Another bit of insight into animal languages from this AP story:
Nuthatches appear to have learned to understand a foreign language – chickadee. It’s not unusual for one animal to react to the alarm call of another, but nuthatches seem to go beyond that – interpreting the type of alarm and what sort of predator poses a threat.
[via TeresaCentric]
SpaceX, which I’ve covered previously, successfully launched its Falcon 1 rocket yesterday. The launch wasn’t without incident — there was a problem with the second stage after launch, and the first launch attempt was aborted at the last second — but the results were deemed enough to justify launching commercial payloads later this year.
On the latest flight, the second stage did not achieve its full speed, again because of an early shut down of the engine, this time because the vehicle began an unexpected roll.
Mr Musk said he thought this problem should be easy to fix once flight engineers had analysed the data.
“The launch was not perfect, but certainly pretty good,” he added.
“Given that the primary objectives were demonstrating responsive launch and gathering test data in advance of our first operational satellite launch later this year, the outcome was great.”
I personally see this as a huge success, because they were able to launch, reach space, and test their operational capacity. Besides all that, they were able to make fundamental improvements to their launch platform in a single year, while still targeting that $7-million-per-launch figure. Congratulations, SpaceX, and we can’t wait for the next stages!
Okay, so a lot of the time I love Britain. It’s a me thing. But in this case, it’s specific. Agencies controlling food standards and safety have ordered baby milk (formula) manufacturers to stop putting claims like “next best thing to breast milk” on their packaging. They can’t say, “Helps support the immune system.” They can’t say, “helps growth and the immune system.” Even if these things are true they cannot print them on their packaging because it may be undermining the push toward greater numbers of breastfeeding moms. Yay!
Karen is too tired to post this article from the Seattle P-I:
Proponents of same-sex marriage have introduced an initiative that would put a whole new twist on traditional unions between men and women: It would require heterosexual couples to have children within three years or else have their marriages annulled.
I can’t wait to see what comes of this. No matter how it goes, they’ve introduced their ideas into the discussion. Yay, subversion!