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Bill Gates is funding a large initiative against Malaria: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2001/05/05 31_wiremalaria.html So the trickle down seems to work fairly well...

What is cause for concern are the number of critical tipping points we seem to be hitting. Specifically:

• Melting permafrost to release billions of tons of methane - as the northern reaches thaw, trapped methane and carbon dioxide is released. The methane is of particular consequence since it is a much stronger greenhouse gas and persists much longer than CO2 does. As more permafrost outgases, the temperature rises and bakes even more of the frozen north. There is even bi-partisan acknowledgment and concern over the problem. Alaska is literally melting
• Loss of polar sea ice changes albedo - warming sea waters melt ice faster, as the surface of the earth in that region changes from reflective white to darker colors more heat is retained, in turn melting more ice.
• Global warming to speed up as carbon levels show sharp rise - this is BIG news. Why? Because there's no corresponding relative increase from human emissions or other known sources. The implications are that we've tipped a balance with CO2 and triggered a feedback loop. Even if we ceased all industrial activity today, the natural source might continue until the planet is again uninhabitable for oxygen-breathers.
• Those paranoid wackos at NASA have also noticed problems if the ocean currents shift which some reports say has already begun.

It's not that things might get a bit warmer (or colder), or that a "few people" in low-lying areas might have to move (actually, it's 53% of the U.S. population according to the census). What's really scary is that we are changing the atmosphere on a scale that may not recover for thousands of years if ever, and which has no guarantees of being suitable for higher life.

You are 180 degrees wrong with the direction a law liek this would go.

You already CAN patent yourself. You can patent you own genes. The problem is yours have already been patended but that doesn't mean you didn't have the CHANCE to patent yourself, but you were just a little too late.

If you dont believe me read this.

So yes you can patent yourself but this does not give you power over government/corporate interests. It gives them power over you.

The first 6 of the top 10 photos of last year's (2005) National Geographic Annual Photo Contest were shot in film.

Wow. There are so many contradictions and logical fallacies in your post here that I am simply going to ignore most of it. It's not even worth discussing when the person you are discussing with contradicts themselves.

I am, however, going to respond to a single statement you made, which just about sums this whole discussion up for me, and then I am going to go my merry way and never look at this discussion again.

"In fact, the "God-of-the-gaps" theory is quite unscientific and illogical, and, contrary to what you seem believe, is widely unpopular among I.D.ers (and creationists), for exactly those reasons."

News flash: then these people don't believe in intelligent design, or creationism, for that matter.

Scientist who believes in God != intelligent design proponent

If someone truly admits that they don't know why an evolutionary process happens, makes no presuppositions, and does not invoke the name of some divine being who exists outside the universe, then that person does not believe in intelligent design. Period.

As I have said before, those who believe that intelligent design is science apparently know nothing about intelligent design. They are simply trying to reconcile their own religious beliefs with the factual world around them and are mistakenly latching onto a deliberate propoganda campaign by the Discovery Institute, who are a bunch of fundamentalist quacks with nice suits and a well-paid PR department. Don't buy into it. You will only be labeled as a pseudo-science jerk and lumped in with every other wacko that investigates alien abductions, magnetic healing bracelets, and the theory of Atlantis.

You are obviously very confused about what intelligent design really is and what its goals are. I encourage you to read this very fine article from the November 2004 issue of National Geographic, because it has a very clear explanation of what evolution is, why most people don't truly understand it, and consequently why people seem to buy into this intelligent design garbage. I would also encourage you to read this article from the September 2001 issue of Skeptical Inquiry on the logical fallicies inherent in all intelligent design arguments, and how evidence of such a thing is currently non-existent.

Then, just for kicks, read up on the Discovery Institute to learn about the nutjobs that started most of this nonsense.

Somewhere in the dusty recesses of the library stacks I came across writings that suggested many early northern european peoples practised cannibalism as was evidenced by the skulls of victims being halved to get at the brains. The National Geographic article suggests modern cannibals fed the brains to women and children as less desirable, but, for examples, grizziles feeding on migrating salmon will feed exclusivley on the brains once their initial hunger is sated.

My culinary perversion only extended to a one time feeding on beef tartare. I kinda liked it.

Why not? NatGeo even talks about flying whales and hydrogen-filled floating plants...

...the new human species, Homo floriensis, observes quite the opposite of the evolutionary path - standing at under 1meter tall

What's more, it is thought they spent most of their time in trees :

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/10/10 27_041027_homo_floresiensis.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/3948165.stm

All you need are the genes controlling size from these, and you could have a single rabbit for the entire block! Much more efficient and you could possibly train it to keep guard at nights.

Guys, our worst fears are coming true. I always heard that if women could make babies without us and figured out a way to open jars, we were not long for this earth. Well, check out this and this. Doh!

This is the basis for the argument for CATs (Cheap Access to Space) and
http://www.space-frontier.org/Projects/CatsPrize/
various legislative pushes and at least a couple of billionaires (including Jeff Bezos of
Amazon.com) putting a lot of money into this (perhaps as businesses, but
essentially still billionaire hobbies). While I wish them well, I think
this approach towards space settlement is misguided. Let's work the
numbers.

The USA has about two million millionaires. There are many more elsewhere.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/07/07 11_030711_money.html
"In total, there are an estimated 7.3 million people in the world whose
assets--excluding their home--amount to U.S. $1 million or more. Behind
Europe, North America has the second highest concentration of
millionaires at 2.2 million. The Asia Pacific region accounts for 1.8
million. Latin America and the Middle East account for 300,000 each, and
Africa accounts for 100,000."

At current launch costs of $10000 per pound, to put a 150 pound adult
(me on a starvation diet for a couple months!) would be about
$1,500,000, or $6,000,000 for a family of four. Now that amount of money
being paid is well within the reach of hundreds of thousands of people
if they liquidate all their assets -- homes, stocks, retirement
accounts, and so forth. Now if you could guarantee that they and their
children would have a better life living in cities in space, then some
percentage of them might well do that. The problem as I see it is, we
can't guarantee that right now. The other problem is of course, there is
no place to live right now for hundreds of thousands of people showing
up in their underwear and starving with no shelter or clothes or food or
air or water or other goods for them.

One solution is to pursue the 1980s NASA vision
http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/AASM5A.html#5a
of first putting
automated factories on the moon (or at asteroids) and using robotics
(and teleoperation) make space settlements complete with food, water,
clothes, etc. for when these people show up. It would in theory only
take one Apollo-type launch to the Moon or an asteroid
with the seed of an automated
factory instead of a LEM to start the process rolling, and that would
have an up front cost of a few billion dollars or so -- far less than
the total launch costs for all the people. The factory could also carry
out putting up mass drivers etc. to realize Gerry O'Neill's or
J.D. Bernal's vision of building
near earth habitats from lunar or asteroidal resources.

So, as I see it, launch costs are not a bottleneck.
So while lowering launch costs may be useful, by itself
it ultimately has no value without someplace to live in space.
And all the innovative studies on space settlement say that space colonies will not be
built from materials launched from earth, but rather will be built mainly from
materials found in space.

So, what is a bottleneck
is that we do not know how to make that seed self-replicating factory,
or have plans for what it should create once it is landed on the moon or
on a near-earth asteroid. We don't have (to use Bucky Fuller's terminology)
a Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science
http://www.bfi.org/node/387
that lets us make sense of all the various manufacturing knowledge
which is woven throughout our complex economy (and in practice,
despite patents, is essentially horded and hidden and made proprietary whenever possible)
in order to synthesize it to build elegant and flexible infrastructure
for sustaining human life in style in s

The deterioration of the Ozone layer was very well proven, and Crutzen, Molina, and Rowland won the Nobel for conclusively proving that CFCs caused the depletion of the layer.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/08 05_030805_ozone.html

Now the issue is why this is happening - the argument about whether this and CFC ban is causation or merely correlation could probably go on forever.
However, if the phenomenon is cyclical (after all ozone is produced by UV radiation from regular O2 oxygen, so increasing/decreasing ozone levels might be just yet another complex cyclical phenomenon), we're going to find out. This might take time, though.

Look here:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/ozone-depletion/intro/

And fortunantly we all know that rule is actively enforced. Anti-Gravity Patent

Looks to me as if the eyes were taken straight from the top National Geographic magazine cover (http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangir l/). You can't help but stare at those eyes for a few seconds... very captivating.

Hm... I've just done an extensive search and all I found was a "Penis casting kit". An interesting idea in itself, but requires the replicated object to already exist in 3D :-)

Tasmania is a very cold place and it's population quite tiny

So that's where they disappeared to.

what the consequences are for asking everyone to enjoy being a Barbarian for an hour. Rome falls.

We can't have a big impact on nature? Okay since you mentioned the New Orleans levees, here you go.
http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0410/featu re5/
By screwing with nature we caused all that damage during Katrina, that article was written a year ago. It had been known for decades that we'd been screwing up the whole region and eventually it was gonna come back and get us. Naaah... we can't really have much of an impact... Whoah! Hey where'd the Aral Sea go?
http://unimaps.com/aral-sea/index.html

Mods, why is this guy a 5? Induced Seismicity is explained several times in other posts... are you too busy trying to protect your "We can't hurt the earth" biases?

It is known by archeologists that the process of creating beer in ancient societies (Egypt, Africa), often led to the contamination of the storage containers by the streptomycedes bacterium. This in turn led to the production of the antibiotic "tetracycline". The physicans of the time knew that beer was a good cure for ailments, but not why.

I don't know if I find that site particularly credible. For one thing, he claims that the Irish Potato Famine was caused by climate change, when in fact it was caused by a fungus.

In addition, other sites suggest that water vapor accounts for much less of the greenhouse effect, 60% according to these folks, and the Wikipedia offers anywhere from 36% to 70%.

It's not that bad. The only more conclusive fossil evidence for eating something is if you find stomach contents inside a skeleton, so the general interpretation is reasonable, even if the suggestion of full-time grass grazing isn't.

Regardless of whether you think the assignment of these coprolites to dinosaurs is correct, even the discovery that grasses were present in the Cretaceous is a huge discovery, because, until this paper, it was thought grasses did not show up until after the dinosaurs were extinct. Their pollen is not known until well into the Cenozoic Era.

Other articles:
National Geographic, with picture
BBC

The original article in Science (but you need a subscription to view the full article): Prasad et al. 2005

Apparently the grass is only a small component of the plant debris in the coprolite, so, even though it appears to be there, it was apparently a minor part of the diet. I also worry a little about the possibility of contamination with modern grass phytoliths (mineral structures produced within the vascular tissues of the grasses), but I assume the reviewers would have scrutinized that possibility very carefully.

You really have no information on which to base that speculation, do you? And even if you did, it's irrelevant. The point being that I know more than enough about software engineering that "sophisticated software" doesn't do it for me. I need to know what this awesome software does before that sentence in the article has any importance to me. What's sophisticated to one person is peanuts to another.

These features are enough to classify a species according to modern cladistics. The software used, assists in comparing bone features with the hundreds of thousands of other fossils in the database, which also proves consistency.

If this is the case, I'm at a loss as to why this is a big deal and everyone is excited about his "work." Sounds more like he plugged some data into the palentologist fingerprint software and it spit out an answer. So what?

Me: So this thing basically contradicts everything we think we know about crocs, but dang it, evolution is right so this is just amazing, isn't it?

You: No actually they asked someone who is familiar with crocs how they would improve it, essentially they asked an intelligent designer what they would improve and the intelligent designer implied that it would not have been this. Therefore further giving credibility that evolution is not an intelligent process, but rather random and "bad" mutations die off. So far nothing contradicts this.

Hahaha, so you're saying that--assuming intelligent design were real--this croc expert is an authoritive answer on what the much-more-intelligent-designer would do? Ok... :)

And as far as the unpredictable comment goes, I couldn't find it in the articles, but I may have simply missed it.

Yep, you missed it because it was at the link I provided.

Whoever said that, I'm not sure what the context was, but either they were blatantly wrong, misquoted, or trying to make this finding seem mystical in some fashion.

It was said by Paul Sereno, a University of Chicago paleontologist and National Geographic Society Explorer-in-Residence. He's also the "croc expert" who is apparently as intelligent as the intelligent designer. :)

But Evolution in an undisputed theory...

That, my friend, is incorrect. There are plenty of people who dispute it, including honest scientists in the field that recognize a lot of problems with the theory. They may "believe" in evolution and are interested in continuing research to refine it, but at least they are honest enough to recognize its limitations and problems in its current form.

You are a direct result of microevolution, this is undisputed.

Again, please be honest. Feel free to say that a lot of scientists agree with you, but to suggest that even all of those that do believe this put such blind faith in the theory is incorrect. In honest peer-review, there are acknowledgements of limitations and the potential problems of the theories and findings that are obtained.

These evolutionary changes happened on a scale too large for many humans to comprehend.

4.5 billion years isn't so big a number that intelligent humans can't comprehend it. Don't try to make this thing seem more overwhelming than it really is.

Also most humans are selfish and ignorant beings who have enough balls to claim that they were designed in the form of God. You are not as special as you think you are, you are the result of a series of random, yet directed, mutations. Get over it, you are not as important in the scheme of things as you want to be.

You are clueless to anyone's beliefs but yourself, it would seem, but I thank you for making an attempt to misrepresent mine.

I

Y'think? Let's see some quotes from TFA:

"The researchers don't yet know what events triggered the relatively sudden emergence of the large crocodile..."

Sounds like more data that evolution can't really explain.

"Unlike the crocodiles we know today, Dakosaurus andiniensis lived entirely in the water, and had fins instead of legs."

What part of the skull did the researches base *that* conclusion on?

" Pol used sophisticated software to map the features of those bones and determine its lineage. "

Oooohh, "sophisticated software." I trust we'll hear more about the science of how they "determined its lineage". I'm a software engineer and "sophisticated software" doesn't impress me... I want to know what this software actually did.

"It measured 13 feet from nose to tail."

Still interested in how they concluded that based on the skull. I'm assuming there must be more fossil elsewhere, but curiously none of the "technical" diagrams include more than its head. Some of the "artists concept" drawings show a little more as the thing supposedly jumps out of the water, but I've seen no technical diagrams of anything but the head which leaves me wondering where this 13-feet figure is coming from.

Then we have this:

""The most perplexing thing about the animal is that its head shape does not appear to be well suited to a fast swimming crocodilian, because rather than being streamlined, it is somewhat high and flattened from side to side," said Clark, who was not involved with the research."

So rather than contemplate other explanations (maybe it wasn't so closely related to a croc? maybe it wasn't even aquatic--sometimes mammals can actually find there way into water and die, y'know), we automatically assume this is some groundbreaking discovery? Maybe it's so weird it's wrong?

Or how about:

""If you went to a crocodile worker and said, Let's say you had a chance to evolve something new out of this group, what would you do? And you gave them a pad and a pencil, the last thing they would draw would be a skull that looks like Dakosaurus."

So this thing basically contradicts everything we think we know about crocs, but dang it, evolution is right so this is just amazing, isn't it?

This one is choice:

"It's a beautiful example of the unpredictable nature of evolution, and the variety of things that dinosaur-age crocodiles did."

And here I was thinking that science was supposed to be falsifiable, testable, and actually be a useful predictor? And here they're celebrating just how unpredictable it is? I'm glad other theories are a little more relaible. I'd hate to be walking into my house and suddenly find gravity reverse itself and hit my head on the ceiling. *

Color me unimpressed.

* Note: If gravity did reverse itself, would you be prepared? How would you keep the coins in your pocket? I have the answer: Nudity! (This poorly-quoted quote is left as an exercise for the reader to discover its source).

The Cretacious "SuperCroc" was 40 ft long.

Sure 4 m may not seem like a giant crocodile but I don't think anyone can deny that the creature in this "photo" is a giant for sure!!

Seriously, that flying dinosaur it's going after would have to be the size of a sparrow for the scales in that picture to work!

respect_for_national_geographic--;

how can this thing possibly be any larger than two maybe three feet? ;)

You are wrong. There are multiple theories which fully take into account all observations while positing an ever-existing universe.

As an added bonus, they have testable differences from the standard Big Bang theory, some of which (such as low-frequency gravity waves) we're working on detectors for even now.

What do you consider speciation? Consider this as an example:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/07 27_050727_evolution.html/

There was a crossing of two different fly species, the blueberry maggot and the snowberry maggot. They're highly specialized insects that live on one and only one variety of plant. Normally such an offspring would have been doomed - unable to outcompete the blueberry fly on blueberries or the snowberry fly on snowberries. But the environment has changed - this hybrid found itself well adapted to living on honeysuckle, a plant that was only introduced to this continent relatively recently by humans. So rather than die out, it has found a new ecological niche and can thrive as its own distinct species.

This wasn't a random mutation. Many forms of life throw off a certain percentage of offspring that are poorly adapted to current conditions. But when conditions change around them, their different genes can become dominant - i.e. the classic example of white moths that became dark in industrial Britain. Evolution is more complex than simple random mutation, though random mutation does play a role. Old strategies seem to remain dormant and periodically arise to 'test the waters' and see if they're useful again. But this is just a better understanding of evolution, not any kind of refutation of it.

Some scientists are using a kind of paddle-wand that can selectively, non-invasively, and according to them harmlessly deactivate portions of someone's brain. They're using it to run experiments in which someone's sense of sight is temporarily deactivated, to try to get information on the phenomonon of "blind-sight," a sort of rudimentary sense of the location and presence of objects not directly seen.

This is a guess of course, and other than what's in this article I know nothing about it. But I thought it was kind of weird that I should read about this, and then two weeks later someone announces a weapon that can blind someone....

Ppl have said it before to some extent NASA is a jobs program .

Why build shuttles unless u have somewhere to go .

Why build space station unless u have a way to get there .

Some good science has come out of the space station, but some of it could have
been done on the ground .

What was not done on the ground might have been done with robotic control
instruments from earth after just the experiment was delivered via remote control .

I think we stand more to gain from a robotic return to the moon and possibly
mining Helium-3 for the "working" helium-3 reactor in wisconsin .

Helium-3 with a billion dollar a ton return cost would equal oil at $7 a barrel .

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/LEC27/IMAGES/fig1 8.JPG

Just getting us out of the middle east would be damn nice too .

Not to mention the zero pollution aspect ...

It could be dropped back to earth much like the apollo capsules after a rail mass driver
tosses it off the moon's surface much like NASA planned in the past already .

Sending a rover to mars is hard, sending a robot to the moon should be a bit easier,
and a LOT cheaper than sending a human .

Humans require h2o+o2+food and don't have the best tolerance for radiation .

cryogenics for a robot is an off switch ...

It is just not as glorious and all that macho BS .

If we can get a underground chamber dug on the moon and then use solar electricity over time to
extract material from lunar soil to process and make oxygen, it could be stored in the cave
til we are ready for ppl to arrive .

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/10 19_051019_moon_oxygen.html

Still alot of issues to work out, but it is cheaper, and nobody dies .

Build a moon base underground, protected from radiation, build ur spaceships and space stations
up there and it is easier to launch from the much weaker lunar gravity, 1.6 vs. 9.8, roughly 600% less .

Here are the lab locations of prominent scientists that have put alot of time and money
into what they think can fix the world's energy needs .

http://fti.neep.wisc.edu/neep602/LEC27/IMAGES/fig2 1.GIF

Ex-MislTech

You fail to note that a) Canada admits it has to lower it's usage of coal and b) US rates for pollution are falling!! Falling in the face of rising population, rising GDP, rising vehicle use and rising energy use. How is that possible if the US is not doing *anything*? Like I said, more work is needed, but progress is measured by lowering pollution which the US is doing.

Kyoto? Do you actually think Kyoto is the only pollution initiative in the world? How is it possible that the US (as well as other countries) have managed to lower pollution substantially in the last 30 years if Kyoto is your bar for doing *anything*. Kyoto targets aren't due for another 7 years and many experts are predicting that very, very few countries will make their quotas.

Here's my prediction...The US matches or beats the EU in reducing Kyoto specified emissions by 2012 without needing to formally sign the agreement.

PBS ran a Frontline story about China this fall. Car usage is *soaring*. Pollution in the big cities is soaring, in part due to the increase in cars. Here read this. As the article points out, if the Chinese economy continues to grow, the middle class will continue to grow, further fueling the need for cars. (and TVs, and cell phones, and shopping malls and single family homes)

Anyway, here's something a little more recent, even though it's not a scientific paper. Unfortunately, it seems that recent tests indicate that this concept will probably not solve any problems.

A friend gave me a link to this video a few days ago and I thought it was interesting:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/10 12_051012_hornet_video.html

Video in the News: Bees Battle "Hornets From Hell"

A small but highly efficient killing machine lurks in the mountains of Japan--the Japanese giant hornet. The voracious predator pumps out a dose of venom with an enzyme so strong it can dissolve human tissue. Just a handful of these hornets can kill 30,000 European honeybees within hours. Watch an attack of giant hornets on a beehive, and learn the surprising secret that Japanese honeybees use in their defense.

Original Article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/10 25_021025_GiantHornets.html

A friend gave me a link to this video a few days ago and I thought it was interesting:
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/10 12_051012_hornet_video.html

Video in the News: Bees Battle "Hornets From Hell"

A small but highly efficient killing machine lurks in the mountains of Japan--the Japanese giant hornet. The voracious predator pumps out a dose of venom with an enzyme so strong it can dissolve human tissue. Just a handful of these hornets can kill 30,000 European honeybees within hours. Watch an attack of giant hornets on a beehive, and learn the surprising secret that Japanese honeybees use in their defense.

Original Article: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2002/10/10 25_021025_GiantHornets.html

"I was personally involved in an investigation over the death of a dozen beak whales off of the Canary islands...Guess who got blamed for these whales beaching themselves? In the end, it was determined the whales beached themselves trying to get away from the shipping traffic, not the Sonar."

Are you talking about this?

FTA:
"Last year 14 beaked whales were stranded during an international naval exercise off the Canary Islands. They appeared on beaches four hours after the sonars were turned on."

I don't know about "definitive proof" but lets look at our options. Maybe the sonars in some way affected the beachings, or there happened to be a flotilla of shipping traffic due to the heavy volume of canary purchases at ebay.
It's also mentioned in this article. The Nature article they both refer to is entitled "Gas-bubble lesions in stranded cetaceans" if you can get your hands on it. They are, however, cautious to reach any blatant conclusions without sufficient evidence. Also here's some background information on acoustic sensitivities of marine life from NRDC. Sorry, but these "government haters" are trying to save marine life from being trampled by our preparations for armageddon.

You have three complete cycles. That is more then enough for the Nyquist Limit

This cycle is known as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The theory is that this is caused by interference effect between the sunspot cylces and El Nino/La Nina.

And this would seem to affect fishery catches fishery catches

Well, bear in mind that the heartland of the United States has been subject to the worst weather on the planet for as far back as anyone knows. Take a look here, for example, a map of tornado hits. From the link: "The United States has the dubious distinction of having the most severe, damaging tornadoes of any country in the world."

It's also the case that the US Gulf Coast is arguably the only highly-industrialized, high-population piece of the First World to have been so regularly pummeled by hurricanes in this century. And let's not even talk about minor problems like lightning, which whacks a hundred or so people a year, and for which Florida is the worst place to be outside of central Africa and atop mountains.

I've lived in the American Midwest (Colorado and Illinois). They're a tough breed. You don't stay if you're scared of big storms, or worry that they're a personal message from God.

I see a lot of pet snake-loving, tree hugging individuals have already started picketing...

So before that happens let me just say this. I think an alligator is a scary predator (which would enjoy soft, pudgy geek meat like my own).

But scarier still, is the fact that a Burmese python can eat 6-foot-long (2-meter-long) American alligator.

Nuf Said.

well, considering the fact that a python can eat a 6-foot alligator, I'd say dogs aren't as dangerous, they're just more common, I gues...

How about National Geographic?

They stayed away in droves. Hmmmm...

Just to clarify the article. The DNA samples that are submitted to the National Geographic Genographic project are completely anonymous. In addition, they are only using the material to look for specific genetic markers that help indicate patterns of human migration, not any medical signatures.

• From Wikipedia.org: "Noodling is the practice and sport of fishing for catfish using only one's bare hands. Noodling may be called grabbling, graveling, hogging, or tickling, depending on what southern state you're in (Kentuckians call it dogging, while Nebraskans prefer stumping)."

The press doesn't harp on it much, but anytime they mention it they call it the next big pandemic. National Geographic covers it in the current issue, and they've got a little presentation about it on their website.

and here for Betty The Crow, bending a wire to gain access to food. Quite cool.

Addendum: See also for videos and other examples of chimpanzee tool usage.

And according to the National Geographic article,
"The photo sequence ... shows the squid homing in on the baited line and enveloping it in 'a ball of tentacles.'" [source]

Apparently, the best way to occupy a giant squid is to involve him in a real life game of Katamari.

Holy crap! Is it me or is he shooting a laser-beam there?
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/09/im ages/050927_giant_squid.jpg

I think the U.S army got to him before us (or was it Dr. Evil?)

Well according to this
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2004/07/07 01_040701_oceantrap.html
many deep sea fish die simply in the process of being captured and transported to the surface due to changes in "temperature and pressure"

Of course! In such cases the changes in pressure and temperature can be rapid, which would naturally be damaging to most organisms. There can also be excessive oxygen present, which can also be fatal.

and according to this
http://www.sciencentral.com/articles/view.php3?art icle_id=218391869&cat=1_1
at least one known fish has an enzyme which simply doesn't work at aquarium pressures (so it dies)

One example of a high-pressure-adapted enzyme does not contradict my point.

And according to this
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_sea_fish
"These fish live at depths of several kilometres with pressures of several hundred atmospheres; as a result they cannot survive at sea level and any attempts to keep them in captivity has led to their death."

This is not a valid statement. Living at pressures of several hundred atmospheres does not of itself imply that that such organisms can't survive at sea level. This is obviously false as there are many animals that normally migrate between such pressure ranges!

So raising them in captivity is probably a bit more complicated than simply turning down the lights and attaching a small refrigeration unit.

There are very, very many reasons why wild animals die in capitivity, and they can be very complex. For example, the animals may starve as a result of the lack of chemical cues in the water. Some deep-sea squid species will grow to a certain age in captivity but then stop eating because some (as yet) unknown factor is present.

Likely to be this: "On The Edge: Sea Monsters: Search for the Giant Squid". Credits are here: National Geographic Channel website.