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94 New Species Described By CA Academy of Sciences
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at the California Academy of Sciences traversed four continents and two oceans to uncover 94 new species in 2009, proving that while sometimes in this digital age the world can feel like a small place, much of it has yet to be explored. Among the 94 discoveries were 65 arthropods, 14 plants, 8 fishes, 5 sea slugs, one coral, and one fossil mammal. Why does it matter? As Dr. David Mindell, Dean of Science and Research Collections at the Academy, explained, 'Humans rely on healthy ecosystems, made up of organisms and their environments. Creating a comprehensive inventory of life on our planet is critical for understanding and managing resources. Yet a great many life-forms remain to be discovered and described.'"
We could do with a few more extinct animals...
"Yet a great many life-forms remain to be discovered and described.'"
And exploited.
The old definition was that two things were different species if they couldn't produce viable offspring. New definition? Something about DNA? But this hasn't been settled. So what did they find?
I propose that we name them all after Stephen Colbert.
'Humans rely on healthy ecosystems, made up of organisms and their environments."
And that, my friends, is a prime example of what soft liberal earth-worship thinking will get you. We don't get our fuels or building materials or other raw materials from the "ecosystem" -- we smite the earth and take them out by force of will and machines built by the human mind. We don't hunt and gather like savages, and we don't even use primitive low yield agriculture -- we use industry powered by investment to get our food and textiles. And you think nature just made your Droid? That's intelligent design in action, not evolution.
We live off an ECONOMY. Ecosystems are made-up concepts by hippy-dippy types who'd rather save the life of some spotted owl than let a hard-working man earn an honest dollar. If ecosystems were valuable, you'd pay for them.
Tweet, tweet.
"If ecosystems were valuable, you'd pay for them."
Now, or later?
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Ah, see, there's the problem right there: we shouldn't be trying to do that. We're lousy at it. We should be focusing all of our limited PHB managerial skills on managing ourselves and our own six-fold overpopulation, not trying to manage everything else.
Dude are you serious? On the off chance that you are, perhaps you should do a little research. You'll find out that supermarket shelves are in fact not plants, and that canned foods are not fruits that grow there without human intervention.
That's the problem with cities: People living in them become totally ignorant of the fact that despite not having to see it even once in a typical city-dweller's lifetime, the ecosystem is absolutely crucial to the survival of every man, woman and child, even if they never leave the concrete of the city.
Even the most processed of trashy foods requires, as a basic first step ingredient, some product of an ecosystem. Farms are not self-sustaining, without healthy, pollution-free rain, there are no crops or feeding paddocks. Without healthy bees, there is no honey. Without healthy birds, locusts would decimate crops.
It should be compulsory for every high schooler to spend one month of every year of school working on a farm. It's time we stopped schooling our kids to be cogs in the mindless machine of urban society and started educating them to be fully aware citizens of Mankind.
I hate printers.
As long as the hippie scientists are not eating into your pie, why do you care? Someone has a perception or standard of "value" different from yours. News at 11.
Or if they *are*, fight them. Even better, fight them "honestly". Stop whining.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Dude are you serious?
No.
Tweet, tweet.
Yet you get modded insightful +2 and are 1st visible comment. .... well done :)
I don't know what to say except
Search your logs like the web: splunk!
Don't worry, Al Gore will save us!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Hey CA Academy of Sciences, Please patent the species (including all genetic code) you discovered/described, and grant free use under open license. "Biologists" and "geneticists" discover lots of things, of which many of the useful ones end up being owned by "Big Pharma" or "Agribusiness." As an experiment (or a friendly competition), see what the "Open-source community" does with the 93 still-extant species you discovered last year.
A treehugger gave to me
14 plants oxygenating
5 sea slugs
65 creeping arthropods
8 swimming fishes
One coral reef
And a fossilized raccoon dog from an ancient lake bed.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
In the big picture, DNA and life are just giant software programs. So they just discoverd 94 new utilities. We humans are trying to reverse engineer the code of life. When we succeed that will be endgame. There will be no need for economies if we have the power of life at our fingertips. AKA God. Programming in C++ or whatever are other attempts that will be superseeded by other languages. I predict ultimately the only thing valuable left on earth when we can program life will be life itself, the real evolved stuff, not the human created stuff that will become a commodity. So appreciate these 94 cos whatever is going to happen will happen soon, 50 years, extinction of them or us - and we have horrendous weapons - my bet is on 30 of these species outlasting humanity!
Wow. Arguing with a work of satire. I didn't realise that sarcasm detectors were such an endangered species!
...the ecosystem is absolutely crucial to the survival of every man, woman and child, even if they never leave the concrete of the city.
And this is why it's so crucial that we take the right steps in protecting it, rather than the politically expedient ones.
Well I got all my recent furniture interest free till June 2010. I'll make a deal like that with the planet; I'll do what we want now, and later I'll pay for it, K? Earth knows I'm good for it.
I am a programmer, and I am a big fan of the "need to know" basis. If I am curious I like to learn how things work, but when I am working efficiently I just assume functions and libraries will do exactly what they claim to, and write my code based off of that.
Living in cities has enabled us to abstract the bare necessities. Since we do not need to worry about where our food comes from, or how it is made; just that it will be there when we need it, we can focus ourselves more intensely on other subjects, increasing the net productivity of society as a whole. Granted in the event of a natural disaster of epic proportions most of the society would die off due to lack of basic survival skills. It is a gamble.
Sewage Treatment Facilities - "Our duty is clear."
.and we get out oxygen from--
Oh, wait...
Me too, but without guessing the exact ones, we'll never know which to attach our disembodied brains too with our genetically engineered, brain-payload parasites.
Out of 94 new species,less the fossil and coral, how many actually taste good?
Hey, if they're gonna hang out here, they might as well be worth the space they take up.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
Sadly the fact that you have to verify that doesn't reflect poorly on /.s ability to pick up sarcasm. But rather some of the ridiculous positions people hold on the internet (getting modded insightful). I assumed sarcasm, guess that means there is still some optimism left in me. Or I could have noticed that you at least make fun of glenn beck so you are at least left of him...
And what made you think my post wasn't satire too? I leave it as an exercise for you to detect the sarcasm in that post. Or if you prefer, get off my lawn.
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
Wow. There must be some real Anti-Gore peeps out there to mod that troll rather than funny.
Just think, one day we may even find intelligent species!
Wherever they went, I want to stay far away from it.
Don't forget thermodynamics. Being able to alter our own biology does not change the fact that we will continue to need energy.
Yet you get modded insightful +2 and are 1st visible comment.
Good satire will always be insightful.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
In the big picture, DNA and life are just giant software programs.
In the big picture, all software analogies breakdown.
There will be no need for economies if we have the power of life at our fingertips.
Case and point. Unless you actually believe that humans will no longer struggle-for/barter/buy power over the Earth's/Solar System's/Galaxy's/Universe's inherently limited resources just because we figured out how to live forever (violent deaths aside). The Great Basin Bristlecone Pine still struggles to gather resources for itself with all it's energy despite it's effective immortality when compared to the mayfly.
Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure everything I just said is completely wrong.
Living in cities has enabled us to abstract the bare necessities. Since we do not need to worry about where our food comes from, or how it is made; just that it will be there when we need it, we can focus ourselves more intensely on updating our twitter status and choosing which brand of coffee to drink.
ftfy
Brain surgery - it's not rocket science!
Sounds like a good philosophy. However, there are problems when things like getFood() fails to deliver a result. Perhaps a waterTap('on') call fails to appropriately change the status. Maybe you'll one day find out that the methods that you execute repeatedly Body.inhale() and Body.exhale() result in cache poisoning.
The world is not a computer. You can't safely abstract away your machine code. One day, total failure to understand where you food comes from or how basic stuff works will bite you in the ass.
But do any of these new sea slugs produce ADAM?
Everything you consume at one point came from an ecosystem...so in a round about way....yeah you ARE paying for them and they ARE valuable.
And jeese....whats up with all the liberal/hippy bashing or did I miss some sarcasm in there or something?
Just realized HTML tags work here hehe.
It isn't that simplistic. A lot of the developing world agriculture goes to make foreign exchange hard currency to support the local warlord/junta and wall street fatcats and the IMF, the food production there goes to the developed world instead of feeding the local population *first*. There's much less need for "food aid" when the local agriculture has as a priority a diverse system dedicated at the first level to feeding their own people, rather than vast monoculture farms dedicated to overseas exports.
So it is actually the reverse in a lot of cases from this often alleged "common knowledge", the local population could probably live on their food production even with a lot of kids, if it stayed there more in the first place, whereas in the heavily developed nations, even with fewer kids, they would be hard pressed to feed themselves (and a lot of other basic life's necessities sustainability issues) without truly massive imports of food and energy and the still continuing "soft" exploitation going on with the connivance of their political and economic leaders.
If it isn't discussed, it must not happen or "see no evil" and get to pontificate on how superior one way is over the other. See, them dumb natives have too many kids and can't take care of themselves"! gloating. Then you look at it closer, they have been getting shafted for decades/generations and are stuck in a never ending cradle to grave foreign "debt" situation which was imposed on the bulk of the people there rather shadily in the first place.
Here is an example of one situation, the African nation of Malawi. When they used to follow the wall street/IMF western "developed nation" advice and way of doing business and running their agriculture, their nation starved constantly, using exported ag resources all the time for making money rather than first feeding their people. When they switched back to putting their own nation first-adopting those often criticized "protectionist" principles, plus just a scosh more education into some alternative ways of farming-they went back to self sufficiency a long way and built themselves back to being more diversified in ag and feeding their people a lot better. And it can change fast with actually rather simple economic and educational policy changes.
It isn't perfect, they can still have and do have problems, but they become "wealthier" faster once some priorities get shifted around back to the actual people as a whole inside some area and not focused on making the top 1% there and wall street, etc. even richer.
refs:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/malawis-farming-revolution-sets-the-pace-in-africa-821135.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7683748.stm
And just a further notation, speaking as a farmer. I will guarantee you, with 100% certainty, if *ever* there is a fast rising shortage of diesel to the "developed" world, that lasts longer than a couple weeks or months, even with "fewer kids", etc, you will see near famine or outright famine. Your best case scenario will be much less variety of foods in the stores at multiples of the current prices.
Without cheap diesel, you just ain't eating. You can ride some subway or bicycle all day long, wall off huge areas to protect the three eyed flying newt, and that isn't going to feed you. That's the *best* case with a fast loss of diesel situation, or fast rising prices of diesel due to any other reason, such as rampant uncontrolled or unregulated market speculation like we had a small taste of recently last year.
This also warrants a rather severe look at this huge push for an emergency "war on carbon" without any credible alternatives in place, in advance. Margins are really lean now with farming for a lot of places, and this is during good supp
While it's nice to hear of new species being discovered, 94 is not a large number in this context, and you certainly don't need to travel all round the globe to find new species. They're everywhere around us, in every nook and cranny of the biosphere, in the air and inside rocks (even a few miles down), living on the surface of larger organisms and also inside. Even our bodies are hosts to unknown species --- like all higher animals, we're really just mobile habitats for smaller forms of life, and wherever there is life, there is unknown life as well.
We've catalogued roughly 1.4 million species, but biologists estimate that 10 to 30 million are still unknown to science. This page from University of Michigan gives a detailed breakdown of the state of our species catalogue circa 2006. It puts TFA's study into perspective rather well.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The problem with that of course is that our parents and our parents parents and our parents parents parents going back till dunno when have been doing that same thing. "Oh Earth, you know I'm good for it." Then they die and pass the burden onto their kids, who say the same thing while continuing to add to the balance that must be paid for at some time. "Oh Earth, you know I'm good for it."
But this can't go on forever. Eventually it will reach the breaking point, and Earth will say "PAY UP OR GTFO!" Maybe not this generation, maybe not the next generation, but some generation will get the eviction notice.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
"Fish". I believe the plural of fish is fish.
Great that we are finding new species! If we keep this up maybe we can replace the ones that are going extinct with these new ones. Besides, the other ones were getting old anyway.
Will code a sig generator for food
I'd like your grandchildren to pay for my despoliation of their ecosystem before they were conceived, please. Isn't that a nice, symmetrical distribution of costs and benefits ; I take the benefits and they pay the costs.
But if you wanted to make things less uneven, you can't ask my grandchildren to pay for your despoliation of their ecosystem unless you manage to reverse my sterilisation without me noticing it (as a side topic, you'd have to persuade my wife to carry the sprog(s) to term, which is a whole 'nother task).
(Yes, I did detect the sarcasm in the original post. "Do unto others ...")
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"