Category Archives: Evolution

February 16, 2017 A suite of common ecological impacts ofroads are shown as labeled arrows. While these effects are well described in roadecology, their role as known or likely agents of natural selection is poorly understood.Yet these factors are capable of driving contemporary evolutionary change. Studying the evolutionary effects of these factors will provide a more comprehensiveunderstanding of the ways in which organisms are responding to the presence and consequences of roads. (This is Figure 2 from the paper). Credit: Graphic created by Steven P. Brady using symbols courtesy of the Integration and Application Network, University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science (ian.umces.edu/symbols/).

Roads are causing rapid evolutionary change in wild populations of plants and animals according to a Concepts and Questions paper published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. The paper is available now online in 'early view' ahead of being featured on the cover in the print edition on March 1.

Said to be the largest human artifact on the planet, roads impact the ecology of nearly 20 percent of the U.S. landscape alone, and globally, are projected to increase 60 percent in length by 2050; yet, how roads are triggering contemporary evolutionary changes among plants and animals, is a topic that has typically been overlooked.

By drawing on previous studies, the researchers show that the numerous negative effects of roads - such as pollution and road kill - can cause rapid evolutionary changes in road-adjacent populations. This finding that roads spur rapid evolution is transforming scientists' views of the biological impacts caused by the ever-expanding network of roads.Over a period of just a few generations - and in one case in as few as just 30 years - some populations living in road-adjacent habitat are evolving higher tolerance to pollutants, such as road salt runoff; the common grass Anthoxanthum odoratum is one such example, the spotted salamander (Ambystoma maculatum) is another. Despite this positive influence of rapid evolution, road-adjacent populations are not always able to adapt to life beside the road, at times becoming 'maladapted,' evolving lower tolerances to negative road effects. This can occur even if other species in those habitats are adapting, as was the case with the spotted salamander and a cohabitant frog. Earlier fieldwork by Brady found that the survival rate for wood frog Rana sylvatica populations living by the road was 29 percent lower than those transplanted from other areas. With the spotted salamander and wood frog, the fitness of each population had increased and decreased, respectively, relative to populations not living roadside, which demonstrates how local adaptive and maladaptive changes are occurring through natural selection among various species. Even though a population may experience local adaptation, the researchers point out that while evolution might decrease the chance of local extinction, it does not preclude it.

"We have long known that slicing and dicing our planet with roads presents many challenges for plants and animals but we are only now beginning to appreciate that those same challenges can drive evolutionary change over just a few generations. This forces us to reconsider the nature of road effects and the complexity of ways that life responds to them," says lead-author Steven P. Brady (http://stevenpbrady.weebly.com/), a biologist in the Department of Water and Land Resources at King County in Seattle, Wash., who was a post-doctoral fellow in biological sciences at Dartmouth College, when the paper was written. Brady was a member of Ryan Calsbeek's Lab in Evolutionary Ecology at Dartmouth.

"It is striking to consider that across such different organisms - grasses, swallows, amphibians - roads have similar capacity to cause divergent evolution among local populations," says Brady. "But what is perhaps most surprising is that some populations appear to be evolving maladaptively right alongside populations that are evolving adaptively. And from what we can tell, such maladaptive outcomes may become increasingly common in response to human-modified environments such as road-adjacent habitats."

The evolutionary perspectives of road ecology is integral to understanding how roads are impacting our environment, and to planning for and implementing conservation efforts. As new roads and infrastructure projects are considered by local, state and federal municipalities, including the prospect of a new U.S. infrastructure program, an integrated policy approach that considers maximizing the connectivity of habitats, preserving genetic diversity and increasing population sizes, may help "mitigate the consequences of roads."

Explore further: Road runoff spurring spotted salamander evolution

More information: Steven P Brady et al. Road ecology: shifting gears toward evolutionary perspectives, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment (2017). DOI: 10.1002/fee.1458

Spotted salamanders exposed to contaminated roadside ponds are adapting to their toxic environments, according to a Yale paper in Scientific Reports. This study provides the first documented evidence that a vertebrate has ...

Leipzig/Halle (Saale)/Porto. The effects of roads on carnivores have obviously been underestimated in worldwide species conservation. This is the conclusion of the first comprehensive global study on this topic, which has ...

Naturally occurring chemicals found in road salts commonly used to de-ice paved surfaces can alter the sex ratios in nearby frog populations, a phenomenon that could reduce the size and viability of species populations, according ...

Senckenberg scientists have studied the impact of old forest roads on the species diversity in the rainforest of Central Guyana. They reached the conclusion that the established roads may be of use for amphibians and should ...

Roads present a serious threat to bat populations, indicating that protection policies are failing.

(Phys.org) A first-of-its-kind study by Boise State University researchers shows that the negative effects of roads on wildlife are largely because of traffic noise.

Facial recognition is a biometricsystem that identifies or verifies a person from a digital image. It's used to find criminals, identify passport and driver's license fraud, and catch shoplifters. But can it be used to ...

A smart trap for mosquitoes? A new high-tech version is promising to catch the bloodsuckers while letting friendlier insects escapeand even record the exact weather conditions when different species emerge to bite.

Where do honey bees come from? A new study from researchers at the University of California, Davis and UC Berkeley clears some of the fog around honey bee origins. The work could be useful in breeding bees resistant to disease ...

Timothy Blake, a postdoctoral fellow in the Waymouth lab, was hard at work on a fantastical interdisciplinary experiment. He and his fellow researchers were refining compounds that would carry instructions for assembling ...

A University of Michigan biologist combined the techniques of "resurrection ecology" with the study of dated lake sediments to examine evolutionary responses to heavy-metal contamination over the past 75 years.

A study reported Feb. 17 in the journal Science led by researchers at Indiana University and Harvard University is the first to reveal in extreme detail the operation of the biochemical clockwork that drives cellular division ...

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Roads are driving rapid evolutionary change in our environment - Phys.Org

Pokemon Go is available for iOS and Android devices. (Niantic)

With the latest update toPokemon Go,Politoed is now available.

Politoed is, of course, a second generation Pokemon that evolves from Poliwhirl. Getting your hands on aPolitoed wont be an easy process, though, as you first have to rack up 100Poliwhirl Candies.

As you can see in the screenshot below, theres one other item you need in addition to the candy:

That item there is called a Kings Rock, and its one of several evolution items that have been added to the game in the February 16th update. In order to evolvePoliwhirl intoPolitoed, you need both the 100Poliwhirl Candy and the one Kings Rock.

Kings Rock can only be obtained through visiting PokeStops. The evolution items dont appear to be given out too frequently, so youll have to just keep visiting PokeStops and collecting items in hopes of being lucky enough to come across a Kings Rock.

The Kings Rock can also only be used for a single use, and so once you evolve aPoliwhirl, the Kings Rock you utilized will be gone forever, and youll have to go back to PokeStop spinning if you want another one. Kings Rock can also be utilized to evolve Slowpoke.

As you can see in the screenshot above, from thePoliwhirl screen, there are two separate evolution buttons: one to evolve into Poliwrath, and one to evolve into Politoed. The former only requires 100Poliwhirl Candy, but the latter requires both the candy and the Kings Rock.

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'Pokemon Go': How to Evolve Poliwhirl Into Politoed - Heavy.com

Without calling it a series, I've written several articles recently that followed a logical path. In the first, I described the distinction between incremental innovation and radical innovation. I also outlined the commonalities and differences between intelligent design and theistic evolution (TE) as approaches to biology. In a follow-up, I applied the concepts from the first article to the proposed evolution of the vertebrate eye, demonstrating that it could not have occurred without intelligent direction. That's mainly because the majority of steps required for the addition of a lens are disadvantageous in isolation, so selective pressures would have operated in opposition to the evolutionary process.

Let's now consider the challenge of waiting times -- the minimum time required for hypothesized evolutionary transformations, such as the development of the camera eye, to occur through undirected processes. Even if the selective pressures were favorable, the required timescales are far longer for sufficient numbers of coordinated mutations to accumulate than the maximum time available, as determined by the fossil record. Of special interest is the proposed cooption of crystallin proteins, which give the lens its refractive properties. Seemingly, one of the easiest evolutionary steps should be producing these proteins in the lens, for some of them are already used for other purposes. The main hurdle would simply be altering the regulatory regions of the first borrowed crystallin gene, so it binds to the correct set of transcription factors (TFs). The lens protein could then be produced in the fiber cells in sufficient quantities at the right time in development.

However, the cooption process is far more challenging than it might at first appear. It requires regions in the gene to bind to at least four new transcription factors. This alteration would involve numerous mutations creating the four corresponding DNA binding sites known as transcription factor binding sites (TFBS). As I mentioned in the previous article, the earliest lens should have closely resembled lenses of vertebrates today, so this lower estimate is almost certainly accurate.

A typical binding site involved in lens construction consists of a DNA sequence ranging from roughly 7 (e.g., SOX2) to 15 (e.g., Pax6) base pairs, so four TFBS would likely correspond to over 30 base pairs. One could think of these DNA sequences like the launch codes to a missile; they must be correct before the protein can be properly manufactured. The lower bound of 30 base pairs can be divided by a factor of 3 to compensate for sequence redundancies, flexibility in where in the DNA sequences start, and the fact that roughly one quarter of the bases would be correct purely by chance. This extremely conservative estimate indicates that over 10 mutations would be required to generate a proper sequence. All but the final mutation would be neutral.

We can now calculate the likelihood of sufficient mutations occurring in 10 million generations. The mutation rate for a specific base par is typically estimated for complex animals to correspond to a probability around 1 in 100 million. The chance of a mutation occurring in 10 million generations is then 1 in 10. Therefore, the chance of 10 coordinated mutations appearing on the same DNA strand works out to much less than 1 in 10 billion. No potential precursor to a vertebrate with a lens would have had an effective population large enough to acquire the needed mutations. For comparison, the effective population size estimate used for Drosophila melanogaster can be in the low millions. If the generation time were even as low as one year, a crystallin could not be coopted even in 10 million years, which is the time required for the appearance of most known phyla in the Cambrian explosion.

Moreover, this step is only one of hundreds required to produce a lens. Researchers have identified numerous TFs essential to lens development in vertebrates, and each has its own set of TFBS, which integrate into a complex developmental regulatory gene network. If only one connection were wired incorrectly, the eye in the vast majority of cases would not form properly, resulting in impaired vision. In addition, the lens is only one component of the eye, which is only one part of the visual system. The obvious conclusion is that, in the timeframe allowed by the fossil record, the reengineering to produce the vertebrate visual system would require foresight and deliberate coordination. Those are the hallmarks of design.

Biologists have claimed to produce viable scenarios for the evolution of several other complex systems. What all these stories share is that they ignore crucial details and lack careful analysis of feasibility. When we examine these issues in detail, the stories collapse for the same reasons that the one about the eye does: First, the selective pressures oppose transitions between key proposed stages. Second, the required timescales are vastly longer than what is available.

For biologists, rigorously evaluating evolutionary narratives has become fully possible only in the past several decades due to advances in molecular and developmental biology. Meanwhile, with breakthroughs in computer engineering, information theory, and nanotechnology, parallels between biological and human engineered systems are increasingly evident. These developments are making the intelligent design framework essential for scientific advancement. They also create new opportunities for ID proponents and theistic evolutionists to collaborate.

Proponents of TE want to push materialistic explanations for biological systems as far as possible, as science demands. ID advocates would not disagree with them on that. No one wants to trigger the design filter prematurely. So theistic evolutionists should join us in considering what the modern evolutionary synthesis with its auxiliary hypotheses, such as niche construction and epigenetic inheritance, can explain. We should all continue to examine how insights from evolution may benefit research on cancer, in epidemiology, and other fields.

ID researchers, meanwhile, can examine the limits of purely materialistic processes, and we invite theistic evolutionists to do likewise These combined efforts will help to define in greater detail what Michael Behe calls the edge of evolution. This understanding would also help advance research on cancer treatments, antibiotic protocols, and more. At the same time, ID proponents can help identify how principles and insights from engineering may advance biological research and related applications.

Many theistic evolutionists recognize that the appearance of design is real (but then, so does Richard Dawkins). This insight, at least, should inform their research. In contrast, anti-theistic evolutionists are biased against recognizing the benefits of design thinking. As a result, in studying life they have stumbled upon close parallels to human engineering, which, however, they recognized only begrudgingly. On the other hand, ID expects these parallel and is unsurprised to find them. A classic example is how researchers, misled by evolutionary thinking, dismissed a large portion of the human genome as "junk" DNA instead of anticipating that it would function as a genomic operating system.

TE researchers do not need to immediately agree with ID researchers on whether any particular feature of life is the result of primary design or secondary causes. They can still work together to best serve the cause of genuine science, and I hope they will do so more in the future.

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Eye Evolution: The Waiting Is the Hardest Part - Discovery Institute

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Niantic and The Pokemon Company have announced that more than 80 new Pokemon are headed to Pokemon Go this week.

The new Pokemon come from the Johto region, originally introduced in Pokemon Gold and Silver, and can be encountered in the wild starting this week. Niantic is also adding new Evolution items for evolving Pokemon, as well as new purchasable outfit and accessory options for customizing your trainer.

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New berries will also be introduced to aid in catching Pokemon. The new Nanab Berry will slow the movements of wild Pokemon, while the Pinap Berry will double the amount of candy earned from catching a Pokemon if the next ball thrown yields a successful catch. The new berries join the Razz Berriesthat were already in the game, which can be fed to a Pokemon to make them slightly easier to catch.

While a full list of new Pokemon isnt available yet, Niantic specifically mentioned that Chikorita, Cyndaquil, and Totodile will be among the new additions. The new Pokemon coming this week join the initial set of Pokemon from generation 2 introduced to Pokemon Go in December, which included Togepi, Togetic, Pichu, Elekid, Smoochum, Magby, Igglybuff, and Cleffa.

A few of the new Pokemon and new berry types on display.

Todays announcement arrives as the Pokemon Go Valentines Day event comes to a close, ending a week of double candy rewards and extended six-hour Lure Modules.

The news also ends months of speculation about the full Johto Pokedex appearing in Pokemon Go, following details datamined from previous updates. Additional features found from datamining, including shiny Pokemon variants, have not yet been officially announced.

For much more on Pokemon Go, see IGNs Pokemon Go wiki guide, including a list of original Pokemon that evolve in generation two.

Andrew is IGN's executive editor of news and currently has a full Pokedex for the United States and Europe. You can find him rambling about Persona and cute animals on Twitter.

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Pokemon Go Adds 80 Generation 2 Pokemon, New Evolution Items This Week - IGN

CHRISTOPHE SIMON/Getty Images Tim CollinsFeatured ColumnistFebruary 15, 2017

Thomas Meunier looked up, and all he saw was empty space. For 70 minutes, he and his Paris Saint-Germain team-mates had seen little else, so he put his head down and ran and ran and ran, all the way from right-back to the other penalty area where Edinson Cavani was waiting for the baton, poised to blitz the final leg.

Thrashing the ball into the net, Cavani set off, first toward the corner flag and then past team-mates, beyond his own bench and past opposition manager Luis Enrique, covering more distance with more speed than every Barcelona player on the night combined to embrace those in the stands at the other end.

In the background, the scoreboard read 4-0. It may as well have read "The End."

Cavani's goal was the nadir in a nightmare for Barcelona, but it was also so much more. This was the goal and the brutal treatment the Catalans have been trending toward all season. Every warning that's been dealt, every concern that's been voiced, they'd all fixated on a moment and a night such as thisone that had felt as though it was coming, one when the consequences of drift would crystallise.

Even if the extent of Tuesday's hammering at Parc des Princeswas surprising, the nature of the performance wasn't. For those who've watched Barcelona closely this season, this wasn't anything new. Instead, it was more of the same; only the strength of the opponent was different.

Watching PSG harass and trample the Catalans was essentially the maxed-out version of the type of contest we'd seen a handful of times before. Rewind to the clash with Celta Vigo in October and you'll see all the same themes; rewind to the games against Valencia, Manchester City, Sevilla, Real Sociedad and Real Betis and you'll see them, too.

On Wednesday morning, the cover of Catalonia-based Sport read, "This is not Barca." You knew what it meant. In a broader sense, this isn't them: the identity, the philosophy, the strength of the collective. But Sport's cover was also wrongthis is what this Barca have become.

It is Luis Enrique of course who has steered Barcelona down this path. The period of evolution led by the Asturian since 2014 has been both necessary and highly successful, reaping a treble in his first season and a domestic double last term. But evolution has now become regression, with the process having gone beyond the outer limit of its effectiveness and the team having moved too far along the spectrum. Tuesday signals the end of such a shift.

"It is difficult," the Barcelona boss said afterwards. "They were superior to us from the start. It was a disastrous night for us in which we were clearly inferior.There's not much more to say. PSG did what we expected them to do and produced their best version and we were at our poorest."

Nowhere was that more evident on Tuesday than in midfield. Once the cornerstone of Barcelona's dominance, the central third at Parc des Princeswas the area of the game's greatest discrepancy. Marco Verratti was sublime for the hosts, the conductor behind the athletic enforcers in Adrien Rabiot and Blaise Matuidi.

That trio swamped Sergio Busquets and rendered an underdone Andres Iniesta irrelevant. Gone, then, was the control so characteristic of Barcelonathe command of possession, the metronomic quality of the ball movement, the domination of territory, the suffocation of the opponent.

The effects of that were felt everywhere. Angel Di Maria attacked the space between a besieged midfield and a backtracking defensive line, Julian Draxler tormented an exposed Sergi Roberto and the vaunted front three had no supply line.

"I was there for Barca's 5-0 win over Real Madrid and was left with a similar facial expression right after it as they have now," Di Maria told beIN Sports (h/t Marca). "Surely, Barcelona have been finished."

The collapse, though, of Barcelona's central foundation is more consequence than cause. The erosion of the club's midfield supremacy has been the casualty of the Luis Enrique-led evolution as the team's definition has changed, with the emphasis moving to the forwards.

In Lucho's first season, the club's march to a treble was due to the calibration of Lionel Messi, Luis Suarez and Neymar falling into place largely within the existing framework. There was a degree of compromise, as the manager's desire for explosiveness met midway between it and structure. But since, that shift has continued unabated, taking Barcelona away from what they were and to where they are now. Luis Enrique will pay for that.

"[Johan]Cruyff built the cathedral. It is our job to maintain it," Pep Guardiola once said. The problem is not the cathedral; it's still there. The problem is that they've drifted too far from their own religion.

For that, Barcelona's players will have to take their share of responsibility. But they'll also get their chance to make amends. Luis Enrique likely won't.

The man who played at the Camp Nou for eight years around the turn of the century has a contract that expires in June, and he has been non-committal all season on his future. Tense and often prickly, the Barca boss has regularly exuded the feeling he's tired of the demands, tired of the scrutiny and political swirl. His position consumes even the greats, and you sense that strain has taken its toll.

At the beginning of the campaign, this writer suggested that this season would present stiffer challenges to the 46-year-old: "Just as testing will be the necessity to continue feeding his players' drive. Astutely, he'll need to keep pushing his stars, challenging them, appealing relentlessly to them as competitors for another year after already doing so for two."

It's this that's seemingly escaped him, and it's not unusual. The great Hungarian manager Bela Guttmann used to argue that the third season was the point at which methods grew stale, messages lost their punch and at which opponents worked out the riddle. "The third season," went his famous line, "is fatal." And so it looks to be proving.

Back in November, when Barcelona were ambushed and run over by Manchester City,Sport likened the Luis Enrique incarnation with the way Liam Gallagher once described Oasis: "Like a Ferrari: Great to look at. Great to drive. And it'll f--king spin out of control every now and again."

Under the club's current manager, years one and two were full of great driving. In year three, they've been gradually losing the back end before entering a high-speed spin on Tuesday. There's a pole not far in the distance.

Almost certainly heading out of the Champions League, Barcelona are three weeks from their earliest European exit in a decade. They're also one point back of Real Madrid in La Liga despite having played two more games.

"Desastre," said Mundo Deportivo on Wednesday. Sport added: "Shipwrecked without a manager." It's not quite true, but it likely soon will be.

Continue reading here:

PSG Hammering Signals the End for Luis Enrique-Led Evolution at Barcelona - Bleacher Report

El Club in Southwest Detroit is littered with glow sticks, blow-up palm trees, and balloons. A pair of DJs with skipper hats on are warming up the room with tech-house jams. A few people are already dancing. Unaware this was a themed party, I've got a tiny umbrella in my gin and tonic.

The vibes are warm and fresh, and for a minute, I forget we're in the middle of a Detroit winter. My friend picks up a balloon to volley across the room. The balloon says "Humons." We smile to each other and watch it bounce from human to human until it finds an empty, human-less zone. Both of us track its slow and graceful surrender to the floor while activity whirls around us. So far this is what the night is observing, human-watching girls dressed in smart '90s rave garb, and boys in sweaters, Hawaiian leis, and knit caps.

Washed in a zig-zagging row of bright white lights, two figures emerge onstage. My focus locks on the mic where the man behind the music stands in a royal blue bomber jacket, accompanied by a drummer, who wears a neon green cap on top of a mess of long curly hair. Starting from their single, "Underneath," the show progresses seamlessly, and by the end I'm elbowing my friend, going, "Who knew this would turn into a house show!"

Humons is the creation of Ardalan Sedghi aka Ardi. He's unassuming, with an honest face and an effortlessness about him. He's not trying to win your affection; he's here the same reason you are, to share something with the community he moves within. There's a feeling it was never his intention to get attention, yet here we are.

"I've been writing music since I was a young lad in middle school... that would be around 2003," Ardi says. "Humons started in 2013 and that is the first time I had set to write and release music with some sort of intention or coherent theme."

His setup is simple: a laptop for some backing tracks, a keyboard, a controller designated to a drum machine, and a small vocal effects box that's locked on the mic stand. Oh yeah, and there's the mic. Humons would be a complete one-man live operation if not for the addition of drummer Mike Higgins, which Ardi says, "definitely stepped the live show up a notch. I'm grateful to have his talent and energy onstage."

An eclectic mix of minimal electronic, pop, and experimental sonic animation born from a process and method that continues to evolve with each track Humons draws most of their influence from Detroit. "We are blessed with some of the world's best electronic music be it at Movement or at TV Lounge on any weekend," Ardi says.

At this El Club show, the material Humons is sharing is the recently released Spectra EP most of which was recorded at Ardi's home studio, "aka my bedroom," he says, "but I did some additional recording at Assemble." The mixing and mastering for Spectra EP were done at Assemble with producer/engineer Jon Zott (Tunde Olaniran, JRJR, BRNS, ect.). "He is absolutely great to work with," Ardi says of Zott. "He took the EP to the next level with his production prowess."

The album, while pristine in its original form, will be reimagined into a full package of remixes that will come out each week over the next five weeks. The first, a remix of "Underneath" by Detroit-based Mega Powers already dropped at the beginning of the month. Other Detroiters who will join the party are Jon Zott and Monty Luke. Elsewhere, there is Color War from New York and Diamondstein from Los Angeles. "It's a cool project for me," Ardi says, "not only because I'm a fan of what all of them are doing musically, but also because three of the five artists were involved with either Spectra EP itself or were a part of the EP release party."

Having lived in Detroit for the last five years, Ardi is cognizant of the limitations of such a city, as well as the undeniable benefits, which, at times feel like intangible energies rather than citable stats supporting the fact that Detroit is indeed growing from more of an artist "launching pad" to something of a viable "home" meaning that artists won't have to keep leaving to expand their reach, their creativity, their income. But maybe leaving is also part of a necessary process, an experience that any creative might eventually embark upon. One has to remain open, become cultured, grown in a scope that is not always accessible so far removed from the entertainment capitals of the world. We've all noticed a definite shift, growth, and rebirth in Detroit over the years, but I was curious of Ardi's thoughts on what has changed to alter the struggle. The fan base? Raise the ceiling? I had to ask.

"As with most places there's definitely pros and cons," Ardi says. "It's easy to survive as an artist financially and there is a lot of hidden talent here, but it's hard to grow beyond a certain level because the industry hasn't been around for a while and there simply aren't that many folks living in the city to build a local following."

If that sounds like the same old problems, well they are, but Ardi seems confident that things are gaining important momentum.

"In the past, it's felt a bit isolated in terms of everybody just doing their own thing, but I think that's starting to change, especially with groups like Assemble Sound," he says. "I'm definitely hopeful about the music scene here, as we start building resources and connections helping our local talent develop into its potential."

That said, Ardi is playing it safe Humons isn't a full-time gig. "Both from a financial and a personal standpoint, I don't think it's the move for me right now," he says.

Not surprisingly, being able to support yourself as a full-time artist is one of those unicorns of the industry a fantasy for most, rare way of life for some those who have talent, luck, dedication, and an amazing work ethic on their side. That said, sometimes that part-time job is fuel too offers balance. We've always been a working-class city. Maybe that balance of jobby-job and artist is unique to what makes Detroit artists such an impressive breed as it's a lifestyle that begs respect rather than the opposite.

"I have been putting in more energy and time into it since about last October leading up to the release of Spectra EP," Ardi says. The opportunity was there to keep on keeping on a natural progression of well-timed successes and good live shows that has allowed Humons the pleasure of riding out that wave.

As for the future, Ardi isn't making any predictions, just figuring out his personal evolution as it goes. "I'm getting more and more interested in dance being a main goal as it relates to live shows," he says. "There is such a great energy that comes with a group of people dancing together."

This interest will likely translate to the next batch of songs he's writing alongside aforementioned co-producer Jon Zott and drummer Michael Higgins. This year they'll all be in the midst of creation, getting heady in the studio, having fun, vetting out ideas, and learning in the process.

"It's a good challenge," Ardi says, "and I think the result will be great with the live drums and synth takes." He hopes to have a new album available by the end of the year.

Other than that, Humons is working on designing some T-shirts. As to his long-term plans, he's keeping it pretty loose. Ardi doesn't imagine a typical music career for himself atypical is more of his flavor anyway, but his goal maintains a basic simplicity. "I want to keep writing music, getting better, playing live shows, and building an audience so that the music is being heard and enjoyed."

The tracks mentioned in this article can be found at soundcloud.com/humons.

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Humons presents an atypical dance evolution - Detroit Metro Times

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Published on February 15th, 2017 | by Joshua S Hill

February 15th, 2017 by Joshua S Hill

A new interactive web tool created between the Global Wind Energy Council and renewable energy software company Greenbyte allows users to witness The Evolution of Wind Power between 1981 and today.

The Evolution of Wind Power was created based on data provided by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) tracing the evolution and growth of the worlds wind energy fleet, working right through to the most recent GWEC annual report published earlier this week. According to Greenbyte, The interactive map reveals the cumulative installed capacity per country, continent and the world between 1981-2017.

The map is a visual representation of the figures outlined in the Global Wind Energy Councils annual statistics report, which showed China was still leading the way, installing 23 gigawatts in 2016, bringing their cumulative installed capacity up to over 168 GW. The United States and Germany followed, with strong performances from India, the Netherlands, and Turkey.

Buy a cool T-shirt or mug in the CleanTechnica store! Keep up to date with all the hottest cleantech news by subscribing to our (free) cleantech daily newsletter or weekly newsletter, or keep an eye on sector-specific news by getting our (also free) solar energy newsletter, electric vehicle newsletter, or wind energy newsletter.

Tags: Global Wind Energy Council, Greenbyte, GWEC, The Evolution of Wind Power

Joshua S Hill I'm a Christian, a nerd, a geek, and I believe that we're pretty quickly directing planet-Earth into hell in a handbasket! I also write for Fantasy Book Review (.co.uk), and can be found writing articles for a variety of other sites. Check me out at about.me for more.

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New Interactive Tool Shows The Evolution Of Wind Power Around The World - CleanTechnica

February 15, 2017 Jonathan Malidine displays a halibut hook made by Jon Rowan, a Tlingit master carver. The hook has caught fish; note the scratches from teeth on the lower arm. Credit: University of California - Santa Barbara

The Tlingit and Haida, indigenous peoples of the Northwest Coast (NWC), have used carved wooden hooks to catch halibut for centuries. As modern fishing technology crept into use, however, the old hooks practically disappeared from the sea. But they thrived on landas decorative art.

The hook's evolution from utilitarian tool to expression of cultural heritage is the subject of a paper by Jonathan Malindine, a doctoral student in UC Santa Barbara's Department of Anthropology. In "Northwest Coast Halibut Hooks: an Evolving Tradition of Form, Function, and Fishing," published in the journal Human Ecology, he traces the arc of the hook's design and how its dimensions have changed over time.

"I used to be a commercial fisherman in Alaska, and also lived in a Tlingit and Haida community," Malindine said. "So, the intersection of fisheries and Alaska Native art has always fascinated me. These NWC hooks are really effective at catching halibut, and also are intricately carved with rich, figural designs. Between the technology and the mythological imagery, there's a lot going on."

Halibut hooks, often called wood hooks, are part of a sophisticated apparatus for catching the flat, bottom-dwelling fish that can weigh more than 500 pounds. Constructed in two pieces of different woods, they look something like an open fish mouth from the side, with a barb, facing backwards, lashed to the top piece. When the fish tries to spit out the hook, the barb sets in its jaw. Hooks were carefully carved to maximize their potential for catching fish, and their shape and size varied depending on the size of halibut they were used for.

But as modern fishing technology displaced traditional gear, wood hooks began to change, varying greatly in design and dimension from early versions. These "art hooks" were created as decorative objects, often depicting animals important to NWC traditions and using materials such as abalone inlay.

It was that transition in the hooks, from utility to art, that Malindine studied. To do so, he examined, photographed and took detailed measurements of every intact NWC hook109 totalin the collections of the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian. He found that "in the case of NWC halibut hooks, shifting function drives the shift in materials, dimension, and meaning," he writes in the paper. "The NWC halibut hook has largely ceased to function to catch fish, and its dimensions are changing to favor decorative and symbolic content over utilitarian/functional requirements. Nowadays it is primarily designed to link Alaska Natives to their ancestral heritage, and the art buyer to a tangible representation of NWC mythological and artistic tradition."

In addition to its contributions to academia, the research will benefit NWC carvers of wood hooks. Malindine has shared his work with them, allowing them to see what the hooks looked like as many as 150 years ago. "The Alaska Native carvers and Tribal members with whom I've shared these images and dimensional measurements are just happy to see them," he said. "These hooks are part of their cultural heritage, and have basically been locked away in storage facilitiessometimes for a hundred years.

"I've specifically given the images and measurements I produced to several Alaska Native artists and carving instructors, so they can use them in their classes when teaching students to carve halibut hooks," he continued. "Hopefully these images and measurements will be really useful in that type of classroom setting, especially for creating accurate reproductions."

Malindine's study of the hooks came through his participation in the Summer Institute in Museum Anthropology (SIMA) program, which is funded by the Smithsonian Institution and the National Science Foundation. He was one of 12 graduate students chosen from around the country to learn to use museum collections as field sites for research.

"There are vast numbers of important objects hidden away in museum collections facilities that are rarely studied," he said. "The SIMA program taught us how to approach studying museum objectsfrom theory of material culture, collections management, conservation and object handling, to photography, research design, data collection, analysis and eventual publication of results."

As Malindine noted, wood hooks are still more than curiosities or museum pieces. "I was fortunate enough to interview two of the very few people who still fish with traditional wood hooks," he said. "One of them, Jon Rowan, claims he has as much, if not more, success using wood hooks to catch halibut than he does using modern fishing gear. These have stuck around for a reason: They're very good at catching halibut. Of course most people don't want to risk losing a valuable and beautiful carved NWC halibut hook, so almost everyone these days uses commercially produced circle hooks that cost a few dollars each."

Casey Walsh, an associate professor of anthropology and Malindine's graduate advisor, called the examination of wood hooks solid science that places it in a human context. "Jonathan's paper is a great example of the explanatory strength of a holistic approach to understanding humans," Walsh said. "He skillfully combined environmental, social and cultural elements to tell us why halibut hooks matter, not only for basic sustenance, but also for people's relationships with each other and their creative, artistic lives."

Explore further: Study finds circle hooks lower catch rate for offshore anglers

More information: Jonathan Malindine. Northwest Coast Halibut Hooks: an Evolving Tradition of Form, Function, and Fishing, Human Ecology (2017). DOI: 10.1007/s10745-016-9884-z

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Team examines the evolution of wooden halibut hooks carved by native people of the Northwest Coast - Phys.Org

Fossil discovery rewrites understanding of reproductive evolution Science Daily "This new specimen from China rewrites our understanding of the evolution of reproductive systems." Professor Mike Benton of the University of Bristol said analysis of the evolutionary position of the new specimens showed no fundamental reason why ... and more »

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Fossil discovery rewrites understanding of reproductive evolution - Science Daily

February 13, 2017 The deep sea has its fair share of quirky creatures equipped with odd features, and the cockeyed squid, sporting two different sized eyes, likely doesn'tstand out too much among other bottom ocean dwellers.

But scientists have never before been able to pinpoint a reason for its two vastly different eyes. But now, researchers from Duke University may have finally nailed down an answer, according to a study published Monday in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

The cockeyed squid, officially known as Histioteuthis heteropsis, has long puzzled researchers. While the species is born with eyes of the same size, its left eye grows rapidly, becoming tube-shaped and sometimes twice the size of its right eye.

"You can't look at one and not wonder what's going on with them," Duke University biologist and study co-author Kate Thomas said in a press release.

Researchers watched more than 150 videos of the squids swimming in the Monterey Submarine Canyon in Monterey Bay,Calif., which were recorded over the past three decades, observing as they swam in an unconventional upside-down position. While doing so, the squids larger, left eyes continuously looked up, while their smaller right eyes were fixed downward.

Observation and light simulations revealed that the large eye seems to search for shadows of different fish swimming overhead, while the small eye scans the ocean floor for signs of light emitted by other marine organisms.

While the left eye's field of vision picks up shadows from sun shining into the water, that's not an option for the downward-facing eye, scientists concluded. Instead, they detect bioluminescence, the kind of chemically-produced light that comes from living organisms such as fireflies or deep sea fish. That requires a different kind of eye structure than is needed for ambient light. Bigger isn't better when it comes to spotting glowing fish, the researchers found, but larger eyes are better at detecting sunlight.

So while the cockeyed squids design might look odd at first glance, it actually allows the squids to navigate their complex environment.

"The eye looking down really only can look for bioluminescence," Snke Johnsen, the study's senior author and a professor of biology at Duke University, said in a statement. "There is no way it is able to pick out shapes against the ambient light. And once it is looking for bioluminescence, it doesn't really need to be particularly big, so it can actually shrivel up a little bit over generations. But the eye looking up actually does benefit from getting a bit bigger."

Overall, squid species are faring well among their deep sea neighbors. A 2016 study revealed that squid numbers have continuously boomed for six decades, while climate change and warming waters have spelled trouble for some other species.

While that marks good news for cephalopods for now, some wonder what long-term implications for aquatic life the trend could have particularly for the creatures they eat.

"We're seeing a new world here, one we haven't seen before. Any time you push an ecosystem into a different state, there's greater uncertainty in how it will behave, and how it will respond to future changes. Frankly, I think that should make people really worried," Ben Halpern, a biology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara's Bren School of Environmental Science and Management and the director of the school's Center for Marine Assessment and Planning, told The Christian Science Monitor last year.

"More squid and octopus to eat may seem like a good thing, and in the short run maybe it is. But I'm more worried about the long run," he said.

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Cockeyed squid shines light on deep sea evolution - Christian Science Monitor