How pandas climb trees, new research

This video from China is about giant panda Mao Sun climbing a tree.

By Susan Milius in the USA, 28 January 2020:

How pandas use their heads as a kind of extra limb for climbing

Short legs on a chubby body demand a work-around when it comes to getting up a tree

AUSTIN, Texas — Pandas really use their heads to climb.

As the pudgy, short-legged bear climbs, it presses its head briefly against the tree trunk again and again, physicist Andrew Schulz said January 4 at the annual meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology. The head serves as a make-do extra paw, first pressed against one side of the tree and then against the other. This extra pressure helps the bear hold on as it releases and raises an actual paw. Schulz knows of similar behavior only in newborn kangaroos, which use their heads to help haul themselves to their mother’s pouch for the first time.

Head moves make sense for panda proportions, said Schulz, speaking for a research collaboration between his university, Georgia Tech in Atlanta, and China’s Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. Pandas have the shortest leg-to-body ratio among the world’s eight living bear species. “I like to call them Corgi bears,” he says.

How pandas, or any other big mammals, climb hasn’t gotten the analytic attention that techniques of squirrels and other small animals have, Schulz said. Yet rushing up a tree trunk can be a lifesaving move in the wild for pandas attacked by feral dogs. Chengdu researcher James Ayala conceived the climbing study to get the first quantitative data on emergency escape skills in captive-bred youngsters. Such information helps the Chengdu researchers judge young pandas’ chances of surviving in the wild.

For this study, the Chengdu staff built a panda climbing gym: four bark-stripped tree trunks, each a different diameter, holding up a high platform. Researchers videotaped eight young pandas, all at least a year old. The animals had grown beyond the waddling fluffball stage and were basically young teenagers with a bit of growing, and sometimes a lot of learning, left to do.

Some youngsters just didn’t get the tree thing. “No controlled ascent or descent — it was kind of madness every single time,” Schulz said of one young bear.

Others caught on, for instance reaching the pole top in eight of 10 attempts. The most successful climbers moved their heads roughly four times more than those who flubbed the poles, Schulz said. Even one female born without claws made it up the pole. The head press improves the panda grip and keeps panda weight safely balanced close to the tree.

Head-climbing looks familiar to Nicole MacCorkle, a giant panda keeper at Smithsonian’s National Zoo in Washington, D.C. She wasn’t at the meeting, but she has seen video from the Chengdu climbing tests. The zoo pandas tackle trees this way too, she says.

Although for cubs, sometimes heading up is the easy part. “They’ll climb up fairly quickly into a tree, but it seems like they can’t quite figure out how to get back down,” MacCorkle says. If cubs stay stuck too long, a keeper will come to the rescue, but, “typically they work it out for themselves.”

Iraqi anti-Trump occupation demonstrators killed

This November 2018 video says about itself:

Trump wants Iraq to pay for the US invasion with oil

Donald Trump urged the Iraqi prime minister to compensate for the 2003 US invasion of Iraq with oil, according to Axios.

By Jean Shaoul:

Iraqi government cracks down on anti-US protests

28 January 2020

Iraq’s caretaker Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi ordered a brutal crackdown on peaceful mass demonstrations that erupted on Friday. Protesters chanted “get out, get out, occupier”, and called for the immediate withdrawal of US troops from the country.

For the last three days, security forces have fired teargas and live ammunition, killing at least 12 people and wounding dozens more in the capital, Baghdad, and in the southern cities of Basra, Nasariyah, Dhi Qar and Diwaniya, in a bid to disperse the protests.

According to the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights, more than 500 people have been killed since the protests began on October 1 with several rights groups accusing security forces of using excessive force. There have been reports of kidnappings, torture, snipers on rooftops and armed gunmen in drive-by shooting of protesters.

The protests, sparked by unemployment, particularly among young people, the lack of electricity and water, poor services and rampant corruption, rapidly escalated, with calls for the government to resign, a new prime minister independent of the main political blocs, fresh elections, an end to the sectarian-based political system and the prosecution of those implicated in corruption and the killing of protesters.

While the protests have mainly taken place in Baghdad and nine predominantly Shia provinces, they have generally been supported by Sunni Iraqis. Most of the Sunni politicians, however, have remained silent over the protests.

Although Abdul Mahdi resigned last month, he remains in office until a new prime minister is appointed. Candidates nominated by the government have been rejected by the protesters as being too close to the old corrupt setup. …

Al-Sadr has millions of supporters in Baghdad’s poorest neighbourhoods and the south and heads the largest political bloc in Iraq’s parliament, which holds several ministerial posts. Al-Sadr, who has long sought to balance between Washington and Tehran, has found it increasingly difficult to contain his supporters’ hostility to the corrupt politicians that have ruled the country since the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. …

Anger was fuelled by Iraqi President Barham Salih’s meeting with US President Donald Trump at Davos last week, a clear sign that Salih wants US troops to stay in the country. This flew in the face of a parliamentary vote taken in response to mass pressure for the expulsion of all US forces from Iraq in the wake of the US drone missile assassination of Iran’s General Qassem Suleimani, along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, a prominent member of the Iraqi government and leader of the Popular Mobilization Forces, the umbrella group of predominantly Shia militias funded by the Iraqi government.

The US murder of Suleimani, who had been invited to Baghdad by Abdul Mahdi to discuss attempts to ease regional tensions between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and al-Muhandis, together with eight other Iraqis and Iranians, at Baghdad’s international airport on January 3 was an unprovoked act of war against Iran and Iraq. It provoked furious opposition from the Iraqi people across the sectarian divide to any outside interference in Iraq—whether by the US, Iran, Israel or Saudi Arabia. …

Trump … has made clear that should Iraq insist on the US leaving Iraq, then Washington will impose punishing sanctions. …

Within hours, riot police tried to storm protest camps set up across the capital and in the south, removing concrete barriers near Tahrir Square where anti-government demonstrators have camped out for months, and used tear gas and live ammunition to disperse the activists.

This served to fuel the protests, with thousands of university and school students taking to the streets in Baghdad, Basra and Nasariyah.

How Jurassic pterosaurs fed, new research

This video is called TRILOGY OF LIFE – Walking with Dinosaurs – “Ramphorhynchus“.

By John Pickrell, January 27, 2020 at 5:00 am:

A squid fossil offers a rare record of pterosaur feeding behavior

A tooth embedded in a squid fossil tells a story of a battle at sea with the flying reptile

A fossil of a squid with a pterosaur tooth embedded in it offers extraordinary evidence of a 150-million-year-old battle at sea. While many pterosaur fossils containing fish scales and bones in their stomachs have revealed that some of these flying reptiles included fish in their diet, the new find from Germany is the first proof that pterosaurs also hunted squid.

The fossil was excavated in 2012 in the Solnhofen Limestone, near Eichstätt in Bavaria, where many Jurassic Period fossils of pterosaurs, small dinosaurs and the earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, have been found. The region’s environment at the time was something like the Bahamas today, with low-lying islands dotting shallow tropical seas.

The embedded tooth fits the right size and shape for the pterosaur Rhamphorhynchus, paleontologists report online January 27 in Scientific Reports. They argue that the tooth was left by a pterosaur that swooped to the ocean surface to snap up the 30-centimeter-long squid from the extinct Plesioteuthis genus, but was unsuccessful, possibly because the squid was too large or too far down in the water column for the predator to manage.

“The Plesioteuthis squid wrestled it off and escaped, breaking at least one tooth off the pterosaur, which became lodged in [the squid’s] mantle,” says Jordan Bestwick, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in England. “This fossil is important in helping us understand the dietary range of Rhamphorhynchus, and tells us about its hunting behavior.”

The fossil itself is unique, according to pterosaur researcher Taíssa Rodrigues at the Federal University of Espírito Santo in Vitorio, Brazil, who was not involved in the study. “It is very rare to find predator-prey interactions that include pterosaurs,” she says. “In the few cases we do have, pterosaurs were the prey of large fish. So it is great to see this the other way around.”

Paleontologist Michael Habib of the University of Southern California in Los Angeles says he suspects the squid was far too large for the pterosaur to haul out of the water. “The pterosaur was lucky that the tooth broke off,” says Habib, who was not involved with the study. “A squid of that size could probably have pulled it under.”

Blogger Recognition Award, thank you Ospreyshire!

My blogging friend Ospreyshire of Ospreyhire’s Realm blog has nominated Dear Kitty. Some blog for the Blogger Recognition Award.

Thank you so much for this kind gesture!

The rules of this award are:

1. Post an image of the award.

2. Thank your nominator.

3. Give the story or history of your blog.

4. Give two or more pieces of advice for new bloggers.

5. Nominate 10 other bloggers and link to their blogs.

6. Comment on their blogs so they know of their nomination.

A brief description of my blog is here. It started in 2005 on ModBlog. However, ModBlog was sold to a big corporation which deleted it. So, after having been on Blogsome, which was deleted as well, I am on WordPress since the end of 2011.

Two pieces of advice for new bloggers are:

1. Especially in older blog posts, you may check whether links have become broken, and repair them. There is a tool for that, Xenu’s Link Sleuth, downloadable here.

2. Use categories and tags for your blog posts, making it easier for yourself, yout readers, search engines etc. to find related posts. Not too many categories and tags per blog post though; it seems that for WordPress over 12 is too many.

My ten nominees are:

1. A Little Haze Book Blog

2. dinipandareads

3. Chapter Malliumpkin

4. Marshmellow Pastel

5. Willow Writes And Reads

6. AfictionReality

7. Local Bee Hunter’s Little Nook

8. It Is What It Is

9. Bookmark Your Thoughts

10. Maggie B. Reads

Related articles

• Unique Blogger Award
• Blogger Recognition Award, thanks Cosmic Explorer!
• Blogger Recognition Award, thank you Xena!
• Real Neat Blog Award, my congratulations for you!
• Starlight Blogger Award, thanks unbolt and Jennifer!
• Creative Blogger Award, thank you Aquileana!

Female leopard stops fighting males, video

This 28 January 2020 video from South Africa says about itself:

Watch the incredible moment a leopardess spots two male leopards fighting over her, where she comes in and seemingly breaks up them up!

Daniel Bailey, 28-year-old Safari Guide at Mala Mala, captured this incredible sighting while on one of his drives recently. He explained the scenes leading up to his intense sighting:

“It was early in the morning. The temperature was still cool and ideal for a sighting of one of the big cats.

Not long after we started the drive, we found fresh tracks of a male leopard on the road close to the riverbank. We soon found him in a drainage line just a few feet off the road.”

“While observing the leopard, everything from his body language, constant scent-marking, and profuse salivation, it became clear that there was another leopard in the area. Indeed, a few moments later, another male leopard appeared. As soon as he became visible an audible low growl commenced and then a female appeared! She trailed the 2nd male’s every move, rubbing up against him, trying to entice him.”

“As the sighting played out, a sense of excitement and adrenaline started to course through my veins. It is special seeing a leopard in the wild but three adults together is not so common. The presence of a female and two big males seeking breeding rights, it had all the ingredients for an unforgettable sighting. It was clear that neither male wished to relinquish the opportunity to win the female. The scene was on a knife’s edge and tensions were running high. A clash was imminent.”

“The two male leopards sized each other up. Then started running alongside each other (a display known as parallel drafting) and then a clash broke out between the two males. They made contact just out of sight behind some vegetation. Once regaining visual, both males were locked teeth and claw in a ball. The younger male had pinned the older male by the head and neck. Whilst the other kicked and scratched wildly to try to loosen his grip.”

“The female eventually caught up, examined the scene and then seemingly broke up them up. She attacked the nape of the neck of the younger male and this sent all three leopards flying into the air. The younger male, unsure of his attacker, let go of his grip and quickly escaped to the safety of a nearby sausage tree. The scene settled down, with the older male slightly bruised and disorientated. He scent-marked and eventually lay down in the shade, licking and cleaning his wounds. The female examined him briefly and then disappeared into the river bed below the sausage tree to try and find the victor, which by now had descended the tree.”

“It was a very rare sighting. It was a dream sighting for any ranger or guest alike. One could spend a lifetime in the bush and never see male leopards in a serious clash like this. Let alone have three leopards in a sighting”.

“When you are at a sighting that might get intense, take a deep breath and enjoy the moment. Try and ensure you have a beanbag or something to support your camera body and a larger lens to prevent camera shake. Your adrenaline will be through the roof, and your hands will be shaking due to seer excitement. Try stay zoomed out – if you’re zoomed in too close you’ll miss a lot.”

“At the sighting, there was just me and my guests. At Mala Mala Game Reserve the leopard sightings are restricted to only two vehicles at a time. This is done to ensure the comfortability of the predators and to ensure there is no negative effect on these high profile felines.”

Hitler’s mass murder of LGBTQ people

By Ryan Williams in Wales:

Monday, January 27, 2020

Remembering LGBT people murdered in the Holocaust

TODAY, International Holocaust Remembrance Day, Unison Cymru Wales will be remembering all those who perished in the Holocaust with a minute’s silence in our regional and branch offices.

We stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community in commemorating the more than six million people murdered in a crime against humanity.

What is less well known is that alongside Jewish victims, many Romany Gypsies, people with disabilities and members of the LGBT community were also targeted by the nazis.

Berlin in the 1920s and early ’30s was home to a flourishing LGBT community, however, the rise of the nazi party changed that. It brutally cracked down on gay people, who they portrayed as a threat to society.

In the concentration camps, prisoners arrested for being “homosexual” were forced to wear a pink triangle on their sleeve as a badge of shame.

“Homosexuals” in the camps suffered an unusual degree of cruelty by their captors, including being used as target practice on shooting ranges.

Gay people were additionally used as subjects for nazi medical experiments, as scientists tried to find a “cure” for homosexuality.

Between 1933 and 1945, an estimated 100,000 men were arrested in nazi Germany as “homosexuals”, of whom 50,000 were sentenced, and between 5,000 and 15,000 were sent to concentration camps.

Lesbians, bi women and trans people, whose experiences remain under-researched, were also targeted. It is unclear how many LGBT people perished in these camps.

After the war, the treatment of “homosexuals” in concentration camps went unacknowledged by most countries, and some men were even rearrested and imprisoned based on evidence found during the nazi years.

It was not until the 1980s that governments began to acknowledge this episode, and only in 2002 did the German government apologise to the gay community.

In 2005, the European Parliament adopted a resolution on the Holocaust which included the persecution of “homosexuals”. Commissioned memorials around the world were adopted, including the Memorial to Homosexuals Persecuted Under Nazism in Berlin.

Now, the pink triangle has been inverted and reclaimed as a symbol of queer resistance and liberation, as was done most visibly by US HIV/Aids activists in the 1980s.

The pink triangle symbolises the power of remembering the past, reflecting on the injustices that persist today, and the possibility of a future where people are not demonised for their differences.

Today LGBT+ people face an increase in hate crime and continued discrimination in Welsh communities and workplaces.

Unison Cymru Wales, with 100,000 members in public services across the country, is using its enormous reach to challenge prejudice and intolerance.

Anyone who faces discrimination should think about how a union can help and join our campaign for equality and respect for everyone.

Ryan Williams is Unison Cymru Wales LGBT+ officer.

USA: FOOTBALL COACH SUSPENDED OVER HITLER COMMENTS Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Michigan, suspended new football coach Morris Berger after he said in an interview with the school’s student-run paper that the way Adolf Hitler “was able to lead was second-to-none” and that “you can’t deny he wasn’t a great leader.” [HuffPost]

Golden eagle feeds in Swedish winter, video

This video shows a golden eagle feeding in a Swedish winter.

London Grenfell fire disaster cladding corporations’ irresponsibility

By Lamiat Sabin in Britain:

Monday, January 27, 2020

Grenfell cladding firms pass the buck

Second phase of the inquiry hears companies showing ‘no trace of responsibility’ for the horrific London fire

COMPANIES involved in the fatally flawed refurbishment of Grenfell Tower are playing the blame game: expressing “no trace of responsibility” for the fire, the inquiry’s second phase heard yesterday.

The second stage of the investigation into the 2017 disaster that killed 72 people opened at a new venue in Paddington, west London, to consider how the council housing block came to be wrapped in the cladding.

The first stage concluded that flammable aluminium composite material (ACM) cladding was the “principal” reason for the rapid spread of fire up the 24-floor building.

Grenfell United, a group representing bereaved families and survivors, said that the second stage of the inquiry should “expose the people and organisations who put profit above our safety.”

The inquiry’s chief lawyer Richard Millett QC accused the corporate firms of passing the buck without accepting any blame.

Addressing inquiry chairman Sir Martin Moore-Bick, he said: “With the sole exception of RBKC [Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea], not a single core participant involved in the primary refurbishment of Grenfell Tower has felt able to make an unqualified submission against its own interests.

“With that solitary exception, Mr chairman, one finds in those detailed and carefully crafted statements no trace of any acceptance of any responsibility for what happened at Grenfell Tower. Not from the architects, not from the contract managers, main contractors.

“Any member of the public reading those statements and taking them all at face value would be forced to conclude that everyone involved in the refurbishment of Grenfell Tower did what they were supposed to do and nobody made any serious or causative mistakes.

“All core participants who played a material part in Grenfell Tower have laid out a detailed case that it relied on others, and how in no way was the work it did either substandard or non-compliant [with building regulations].

“In every case, what happened was, as each of them would have it, someone else’s fault.”

Studio E, the lead architect for the refurbishment that took place between 2012 and 2016, said it “did not have any knowledge that the products used on the tower were unsafe.”

Main contractor Rydon said the providers of cladding and insulation, Arconic and Celotex, misled buyers into believing their products were safe for towers despite appearing to know of the dangers.

An internal report from an Arconic director in 2011 noted the material Reynobond PE was “dangerous on facades.”

During the hearing, Rydon lawyer Marcus Taverner QC read out an internal Celotex email from November 2013 that showed that officials were aware that the insulation material CelotexRS500 with ACM cladding could “melt and allow fire into the cavity.”

After hearing the “shocking” allegations against the companies, Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack called for an overhaul of the “entire system” of building and fire safety.

He said: “We have little time for buck-passing from the businesses complicit in wrapping Grenfell with flammable cladding. They must all be held to account.”

Yesterday’s opening of the second stage of the inquiry followed inquiry-panel member Benita Mehra’s resignation after the discovery that she had links to a charitable arm of the firm that supplied the tower block’s deadly cladding.

Ms Mehra tendered her resignation to Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Saturday after it was disclosed that she was a former president of the Women’s Engineering Society.

According to the society’s website, the organisation benefited last year from funding from Arconic for an apprentice conference.

Michael Mansfield QC, representing victims, was scathing. He said there has been “a stunning silence” from Mr Johnson and the Cabinet Office on the resignation of Ms Mehra and whether she would be replaced.

See also here.

MORE than 260 residential blocks in England still remain cloaked in Grenfell-style cladding, government statistics revealed today. Of these buildings, 86 are social sector and 175 private-sector residential buildings, the ministry of housing’s monthly building safety report said: here.

TENANTS came from all over the country to lobby Parliament yesterday demanding that the tower blocks they live in are immediately stripped of flammable cladding before another terrible fire, like the one at Grenfell Tower, breaks out: here.