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Thursday, April 17, 2008

Australia suffers massive shorebird loss

SYDNEY (UPI) -- Australia has suffered a "truly alarming" decline in its number of migratory and resident shorebirds, a long-term study revealed.

An aerial survey conducted by the University of New South Wales in the eastern third of the continent determined migratory shorebird populations plunged by 73 percent and 15 species of resident shorebirds declined by 81 percent between 1983 and 2006.

"This is a truly alarming result: in effect, three-quarters of eastern Australia's millions of resident and migratory shorebirds have disappeared in just one generation," said Professor Richard Kingsford, an author of the study. "The wetlands and resting places that they rely on for food and recuperation are shrinking virtually all the way along their migration path, from Australia through Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia and up through Asia into China and Russia."

The study that included John Porter and Silke Nebel appears in the journal Biological Conservation.

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Copyright 2008 by United Press International

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

Wordless Wednesday

yummy!! I love Snitzel!! I cooked this last Saturday as mentioned in my post that same day.
It is like a breaded pork...It is one of my favorite!!!

Cheap Phone Cards and Calling Cards

I always call back home to the Philippines at least once a week for almost 5 years now. I am presently living in Germany. Calling from Germany to the Philippines is quite expensive. We always have high telephone bills every month. I even remember the first time I arrived here in Germany way back in 2003 and called back home for 1 hour and we were billed so high !! Can you imagine paying 60Euros for 1 hour calling to the Philippines??? My gosh, that is around four thousand pesos.. A lot of money..huh??

Of course, nobody wants to pay high telephone bills. Everybody want to save money, unless maybe if you are a millionaire and spending money might not be a pain in the pocket. I also have a sister in USA who might also want to save some bucks for telephone bills.

Nowadays prepaid phone cards are already very common and great means to keep in touch with our love ones who are thousand miles away from us. While browsing the net, I stumbled at THERICHCOM.COM. It is an online shop that sells prepaid phone cards to call different countries around the world ranging from Asia to Europe and middle east. Callers can call from the United States to anywhere around the globe for very cheap price compared to leading companies like AT&T, etc.

I am highly recommending this site to my sister in Las Vegas and to all my dear readers and friends to the USA. Since I am also flying to the US this month, I believed I can also save some bucks if I call my family in the Philippines and Germany..What a perfect timing!!

Visit this site for more infos and of course to save some money too!! Great idea right!!!

Tuesday, April 15, 2008

It's Joke Time!!

Life's a Mess

A poodle and a collie were walking down the street. The poodle turned to the collie and complained, "My life is a mess. My owner is mean, my girlfriend is having an affair with a German shepherd, and I'm nervous as a cat."

"Why don't you go see a psychiatrist?" asked the collie.

"I can't," replied the poodle. "I'm not allowed on the couch."

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Smaller asteroid may have killed dinosaurs

HONOLULU (UPI) -- A scientist in Hawaii says the asteroid implicated in the extinction of dinosaurs was much smaller than previously suggested.

Francois Paquay of the University of Hawaii Manoa has developed a new tool using variations of osmium isotope composition in the marine sediment record to estimate the size of asteroid impacts, the university said Thursday in a release.

The findings are published in the journal Science.

Paquay said sediment shows the asteroid that created Chicxulub crater off the coast of Mexico was about 2.5 miles wide -- less than half the size that researchers had previously suggested, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The researchers estimate the size of the asteroid that created the 63-mile-wide Popigai crater in Siberia at about 1.7 miles across. Previous estimates had put that asteroid at about 2.5 miles across.

New system makes hydrogen from plant sugar

BLACKSBURG, Va. (UPI) -- A U.S. scientist says he has developed a technology that can convert plant sugars into hydrogen to be used in hydrogen-fueled cars.

Virginia Tech Assistant Professor Percival Zhang says the process involves combining plant sugars, water and a cocktail of powerful enzymes to produce hydrogen and carbon dioxide under mild reaction conditions.

"This is revolutionary work," said Zhang. "This has opened up a whole new direction in hydrogen research. With technology improvement, sugar-powered vehicles could come true eventually."

Zhang and colleagues said they believe they can produce hydrogen from cellulose, which has a similar chemical formula to starch, but is far more difficult to break down.

In laboratory studies, the scientists collected 13 different, well-known enzymes and combined them with water and starches inside a specially designed reactor. The resulting broth reacted to produce only carbon dioxide and hydrogen, with no leftover pollutants. However, they said the amount of hydrogen produced was too low for commercial use and the speed of the reactions wasn't optimal.

Zhang and colleagues described the system -- called the world's most efficient method for producing hydrogen -- this week in New Orleans during the American Chemical Society's 235th national meeting.

Potential diabetes drug target identified

TORONTO (UPI) -- Canadian scientists announced the discovery of a novel signaling pathway to the gut, brain and liver that lowers blood sugar when it is activated.

The scientists at the Toronto General Hospital Research Institute, led by Dr. Tony Lam, used a rat model to discover that fats can activate a subset of nerves in the intestine, which then send a signal to the brain and subsequently to the liver to lower glucose production.

"This is a new approach in developing more effective methods to lower glucose or blood sugar levels in those who are obese or have diabetes," said Lam.

"We already knew that the brain and liver can regulate blood glucose levels," he said, "but the question has been, how do you therapeutically target either of these two organs without incurring side effects? We may have found a way around this problem by suggesting that the gut can be the initial target instead.

"If new medicines can be developed that stimulate this sensing mechanism in the gut, we may have an effective way of slowing down the body's production of sugar, thereby lowering blood sugar levels in diabetes," said Lam.

The research appears in the online issue of the journal Science in advance of print publication.