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What was highest label on your first car speedometer?

  • 80 mph
  • 88 mph
  • 100 mph
  • 120 mph
  • 150 mph
  • it was in kph like civilized countries use you insensitive clod
  • Other (please specify in comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:44 | Votes:98

posted by janrinok on Friday February 14 2020, @10:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the why-does-Kuiper-use-a-belt,-anyway? dept.

ArsTechnica:

Following its successful rendezvous with Pluto, the New Horizons spacecraft was sent on toward a smaller object out in the Kuiper Belt. As it shot past, the spacecraft captured images of a small world [Arrokoth] consisting of two very distinct lobes, with properties that scientists found a bit confusing. But details would have to wait, as the combination of distance and power budget meant that transmitting much of New Horizons' data back to Earth was a slow process.

[...]the object is likely to be composed of material that is largely unchanged since the formation of the Solar System. And, by all indications, it is true. Evaluations of the crater density on the surface of Arrokoth is consistent with an age of four billion years, that of the Solar System itself. And the surface has the red color typical of other objects from this region of the Kuiper belt, suggesting that its surface hasn't seen significant chemical modification.

The red color seems to come from a complicated mix of longer-chain hydrocarbons collectively called tholins. These are built by chemical reactions among shorter molecules driven by radiation exposure. In Arrokoth's case, those shorter molecules appear to include methanol, a single-carbon alcohol and the only individual chemical clearly identified in the New Horizons data. Methanol could have formed by chemical reactions between methane and water, but there's only weak indications of the presence of water on Arrokoth and no clear signature of methane.

The object is of particular interest because of its age and lobed structure.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @08:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the had-a-big-impact dept.

New research finds Earth's oldest-known asteroid strike linked to 'big thaw' - News and Events:

Curtin University scientists have discovered Earth's oldest[-known] asteroid strike occurred at Yarrabubba, in outback Western Australia, and coincided with the end of a global deep freeze known as a Snowball Earth.

[...] Lead author Dr Timmons Erickson, from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences and NASA's Johnson Space Center, together with a team including Professor Chris Kirkland, Associate Professor Nicholas Timms and Senior Research Fellow Dr Aaron Cavosie, all from Curtin's School of Earth and Planetary Sciences, analysed the minerals zircon and monazite that were 'shock recrystallized' by the asteroid strike, at the base of the eroded crater to determine the exact age of Yarrabubba.

The team inferred that the impact may have occurred into an ice-covered landscape, vaporised a large volume of ice into the atmosphere, and produced a 70km diameter crater in the rocks beneath.

Professor Kirkland said the timing raised the possibility that the Earth's oldest asteroid impact may have helped lift the planet out of a deep freeze.

[...] "The age of the Yarrabubba impact matches the demise of a series of ancient glaciations. After the impact, glacial deposits are absent in the rock record for 400 million years. This twist of fate suggests that the large meteorite impact may have influenced global climate," Associate Professor Timms said.

"Numerical modelling further supports the connection between the effects of large impacts into ice and global climate change. Calculations indicated that an impact into an ice-covered continent could have sent half a trillion tons of water vapour – an important greenhouse gas – into the atmosphere. This finding raises the question whether this impact may have tipped the scales enough to end glacial conditions."

The full research paper, 'Precise radiometric age establishes Yarrabubba, Western Australia, as Earth's oldest recognized meteorite impact structure,' can be found online here.

Journal Reference:
Timmons M. Erickson, Christopher L. Kirkland, Nicholas E. Timms, Aaron J. Cavosie, Thomas M. Davison. Precise radiometric age establishes Yarrabubba, Western Australia, as Earth's oldest recognised meteorite impact structure. Nature Communications, 2020; 11 (1) DOI: 10.1038/s41467-019-13985-7


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @06:32PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-needs-bags? dept.

Apple must pay store employees for bag-search time, court rules

Apple must pay its retail store employees for the time they spend waiting for mandatory bag searches at the end of their shifts, the California Supreme Court ruled Thursday. The decision is retroactive, but it wasn't immediately clear how much Apple would have to pay.

The decision stems from a class-action lawsuit filed in 2013 by two former workers from Apple stores in New York and Los Angeles that claimed employees at physical locations were required to stand in lines up to 30 minutes long every day for store managers to check their bags to ensure they weren't smuggling home stolen goods. Failure to comply can lead to the employee's termination.

"Under the circumstances of this case and the realities of ordinary, 21st century life, we find farfetched and untenable Apple's claim that its bag-search policy can be justified as providing a benefit to its employees," Supreme Court Judge Tani Cantil-Sakauye wrote in the decision (PDF).

[...] "Given that Apple requires its employees to wear Apple-branded apparel while working but directs them to remove or cover up such attire while outside the Apple store, it is reasonable to assume that some employees will carry their work uniform or a change of clothes in a bag in order to comply with Apple's compulsory dress code policy," she wrote.

[...] "Apple may tailor its bag-search policy as narrowly or broadly as it desires and may minimize the time required for exit searches," Cantil-Sakauye wrote. "But it must compensate those employees to whom the policy applies for the time spent waiting for and undergoing these searches."

Apple didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 14 2020, @04:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the creation dept.

Our solar system is thought to have begun billions of years ago as a protoplanetary disk. Over time, gravity caused this matter to clump together and eventually form planets. There is debate over the process and its duration, with previous studies suggesting several ten million years until the initially dry Earth was formed. Water was delivered at the end of this period.

A new article in Science Advances (open) describes Iron isotope evidence for very rapid accretion and differentiation of the proto-Earth.

Moreover, new planet formation models based on the rapid accretion of pebbles onto asteroidal seeds suggest that Earth's main accretion phase may have been completed within the ~5–million year lifetime of the protoplanetary disk.

The authors find that the ratio of iron isotopes 54Fe to 56Fe in most meteorites differs from the Earth, and deduce that the planet formed rapidly with little material from the outer solar system, where those meteorites originated. The terrestrial iron isotope ratio does match that of a rare class of meteorites known as CI chondrites.

The only epoch in the history of the solar system when the CI-like material is readily available within the terrestrial planet–forming region is during the lifetime of the protoplanetary disk. This period represents the time when the in-falling envelope material of CI composition is channeled through the disk to fuel the growth of the proto-Sun and is estimated to have lasted approximately 4.8 ± 0.3 million years (Ma).

This conclusion has implications for where the Earth's water and oxygen came from:

An initially more reduced proto-Earth relaxes these constraints and only requires that Earth oxidized (i.e., acquired most of its mantle iron budget) by the accretion of CI-like dust. Water is the key ingredient for oxidation, and as such, our results are consistent with the accretion of a component of Earth's water and other volatile elements during the protoplanetary disk's lifetime. This may be achieved via the direct accretion of water adsorbed to dust or reflects the fact that the snowline will be inside of Earth's orbit toward the end of the protoplanetary disk's lifetime, allowing direct accretion of ice during this stage.

Regarding the Moon:

Critically, the rapid timescales proposed here can be reconciled with Earth's mantle 182W isotope composition if the Moon-forming impact occurred at least 40 Ma after the main accretion and differentiation of the proto-Earth.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Friday February 14 2020, @02:50PM   Printer-friendly

Debian developer Jonathan Carter was recently given a MIPS64-based motherboard which he ran through its paces. The board has a Loongson processor which is intended for both general purpose and embedded processing.

The reason why I wanted this board is that I don't have access to any MIPS64 hardware whatsoever, and it can be really useful for getting Calamares to run properly on MIPS64 on Debian. Calamares itself builds fine on this platform, but calamares-settings-debian will only work on amd64 and i386 right now (where it will either install grub-efi or grub-pc depending in which mode you booted, otherwise it will crash during installation). I already have lots of plans for the Bullseye release cycle (and even for Calamares specifically), so I'm not sure if I'll get there but I'd like to get support for mips64 and arm64 into calamares-settings-debian for the bullseye release. I think it's mostly just a case of detecting the platforms properly and installing/configuring the right bootloaders. Hopefully it's that simple.

In the meantime, I decided to get to know this machine a bit better. I'm curious how it could be useful to me otherwise. All its expansion ports definitely seems interesting. First I plugged it into my power meter to check what power consumption looks like. According to this, it typically uses between 7.5W and 9W and about 8.5W on average.

The Loongson processors are developed at the Institute of Computing Technology (ICT) at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in China in conjunction with the BLX IC Design Corporation, also in China.

Earlier on SN:
Is Low-Priced Computing Stuck With an ARM/x86 Duopoly? (2019)
MIPS CPU Architecture to Become Open Source Hardware in 2019 (2018)
Linux-Based, MIPS-Powered Russian All-in-One PC Launched (2016)


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @12:59PM   Printer-friendly
from the plane-old-detection-work dept.

A group of scientists led by professors Jürg Leuthold of the Institute for Electromagnetic Fields and Lukas Novotny of the Institute for Photonics, together with colleagues at the National Institute for Material Science in Tsukuba (Japan), have developed an extremely fast and sensitive light detector based on the interplay between novel two-dimensional materials and nano-photonic optical waveguides. Their results were recently published in the scientific journal Nature Nanotechnology.

"In our detector we wanted to exploit the advantages of different materials whilst overcoming their individual constraints," explains Nikolaus Flöry, a Ph.D. student in Novotny's group. "The best way of doing so is to fabricate a kind of artificial crystal—also known as heterostructure—from different layers that are each only a few atoms thick. Moreover, we were interested to know whether all the buzz about such two-dimensional materials for practical applications is actually justified."

In two-dimensional materials, such as graphene, electrons only move in a plane rather than three spatial dimensions. This profoundly alters their transport properties, for instance when an electrical voltage is applied. While graphene is not the ideal choice for optics applications, compounds of transition metals such as molybdenum or tungsten and chalcogenes such as sulfur or tellurium (abbreviated as TMDC) are highly photosensitive and, on top of that, can be easily combined with silicon optical waveguides.

The expertise for the waveguides and high-speed optoelectronics came from the research group of Jürg Leuthold. Ping Ma, the group's Senior Scientist, stresses that it was the interplay between the two approaches that made the new detector possible: "Understanding both the two-dimensional materials and the waveguides through which light is fed into the detector was of fundamental importance to our success. Together, we realized that two-dimensional materials are particularly suited to being combined with silicon waveguides. Our groups' specializations complemented each other perfectly."

[...] The ETH researchers are convinced that with this combination of waveguides and heterostructures they can make not just light detectors, but also other optical elements such as light modulators, LEDs and lasers. "The possibilities are almost limitless," Flöry and Ma enthuse about their discovery. "We just picked out the photodetector as an example of what can be done with this technology."

In the near future, the scientists want to use their findings and investigate other two-dimensional materials. About a hundred of them are known to date, which gives countless possible combinations for novel heterostructures. Moreover, they want to exploit other physical effects, such as plasmons, in order to improve the performance of their device even further.

More information: Nikolaus Flöry et al. Waveguide-integrated van der Waals heterostructure photodetector at telecom wavelengths with high speed and high responsivity, Nature Nanotechnology (2020). DOI: 10.1038/s41565-019-0602-z


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @10:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the illuminating-information dept.

The 2020 Consumer Electronics Show was absolutely crawling with companies hawking lidar. Short for light radar (yes, really), this powerful type of sensor generates a three-dimensional pointcloud of its surroundings. Experts and industry insiders not named Elon Musk see it as a key technology for self-driving cars. There are dozens of companies developing lidar technology, and each insists that its sensor is a cut above the rest.

But while every lidar is above-average in the halls of CES, things are starting to look different in the real world. At least one segment of the market—custom robots for warehouses, mines, and other industrial sites—is starting to buy lidar sensors in significant volume. Another segment—low-end lidars used in car driver-assistance systems—is poised to become a big market in the next couple of years.

For this piece I asked both lidar company officials and independent experts to help me understand the state of the lidar market. They told me that Velodyne—the company that invented modern three-dimensional lidar more than a decade ago—continues to dominate the industry.

But Velodyne is facing growing competition from newer firms. One company in particular—Ouster—has begun shipping aggressively priced alternatives to Velodyne's flagship products. While these products might not quite match Velodyne's performance, they're good enough and cheap enough to pose a serious threat to Velodyne's dominance.

The big battles in the lidar market are still in the future. A lot of lidar sales so far have come outside of the automotive industry, but experts expect carmakers to be the biggest customers for lidar. In the next few years, we're going to see a number of carmakers make their first bulk lidar purchases—buying thousands of low-cost lidar sensors to improve their advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). A number of lidar companies are positioning themselves to win these deals, and some are pairing up with traditional "tier 1" automotive suppliers to improve their odds.

The industry's biggest prize may be supplying more powerful lidar sensors for use in fully self-driving vehicles. Many companies are angling to serve this market, but those sales are still quite a way off because fully self-driving technology isn't yet ready for prime time.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @08:57AM   Printer-friendly
from the a-lot-of-ground-to-cover dept.

The maritime and scientific communities have set themselves the ambitious target of 2030 to map Earth's entire ocean floor.

It's ambitious because, 10 years out from this deadline, they're starting from a very low level.

You can argue about the numbers but it's in the region of 80% of the global seafloor that's either completely unknown or has had no modern measurement applied to it.

The international GEBCO 2030 project was set up to close the data gap and has announced a number of initiatives to get it done.

What's clear, however, is that much of this work will have to leverage new technologies or at the very least max the existing ones. Which makes the news from Ocean Infinity - that it's creating a fleet of ocean-going robots - all the more interesting.

US-based OI [(Ocean Infinity)] is a relatively new exploration and survey company. It was founded in 2016.

It's made headlines by finding some high-profile wrecks, including the Argentinian submarine San Juan and the South Korean bulk carrier Stellar Daisy. It also led an ultimately unsuccessful "no find, no fee" effort to locate the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370.

OI's strategy has always been to throw the latest hardware and computing power at a problem. The move into Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USV) at scale is therefore the logical next step, says CEO Oliver Plunkett.

"We've ordered 11 robots, different sizes. The smallest ones are 21m; the biggest are up to 37m," he told BBC News. "They will be capable of transoceanic journeys, wholly unmanned, controlled from control centres on land.

"Each of them will be fitted out with an array of sensors and equipment, but also their own capability to deploy tethered robots to inspect right down to the bottom of the ocean, 6,000m below the surface."

The boats will be used to search for missing objects, yes; but they'll also inspect pipelines, and survey bed conditions for telecoms cables and off-shore wind farms. They'll even to do freight, says Dan Hook who'll run the robot fleet for OI under the spin-out name of Armada.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @06:46AM   Printer-friendly
from the just-one-more-episode...and-then-the-sun-comes-up dept.

The increasing popularity of global media content like American TV series has been considered as one notable factor associated with binge-watching practices, or continuously consuming media content in a single session.

With the massive global expansion of streaming platforms like Netflix—which had more than 154 million subscribers in over 190 countries in 2019—this practice of marathon viewing of televised content has gradually become a "new ritual" for many viewers.

But not without a price.

Indeed, an American Academy of Sleep Medicine survey in 2019 found 88% of American adults reported a lack of sleep due to binge-watching television and streaming series.

As the use of online streaming services to consume televised content is becoming more common globally, the problem of binge-watching behavior may also become a global phenomenon.

[...] It is inevitable that binge-watching has become a new normal among today's audiences. Yet, given the negative health ramifications associated with it, can we move beyond that? We could try savoring one episode at one time in a slow watching practice.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @04:55AM   Printer-friendly
from the microscopy-is-heating-up dept.

By adding infrared capability to the ubiquitous, standard optical microscope, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign hope to bring cancer diagnosis into the digital era.

Pairing infrared measurements with high-resolution optical images and machine learning algorithms, the researchers created digital biopsies that closely correlated with traditional pathology techniques and also outperformed state-of-the-art infrared microscopes.

Led by Rohit Bhargava, a professor of bioengineering and the director of the Cancer Center at Illinois, the group published its results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"The advantage is that no stains are required, and both the organization of cells and their chemistry can be measured. Measuring the chemistry of tumor cells and their microenvironment can lead to better cancer diagnoses and better understanding of the disease," Bhargava said.

[...] Bhargava's group developed its hybrid microscope by adding an infrared laser and a specialized microscope lens, called an interference objective, to an optical camera. The infrared-optical hybrid measures both infrared data and a high-resolution optical image with a light microscope -- the kind ubiquitous in clinics and labs.

"We built the hybrid microscope from off-the-shelf components. This is important because it allows others to easily build their own microscope or upgrade an existing microscope," said Martin Schnell, a postdoctoral fellow in Bhargava's group and first author of the paper.

Combining the two techniques harnesses the strengths of both, the researchers said. It has the high resolution, large field-of-view and accessibility of an optical microscope. Furthermore, infrared data can be analyzed computationally, without adding any dyes or stains that can damage tissues. Software can recreate different stains or even overlap them to create a more complete, all-digital picture of what's in the tissue.

The researchers verified their microscope by imaging breast tissue samples, both healthy and cancerous, and comparing the results of the hybrid microscope's computed "dyes" with those from the traditional staining technique. The digital biopsy closely correlated with the traditional one.

Furthermore, the researchers found that their infrared-optical hybrid outperformed state-of-the-art in infrared microscopes in several ways: It has 10 times larger coverage, greater consistency and four times higher resolution, allowing infrared imaging of larger samples, in less time, with unprecedented detail.

Journal Reference:

Martin Schnell, Shachi Mittal, Kianoush Falahkheirkhah, Anirudh Mittal, Kevin Yeh, Seth Kenkel, Andre Kajdacsy-Balla, P. Scott Carney, Rohit Bhargava. All-digital histopathology by infrared-optical hybrid microscopy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2020; 201912400 DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1912400117


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @03:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-now? dept.

With MWC [Barcelona] 2020 canceled, most new Android phones face a tough debut:

With Mobile World Congress 2020 officially terminado -- thanks to the coronavirus -- mobile vendors, big and small, are now scrambling to figure out their next steps. Some, particularly Chinese companies, are mulling plans to proceed with their events in Barcelona, Spain, even though the official conference won't take place.

MWC brings together companies from across the world, with many using the weeklong trade show as the place to introduce their newest smartphones. This year was expected to feature new 5Gphones from nearly every major Android vendor, as well as updates about the networks running the new superfast connectivity. While 5G became a reality last year, this year is when it could go mainstream.

MWC is key to the mobile industry for two big reasons: It's where vendors get attention for their newest devices and it's where companies hammer out deals behind the scenes. That includes getting carriers to agree to offer devices from smaller players that don't go by the name of Apple or Samsung. This year's show was officially slated to run from Feb. 24 to 27, with press meetings starting as early as Feb. 21.

On Wednesday, though, GSMA finally pulled the plug on the entire show. The show's organizer said the coronavirus, the disease infecting tens of thousands of people, had made it "impossible" for the show to proceed.

With MWC no longer taking place, that disrupts the launches -- and dealmaking -- for over 2,000 companies that planned to attend the show. For some, it could mean holding their own events or simply putting out press releases to unveil their newest gadgets. Many could delay their product launches altogether while they figure out what to do. Ultimately, we may all have to wait longer to hear about -- and buy -- the latest gadgets.

"The delayed product releases that will occur as the result of this show, as well as the supply side challenges surrounding the coronavirus' broader impact in China ... could potentially delay the smartphone industry's return to growth into 2021 if the current state of flux is not settled soon," Futuresource Consulting analyst Stephen Mears said.

Also at The Register

Previously:
MWC Barcelona 2020: "Mobile World Congress" or "Most Won't Come"?


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Friday February 14 2020, @01:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the he-started-it dept.

Chinese vendor Huawei has provided a longer response to US allegations of spying, claiming that it doesn't have the spying capability alleged by the US and pointing out that the US itself has a long history of spying on phone networks.

"As evidenced by the Snowden leaks, the United States has been covertly accessing telecom networks worldwide, spying on other countries for quite some time," Huawei said in a six-paragraph statement sent to news organizations. "The report by the Washington Post this week about how the CIA used an encryption company to spy on other countries for decades is yet additional proof." (That Post report detailed how the CIA bought a company called Crypto AG and used it to spy on communications for decades.)

Huawei's latest statement came in response to a Wall Street Journal report yesterday quoting US officials as saying, "We have evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal information in systems it maintains and sells around the world." The US has been sharing its intelligence with allies as it tries to convince them to stop using Huawei products but still hasn't made the evidence public.

Huawei said:

US allegations of Huawei using lawful interception are nothing but a smokescreen—they don't adhere to any form of accepted logic in the cyber security domain. Huawei has never and will never covertly access telecom networks, nor do we have the capability to do so. The Wall Street Journal is clearly aware that the US government can't provide any evidence to support their allegations, and yet it still chose to repeat the lies being spread by these US officials. This reflects The Wall Street Journal's bias against Huawei and undermines its credibility.

[...]US allegations that Huawei secretly uses backdoors that were designed for law enforcement, if true, would bolster arguments from security experts that it's not possible to build backdoors that can only be accessed by their intended users in law enforcement.


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday February 13 2020, @11:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the now-they-will-sell-non-essentials? dept.

Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

Andy Rubin's smartphone startup, Essential, is finally dead. Today, Essential announced in a blog post that it is closing its doors, saying that since it has "no clear path to deliver" its newest smartphone to customers, the company has "made the difficult decision to cease operations and shut down Essential."

Essential was Andy Rubin's next company after his previous gig at Google, where he lead the development of Android, taking the OS from nothing to the world's most popular operating system. Being "The Father of Android" meant venture capital firms would throw money at him when he left Google to form a new company. That company was Essential, where Andy Rubin jumped full time into smartphone hardware. The company was valued at $1.2 billion before it even sold a single product.

The company canceled a straightforward sequel to the Essential Phone in 2018. By 2019, it was teasing "Project Gem"—a super-skinny smartphone with the form factor of a TV remote, which seemed like it would lack compatibility with most smartphone apps on the market. With today's announcement, the Gem phone is dead, too.

In between canceling products, Essential was a non-stop catastrophe of bad PR. The Essential Phone was delayed from its original launch date, and when the time finally came to take payments and ship the phone, the company botched the launch. Essential sent out a bizarre payment-processing email to some customers asking then to send in their photo IDs over email, then it accidentally CC'd that personal information to several other customers who bought Essential Phones. The move was one of the worst first impressions of all time, and Rubin called the mistake "humiliating" in a blog post.

[...] Newton Mail, an email app Essential bought one year ago, will be shut down April 30. The Essential Phone's February security update is the last OS update the device will receive from Essential, though the company was nice enough to leave some code up on GitHub for the Android hacking community to produce further updates.

-- submitted from IRC


Original Submission

posted by martyb on Thursday February 13 2020, @09:30PM   Printer-friendly
from the At-least-this-time-it-was-not-actually-deleted dept.

Reports are coming in that the Windows 10 KB4532693 cumulative update is loading an incorrect user profile and causing the user's desktop and Start Menu to be reset to default.

On February 11th, Microsoft released the Windows 10 v1909 and v1903 KB4532693 cumulative update as part of their February Patch Tuesday updates.

Since then, reports are starting to come in that after installing the update, some users state that their normal user profile is missing, their desktop files are missing, and everything was reset to default.

Here are links to some of these reports:

[...] The good news is that the update is not wiping your data, but rather renaming the original user profile in the C:\Users folder. If you are affected by this issue, you can look in C:\Users and see if you have a renamed profile ending in .000 or .bak.

Unfortunately, restoring a profile through Registry edits may be a very difficult and risky task for many people.

As some people stated that they could resolve the issue by restarting Windows a few times or uninstalling the KB4532693 update, it is safer to go down this route first if you are affected by this issue.


Original Submission

posted by Fnord666 on Thursday February 13 2020, @06:23PM   Printer-friendly
from the cheep-research dept.

How bird flocks with multiple species behave like K-pop groups:

In an analysis of nearly 100 North Florida flocks, Florida Museum of Natural History researchers found similar bird species were significantly more likely to flock together than hunt alone, working as a group to stay safe from predators while cruising the canopy in search of insects. Species kept competition within the flock low, however, by differentiating their foraging technique, their choice of hunting spot or the general distance they kept from a tree trunk.

In other words, think of flock dynamics like a K-pop band, said study lead author Harrison Jones.

"You have to be similar enough to the other members to get along as a group but specialized in some way: There's the leader, the one who raps, the one who plays guitar," said Jones, a doctoral student in the University of Florida's department of biology. "It's the same with birds. They hang out together because they share things in common, but they can't share too much. If you're so similar that you're eating each other's lunch, then you have a serious problem."

North Florida's winter flocking community is "probably the most complex in North America," Jones said, featuring dozens of migratory species and a bevy of foraging opportunities. Still, the researchers were surprised to see how specialized the birds' foraging habits were—a feature more reminiscent of the Amazon than North America.

[...] Species that pick insects off live leaves and nab them in the air—the most common foraging techniques—were relatively abundant in mixed flocks. These included ruby-crowned kinglets, blue-gray gnatcatchers and pine warblers. But birds that hunt exclusively in harder-to-find material tended to be represented by a single member per flock. These specialists called repeatedly, as though to warn others of their kind "Hands off! This is my flock," Jones said.

[...] Mixed-species flocks only occur during winter, birds' non-breeding season. Finding enough food in colder months is vital for birds, which must strike the right balance between putting on sufficient body fat to survive the night while staying lean enough to make a quick escape from a predator, Jones said.

Hunting insects as a group can be a life-saver. Flock members rely on sentinel species, which also direct the flock's movements and pace, to sound the alarm if an owl or hawk swoops in. This allows the majority of birds in the flock to devote more attention to finding food. Traveling in numbers also lessens a bird's chance of being the unlucky victim if a predator attacks.

More information: Harrison H Jones et al, Do similar foragers flock together? Nonbreeding foraging behavior and its impact on mixed-species flocking associations in a subtropical region, The Auk (2020). DOI: 10.1093/auk/ukz079

Some research really is going to the birds.


Original Submission