Samwise rides again

Groucho.Wahine.Nani

Originally uploaded by samh101.

You know it’s that time of year …

It is a little known fact that Johann Sebastian Bach was a giant.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:J.S._Bach_-_A_Portrait_in_Leipzig.jpg

As a friend to the children commend me the Yak.
You will find it exactly the thing:
It will carry and fetch, you can ride on its back,
Or lead it about with a string.

Then tell your papa where the Yak can be got,
And if he is awfully rich
He will buy you the creature - or else he will not.
(I cannot be positive which.)

From the Beeb …

Perky the duck has had a difficult couple of weeks.

A duck that survived being shot and spending two days in a refrigerator has now overcome major surgery - despite briefly dying on the operating table.

Florida vets working to repair gunshot damage to Perky’s wing panicked when the duck twice stopped breathing.

Perky first made international headlines when she shocked a hunter’s wife who found her alive after being stored inside a refrigerator for two days.

Mr Hale said the duck’s slow metabolism helped her survive the low temperatures for so long.

The ring-neck duck entered surgery with vets confident that she would survive the procedure despite serious injuries to her wing, leg and beak.

But they struggled to fully sedate Perky, who briefly lost consciousness, said Susan May, treasurer of the Goose Creek Animal Sanctuary in Tallahassee.

“The first time she stopped breathing a quick thump on the chest brought her back,” Ms May told the BBC News website.

“But once the surgeon started sewing her back up she stopped breathing again, this time for 15 seconds.”

When a second thump failed to bring Perky round, veterinary surgeon David Hale tried manipulating the duck’s beak, before using a needle to shock her into consciousness.

At one point the duck was given pure oxygen through a face mask, Ms May said.

“At that point the vet turned and said: ‘I’m sorry, she’s gone.’”

The room fell into shocked silence as those present took in the news, but then Perky raised her head and began flapping her wings.

The relief reduced everyone to tears, Ms May said, describing one of her colleagues as “extremely emotional” as she left the room.

“For the duck to have gone through all of this and then to die at that time was a real shock,” Ms May said.

“This duck has taken us all on an emotional rollercoaster,” she said, adding that Perky has since recovered well and is staying out of trouble.

Perky now has a pin in her wing, but is expected to make a good recovery.

According to a Greenpeace report on how different tech companies rank environmentally, Apple ranks lowest in removing toxic chemicals from its products and adopting recycling policies. Said toxic chemicals, it is claimed, end up in scrap yards in Asia where they contaminate child laborers and the environment.

To turn this Apple green, Greenpeace have started the Green my Apple campaign. The site contains a lovely play on Apple’s recent ad campaign, plus some bites of mock keynotes.

Also … previous episodes.

Aunty says …

A Leicester University study found that seven men with a rare Yorkshire surname carry a genetic signature previously found only in people of African origin.

The men seem to have shared a common ancestor in the 18th Century, but the African DNA lineage they carry may have reached Britain centuries earlier.

Details of the study appear in the European Journal of Human Genetics.

The scientists declined to disclose the men’s surname in order to protect their anonymity.

The discovery came out of genetic work looking at the relationship between the male, or Y, chromosome and surnames.

The Y chromosome is a package of genetic material normally found only in males.

It is passed down from father to son, more or less unchanged, just like a surname.

But over time, the Y chromosome accumulates small changes in its DNA sequence, allowing scientists to study the relationships between different male lineages.

Y chromosomes can be classified into different groups (called haplogroups) which, to some extent, reflect a person’s geographical ancestry.

Certain haplogroups might be very common in, for example, East Asia and very rare in Europe.

By chance, the researchers discovered a white man with a rare Yorkshire surname carrying a Y chromosome haplogroup that had previously been found only in West African men. And even there, it is relatively uncommon.

“We found that he was in haplogroup A1, which is highly West African-specific,” said Turi King, a co-author on the study at the University of Leicester.

“It is incredibly rare, there are only 25 other people known worldwide and they are all African.”

The individual had no knowledge of any African heritage in his family.

Sharing a surname also significantly raised the likelihood of sharing the same type of Y chromosome, with the link getting stronger as the surname gets rarer.

So the researchers started recruiting people with the same last name, which starts with “R” and originates in Yorkshire.

Of 18 people they tested, seven carried the rare African haplogroup.

Turi King and Leicester colleague Mark Jobling then commissioned a genealogist to fit the men into a family tree to see how they were related and find clues about where exactly their unusual Y haplogroup came from.

“He could only get them into two trees, one which dates back to 1788 and the other to 1789. He couldn’t go back any further. So it’s likely they join up in the early 18th Century,” said Turi King.

The majority of the one million people who define themselves as “black” or “black British” trace their origins to immigration from the Caribbean or Africa from the middle of the 20th Century onwards.

Prior to the 20th Century, there have been various routes by which people of African ancestry might have reached Britain. For example, the Romans recruited from Africa and elsewhere for the garrison that guarded Hadrian’s Wall.

Another major route was through the slave trade.

“Some of the Africans who arrived in Britain through the slave trade rose quite high up in society, and we know they married with the rest of the population,” said Ms King.

“It could be either of these two routes,” she said. Even if the two family trees link up in the 18th Century, haplogroup A1 could have reached Britain long before that.

“But my guess is that, because many slaves came from West Africa, it could have been through that route,” Ms King told BBC News.

She added that the study showed that Britain has always been composed of a mosaic of different people.

Professor Jobling echoed this view: “This study shows that what it means to be British is complicated and always has been,” he said.

“Human migration history is clearly very complex, particularly for an island nation such as ours, and this study further debunks the idea that there are simple and distinct populations or ‘races’.”

Turi King said she had since found another African Y chromosome haplogroup in a different British lineage.

The research on haplogroup A1 was funded by the Wellcome Trust.

The British
Serves 60 million

Mix some hot Chileans, cool Jamaicans, Dominicans,
Trinidadians and Bajans with some Ethiopians, Chinese,
Vietnamese and Sudanese.”

Clusty have added a Wii-friendly portal.

Clusty is uniquely suited for searching on the Wii because the text entry with the soft keyboard on the Wii is very slow. With our topical clusters, you’re able to use shorter queries and just navigate with the clusters to get the results you’re searching for.

If you have a Wii and have downloaded the Internet Channel check it out …

http://wii.clusty.com/

From the Independent …

An Australian diver fought himself free from the jaws of a 10ft great white shark that swallowed his head and shoulders and then bit him around the torso.

Eric Nerhus, an abalone diver, told rescuers that he pushed his abalone chisel into the shark’s head and poked it in the eye. He then fought it off when it returned for a second attack, clamping its jaws around his body.

With the first bite, the shark crushed Mr Nerhus’s reinforced face mask, leaving him with a broken nose. The brunt of the second bite was taken by his lead weight vest, but his wetsuit was shredded. He suffered shock and blood loss and was left with lacerations to his body, left arm and head.

His 25-year-old son managed to pull him into their boat.

“He was actually bitten by the head down, the shark swallowed his head,”

“Eric is a tough boy,” he said. “He’s super fit. But I would say that would test anyone’s resolve, being a fish lunch.”

A shark expert said that the shark probably mistook Mr Nerhus for a seal.

He said that the shark would have quickly realised that Mr Nehrus didn’t taste anything like a seal, but “sort of a bit bony ­ so it possibly spat [him] back out”

http://www.frederiksamuel.com/blog/images/Fondation_Nicolas_Hulot.jpg

Fondation Nicolas Hulot is a non-profit, environmental concerned french association which fights against human destroying activities, climate changes and so on. The aim is to make people realize that to nature, we are all daily terrorists with our consumer addictions.

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/jmb-cat.GIF