Hong Kong panda Ying Ying loses cub
Hong Kong: Hong Kong panda Ying Ying has lost the long-awaited cub she was expecting, vets said on Wednesday. It would have been the first ever giant panda born in the city.
After years of trying, 10-year-old Ying Ying began to show signs of pregnancy in July and was due to give birth this week. The pregnancy came after several attempts, both natural and artificial, at insemination.
But animal carers at Hong Kong’s Ocean Park, where Ying Ying lives, announced Wednesday that she had miscarried the cub. “Unfortunately we have sad news to share,” Ocean Park vet Lee Foo Khong told reporters. “Based on recent scans, the pregnancy is no longer viable.” Lee said that scans taken Wednesday morning showed the foetus had stopped developing.
“The structure was no longer distinct… it was breaking down,” Lee said. He added they had not determined the reason for the failed pregnancy. Panda pregnancies are fragile and vets had already warned when the imminent birth was announced last week that it was possible Ying Ying could reabsorb or miscarry the foetus.
A team of specialists had been assigned to keep an eye on her around the clock and park managers had sought to protect her from noise and disturbance. Female pandas are only interested in mating for three days a year, and have a gestation period of three to five months. (AFP)
Mystery of giraffe’s long neck solved
New York:The long neck of modern-day giraffes evolved in several stages as one of the animal’s neck vertebrae stretched first towards the head and then towards the tail a few million years later, scientists have found. Scientists have long theorised that the long neck of modern-day giraffes evolved to enable them to find more vegetation or to develop a specialised method of fighting.
The new study of fossil cervical vertebrae shows the evolution likely occurred in several stages as one of the animal’s neck vertebrae stretched first toward the head and then toward the tail a few million years later.
The study shows, for the first time, the specifics of the evolutionary transformation in extinct species within the giraffe family, researchers said. “It’s interesting to note that that the lengthening was not consistent,” said Nikos Solounias, a giraffe anatomy expert and paleontologist at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine.
“First, only the front portion of the C3 vertebra lengthened in one group of species. The second stage was the elongation of the back portion of the C3 neck vertebra. “The modern giraffe is the only species that underwent both stages, which is why it has a remarkably long neck,” Solounias said. Solounias and Melinda Danowitz, a medical student in the Academic Medicine Scholars programme, studied 71 fossils of nine extinct and two living species in the giraffe family.
The bones, discovered in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were housed at museums around the world, including those in England, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Kenya, and Greece. “We also found that the most primitive giraffe already started off with a slightly elongated neck,” said Danowitz. “The lengthening started before the giraffe family was even created 16 million years ago,” she said.
The researchers analysed anatomical features of the various fossils and compared them to the evolutionary tree. “That’s when we saw the stages playing out,” said Danowitz. Solounias and Danowitz found the cranial end of the vertebra stretched initially around 7 million years ago in the species known as Samotherium, an extinct relative of today’s modern giraffe.
That was followed by a second stage of elongation on the back or caudal portion around one million years ago. The C3 vertebra of today’s giraffe is nine times longer than its width – about as long as an adult human’s humerus bone, which stretches from the shoulder to the elbow. As the modern day giraffe’s neck was getting longer, the neck of another member of the giraffe family was shortening. The okapi, found in central Africa, is the only other living member of the giraffe family. Yet, rather than evolving a long neck, Danowitz said this species is one of four with a “secondarily shortened neck,” placing it on a different evolutionary pathway. The study is published in Royal Society Open Science. (PTI)
New ‘habitability index’ to help find alien life
Washington: The hunt for alien life may get easier, thanks to a ‘habitability index’ created by scientists that can point out which of the thousands of exoplanets discovered so far have a better chance of hosting life.
Traditionally, astronomers have focused the search by looking for planets in their star’s “habitable zone” – more informally called the “Goldilocks zone” – which is the swath of space that’s “just right” to allow an orbiting Earth-like planet to have liquid water on its surface, perhaps giving life a chance.
But so far that has been just a sort of binary designation, indicating only whether a planet is, or is not, within that area considered right for life. The new metric, called the “habitability index for transiting planets,” is more nuanced, producing a continuum of values that astronomers can punch into a Virtual Planetary Laboratory Web form to arrive at the single-number habitability index, representing the probability that a planet can maintain liquid water at its surface.
In creating the index, University of Washington’s professors Rory Barnes and Victoria Meadows, with research assistant and co-author Nicole Evans factored in estimates of a planet’s rockiness, rocky planets being the more Earth-like. They also accounted for a phenomenon called “eccentricity-albedo degeneracy,” which comments on a sort of balancing act between a planet’s albedo – the energy reflected back to space from its surface – and the circularity of its orbit, which affects how much energy it receives from its host star.
The two counteract each other. The higher a planet’s albedo, the more light and energy are reflected off to space, leaving less at the surface to warm the world and aid possible life. But the more noncircular or eccentric a planet’s orbit, the more intense is the energy it gets when passing close to its star in its elliptic journey.
A life-friendly energy equilibrium for a planet near the inner edge of the habitable zone – in danger of being too hot for life – would be a higher albedo, to cool the world by reflecting some of that heat into space, Barnes said. Conversely, a planet near the cool outer edge of the habitable zone would perhaps need a higher level of orbital eccentricity to provide the energy needed for life.
Barnes, Meadows and Evans ranked in this way planets so far found by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, in its original mission as well as its “K2” follow-up mission. They found that the best candidates for habitability and life are those planets that get about 60 per cent to 90 per cent of the solar radiation that the Earth receives from the sun, which is in keeping with current thinking about a star’s habitable zone. The research was published in the Astrophysical Journal. (PTI)
Viral disease to blame in deaths of some 1,000 Idaho deer
Idaho: A viral disease called bluetongue, which tends to strike with greater severity during droughts, is to blame for the mysterious die-off of as many as 1,000 whitetail deer in Idaho, state wildlife managers said . The Idaho Department of Fish and Game began receiving reports of dead and dying deer last month tied to a bluetongue outbreak concentrated in north-central parts of the state bordering Washington.
The spread of the ailment, which does not threaten humans, spikes during hot, dry summers as more animals gather around waters where the infected gnats that transmit the disease breed, Idaho Fish and Game spokesman Roger Phillips said. (Reuters)