mel Melcon / Los Angeles Times)

As for what this means for Respawn, Zampella speaks of his role there now as more of a head coach.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order leader Asmussen will continue to direct a narrative-driven branch at Respawn. The ongoing Apex Legends is overseen by Chad Grenier, who followed Zampella from Infinity Ward to Respawn to work on what would become the first-person-shooter series Titanfall. The virtual reality Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond is being spearheaded by Peter Hirschmann, whose Medal of Honor experience stretches back to the games early days when it was developed by DreamWorks Interactive.

There might be more, says Zampella, narrowing his eyes somewhat cryptically (the company even declines to say how many staffers it currently employs), but he adds, I think my role is the same.

Obviously with Jedi coming out, my focus was a little more on getting that game out the door. Now that its done and out there, its, OK, whats next? Peter will get the Eye of Sauron.

The move to bring in Asmussen was instrumental in changing the tenor of Respawn. Jason West, who recently joined Fortnite developer Epic Games, left Respawn for unspecified family issues in 2013, before the company had issued its first game. Titanfall in 2014 was largely dedicated to fine-tuning the first-person-shooter by creating a game that nimbly moved among different action styles.

Talks with Asmussen began around that same time, before Respawn was acquired by its early investor Electronic Arts, and also before the industry would heavily pivot from single-player adventures to ongoing multiplayer games such as Apex Legends, a Fortnite competitor that lives as a live service with regular updates.

In 2014, I dont think we were talking about single-player action-adventure games being an endangered species, Asmussen says. Thats something that happened while we were working on the game. There was a rise in game experiences that were service-based and people could continue playing over and over. But we stuck to our guns. This is the type of the game we were going to make. I think what happened is live service games expanded the market, but they werent taking away the players who wanted to play a single-player action-adventure.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order is set before Luke Skywalker arrives to destroy the Death Star. Its tale is of a lone, rebellious Jedi. Shown is Jedi Cal Kestis on a zipline.

(Lucasfilm/Respawn/Electronic Arts)

While Electronic Arts hasnt released official sales figures, Fallen Order was tracked as the No. 2 selling game of November, behind Call of Duty and ahead of Pokmon Sword/Shield, according to research firm the NPD Group. Where Asmussens team goes next, he says, isnt set in stone, but there should be plenty of ideas to pull from. Before Respawn knew it was working on a Star Wars game Electronic Arts possesses the license for the Lucasfilm/Disney brand it had developed about 12 prototypes for a new intellectual property, one of which was properly demoed and shopped around the industry.

And Asmussen is steadfast in the types of games he wants to direct. Im not a very good competitive player, he says. Thats when you see the worst of me, in terms of temper. I havent done it in so long because it was getting the better of me. Its a frustrating experience for me. I dont have the patience.

Miele cites Respawns ability to move quickly on an idea to have, for instance, a rudimentary prototype up and running under Asmussen or to shift from a proper Titanfall project to put resources into what would become Apex Legends as a trait she admires in Zampellas teams and wants to spread among Electronic Arts other studios. I feel really strongly about this, she says, and Vince has taught me a lot about this: rapid prototyping.

As I have partnered with him, Ive noticed they get their games stood up and they have hands on their games really soon, sooner than other studios we have, outside of sports, she says. So weve adopted and brought in new prototyping tools and are highly encouraging teams to prototype and prove out game type, game flow and game features before we get to art execution and make it look pretty for executive presentations.

While it may not be apparent from the outside, Zampella says theres a sense of experimentation driving Respawns decisions, even behind more seemingly direct business-driven moves, such as the jump with Apex Legends into the free-to-play battle royale arena popularized by Fortnite.

Zampella and Grenier say theyre not terribly interested in challenging Fortnite as a communal hangout space the latter recently has had crossovers with Marvel and Lucasfilm properties, even hosting a live event with The Rise of Skywalker director J.J. Abrams but they are using Apex Legends as a way to better develop characters, ensuring that game mechanics and art style coalesce into visual storytelling opportunities.

We tend to rapidly prototype characters at a high rate and throw them away when theyre not working, says Grenier. We do 10 times more prototypes than what actually make it into the game.

Or as Zampella puts it, Titanfall, like a lot of other properties in the sci-fi space, started to read as generic sci-fi. He says, Thats terrible for me to say about my own game, but we wanted something more identifiable by going into characters. ... To identify with a character, either by play style or because you like who they are and what they stand for, it was important for us to take that next step. Character-based is now super important to what we do.

Other questions lie ahead. Its clear Zampella has ideas hes not yet sharing on where he intends to take the DICE L.A. team, but Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond will present more near-term challenges. Set in the early 1940s and in development with Facebook-owned Oculus, the game will capture the realistic tone of the early Medal of Honor games each virtual gun, for instance, comes with a very specific set of hand gestures when it comes to reloading.

Shooting in VR is not always a comfortable gaming experience. As fidelity gets better and VR gets more immersive, you kind of feel like youre there. That translates to, Am I harming another more realistic-looking human? Thats something were going to have to be very wary of, Zampella says. When you know the setting is life-and-death and its a historical thing while you may be causing harm to virtual humans youre doing it for the good of other virtual humans in that simulation its something that was valuable to the world.

Such questions fuel Respawns desire to connect in-game conflict to real-world stories and people, says the games lead Hirschmann. We just got a rough cut of a guy named Frank who served in the Pacific, and the stories he tells about what he went through in the submarine service are just crazy. So again, we try to help it hit home that this really happened. These were 19-year-old kids. And you know, often thats our target audience. So its always good if we can build empathy and ignite peoples imaginations. Then maybe theyll come away understanding the conflict a little more.

Its clear Zampella thinks the studio is up to the challenge. The only time he bristles during an interview is when asked about giving up Respawns independent status to sell to Electronic Arts. While the latter provided some of the seed money to help launch Respawn, Zampella also spoke in the early 2010s about the creative importance of maintaining some self-sufficiency from corporate overlords.

Did I give up my independence? he shoots back. Hold on. This is new news.

He continues, For a small studio to do as much as I want to do, it made sense for us to join forces with EA. In talking to EA, they wanted the influence of me coming in to help shape the future of EA. The industry is changing, and we have the chance to be at the forefront of that. Being able to take on new challenges, like DICE L.A. falling under me now, is exciting. I want to challenge myself. I want to do something bigger and funnerer.

And to ensure the conversation ended on a lighthearted note, he added: Use that word: Funnerer.

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'Titanfall' to 'Star Wars' to VR realism, the evolution of Respawn games - Los Angeles Times

The evolution of Sicilian weddings – Pocono Record

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Every winter I take a vacation abroad, and I always try to crash a wedding if possible. Preparing in advance I want to learn about the local traditions. This year its Sicily, and as you read this Im there right now!

As I studied up on their wedding traditions Ive learned that for Sicilians, a wedding is probably the most important event of a lifetime. Historically it was a necessity adding to social status, bringing the couple into the community. Unmarried people were considered weird, unlucky and not worthy of attention.

As in other parts of the world, marriages were mostly arranged by parents or relatives, and couples often married without even knowing one another.

Christianity was established in Sicily in the 5th century. The Byzantine, or Orthodox Church became their tradition, but by the 13th century the Roman Catholic Church made inroads on the island.

I found this tidbit to be fascinating: many Sicilian wedding customs, especially before the 20th century, were based on Muslim practices dating back to medieval times when Arabs dominated the island. The church may have supplanted the mosque, but many Muslim traditions held on. It is not uncommon around the world to find subtle influences rooted in ancient customs, and it shows us the power of history, religion, ritual and tradition.

For Jews of course, the story is different. The Jewish explosion from Sicily was at its height in 1493 when the Spanish Inquisition reached the island.

But after 500 years, today there is a slight resurgence of the Jewish community when the Great Synagogue of Palermo was reopened in 2017. The building had been taken and used as a monastery, but it has now been returned to its historic owners.

The famous Godfather movies have two Sicilian weddings in the films. It is interesting and relevant to this discussion that they are very different. One is more modern and one very old-fashioned. One movie scholar writes that As noted in the screenplay, Michaels wedding is the same in feeling and texture as it might have been five hundred years ago, with all the ritual and pageantry, as it has always been, in Sicily.

Lengthy engagements are still the norm but that is mostly due to financial concerns. Having a good job to support a family and pay for a home leads to courtships as long and six or seven years. And when the couple finally announces their engagement, it could still be another year or two until the wedding. The brides family bears most of the costs of the wedding. There are no bridal showers are we know them, but they do now use the bridal registry, which helps the couple establish their home.

Divorce was uncommon until the 1970s. The 1961 film, Divorce, Italian Style, is based on the fact that divorce was actually illegal then, and the story involves a husband fantasizing about getting rid of his wife. Apparently a satire, or dark comedy, it plays with the concept that its OK to murder your wife. At least that is what I gather, I havent seen it.

Until about 1900 most Italian weddings, complete with dowries, were arranged by consent of the spouses' parents. A girl might be informally betrothed while fairly young, perhaps at 14, and wed at around the age of 18, although there were instances of girls marrying at 15. Sicilian marriages are no longer arranged by parents, and today your will even see public displays of affection and all the trappings of modern love and modern life. And today you can choose to have a civil ceremony, officiated by a mayor or civil registrar. Shocking! Same-sex civil unions and unregistered cohabitation have been legally recognized since June 2016.

Due to immigration and the exposure to the rest of the world, especially the EU and the U.S., the modern, western style wedding is in full swing. Even without travel opportunities, through TV and magazines, most Sicilians have adopted modern attitudes.

Lois Heckman is a certified Celebrant officiating in the Poconos and beyond. She writes about creating meaningful weddings, focusing on ceremony, ritual, and diverse traditions. Find her on Instagram, Facebook and website: http://www.LoisHeckman.com.

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For Your Post-Holiday Enjoyment, Healthy ID Snacks – Discovery Institute

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Yesterday, Evolution News offered appetizers for 2020. But maybe you are bothered already by overeating during the recent holidays. No problem. Here are healthy nuggets with an ID flavor to snack on.

Those plastic suction cups we use on glass fall off after a while. One would never think of getting them to stick to uneven rock. How about fastening them to rock underwater in a strong current? Impossible? The aquatic larvae of the net-winged midge do it. To the amazement of biologists from the University of Cambridge, these larvae even move around the rocks without losing their grip while subjected to absolutely enormous forces trying to pull them off, reports Phys.org.

The larvae have the ability to quickly detach and reattach to underwater rocks in torrential alpine rivers that can flow as fast as three metres per second. Their highly specialised suction organs are so strong that only forces over 600 times their body weight can detach them. [Emphasis added.]

The investigators had difficulty balancing while standing knee deep in the river, but they found the larvae grazing on the underwater rocks, apparently oblivious to the torrents bearing down on them. The larvae possess the highest attachment strength ever recorded in insects. Whats their secret?

The researchers found that a central piston, controlled by specific muscles, is used to create the suction and enable each larva to form a very tight seal with the surface of the rock. A dense array of tiny hairs come into contact with the rock surface, helping to keep the larva in place. When it needs to move, other muscles control a tiny slit on the suction disc, pulling the disc open to allow the suction organ to detach. This is the first time such an active detachment mechanism has been seen in any biological system.

Engineers could imitate this mechanism for numerous applications in industry and medicine.

The design inference is at work in the Astrophysical Journal. Astronomers are wondering about lights that appear and disappear in deep space. About a hundred anomalous sources have been detected. The New York Post says that scientists arent ruling out extraterrestrial intelligences as the cause. But of course, IDs design filter requires eliminating chance or nature first.

They say the blinking lights are most likely derived from natural, if somewhat extreme astrophysical sources, adding that the finding could change the study of astrophysics forever.

The implications of finding such objects extend from traditional astrophysics fields to the more exotic searches for evidence of technologically advanced civilizations, the authors write in their report, recently published in the Astronomical Journal.

Theyre not supernovae or any other known phenomena. So while intelligent design is barred from most journals, it remains useful. In fact, the researchers are very excited about looking for intelligent causes.

Archaea constitute a separate domain of life from bacteria, yet they, too, have outboard motors that help them swim. Phys.org describes their place in the living world:

Archaea, bacteria and eukaryotes are what biologists call the three domains of life. Of these three, archaea form an important link within the evolutionary theory. They are the direct ancestors of eukaryotes, but resemble bacteria in structure and organization. Archaea can colonize hot sulphur springs or extremely saline lakes, but can also be found in the ocean or in the human intestine and on the skin. Unlike bacteria, archaea have been relatively little researched because no pathogenic forms have been identified so far.

The outboard motor of some archaea is so different from the bacterial flagellum, it is called an archaellum instead. Like the flagellum, the archaellum appears to be irreducible complex. A paper in Nature Microbiology describes what happens when one part of this unique nanomachine is removed:

In Archaea, motility is mediated by the archaellum, a rotating type IV pilus-like structure that is a unique nanomachine for swimming motility in nature.

Strikingly, Sulfolobus cells that lack the S-layer component bound by FlaF assemble archaella but cannot swim. These collective results support a model where a FlaG filament capped by a FlaGFlaF complex anchors the archaellum to the S-layer to allow motility.

The authors note that Motility structures are vital in all three domains of life, and yet each type of machine is unique from those in the other domains. Phys.org adds:

It is important for microorganisms to be able to move actively so that if their environment deteriorates they can seek better living conditions. Bacteria use what is known as the flagellum, a complex structure requiring up to 50 proteins that assemble according to a strict timetable. Scientists assumed that archaea used the same structure as bacteria to swim from one place to another. But after sequencing the first archaeal genomes, the researchers discovered that archaea did not possess flagella operons. Instead, archaea swim using a structure called an archaellum. It consists of only seven subunits in the model organism Sulfolobus acidocaldarius used by Albers, which lives in highly acidic hydrothermal springs. Nevertheless, this relatively simple structure can perform the same functions as the bacterial flagellum, she explains.

The archaellum cannot be an ancestor of the flagellum, though, because its in a different domain of life, and uses different parts. If five parts in a mousetrap confirm intelligent design, seven subunits in the archaellum make an even stronger case. Undoubtedly the subunits have even more constituent parts.

So here, the most primitive microbes come already equipped with rotary outboard motors, and these tiny cells also live in some of the most extreme environments on the planet including hot springs at the boiling point. See our Archaea Have Their Own Rotary Propellers for more about the amazing archaellum that is profoundly different from the bacterial flagellum yet performs a similar function. Incidentally, it is also highly conserved in all archaeal species.

Youve had some ID cookies. Now here are some small candy pieces. Dont worry about the calories. Theyre all in your head!

The ultimate non-stick coating developed at McMaster University was inspired by the lotus leaf. Made into a plastic wrap, it stops dangerous superbugs in hospitals and food packaging.

Penn State announced a New, slippery toilet coating provides cleaner flushing, saves water. This biomimetic research has already led to products you can buy from SpotLESS Materials. The spray coating was inspired by the pitcher plant. Watch the video to see how well it works on glass and ceramics.

Soil has been called that thin layer on the planet that stands between us and starvation. Phys.org reported on work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison that shows how bacteria can degrade solid bedrock, jump-starting a long process of alteration that creates the mineral portion of soil. Bacteria speed up redox reactions that let them eat the rock because of a biological invention of a protein that allows cells to make electrical contact with minerals. Moreover, the bacteria couple the oxidation of iron to make ATP, the energy molecule in all forms of life. The way bacteria metabolize rock to begin soil formation has been going on basically forever, but unknown to us.

Better desalination machines and water filtration methods could be coming, thanks to mechanisms inspired by our own body cells. Aquaporins are essential membrane proteins that serve as water channels in the cells of our eyes, kidneys and other watery organs. Scientists at the University of Texas at Austin couldnt mimic aquaporins exactly, but found a way to create water wires that work a thousand times better than existing desalination systems.

It is difficult to even effectively mimic the complexities of how the human body works, especially at the molecular level, he said. This time, however, nature was the starting point for an even greater discovery than we could have ever hoped for.

Happy ID snacking all meat and no fat!

Image: Special repellent properties of the lotus leaf inspired the ultimate non-stick coating; by William Thielicke (more images here), [CC BY-SA 4.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

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For Your Post-Holiday Enjoyment, Healthy ID Snacks - Discovery Institute

How Rosie Huntington-Whiteleys Style Has Evolved Over the Years – Footwear News

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Since making her Victorias Secret runway debut in 2006, Rosie Huntington-Whiteley has come a long way.

Not only has the 32-year-old expanded her resum to include acting and an editorial beauty site, but shes also seriously upped her style game.

In the last few years of the 00s, Huntington-Whiteley wore lots of bandage dresses and platform pumps often appearing at events alongside then-boyfriend Tyrone Wood. Her subdued wardrobe included lots of black and gray.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley wears white jeans and sparkling sandals in London on Aug. 9, 2007.

CREDIT: Richard Young/Shutterstock

While she was already known for her Victorias Secret work, Huntington-Whiteley look her career to the next level in 2011. In addition to securing her first major film role as Carly Spencer in Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the actress appeared on the covers of top fashion magazines like BritishVogue, Elle and GQ, plus was made the face of the fragrance Burberry Body.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley wears a tiger-print dress and T-strap sandals at the 2011 MTV Movie Awards, June 2011.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

As she promoted Transformers, Huntington-Whiteley proved shed learned a thing or two about fashion from the runway, strutting out in a series of show-stopping looks from brands including Michael Kors, Gucci and Antonio Berardi.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley wears a Gucci gown and strappy sandals at the 33rd Annual Moscow Film Festival in June 2011.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

The A-lister got the chance to show off her press tour chops again while promoting Mad Max: Fury Road in 2015, attending the premiere in a Rodarte look with soaring Christian Louboutin pumps.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley arrives at the Los Angeles premiere of Mad Max: Fury Road wearing a Rodarte dress with Christian Louboutin pumps on May 7, 2015.

CREDIT: Jordan Strauss/Shutterstock

In June 2017, Huntington-Whiteley gave birth to her first child, Jack, with actor fianc Jason Statham. Although she didnt make many appearances while pregnant, Huntington-Whiteley showed off her growing bump in style at the 2017 Vanity FairOscars party, sporting a silver Versace gown as she and Statham walked the carpet.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley wears a Versace gown with Jason Statham
at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Los Angeles, Feb. 26, 2017.

CREDIT: Matt Baron/Shutterstock

Some of the models most memorable looks have come while supporting Statham. At the August 2018 premiere of his film The Meg, she wore a glamorous Stella McCartney gown with sleek Jimmy Choo sandals an outfit that many felt resembled an iconic 90s look worn by Elizabeth Hurley.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley and Jason Statham attend The Meg premiere in August 2018.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

More recently, Huntington-Whiteley has solidified her status as a trendsetter, embracing Bottega Venetas trend-forward high-heeled thongs and quilted square-toe sandals.

Rosie Huntington-Whiteley in head-to-heel Bottega Veneta in New York on Nov. 7.

CREDIT: Shutterstock

As 2020 approaches, more great fashion moments are likely on the horizon for the Brit. She is set to host and produce a new beauty show to debut in the new year.

Click through the gallery to see more photos showing Rosie Huntington-Whiteleys style evolution.

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Rosie Huntington-Whiteley Repeats the High-Heeled Thong Sandal Trend in NYC

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High school wrestling coaches instrumental in Rock tournament evolution – Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

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Last Saturday, in a hot, crowded gym at Vashon Island High School, Anders and Per-Lars Blomgren greeted each other with coffee cups in hand and shared a laugh shortly before the start of the Vashon Rock Wrestling Tournament.

Then, it was tournament time. The brothers both wrestling coaches for the high school sat next to one another in folding chairs and watched intently at the wrestling matches involving their team members. When each match was finished, they got up to give each of their wrestlers a handshake, a pat on the back and a few words of support.

It was the twentieth time, in fact, that the Blomgrens have coached the Rock tournament together their first was on December 30, 2000. The coaching duo has since taken a premier tournament for 1A schools the division VHS is in and expanded it to include several other divisions, including 4A.

The fact that they have organized the event for so long was not lost on either Blomgren when they sat down for an interview with The Beachcomber on Monday.

I feel like this year is kind of special in that you get a little sentimental about former wrestlers, especially [those who are] connected to the tournament, Per-Lars said. We have a lot of former wrestlers come back and help the ones we still have a tight connection with.

Danny Rock, principal of VHS, told The Beachcomber in an email that the Blomgren brothers have done a great job running the tournament.

Anders and Per-Lars have not only maintained the excellent reputation of wrestling on Vashon Island but have enhanced the community experience through their character and roles as educators in the schools, he wrote. The Rock is a massive undertaking and includes widespread community effort as well as strong relationships with other quality wrestling programs to make it a success.

Tournament Organization

The Blomgren brothers took over organizing the Rock from a beloved coach of theirs, Mick Guglamo, who founded the tournament 30 years ago.

That happened when Guglamo, the head wrestling coach at the time, retired, and Anders was appointed his successor.

Then I made sure my brother came back from college to coach with me, Anders wrote in an email, while noting that Per-Lars was winning a National Championship for Simon Fraser University at the time.

When the Blomgrens were both on the island again, they were mindful of how their former wrestling coach approached the Rock tournament.

He started it by wanting to have the best 1A teams in the state and were a 1A school, Anders said.

The Blomgrens have added more divisions 2A, 3A and 4A to the Rock tournament; 4A is the highest level of competition. Anders said when schools bigger than VHS participate in the Rock, it teaches those wrestlers respect.

Because sometimes, 4A schools will be like, Oh, theyre just a 1A school, Anders said, and theyll all the sudden come here and be like, Oh, wow. Were going to keep coming to this school because theyre good.

He said the tournament is also a good way to showcase different wrestling styles.

The Blomgrens noted during The Beachcombers interview that it takes more than two people to put on a multi-school tournament.

One of the people they credited was BJ Nelson, assistant wrestling coach, and his wife, Desiree. While she does concessions and hospitality, he organizes the tournament floor and does other behind-the-scenes work.

Nelson complimented the Blomgrens, saying theyre 100% committed to the tournament.

Theyre the reason why it happens, he said.

Greg Farley, the wrestling coach for Granite Falls High School, who has known the brothers since their youth, praised the Blomgrens for their work in organizing the tournament which, in his experience, has seen few glitches.

You could be at a really good tournament thats poorly ran. Now, theyre going to start on time and theyre going to end on time, Farley said. Its because they organize it well.

Andy Hamilton, wrestling coach at Lakeside High School in Nine Mile Falls, said he is particularly impressed with what the brothers have done with the Rock tournament.

Theyve done it for so long now, most people know them as the main Vashon people, he said. Its such a testament to how much they care about the community, how much they care about where they came from. People want to come to the tournament because theyre so well-known.

Changing Times

Back in 2000, when only 10 teams were part of the Rock, the wrestlers brackets based on weight class were printed out, placed on a wall and names were handwritten, Anders recalled.

I would get faxes from coaches, he said before bursting out laughing. I dont even know if we do faxes anymore.

Scoring was also antiquated by todays standards, the Blomgrens said. The stats were entered into a computer system and then posted on the wall the next day.

These days, the Blomgrens communicate with coaches via email and upload scores live on a website, which wrestlers and others are known to track on their smartphones as they come in.

As soon as the match is over [and] the person wins, the bracket instantly changes on the computer, where both of their next matches are already ready, Anders said. It just rolls. We dont have to enter that. That helps.

Hamilton praised the Blomgrens for instituting electronic scoring of the competition.

It makes for a very slick, very quick, fast-paced tournament, he said. Theyve really, in the last couple of years, done a really good job of going into the new technology age to do that, rather than just doing the paper copies, like it used to be.

A great tournament

Hamilton and Farley spoke to The Beachcomber about what the Rock tournament and the Blomgrens have meant to their schools.

Hamilton said his team has been coming to the Rock tournament for years. He thinks its a good opportunity for the students.

This is one of the few times that someone like us from [the] Spokane area can come over and wrestle these western schools over here that are in our division, Hamilton said. This is our only opportunity to see them before we get to state, a lot of times.

Farley called the Rock, a good tournament to kind of gauge where you are in your season progression.

The whole experience

Hamilton said having his wrestlers attend the Rock tournament on Vashon is a one-of-a-kind experience.

We get in vans, we come over here, we go to a movie, we stay the night in the school. Its just the whole experience of being with the team, he said.

Anders said the experience off-island school wrestlers get from coming to the tournament is one of the reasons it is unique from other competitions in the state.

Theyve never been on a ferry before. Theyre looking around, looking for a whale, he said.

But what also makes the Rock unique, according to Anders, is the prize the top three wrestlers receive.

They take home a rock; we dont have medals or trophies, Anders said. We have parents, we have wrestlers we have cheerleaders that have made these rocks from the island gravel pit and then painted them.

The rock awards have apparently become a special thing for anyone who earns one, he said.

Anders has heard people say, You know what? We dont have all of our trophies or medals, but we save our rock because its a really special tournament.

They give you motivation

For George Murphy, a wrestler and sophomore at VHS, the Dec. 28 match was the second time he had participated in the Rock. He said what makes it stand out from other tournaments is how well its organized.

You know where you got to be when you got to be there, Murphy said. If you pay attention, youll be on time to everything. At other tournaments, its less organized. Sometimes, you dont know when youre going to have your next match, sometimes you do.

He credits the Blomgren brothers with that organization.

Theyve been through so many different tournaments and they know how they work, Murphy said.

The Blomgrens are very encouraging and supportive of their wrestling team, he said.

Its great because when you win, they give you motivation and tell you what you did right and what you also need to work on, Murphy said.

Per-Lars said merely watching the matches can be an intensive process.

Its great for us to see; were taking notes, were watching other wrestlers, he said. I feel like we do a pretty good job of not just watching these other matches, but taking notes as to what we really need to work on to beat their wrestlers.

When it comes to the Rock, Per-Lars seems to enjoy the coaching part of it the most.

Once the tournament starts, we have enough help where we can do probably what were best at and that is coach, he said. When we coach together, its the best.

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High school wrestling coaches instrumental in Rock tournament evolution - Vashon-Maury Island Beachcomber

Take a look at Deepika Padukones beauty and fashion evolution from 2007 to 2020 on her 34th birthday… – Hindustan Times

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If theres one actor who has captured public imagination with her beauty and her acting prowess over the past few years, its Deepika Padukone. In the years shes been active in the Hindi film industry (2007 onwards), there isnt enough that has already been spoken about Deepikas style and how she is truly magical whether on screen or on the red carpet. Her skill infront of the camera and the choices shes made have got her the accolades in these years, but its her beauty and style evolution that truly takes the cake.

Weve witnessed how Deepika has cultivated a signature sense of style and beauty through a constant evolution whether in terms of her makeup or fashion choices.

From ultra glossy lips, coloured contact lenses and poker straight hair in a few of her earlier films, to smokey eyes, tousled hair and even a new haircut more recently, weve seen how Deepika Padukones image only gets fiercer with each passing year. From powerful pant-suits to gowns to fitted monochrome dresses to sarees, with help from her stylist Shaleena Nathani, make-up artist Sandhya Shekar and hairstylist Gabriel Georgiou, Deepika never misses the opportunity to leave us starstruck.

Deepika Padukone has worn several interesting and innovative creations by fashion designers namely Prabal Gurung, Ashi Studio, Zuhair Murad, Giambattista Valli, Emilia Wickstead to name a few. When it comes to choosing traditional Indian wear, Sabyasachi has Deepikas go-to designer who also did most of her bridal trousseau and jewellery for her November 2018 wedding. More recently however, weve spotted her in dresses with an Indian twist and heavily-embroidered suits at a friends wedding, followed by her first anniversary celebrations. For Chhapaak promotions, Deepikas back to experimentation but has chosen ample black outfits in the past two weeks.

The one thing we did notice Deepika Padukone kept a constant was her choice of the colour red in several of her outfits over the last many years. We even came to the conclusion that there is not quite anyone else in Bollywood who looks so good in red that we can hardly ascertain if she belongs to the colour red or the colour red belongs to her. More recently (mid-2019), weve seen this choice of colour shifting to a lot of whites. It was also in 2019, when Deepika broke her comfortable image and went all out to give the legendary tulle their moment under the sun (or the limelight) since she wore the lime-green Giambattista Valli gown (the hot pink Ashi Studio gown did make waves and was spoken about once again when Beyonce wore the same creation, but Cannes 2019 red carpet seemed like a renewed effort), followed by the black and pink gown at one of MAMIs events in 2019. We dont know what to call this phase, but it could be Ranveer Singhs experimental trait that Deepika has begun adopting and were surely not complaining.

As the actor turns 34 today and prepares for the release what she calls the toughest film of her career yet, Chhapaak, heres a throwback to her beauty and style evolution from year 2007 onwards:

2007: The debutante Deepika Padukone attended one of her first film promotions for Om Shanti Om in London in an ultra-feminine make-up look.

2008: Deepika Padukone kicked off her Bollywood career choosing to adopt a less is more look. For a press conference for her film Bachna Ae Haseeno, she went for dramatic lashes, and otherwise subtle makeup.

2009: Sporting eyeliner, lip gloss, and poker straight hair with an in-your-face fringe, Deepika Padukones goth-glam look for Chandni Chowk To China is one of her more daring looks yet.

2010: Deepika Padukone added a cool, casual vibe to her look with a layered short haircut and soft, smokey eyes at a launch event for a magazine. Her look is playful and vibrant with a little detour from her usual hair and make-up routine.

2011: We saw the very beginning of Deepika Padukones glam curls, when she paired them with a radiant skin and a coral-shade for her lips.

2012: The year 2012 and her role as Veronica was a breakthrough in many ways when we speak of Deepikas fashion. When it comes to sprucing up the basic ponytail, Deepika is an ace. At an event to promote her then upcoming film, she wore a dreamy, curled, low ponytail with subtle winged liner and a muted, natural lip shade.

via GIPHY

2013: Deepika Padukone stunned the Yeh Jawaani Hai Deewani trailer launch with her natural-looking, long, blow-dried hair. As for her make-up, she amped up the glam factor with a some eyeliner, rosy cheeks, and a pink glossy lip. Her looks in the film still remain one of the most-talked-about ones whether its the midnight blue saree or the lehenga that she wore throughout Kalkis characters wedding functions in the film.

2014: Deepika Padukone made this fabulous retro hairdo look glam and casual at the same time during an award show appearance. Shes wearing a bold lip and big lashes a timeless, fierce look that looks fabulous on her.

2015: Deepika Padukone pulled off a sexy smokey eye makeup and bold red lip in this look of hers for a TV show appearance.

2016: This Deepika Padukone look created quite a of buzz. The actor chose minimal make-up, wearing a nude lipper and natural lashes. She paired her dazzling olive and black thigh-high slit ensemble with shoulder dusters (tassel earrings).

2017: Everything about Deepika Padukones Cannes Film Festival 2018 look spells perfection. The tousled, fluffy hair with beaming highlight and the elegant yet sultry makeup choice created a divine, yet slightly retro look.

2018: At a red carpet event, donning an all-black ensemble, Deepika Padukone stole the spotlight with her long, braided, high ponytail. Her minimal make-up and dramatic eyes were the perfect companion for the extravagant hair and traffic-stopping outfit. 2018 was also the year we were treated to her bridal outfits and the functions that followed and weve been more in love since.

2019: With a completely new hair-do and lots of interesting looks Deepika Padukone has sported in 2019 with a bit of a spillover onto this year, fashion-lovers can opine that its the best year yet for the actors fashion sensibilties, after probably her glorious looks for Cocktail back in 2012.

Heres wishing the powerhouse talent a great year ahead!

(Pictures from Instagram)

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Take a look at Deepika Padukones beauty and fashion evolution from 2007 to 2020 on her 34th birthday... - Hindustan Times

From confusing ‘Quds’ and ‘Kurds’ to killing Soleimani: Trump’s evolution on Iran’s terror chief in Iraq – Washington Examiner

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In the fall of 2015, then-candidate Donald Trump didnt seem to know who Qassem Soleimani was, confusing Irans elite military Quds Force for the Kurds, an ethnic group.

But four years later, the president killed Irans terror chief in Iraq.

Soleimani made the death of innocent people his sick passion, but his reign of terror is over, Trump said from Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Friday. What the United States did yesterday should have been done long ago.

Trumps shifting focus to Soleimani, who the U.S. government holds responsible for killing hundreds of U.S. soldiers, is interesting although not surprising from the real estate tycoon turned commander-in-chief who made opposition to the Obama administrations catastrophic Iran nuclear deal which eased sanctions and gave it a much-needed influx of cash a centerpiece of his presidential campaign. After winning, Trump withdrew from the deal and made a maximum pressure campaign against the regime a priority, ratcheting up sanctions and labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its specialized Quds Force a foreign terrorist organization.

Trump appeared on Hugh Hewitts radio show in early September 2015, where the conservative host conducted his typical trivia-style interview, probing the GOP front-runner's foreign policy knowledge.

Are you familiar with Gen. Soleimani? Hewitt asked.

Trump hesitantly replied, Yes I go ahead, give me a little go ahead. Tell me.

He runs the Quds Forces, Hewitt explained.

The host began to ask the candidate about Soleimani, but Trump interjected, confusing the Quds Force with the Kurds.

And I think the Kurds, by the way, have been horribly mistreated by us, Trump said.

No, not the Kurds, the Quds Forces, the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Quds Forces, Hewitt replied. The bad guys.

I thought you said Kurds, Trump said.

Hewitt pressed again, asking Trump whether he believed Soleimanis behavior would change thanks to the Iran nuclear deal.

I think that Iran right now is in the drivers seat to do whatever they want to do, Trump said.

Hewitt analogized, Soleimani is to terrorism sort of what Trump is to real estate, and he said, Many people would say hes the most dangerous man in the world, and he runs the Quds Forces, which is their Navy SEALs.

At this, Trump correctly surmised that Soleimani was the Iranian official hed read about in the news who had traveled to Moscow to meet with Russias leaders.

Not good, Trump said.

The future president admonished Hewitt for his questioning.

When youre asking me about whos running this, this, this, thats not I will be so good at the military your head spin, Trump said, labeling these gotcha questions.

The segment became a storyline in the GOP primary, dominating cable news for a day or two as Trumps rivals jumped on the flub.

But after his 2016 victory, Trump focused on the global terrorism carried out by Irans revolutionary guard.

The Iranian regime is the leading state sponsor of terror, it exports dangerous missiles, fuels conflicts across the Middle East, and supports terrorist proxies and militias, Trump said in a May 2018 announcing the U.S. withdrawal from the Iran deal. Over the years, Iran and its proxies have bombed American embassies and military installations, murdered hundreds of American servicemembers, and kidnapped, imprisoned, and tortured American citizens Since the agreement, Irans bloody ambitions have grown only more brazen.

Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced last spring that the State Department was designating the revolutionary guard a foreign terrorist organization, classifying an element of a foreign government as a terrorist group for the first time.

"The IRGC is the Iranian governments primary means of directing and implementing its global terrorist campaign," Trump said.

With this designation, we are sending a clear signal to the Iranian regime including Qasem Soleimani and his band of thugs that we are standing up to the regimes outlaw behavior," said Pompeo. The blood of the 603 American soldiers ... is on his hands and the hands of the IRGC more broadly."

The State Department revealed Iran is responsible for the deaths of at least 603 American service members in Iraq, many resulting from improvised explosive devices and other attacks aided by the revolutionary guard and Soleimanis group.

The violent storming of the grounds of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad this week followed the Iraqi governments condemnation of U.S. airstrikes targeting Kataib Hezbollah, an Iranian-backed militia in the pro-Iran Popular Mobilization Forces guided by Soleimani and his adviser Abu Mahdi al Muhandis, also killed yesterday. The U.S. blamed Kataib Hezbollah for attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq, including the death of a U.S. contractor. Soleimanis and Muhandiss men showed up at the embassy in droves on Tuesday, along with members of other Iranian-aligned groups.

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From confusing 'Quds' and 'Kurds' to killing Soleimani: Trump's evolution on Iran's terror chief in Iraq - Washington Examiner

THE EVOLUTION OF THE US NEOBANK MARKET: Why the US digital-only banking space may finally be poised for the sp – Business Insider India

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What is a neobank?

Neobanks, digital-only banks that aren't saddled by traditional banking technology and costly networks of physical branches, have been working to redefine retail banking in major markets around the world.

The top neobanks in the US and EU include:

That's largely because of an onerous regulatory regime, which has made it very difficult to obtain a banking license, and the entrenched position incumbents hold in the financial lives of US consumers. Navigating the tedious and costly scheme for obtaining a banking charter and appropriate approvals has been a major stumbling block for the country's digital banking upstarts. However, developments over the past year suggest these startups are finally poised for the spotlight in the US.

Consumers', particularly millennials', growing frustration with legacy banking service providers, combined with their increased appetite for digital solutions, has accelerated the shift to digital-only banking. Startups and tech-savvy players are redefining the retail banking space and forcing incumbents to either evolve or lose out on this key business segment.

In The Evolution of the US Neobank Market, Business Insider Intelligence maps out the factors contributing to this shifting tide, examines how key players are positioning themselves to take advantage, and explores how incumbents can embark on their own digital transformations to stave off disruption.

The companies mentioned in this report include: Aspiration, Chime, Goldman Sachs' Marcus, JPMorgan Chase's Finn, N26, and Revolut.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

Interested in getting the full report? Here are four ways to get access:

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THE EVOLUTION OF THE US NEOBANK MARKET: Why the US digital-only banking space may finally be poised for the sp - Business Insider India

Sports talk radio: The evolution of how we analyze sports – Elite Sports NY

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As we head into a new decade, it is interesting how sports talk radio evolves. How did this form of media become so powerful?

Well, here is an excerpt from my book, Press Box Revolution, on how this happened. I talk about WFAN and its really appropriate to involve both Mike Francesa and Don Imus. The radio legends influence greatly impacted this evolution.

With the passing of Imus, its important to remember his crucial role over the last several decades.

It is impossible to overstate the impact the advent of sports talk radio has had on the media landscape over the past thirty years. Social media and the Internet have also been played a large role but sports talk radio has been responsible for providing the impetus that has shaped our changing sports world.

I remember distinctly where I was when I heard about WFAN taking over the signal of country music station WHN (1050 AM). I was eating lunch with some of my Sports Phone colleagues and we were ecstatic because we thought it would be the perfect place to take the next step in our careers.

But all of our hopes were dashed rather quickly when we found out that WFANs parent company, Emmis Communications, would not hire any current Sports Phone employees. Officially, we were told all positions were filled but we knew better as we heard rumblings from the inside that station management felt our company was a direct competitor. I had a couple of problems with this. First, we were not nearly as direct a competitor as a radio station waswe were a phone service. Also, why wouldnt they want to hire competitors? It made no sense.

By doing this, they passed over talented broadcasters such as Bob Papa which is ironic when you consider he now does the play-by-play for Giants football games for the station. In fairness to the current management team, I firmly believe had they been in charge at the time, both Mark Chernoff and Eric Spitz would have handled it differently. Their predecessors hired mostly out of towners and the problem with that was they lacked a feel for the pulse of the New York sports fan.

Jim Lampley and Greg Gumbel are fine broadcasters but New Yorkers did not gravitate to them and Pete Franklin, the afternoon show host from Cleveland, didnt really understand the give and take with the New York sports fan. They were flying in talent on a weekly basis, spending tons of money and not getting much in the way of ratings or revenue. The weak 1050 signal was an issue as well and the first eighteen months of the stations existence was tough and many experts felt they would not survive.

There were some positives, however. Mike Francesa, Ed Coleman, and Howie Rose were a trio of solid pros that would help shape the future of WFAN. In addition, Emmis inherited the right to broadcast Mets games from purchasing the 1050 real estate and that gave them live sports every night during the summer.

Looking back, a number of things went wrong from the start. Franklin was just the wrong guy at the wrong time. He signed a two-year pact worth $600,000 which in those days was a pretty steep price tag for a radio host, even in New York. He was gruff with the callers and never quite understood that New York, unlike Cleveland, has multiple teams in every sport, and you should at least try to give fair and balanced reporting. He used sound effects but only to demean callers and his act wore thin very quickly.

Jim Lampley and Greg Gumbel were far too stiff to appeal to the listeners and quite frankly, advertisers were not flocking to WFAN aside from the clients they had on Mets broadcasts.

But that big trio of pros I mentioned earlier helped keep the ship afloat.

Howie Rose was a big contributor in those early years as Mets broadcasts were making money for the station (one of the few things that did) and Rose hosted Mets Extra, a pre- and postgame show that was far ahead of its time. The show originally debuted on WHN during the 1986 postseason with Dave Cohen and Rusty Staub co-hosting but Rose took over on WHN at the start of the 1987 season. Once Emmis bought the station, Rose gave WFAN listeners an inside look at the team and played psychiatrist with unhappy fans after a tough loss.

The show was produced on-site at Shea Stadium after home games but was done at WFAN studios which at the time were in Astoria, New York when the Mets were on the road. Kenny Albert, son of the great sportscaster Marv Albert, served as the primary associate producer, one of his first jobs in the business. Of course, Rangers fans came to know Kenny as the radio voice of the team, as his dad had been years earlier. He would go on to a great career, becoming a national voice as well with FOX Sports.

Ed Coleman is perhaps the most versatile sportscaster I have ever been around. Eddie can do an update, a sports talk show, a pre- or postgame show coupled with a solid ability to do play-by-play. Successful companies in any business always have unsung heroes that allow management to better utilize their entire staff and Coleman has always done that for WFAN. The only other talent I have been around that carries this level of versatility is Don LaGreca who in many ways does for ESPN New York what Ed does for WFAN.

Mike Francesa originally turned down a producer spot on the station but his persistence paid off as he was given a weekend show that featured college football and basketball analysis. Francesa had spent many years as a researcher and his command of the college scene was second to none.

Despite this talented trio, the station floundered for a year and a half until they received the gift that vaulted them into success. General Electric, who at the time owned NBC, sold their New York station, WNBC 660AM to Emmis, who moved WFAN down the dial. The move, which occurred on October 7, 1988, improved the stations signal. That night, the scheduled National League Championship Series game between the Dodgers and Mets was rained out but listeners got to hear the difference in how WFAN sounded on their new powerful 50,000-watt signal.

I remember driving to Shea Stadium to cover the game that night and was blown away by the difference in the sound on my car radio. The deal with NBC also brought Don Imus to the station and this saved the day. The morning show WFAN had been airing was hosted by Greg Gumbel and I knew this change was just what the station needed as I was an intern when Don Imus shared the spotlight at WNBC with Howard Stern.

This was a huge coup for WFAN and I have to laugh when I hear people say WFAN proved all-sports radio works. In all honesty, had Imus not arrived in 1988 I am not sure wed be talking about how successful WFAN became because he bridged the sports fanatic with the casual sports fan in a way that no other person was capable of doing.

The greatest illustration of this was Imus utilizing Mike Breen for early morning sportscasts. I went to Fordham with Breen and always knew his sense of humor coupled with his sports knowledge always provided a great listen. Breen did an incredible job, showing he knew how to capture an audience even if Imus constantly interrupted his reports. In fact, so many talk show hosts try to do that now but nobody has ever done it as well as the combination of Breen and Imus.

There were other changes on the horizon as WFAN began branding their updates as 20-20 sports flashes. I could often be heard giving live reports from events as a freelancer on those updates. I freelanced for a bunch of stations, including WFAN, and that is where I first met Chris Russo. We sat together in the press box one night and talked sports for the entire game. He was doing a sports show a WMCA at the time and invited me on quite a few times to provide updates during his show while I was covering the Mets.

You could tell right off the bat that he was a real go-getter. His on-air style was different and many of my colleagues thought his voice was very irritating, but I enjoyed listening to him from the beginning.

Something which impressed me right away was his impressive knowledge of sports history. He could recall even the most minor detail which would connect a point he was trying to make on the air. Years later, he still does it as well as anybody.

In the meantime, Don Imus and afternoon show host Pete Franklin began taking shots at each other which made for great radio. You could see Don was just having fun but Pete was getting heated in his discussions, referring to him as Minus while the morning show host called Franklin a dinosaur among other things. I think it soured Franklin on WFAN and both sides had enough of each other so they parted ways in August of 1989.

This was important because Russo had since joined the station as a part-timer while Mike Francesa parlayed his WFAN weekend gig into a daily show with Ed Coleman. The station was searching for an afternoon sports show duo, and I am sure Don Imus was heavily involved in the decision to pair Chris Russo with Mike Francesa. By this time, the nickname Mad Dog starting to grow with the help of columnist Bob Raissman who coined the phrase and Don Imus who drove it into the heads of WFAN listeners.

On Sept. 5, 1989, the duo was paired on an afternoon talk show that would be like no other. Here were two guys that would change the way we talk about sports and the show started at a time when the New York Mets had become a team you could find on both the front page and the back page.

The Mets were in the news constantly in those days, good and bad. There were court cases, police incidents, off the field fights, and Mike and The Mad Dog took listeners through it every step of the way while pulling no punches.

They also put some radio stereotypes to bed. Neither had the classic radio sound but their success made that less important. They also refused to parrot the popular take and were not afraid to take guests to the mat when interviewing them. To this day, they both remain the best interviewers in our business by asking the questions we all wanted to be answered.

Another stereotype that they put in the grave was you couldnt be both a fan and a talk show host. This is one that is a pet peeve of mine because any talk show host that tells you they are not a fan of a team or a player is either lying or they dont have the passion to do that job. The people that call into these shows are fans because they listen to hours of sports talk per day and they dont want to hear politically correct drivelthey want passion and point of view. If you are totally objective, passion tends to get lost and they understood that better than anyone.

The combination of Imus in the Morning and Mike And The Mad Dog were the main reason that WFAN was the highest billing station in the country during the decade of the 1990s. From a reporters standpoint, you could not be in the press box without hearing the media talking about what they said on their shows.

I worked at WFAN as a reporter and production assistant during the 1990s when they were going through some tumultuous times. There were long stretches when they did not speak to each other for days off the air but still performed compelling shows. Honestly, I did not have too much direct interaction with Francesa since my shifts were usually at night but he was always pleasant to me even though I saw him big-time others. Honestly, I kind of understood it.

When Mike first landed the gig, there were actually people who said that he lucked out and did not pay his dues. Nothing could be further from the truth. He was at CBS during the heyday of The NFL Today and was instrumental in the production of that classic NFL pregame show. Brent Musburger, Jimmy The Greek, Irv Cross, and Phyllis George relied on Francesa, whose research was complete, accurate, and he always found something the viewers did not know.

He and moved up the ranks at WFAN and deserved everything he was given. He took the opportunity and ran with it. If there ever was a star that paid his dues, it would be Mike Francesa.

Russo, unlike Francesa, never big-timed anyone but sometimes I wish that he would have because the media was so phony to him. I knew him before he got to WFAN and he always had time for me.

He was exactly the same off the air as he was on the air. There is not a phony bone in Chris Russos body.

Of course, hes struck it rich but in many ways, hes still the same guy he was at WMCA. Sports is in his soul and he will have a debate with you all night and then go out for a beer to give you advice on your career. Mike and Chris are two very different personalities but together they were picture perfect and if they ever reunite they are the best duo that has ever been put together in the history of sports talk radio.

Mike and Chris had their show simulcast on the YES Network starting in 2002, allowing them to reach a wider audience around the country which further enhanced Mikes weekly football show which could be heard around the country on every NFL Sunday.

I often hear veteran writers telling me they are no longer sports fans and invariably, they are the ones who tell me they also hate their jobs. I do not think thats a coincidence. Baseball will always be in my soul because when I pull up to the park, Im a little kid again. Thats the same reaction Chris Russo gives when he opens his show by yelling into the microphone.

There are people that contend you MUST be objective always and I think thats true if you are a news reporter but sports is a recreational tool people use to forget their problems and part of that is being a fan. And Mike and the Mad Dog brought that into the mainstream when most others were afraid to admit their fandom. Some are still very afraid of it.

Another WFAN show host that is never afraid to show his fandom and has become one of the biggest stars there is Joe Benigno. His first taste of radio came about in 1994 when he guest-hosted a show after winning a contest held by WFAN management. His skills were raw but his passion for sports was obvious as he brought his heart to every broadcast after he was given the overnight shift on WFAN in 1995.

I became close friends with Joe because we both worked weird hours and he wore his heart on his sleeve as the teams he rooted for are the Mets, Knicks, Rangers and Jets. But the Jets were his most special team and he openly rooted for them on the air while at the same time being their harshest critic. To this day, I say Joes best shows came after Jets losses because his panic and grief came right to the surface. He was never afraid to show it and bonded with his fellow Jet fans on an overnight show which was actually therapeutic for the fan base after a brutal day watching their team.

I remember working the last Sunday of the NFL regular season in 1997 when a Jets win would have put them in the playoffs in Bill Parcellss first season as the Jets head coach. It was a tightly contested game with the Jets trailing 1310 late against the Lions in Detroit. Parcells was not a big fan of quarterback Neil ODonnell and many felt it affected his fourth-quarter game calling as a failed halfback option from Leon Johnson and an interception from second-string quarterback Ray Lucas ended the Jets playoff hopes.

I will never forget Joe entering the studio that night reeling from the game and cursing up a storm in the newsroom regarding Parcells. He felt his hatred for ODonnell clouded his judgment and he pinned this loss at the feet of the head coach. I did not disagree with him but I knew someone at the station that wouldMike Francesa, who was very close friends with Parcells.

Joe was getting more and testier as he prepared for his overnight show and I tried to calm him down, but he was ranting and raving like a caged prisoner. I actually began to get him more upset by sharing in his angst. When he hit the air, he let loose on Parcells and simply would not stop.

At this point, the phone rang and an intern answered it. It was Francesa, and he and Joe went at it over the phone. It filtered onto Joes show as Mike demanded air time and a fierce debate ensued that got personal. To his credit, Joe stayed on-topic, but their debate went on for close to 45 minutes. Poor Sam Ryan, who was doing updates, lost air time not knowing when she would go on as Francesa made it seem like he was executing a Senate filibuster about the issue.

This was great radio by two impassioned people who were not afraid to show their fandom for a team or an individual and it had the attention of every sports fan listening in New York. That is the very definition of sports talk radio.

The one show that seemed to be a revolving door for The Fan was middays. After Francesa left for his show with Mad Dog, the station tried a number of different combinations. Ed Coleman and Dave Sims had a very entertaining show through the mid-90s but the station hoped that Len Berman and Mike Lupica could co-host that slot. I had issues with that idea from the start as neither was a radio guy and there is a dynamic to a radio show that is sometimes difficult for writers or TV broadcasters to grasp.

Before it even began, Berman had second thoughts but WFAN would not let him out of his contract so they each did a separate two-hour show beginning at 10 a.m. ET. That did not last long, and then Russ Salzberg was teamed with overnight host Steve Somers (which made Benignos overnight show possible) which was coined The Sweater And The Schmoozer. Russ was known for wearing all different kinds of sweaters while Somers just loved talking to people.

Somers began his career in the early 70s and came to WFAN at its launch in 1987. manning the overnight shift until this opportunity presented itself. He really began to popularize his brand on this show using humor to talk about sports. But people fail to realize Somers was also a great resource for reporters as he personally helped me by giving us airtime on his show to help perfect our skills.

In 1999, the midday ratings were tanking so WFAN decided to fire Salzberg and Somers but after fans starting complaining they re-hired Somers and gave him a prime-time show that would be pre-empted on most nights by a game as the station was carrying a Mets, Jets, Knicks, and Rangers broadcasts by this time.

The next midday show was handled by Suzyn Waldman, who did a great job of covering both the Yankees and Knicks for the station, and Jody McDonald, who, like Suzyn, was an original WFAN member that hosted weekend overnights in the very beginning. This was a great partnership as Waldman knew so much about what was going on in the team clubhouses while Jody was one of the first pros that actually acknowledged the popularity of fantasy sports. He also understood the passion fans had for wrestling as Rich Mancuso often appeared on his shows to talk about the WWF (before they changed to WWE).

In 2001, Waldman left the station to join the YES Network and was replaced by Sid Rosenberg, whose offbeat personality sometimes overshadowed his outstanding sports knowledge. Sid and Jody McDonald tried hard to boost ratings, but to no avail. McDonald was let go and Joe Benigno was moved into the slot, leaving the overnight show a revolving door to this day.

Joe and Sid were able to mesh well and they captured the fans need for sports talk around lunchtime. But Sid had a bunch of demons that he has bravely fought off in the past few years. At that time, he was very talented but reckless with his on-air responsibilities resulting in his being removed from the show, forcing Joe to fly solo for over a year until the station found the answer to their prayers in Evan Roberts.

With the exception of the Francesa/Coleman duo in the early years of WFAN, Roberts and Benigno are the best duo in this time slot Ive ever heard. They are years apart in terms of age but are a shining illustration that sports bridges those gaps. They appeal to a plethora of demographic groups because they never scold listenersthey listen and will debate them but always treat all of them with a respect level rarely seen.

As WFAN continued its growth in both ratings and revenue, sports stations started cropping up all over the country but they flew solo in New York for a long time. There were some brief competitors such as Sporting News Radio, which existed in some form on 620 AM in New York from 2001 through 2011. Aside from Scott Wetzel and Bruce Jacobs, who formed a great morning show that actually brought in some listeners, most of the programming never caught the ear of the New York sports fan. Sporting News Radio was formerly One on One Sports but neither organization effectively cut into the listenership of WFAN in any meaningful way and is now called SB Nation Radio.

I spent most of my time in the early 90s working at ABC Radio and lived through a transition of that organization as most of the networks sports resources were being directed towards ESPN Radio, which launched on Jan. 1, 1992 at Sports Radio ESPN.

By then, ESPN had become such a big part of the sports fan experience especially once their SportsCenter program began to change the way fans looked at sports. The sports anchor had always been defined as a person who gave the scores and big news of the day but rarely inflected their own personality in those reports. The one exception to that was Warner Wolf who delivered a nightly sports report complete with highlights.

Warner gave us a look at the future with his catchphrase Lets go to the videotape. He clearly understood that his personality was important in developing a brand. This is a concept that ESPN employs to this day as SportsCenter is more than a highlight showit is a place where segments like The Top 10 highlights of the day and Web Gems were born.

Anchors like Keith Olbermann, Stuart Scott, Rich Eisen and Kenny Mayne each had a distinct personality. To me, the greatest of these stars was the late Stuart Scott, who brought hip-hop culture into his delivery. His catchphrases became legendary, and my favorite was Just call him butter cause hes on a roll, which described a player on a hot streak.

The combination of the migration of the nightly sports report courtesy of SportsCenter coupled with the evolution of sports talk radio brought about the genesis of ESPN Radio. The channels signature show for many years was Mike and Mike. They spent more than seventeen years together in the morning and proved that not every sports morning show needs to be a shouting match. They have their fierce debates but really began to perfect the biggest revenue grabber in the businessembedded messaging in the program for advertisers and many have tried to copy that concept but few have done it as well.

Sports Radio ESPN only aired on weekends at the start. It provided updated scores and talk shows but did not take calls from listeners, which I think was a huge mistake. Those weekend shows pulled in good ratings during football season, but I learned a valuable lesson seeing the birth of this network up close.

You can accumulate as many affiliates as you want but if you do not have real estate in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles, your revenue model falls apart. ESPN attempted to get around that by clearing programming in New York as WFAN ran some ESPN programming especially after they gained NBA broadcasting rights in 1995 and MLB rights in 1997. They cleared many of those games for ESPN here locally but the worldwide leader needed clearance in New York for other programming after they expanded to a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week format in 1996.

This became a pressing issue for them even though some of their radio shows began to be simulcast on ESPN2, ad sales dollars began to level off, and the revenue model was shaky at best. In 2002, they made the move they needed to makeentering into an agreement with New York station WEVD which was ironically located in the same position on the dial where WFAN first entered our lives.

The first all-sports day on 1050 was Sept. 2, 2001, just nine days before the 9-11 attacks. The station began running the ESPN national feed and was hoping to filter in local programming to give WFAN a run for their money. But even to this day, the impact on WFAN has been pretty negligible and I am telling you that as someone who still does work for them.

They never quite understood that to do sports talk in this market is impossible if you are not going to dive into the pool. There have been times where the local angle was played up but they never kept it on a consistent basis. In fairness to management there, Bristol, not New York, runs the show there.

Still, they have always reached out to me to help with their coverage of the Mets. In 2006, they asked me to cover the postseason for them and followed it up by asking me to be a beat reporter in the same way Ed Coleman covered the Mets for WFAN. The problem was they had no money to send me on the road so I brokered a trade deal with an advertiser that paid for all the travel. I broke some stories and appeared nightly on a show called New York Baseball Tonight which previewed the night of baseball from both the Yankees and Mets perspectives.

Andrew Marchand and Larry Hardesty covered the Yankees while I covered the Mets. The show was a great alternative to the Mets pregame show on WFAN. It featured a one-on-one interview with both a Yankee and Met player plus pregame sound. In fact, we aired the Met and Yankee manager pregame sessions way before anybody aired it as we played excerpts on The Michael Kay Show.

The station faced many obstacles but the backroom production team was not one of them. I worked together with pros like Ryan Hurley and Andrew Gundling whose main goal was to get content on the air and they did it so well. Both of those producers would be on a shortlist of people I would give the keys to if I ever owned a radio station.

New York Baseball Tonight was the brainchild of Pete Silverman, who had spent years at MSG and to this day remains someone that gave me so much in terms of coaching.

ESPN Radio had the chance to put a crack into the WFAN ratings in 2008 when Chris Russo left WFAN to join SiriusXM. The two satellite companies brokered a merger earlier in the year and they offered Chris Russo his own channel known as Mad Dog Radio. Many suggested it happened because of a falling out between him and Francesa. I do think there were some times they fought about issues but this move was about money and not much else.

They did their last show together on Aug. 8, 2008, from the Giants training facility in Albany. Six days later, WFAN and Russo officially decided to part ways, leaving Mike Francesa alone to keep the program alive.

The previous year Don Imus was forced to leave the station after he referred to the Rutgers womens basketball team in a derogatory manner both sexually and racially. It was an issue that forced WFAN to fire him after they thought a two-week suspension would be a just punishment. CBS, who picked up ownership of WFAN in 1997, felt the public outcry was too much and so they severed ties with Imus.

In a mere sixteen months, the two biggest revenue sources of WFAN had left the station. It could have signaled a changing of the guard in the New York sports radio market.

Many 1050 ESPN executives pontificated that this was the opening they were waiting for but their actions illustrated that nothing was going to change much in the near future. I never quite understood why ESPN did not take the ball and run with especially with the fact that an ESPN New York website was on the horizon. The simple fact was they were not equipped to handle the conversion.

A managerial switch brought Dave Roberts to the station in 2009 and many of the moves that would provide a local flavor to the station went out the window. I got the sense that Dave was a nice guy but did not understand the flavor of New York radio. And across town, WFAN had two absolute pros at it in Mark Chernoff and Eric Spitz. Quite frankly, Roberts was no match for them.

Boomer Esiason, former Jets quarterback and Craig Carton had taken over Imuss slot and immediately provided listeners with a sports show that considered no topics taboo. It was almost as if these two had been together forever and Carton knew how to play an audience. Boomer Esiason is a brilliant host whose command of the business goes far beyond the sport of football. He is a true sports expert in every way and Carton is an indispensable part of WFAN because he connects directly to the fans and provides one of two emotions-you either want to hug him or strangle him. Jerry Reccos interaction with Boomer and Carton is the closest thing Ive ever seen to the Mike Breen/Don Imus connection.

In my opinion, Imus was the best morning host I ever heard on a sports station and although Id put Boomer and Carton behind Imus, Id have to place every other morning show well behind this duo.

At the same time, they explored giving Mike Francesa a co-host but he demonstrated he could do a great job as a solo act. I firmly believe the split up benefited both Francesa and Russo. They have both proved they can breed success in any setting. WFAN was able to survive the losses of Imus and Russo that most thought would bring them back to the pack.

Thats not to say 1050 ESPN lacked for talent. The Michael Kay Show is a superbly produced property and both Michael Kay and Don La Greca form a duo that would beat 99 of 100 sports shows in the world. They bring a real personal touch to what they talk about and have a great way of interviewing guests as well as allowing fans to speak their mind in a respectful and open forum.

They have never had a lead-in show that brought in anywhere near the listeners that Joe & Evan pull in for the FAN. They also do not have local baseball broadcasting rights for either of the New York teams which would provide inventory that could command high revenue. Getting a YES simulcast was a great start but they need to get the sales team to sell every inch of real estate on their shows. Kay and LaGrecas names on embedded in-show messaging carry a lot of weight and sales management needs to demand their account executives understand that. These two are the face of the franchise.In many ways, The Michael Kay Show is on an island there and I firmly believe nobody could do more with the limited resources they possess than they do. I have appeared on that show a number of times and from my experience, I can tell that Kay and LaGreca are both true professionals in every way.

With Francesa leaving WFAN at the end of this year, I sincerely hope ESPN will put the money and resources into this show by providing better lead-ins and the capital to get them where they belongNo. 1 in their time slot. Kay and LaGreca are capable, but management needs to step up and support them so they can reach the heights we all know they are capable of achieving.

Aside from the local sports stations, satellite radio has blossomed in the last decade to be a major player in the sports media marketplace. There was a time when some felt satellite radio would never catch on. Two things pushed it alonga loan from Liberty Media and increased penetration into the automobile satellite installation business.

If you want to pinpoint one thing that saved the day, it was Howard Stern and every person working there today owes him a debt of gratitude. He could generate money if he uttered three words and then left for the day because the three words would spike subscribers. I briefly ran into him when I interned at NBC years ago and he was entertaining then but is ten times entertaining now. When I worked at News 12 in Westchester, I served as a production assistant on one of his pay per view shows and it an indescribable experience. He was super nice to all of us and in many ways should serve as an example for people that dont know how to make their brand profitable.

I worked at SiriusXM in a sales and programming senior management position while I was between ESPN gigs and I must say there were issues right off the bat. The merger was still in its infancy stage but instead of consolidating things they treated it like Noahs Arkthey had two of everything. Two sales software systems, two automation systems, two control room facilities, two totally different master control processes, and an ad sales team that had trouble making the grade.

I tried to persuade them to use Wide Orbit, a sales software system that was quickly becoming state of the art in the industry. I begged them to use it but they resisted. They finally installed it five years after I urged them to do it. Sales-wise, they sold out Howard Stern, but little else. I never quite understood how the NFL Channel, Mad Dog Radio, and even the Martha Stewart Channel were undersold. These channels should have sold themselvesthey had Stern and could then force customers to buy other channels if they wanted Stern but somehow that never happened.

They also had a large number of live sports and very rarely sold itevents such as the World Cup, World Series, Super Bowl, and the NBA Finals were grossly undersold not to mention college bowls and even the NCAA Basketball Tournament. I would never blame the salespeople because they were not given the proper direction. I also found it astounding that inventory sell-out levels was never used to spike pricing. The sad part was the programming was outstanding and more channels were cropping up like the Sports Fantasy Channel that should have been a cash cow. I worked in sales for companies that had far less brand recognition than Sirius XM and they brought tons more ad sales revenue than their Sirius XM counterparts.

The sports division is manned by Steve Cohen, whom I always respected for his sports knowledge as well as his honest approach to managing people. The Mad Dog Channel is armed with pros such as Steve Torre and Scott Wetzel who have paid their dues and can attract listeners the moment they speak into the microphone. Wetzel is one of few people WFAN missed the boat on as hes a talk show host that took a single concept like opposite picks and made it a recognizable characteristic of his brand. He picks games by taking the opposite team he chose initially which sounds silly but spikes conversation from callers.

Following the SiriusXM merger, Mel Karmazin became CEO of the company and had very mixed reviews. There is no question he is an adept businessman that knows how to make money but I never thought he let ideas ferment and grow. Often times, he would make changes just for the sake of making them and brought in a head of ad sales who had no broadcast experience at all, making process implementation impossible to execute.

I was not surprised that Sirius XM became more successful after he left because his successor, James Meyer, understands that quality employees bring a value that should never be underestimated and at the same time, subpar employees must be shown the door. The two go hand in hand. The old management would rarely fire anyone; they would just make their lives so miserable they would voluntarily leave the company.

I only stayed at SiriusXM for a few months, but I learned in that time how NOT to manage people and how to spot great managers like Steve Cohen or Steve Torre.

So how has sports radio and satellite radio changed the business? It made reporters rely on reaching fans with instant messaging as well as topics to debate until the games got underway. It also began the demise of the print industry as tomorrows newspaper would never have the clout that sports talk radio or satellite radio could provide. But it also eliminated so many full-time gigs as independent contractors and freelancers have become more plentiful these days than staff positions.

Don Imus, Mike Francesa, Chris Russo and Howard Stern stand alone as the voices that shaped the foundation of sports talk radio as we know it today. It is important to note that two of them really do not have much to do with sports but they were able to connect the casual fan with sports fanatics.

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Sports talk radio: The evolution of how we analyze sports - Elite Sports NY

How fish fins evolved on the way to land-ready limbs – Futurity: Research News

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Fossilized fish from the late Devonian period, roughly 375 million years ago, are shedding light on the evolution of fins as they began to transition into limbs fit for walking on land.

The study uses CT scanning to examine the shape and structure of fin rays still encased in surrounding rock. The imaging tools allowed the researchers to construct digital 3D models of the entire fin of the fishapod Tiktaalik roseae and its relatives in the fossil record for the first time. They could then use these models to infer how the fins worked and changed as they evolved into limbs.

Much of the research on fins during this key transitional stage focuses on the large, distinct bones and pieces of cartilage that correspond to those of our upper arm, forearm, wrist, and digits. Known as the endoskeleton, researchers trace how these bones changed to become recognizable arms, legs, and fingers in tetrapods, or four-legged creatures.

The delicate rays and spines of a fishs fins form a second, no less important dermal skeleton, which was also undergoing evolutionary changes in this period. Researchers often overlook these pieces because they can fall apart when the animals are fossilized or because fossil preparators remove them intentionally to reveal the larger bones of the endoskeleton. Dermal rays form most of the surface area of many fish fins but were completely lost in the earliest creatures with limbs.

Were trying to understand the general trends and evolution of the dermal skeleton before all those other changes happened and fully-fledged limbs evolved, says Thomas Stewart, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago who led the new study. If you want to understand how animals were evolving to use their fins in this part of history, this is an important data set.

Stewart and his colleagues worked with three late Devonian fishes with primitive features of tetrapods: Sauripterus taylori, Eusthenopteron foordi, and Tiktaalik roseae, which a team led by paleontologist Neil Shubin, the senior author of the new study, discovered in 2006. Sauripterus and Eusthenopteron were believed to have been fully aquatic and used their pectoral fins for swimming, although they may have been able to prop themselves up on the bottom of lakes and streams.

Tiktaalik may have been able to support most of its weight with its fins and perhaps even used them to venture out of the water for short trips across shallows and mudflats.

By seeing the entire fin of Tiktaalik we gain a clearer picture of how it propped itself up and moved about. The fin had a kind of palm that could lie flush against the muddy bottoms of rivers and streams, Shubin says.

The researchers scanned specimens of these fossils while still encased in rock. Using imaging software, they then reconstructed 3D models that allowed them to move, rotate, and visualize the dermal skeleton as if it were completely extracted from the surrounding material.

The models showed that the fin rays of these animals were simplified, and the overall size of the fin web was smaller than that of their fishier predecessors. Surprisingly, they also saw that the top and bottom of the fins were becoming asymmetric. Pairs of bones actually form fin rays. In Eusthenopteron, for example, the dorsal, or top, fin ray was slightly larger and longer than the ventral, or bottom one. Tiktaaliks dorsal rays were several times larger than its ventral rays, suggesting that it had muscles that extended on the underside of its fins, like the fleshy base of the palm, to help support its weight.

This provides further information that allows us to understand how an animal like Tiktaalik was using its fins in this transition, Stewart says. Animals went from swimming freely and using their fins to control the flow of water around them, to becoming adapted to pushing off against the surface at the bottom of the water.

Stewart and his colleagues also compared the dermal skeletons of living fish like sturgeon and lungfish to understand the patterns they were seeing in the fossils. They saw some of the same asymmetrical differences between the top and bottom of the fins, suggesting that those changes played a larger role in the evolution of fishes.

That gives us more confidence and another data set to say these patterns are real, widespread, and important for fishes, not just in the fossil record as it relates to the fin-to-limb transition, but the function of fins broadly.

The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Support for the study came from the Brinson Foundation, the Academy of Natural Sciences, the University of Chicago Biological Sciences Division, and the National Science Foundation. Additional authors are from the University of Wisconsin-Parkside and Drexel University.

Source: University of Chicago

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CDS (1.0): Welcome & evolutionary initiative in defence reforms – Economic Times

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Appointment of CDS, though much belated, is welcome reality and Government needs to be complimented for giving shape to defining reform. Armed Forces have been elevated from attached office to formally designated Department of Military Affairs (DMA) and included in Allocation of Business Rules. While it has been widely acclaimed, skeptics term it as clever ploy engineered by bureaucracy to preserve their turf and further downgrade apex military leadership. On balance, the current avatar is CDS (1.0) and as stated in its charter, evolutionary in conception. CDS was part of ruling partys manifesto and has been actualised primarily due to PMs commitment on this issue, articulated by him repeatedly in Combined Commanders conferences, starting with Dec 2015 .

It is well known fact that despite PMs prodding, status-quo oriented bureaucracy managed to stall serious push by late RM, Manohar Parrikar to actualise this reform. Creation of non-functional DPC, in some ways was an interim solution and its relevance, is now debatable. Another crafty construct, to derail and dilute CDS was Naresh Chandra Task Forces ingenious term, Permanent Chairman Chief of Staff Committee (PCCoS), hopefully buried now. Civilian lobbies had managed to make PCCoS, more acceptable, in line with their needless paranoia of coup proofing. It is probably due to PMs persistence that bureaucrats have yielded some ground after having stalled the process for more than two decades.

Gen Rawat has been given fair share of responsibilities though Defence Secretary still retains responsibility for Defence of India, including preparation for war and defence policy. Notwithstanding, bureaucratise of splitting defence and military advice, NSA and CDS are really responsible for national security. Think of Bangladesh and Kargil Operations, instantly one connects with FM Sam Manekshaw and Gen Ved Malik, respectively. No one can really recall, Defence Secretaries during these campaigns. It is difficult to reconcile, facade of Defence Secretary, retained as prima donna in business rules. It is high time, bureaucrats are held accountable for serious issues like hollowness in equipment as Armed Forces continue to be in firing line, in front of parliamentary standing committee hearings, media and populace, with Babus conveniently hiding behind cloak of anonymity.

It is equally baffling to find premier joint service institution, NDC being retained in the remit of bureaucrats, reflecting continued turf centricity. It is hoped that this will not be precursor to gaining control on National Defence University, when it comes up. The same trend is evident for Coast Guard, which needs to synergise with Navy, for maritime security and placed under CDS. He should also exercise full control and authority on Armed Forces Medical Services to forge jointness in medical care, as part of logistics grid.

CDS has been given three year stipulation for rather difficult task of restructuring, forging jointness and establishing theatre commands. The current incumbent, with his proximity to political hierarchy and having spent last three years plus in South Block, is probably best suited to push this agenda. It will also be good to give him traditional honey moon period, without daily post-mortems, to let CDS vision gain traction. Constructive dialogue should avoid targeting individuals and politicisation. Concurrently, there is urgent need to address stalled procurement process and make additional budgetary allocation in impending budget to kick start defence manufacturing eco system.

This nascent concept needs to be mentored, invested and incentivised. The first requirement is to populate DMA with best talent and remain wary of elements wanting to derail this initiative. It will be good idea to consider additional financial incentives like instructional or deputation allowance, as officers have to operate objectively in new and different environment keeping inherited parochialism under check. This can be supplemented with distinctive badge or even medal for completing meaningful tenures. Currently, CDS is odd General out, dressed in customised accoutrements with others in IDS retaining their respective service uniforms. Armed Forces personnel on deputation with Assam Rifles, NSG and UN adopt distinctive uniform for their tenures and same norms need to be applied in joint staff organisations.

DMA is unique department with four cabinet secretary ranked officers, yet it has to be functionally headed by VCDS to retain protocol parity. CISC should accordingly be formally designated and entrusted with onerous responsibility. It is learnt that the original plan was to create separate departments for each service and fourth one for CDS. The credit for having unified DMA goes to PMO and it is hoped that message will percolate down to skeptics. It is most pragmatic that CDS, on HR issues like placement and promotion will exercise functional autonomy and enjoy direct access to CCS through RM. The acid test on commitment will be operationalising it without any dilution and shedding bureaucratic control for political one.

It is good that jointness is proposed to be taken forward, another notch in functional stream by creating joint Air Defence command, something Pakistan has had for many years, albeit at Corps level. Joint Regional Theatre Command being complex subject is likely to be taken up later. Essential pre-requisite is autonomy to regional commanders, as evidenced in successful CDS models, which currently is conspicuous by its near total absence.

The present reforms merit encouragement, well begun is half done. It will be equally pertinent to remain committed to seminal wisdom, miles to go, before we sleep. It is hoped that system will be refined as also customised to cater for emerging security challenges, remaining focused on value additions and evolution of CDS (2.0).

The writer is former Army Commander, Western Command

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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CDS (1.0): Welcome & evolutionary initiative in defence reforms - Economic Times

5 ways influencer marketing will evolve in 2020 – AdAge.com

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With estimates predicting that influencer marketing spending might double in 2020en route to becoming a projected $15 billion market by 2022its a good bet that influencers will be moving further up the priority lists ofmany brand marketers.

Importantly, this growth will come from brands investing in influencer marketing for the first time, in addition to existing brands that have experienced strong returns and are expanding their investments accordingly.

Yet, despite the increased budgets and the rising number ofbrands looking to participate, influencer marketingis still sometimesdescribed as the Wild West. It certainly wasnt without its fair share of controversy in 2019, and the responsibility for professionalizingand standardizingpractices continues to be shared between the platforms, regulators and agencies.

With this in mind, here are my five predictions for 2020:

One natural evolution of influencer marketing has been the integration of paid media budgets to deliver targeted amplification of influencers posts. It delivers the media metrics that brands are used to seeing, and its an obvious goldmine for the platforms, who previously saw none of therevenue from the deals made between influencers andbrands.

Expect to see paid amplification made even easier and, as a result, it will become the norm on influencer campaigns, thanks to the key benefits it brings: increased levels of control for audience targeting; much needed reach and scale; and robust reporting and transparency that will be available around campaign delivery.

The influencer marketing industry has, for far too long, relied on social metrics like follower counts, likesand engagement rates as a benchmark of success. These vanity metrics are a proxy at best, and do not provide any real indication as to which talent is right for a brand, or if a collaboration was truly successful at delivering real business objectives.

Today, it is table stakes for marketers to require verifiable campaign metrics, including audience demographics, unique reach, actual impressions and video views delivered. In 2020,look for more brands and their partners to measure effectiveness via influencer campaign brand uplift studies, conversion and sales lift reportsand creative analysis in order to compare influencer work more directly alongside other parts of the marketing mix.

Most influencer marketing tends to fail when it comes to what messages arepublished. Often, brands are reluctant to hand over too much creative freedom to influencers, resulting in content that makes little sense for either the influencer or their audience. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a brand can relinquishall control to the influencer, who then produces something which may be a popular piece of content with their audience but doesnt actually deliver the appropriate messages and impact for the brand.

Balance is necessary, and brands are seeing exciting creative production capabilities coming from the influencer community,such asthe ability to localize a concept across the globe or tap into the mindset of a diverse range of communities and culturesall while staying on-brief.

When brands start their influencer campaigns with a solid brief, expect to see more suitably matchedbrands and influencers, more authentic and exciting work and more examples of influencer-produced creative that powers other marketing campaigns, from digital mediato print and OOH.

The notion that influencers are becoming increasingly meaningful channels for brands, combined with advances in data and measurement, will undoubtedly lead to longer-term collaborations between the most-effectively matched influencers and brands. And the outcome will be mutually beneficial.

For the brand, there are significant efficiency benefits to the relationship. In addition to the fact that the influencer is able to become a more authentic advocate with a much deeper relationship, it can drive real product and market insights, too.

For the influencer (the publisher), who needs to generate income, thebenefit lies in having both the financial security and opportunity to work continually on a brand collaboration that makes sense for them and for their audience.

Going one step further, you can expect to see more and more partnerships between influencers and brands working together to co-create products or even new brands.

With numerous reports of undisclosed brand collaborations, botaccounts,fraudulent audiences, manipulated results and the blurring of lines between organic and paid, its no surprise that a lack of transparency has been the major complaint about the influencer industry.

And while total eradication of these issues isnt a reality for 2020, the level of sophistication of the data, technology and education now available should enable a more informed and accountable process for influencer marketing. The issue of transparency will hopefully be banished to the fringes and will no longer be the central talking point in the majority of influencer marketing campaigns.

If these predictions become reality then, as a result, we can expect to see the influencer marketing industry taking some giant strides towards raising its professional standards, whichshould pave the way for even greater growth in 2021.

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Long-Awaited Dash Evolution Platform Released on Testnet with Developer Documentation Hub – Dash News

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Dash Platform, the long-awaited upgrade to the Dash network formerly codenamed Evolution, has been released to testnet including a developer documentation portal.

In a post released today, Dash Core Group Product Owner Dana Alibrandi announced today the release of Dash Platform to Evonet, a public testnet enabling developers to experiment with the functionalities of the platform ahead of full mainnet release:

This release to Evonet marks a significant milestone after years of concerted effort by Dash Core Group, as we designed, redesigned, and finally implemented the Evolution vision as it was originally conveyed. This release represents the early stages of a platform that aims to revolutionize value exchange and deliver on the promise of digital cash. The development team behind Dash Platform is driven to make development easy and accessible for everyone striving to realize the promise of blockchain. We look forward to your thoughts, comments, suggestions, and pull requests as the Dash DAO enters a new chapter in its history.

Conceptualized beginning in late 2015, the Dash Evolution project aims to provide a much more user-friendly experience to cryptocurrency than what is presently available, using usernames and contact lists instead of long cryptographic addresses and providing an easy solution for developers unfamiliar with blockchain technology to build decentralized applications for a variety of purposes.

A superior data platform than centralized companies and cryptocurrency competitors

According to Alibrandi, Dash Platform provides distinct advantages over traditional cloud storage platforms, including control over data and heightened security:

Within the centralized web, it is most similar to a product like Firebases Cloud Firestore. The main benefits of using Dash Platform over Firestore are similar to the general advantages of decentralization: better security, ownership over data, reduced data silos, and enhanced transparency. Over time, Dash Platform intends to add more components to its stack so that developers can fully utilize the Dash network to facilitate trustless, disintermediated value exchange.

In addition to centralized cloud storage solutions, Alibrandi believes that Dash Platform offers distinct advantages over other similar solutions within the cryptocurrency industry as well, including Ethereums upcoming Swarm data storage system, promising a more fluid developer experience while allowing its functionality to remain compatible with Ethereum applications:

In a broader sense, Dash Platform provides the missing data layer in the vision for a fully decentralized web. It is similar in functionality and goals to Ethereum Swarm and can be used in tandem with Ethereum dapps as a decentralized database. When compared with Swarm, Dash Platform stands out due to its fluid developer experience and fast block confirmation times on the Platform blockchain, which allow for changes to your application data to be confirmed and reflected on user interfaces in real time.

The Dash Platform experience for recording data state transitions promises to be more streamlined than that of major competitors thanks to the Platform Chain, a data-purposed sidechain that does not interfere with the main blockchain during times of peak activity, as has happened in the past most notably with Ethereum.

The first release of many in a phased rollout leading up to mainnet release

Todays release of Dash Platform to Evonet represents the first in a series of phases to test all aspects of Platforms functionality prior to full mainnet release next year, beginning with some basic username-based functionalities:

With this release, developers will be able to test the following actions:

Following this initial phase will be a release centered on finalizing security around storing and retrieving data, a phase introducing incentive mechanisms and monetization of the platforms various capabilities, and finally an optimization phase prior to full mainnet release:

Lastly, we will optimize and polish the platform in preparation for a mainnet release. There will be improvements to the platform chain in order to handle chain halts and improve consensus efficiency. Without these improvements, the platform chain could stop producing blocks due to validator sets not being able to agree on the contents of a block. Feature flags will be added to smoothly introduce new features once the platform is live on mainnet, and we will conduct thorough security checks to ensure there are no vulnerabilities that put funds or data at risk.

Included in this release is a full dedicated developer documentation portal to bring potential developers fully up to speed with Dash Platforms capabilities so that they are able to quickly begin experimenting with the platform. The various Platform repositories are linked at the bottom of the announcement post.

Read more from the original source:

Long-Awaited Dash Evolution Platform Released on Testnet with Developer Documentation Hub - Dash News

[GAMERS GUIDE]: How to Evolve Honedge, Doublade, and Aegislash in Pokmon Sword and Shield, Plus More Tips – Tech Times

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(Photo : Source: Bulbapedia)Honedge, Doublade, and Aegislash

Evolving species is among the top features of any Pokmon game. In both thePokmon Sword andShieldgames, avid fans know that half the battle of evolving Pokmons is actually knowing where to find them.

In this handy gamer's guide, you'll learn how to evolve the steel/ghost-type Pokmon Doublade from Honedge or into Aegislash.

(Photo : Source: Bulbapedia)Honedge Pokmon

If you're looking to catch an Aegislash, the easiest way is to start with an Honedge, evolve it into Doublade, and then level up to get the dual-type Pokmon.

Luckily for Pokmon Sword and Shieldplayers, the Honedge isn't too difficult to spot in the game. All you have to do is head over to the Wild Area and find the Hammerlocke Hills, where there's a 44% chance of catching a Honedge.

However, weather conditions in the area can be a bit of a problem. When going out in the wild, make sure to come out when it's foggy to maximize your chance of encountering this Pokmon. If it's not foggy, you might have to wait for a snowstorm where your chances of seeing a Honedge drastically drops to 15%.

To evolve your Pokmon to Doublade, you just need to get to level 35 and the evolution will automatically commence.

SEE ALSO: Pokmon Sword and Shield: How to Spot a Fake Pokmon & Get a Gigantamax Pokmon

(Photo : Source: Bulbapedia)Doublade Pokmon

There are two steps to begin your Doublade evolution. First, you can follow the previous instructions and catch a Honedge first. Second, you can go straight to trying to catch a Doublade, although the chances of you encountering this Pokmon in the wild is low.To commence the evolution, first, find a Dusk Stone and then apply it to Doublade to evolve it into Aegislash.

(Photo : Source: Bulbapedia)Aegislash Pokmon

For those who want to go all the way, you can skip the evolutions and proceed to hunt down Doublade or Aegislash in the wild.

Depending on the version you're playing, you can find Doublade in the Lake of Outrage and Giant's Cap, among other places. For Pokmon Sword players, the species are in Watchtower Ruins; for Pokmon Shield players, they're in the Stony Wilderness. Remember to go out during a snowstorm for a 25% chance of spotting a Doublade.

Meanwhile, Aegislash, although a rare sight, can be found at the Giant's Cap and the Watchtower Ruins.

In case you missed it: the Pokmon Company is offering a handful of freebies to fans and Trainers. Until Jan. 15, you can download rare Poke Balls and claim a freeGigantamax Meowth.

Meanwhile,Sword and Shieldplayers have until Jan. 30 to claim 20 Battle Points, a special kind of currency that you can earn by competing in the Battle Tower. You can use your Battle Points to buy special items, like nature-changing mints and other equipment for your Pokmon.

To claim your freebie, select "Mystery Gift" from the menu screen, choose "Get a Mystery Gift," click Select "Get Gift via Code/Password," follow the prompts to connect online, and then input the download code G1GANTAMAX when prompted. Again, this freebie can be claimed until Jan. 30 only, so hurry!

RELATED LINK:Pokmon Sword and Shield Guide: Farm EXP Candy, Hatching Shiny Pokmon, and Getting Evolution Stones

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[GAMERS GUIDE]: How to Evolve Honedge, Doublade, and Aegislash in Pokmon Sword and Shield, Plus More Tips - Tech Times