umbrafeline

i do not feel weird when I cosplay. its people who don't who are the weirdos =P

there are 2 costumes hanging up in my closet: atom eve and kitty pryde [classic blue ensemble]. they only come out for costume weddings, Halloween and my regional comic cons [steel city, Pittsburgh, all-American and Cleveland]

A rare breed of tigers in Russia has been spotted behaving bizarrely for more than a decade, and now researchers say they may know why.

The majestic, endangered felines have stumbled into villages and roads, emaciated and unafraid of people. Eventually, most of the tigers died, or had to be killed.

Now a new study shows these Amur tigers (also called Siberian tigers) suffered from a fatal neurological infection called canine distemper virus.

The virus, which normally infects domestic dogs, may be responsible for the deaths of at least 1 percent of Amur tigers since 2009, the researchers said. [Gallery: Rare and Beautiful Amur Leopards]

"Losing 1 percent of an endangered population is pretty significant," study researcher Denise McAloose, a pathologist at the Wildlife Conservation Society in the Bronx, New York, said in a statement.

McAloose and her colleagues examined tissue samples from five wild Amur tigers that died or were killed as a result of a neurological disease. Canine distemper virus was responsible for the deaths of two of the big cats, and caused a severe infection in a third, the team reportedin the journal mBio.

The brains of the two tigers were full of lesions, suggesting they suffered from severe viral encephalitis, which explains the animals' strange stumbling behavior. Molecular analysis of proteins and antibodies confirmed the presence of the virus, and a gene associated with the virus was found in the third tiger.

The afflicted tigers were found across the Russian Far East, throughout the range where Amur tigers live. The virus appears to be a recent threat, because blood taken from tigers before the year 2000 tested negative for viral antibodies, McAloose said.

The researchers said they suspect the tigers might have contracted the virus from unvaccinated domestic dogs in Russia, or possibly from raccoon dogs or foxes.

To determine the source of the tiger infections, McAloose and her team are now collecting samples from dogs and small wild carnivores in the region.

McAloose called the situation for Amur tigers "quite serious."

Once found throughout the Russian Far East, northern China and the Korean peninsula, the animals were nearly driven to extinction by hunting. By the 1940s, just 40 tigers were living, according to the World Wildlife Fund. Thanks to conservation efforts, the population has increased to around 450 today.

http://news.yahoo.com/bizarre-behavior-endangered-tigers-traced-dog-virus-182221941.html

http://gma.yahoo.com/area-51-revealed-cia-spy-plane-documents-115407496--abc-news-topstories.html

Area 51 in Nevada has long been the subject of wild conspiracy theories about extraterrestrials, time travel and alien autopsies, but newly released declassified documents from the CIA finally acknowledge its existence.

Although the report makes no mention of the sensational stories that have played out in pop culture for decades, it turns out that Area 51 was started as a testing site for the government's U-2 spy plane. The report, more than 400 pages, is titled "Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and Oxcart Programs, 1954-1974."

The U-2 spy planes were commonly used by the United States during the Cold War in reconnaissance missions around the globe.

Officials and former employees have previously acknowledged in passing the existence of the facility and how it was used for testing U-2 planes, but this is the first time the U.S. government has openly referred to Area 51 and given specifics on its operations. The report also features a map of the area.

It makes no reference to the status of Area 51 after 1974.

The U-2 planes flew at an altitude of 60,000 feet, which was higher than any other plane at the time, according to the documents. When people who lived nearby saw the unfamiliar planes, they became suspicious and believed Earth was being visited by aliens.

"High-altitude testing of the U-2 soon led to an unexpected side effect -- a tremendous increase in reports of unidentified flying objects (UFOs)," the report states.

Air Force investigators then attempted to explain such sightings by linking them to natural phenomena, the report says.

"U-2 and later OXCART flights accounted for more than one-half of all UFO reports during the late 1950s and most of the 1960s," according to the documents.

Security at the facility and its secretive nature have been a constant in the years since Area 51 officially opened for business in 1955.

"As the deliveries of U-2 airframes to the testing site increased, a major logistic problem arose: how to transfer Lockheed employees from Burbank to Area 51 without arousing a great deal of curiosity," according to the documents.

"The project staff decided that the simplest approach would be to fly the essential personnel to the site on Monday morning and return them to Burbank on Friday evening."

The information also documents three fatal crashes that took place during 1956 with U-2 planes.

To make Area 51, a facility "in the middle of nowhere," sound more attractive to workers, it was referred to as "Paradise Ranch," or simply "the Ranch."

George Washington University's National Security Archive obtained a CIA history of the U-2 spy plane program through a Freedom of Information request and released it Thursday.

National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey Richelson reviewed the history in 2002, but all mentions of Area 51 had been redacted, according to The Associated Press.

Richelson says he requested the history again in 2005 and received a version a few weeks ago with mentions of Area 51 restored.

Will the conspiracy theories finally come to an end? Not likely, and after all, some parts of the report are still redacted.

An extinct species of tool-making humans apparently occupied a vast area in China as early as 1.7 million years ago, researchers say.

The human lineage evolved in Africa, with now-extinct species of humans dispersing away from their origin continent more than a million years before modern humans did. Scientists would like to learn more about when and where humans went to better understand what drove human evolution.

Researchers investigated the Nihewan Basin, which lies in a mountainous region about 90 miles (150 kilometers) west of Beijing. It holds more than 60 sites from the Stone Age, with thousands of stone tools found there since 1972 — relatively simple types, such as stone flakes altogether known as the Oldowan. Researchers suspect these artifacts belonged to Homo erectus, "thought to be ancestral to Homo sapiens," Hong Ao, a paleomagnetist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Xi'an, told LiveScience. [Photos: New Human Ancestors from Kenya]

The exact age of these sites was long uncertain. To find out, Ao and his colleagues analyzed the earth above, below and in which stone tools at the Shangshazui site in the Nihewan Basin were found. The tools in question were stone blades potentially used for cutting or scraping.

The scientists analyzed the way in which the samples of earth were magnetized — since the Earth's magnetic field has regularly flipped numerous times over millions of years, looking at the manner in which the magnetic fields of minerals are oriented can shed light on how old they are. The researchers discovered this site in northern China might be about 1.6 million to 1.7 million years old, making it 600,000 or 700,000 years older than previously thought.

Horse, elephant and other fossils suggest the area back when the stone tools were made was mainly grassland interspersed with patches of woodland. A lake between the mountains there was probably a major attraction for hominid explorers, providing water and a range of other food sources, while the mountains could have represented an important material source for making stone tools. The researchers suggest hominid migrations to East Asia during the early Stone Age were a consequence of increasing cooling and aridity in Africa and Eurasia.

Given that slightly older artifacts and bones belonging to Homo erectus were previously discovered in southern China more than 1,500 miles (2,500 km) away, these new findings suggest early and now-extinct human species may potentially have occupied a huge territory in China.

"Homo erectus occupied a vast area in China by 1.7 million to 1.6 million years ago," Ao said.

The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 15 in the journal Scientific Reports.

http://news.yahoo.com/early-humans-lived-china-1-7-million-years-133455147.html

2 words: ICEMAN VOLTRON!!!!!

that was an act, just like the bro-mance of billy gunn and chuck palumbo

http://news.yahoo.com/furry-little-carnivore-once-shown-zoos-species-150755196.html

In the cloud forests of Ecuador, scientists have "discovered" the olinguito, the first new carnivore species reported in the Western Hemisphere in 35 years.

The olinguito (Bassaricyon neblina) is a century-old case of missed connections. The furry, 2-lb. animal resembles its fellow olingos, which are sometimes called "cat monkeys" because they look like house cats with long tails. But the orange-brown olinguito eluded classification by scientists for more than 100 years, despite being observed in the wild, ending up in museum collections and even being exhibited at the Louisville Zoo, the National Zoo and the Bronx Zoo in the 1960s and 1970s, according to a statement from the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.

Finally, during a recent effort to classify the world's olingos, which researchers have argued may be one or up to five different species, Smithsonian researchers noticed that some of the olingo skulls looked odd. (The researchers examined more than 95 percent of the olingo skulls kept in museums around the world, the Smithsonian said in the statement.) These strange specimens had teeth and skulls that were smaller and shaped differently than those of other olingos. [6 Strange Species Discovered in Museums]

Preserved pelts revealed that the olingos with unusual skulls also had smaller bodies, with longer, denser coats. Field notes from the early 1900s indicated the animals were collected in Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica and Nicaragua at about 3,250 to 5,500 feet (1,000 to 1,700 meters) above sea level — much higher than the olingo's known range, according to the new study.

Working with Miguel Pinto, a zoologist from Ecuador, the researchers tracked down a living example of the new species.

"The data from the old specimens gave us an idea of where to look, but it still seemed like a shot in the dark," Roland Kays, study co-author and a zoologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences in Raleigh, said in the statement. "But these Andean forests are so amazing that even if we didn't find the animal we were looking for, I knew our team would discover something cool along the way."

The team found the nocturnal carnivores on the western slopes of the Andes, prowling the cloud forests for figs, nectar and insects. The olinguitos occasionally also eat birds, mice and other small animals. Cloud forests are tropical, moist forests with persistent fog or cloud cover. A genetic analysis proved the olinguitos were a distinct species.

The new species is described today (Aug. 15) in the journal ZooKeys.

"Proving that a species exists and giving it a name is where everything starts," lead study author Kristofer Helgen, a zoologist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, said in the statement. "This is a beautiful animal, but we know so little about it. How many countries does it live in? What else can we learn about its behavior? What do we need to do to ensure its conservation?"

Olingos are listed as a species of least concern on the International Union for Conservation of Nature's Red List, the most widely recognized list of threatened and endangered species.

What do you get when you cross a jellyfish with a bunny rabbit? Glow in the dark bunnies.

No, seriously. That's not a joke. It's not even science fiction. Scientists at the University of Hawaii have collaborated with a team of Turkish researchers to breed a litter of neon rabbits. By injecting luminescent proteins from a jellyfish into rabbit embryos, they produced two bunnies that hop, twitch their noses and radiate a bright green under florescent light.

These are not the first glowing bunnies in existence. Alba, the original "light hare" was conceived back in 2000 by a French artist and scientist as an art installation. Rabbits aren't even the only species that have been genetically engineered glow in the dark. Scientists have created pigs, sheep, monkeys, puppies and kittens that light up like mammalian lightening bugs under black lights. And you can readily purchase transgenic fish in six brilliant colors under the brand name GloFish.

Nor is the bunnies' glow just for show. It is intended to serve as a sort of guiding light to trace genetic transfers. If the animal glows, scientists know that a transfer of genes has been successful. Stefan Moisyadi, the lead researcher on the project, says he hopes the bright bunnies and a herd of shining sheep that will be born in his lab later this year will one day lead to cheaper medicines and cures for diseases like hemophilia, Alzheimer's and HIV.

Glowing animals can also help track pollutants as they travel through the body. Bio-luminescent Zebra Fish bred to light up in places where chemical pollutants are present in their cells are already being used to help assess the health impact of environmental pollution.

http://gma.yahoo.com/blogs/abc-blogs/scientists-breed-rabbits-eary-glow-161753729.html

a year is 2.2 days so youll be very elderly before your time that is if you withstand the 1832degrees of fahrenheit

A hot alien planet that's as big as Jupiter and cobalt blue in color has been spotted crossing in front of its parent star in the X-ray spectrum — a first for scientists.

Nearly two decades ago, researchers started detecting exoplanets by observing the dips in starlight that result when these alien worlds pass in front of their stars. But scientists had never before observed an exoplanet eclipse, called a "transit," in X-ray light.

"Thousands of planet candidates have been seen to transit in only optical light," study researcher Katja Poppenhaeger, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass., said in a statement. "Finally being able to study one in X-rays is important because it reveals new information about the properties of an exoplanet." [See the exoplanet eclipse in X-ray light (Video)]

Poppenhaeger and her colleagues focused on the "hot Jupiter" exoplanet HD 189733b, which is similar in size to the gas giant Jupiter but is scorching hot. HD 189733b is more than 30 times closer to its star than Earth is to the sun, which results in temperatures over 1,832 degrees Fahrenheit (1,000 degrees Celsius) and a year that lasts just 2.2 days.

At 63 light-years from Earth, the alien planet HD 189733b is the closest hot Jupiter to our planet and is often targeted by astronomers who want to study its hostile environment. Observations have also revealed that the planet rains glass in howling 4,350 mph (7,000 km/h) winds, and scientists recently used NASA's Hubble Space Telescope to confirm its deep blue hue.

In the new study, the researchers used NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory to watch six transits of HD 189733b and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft to observe one. They found that the dip in X-ray intensity during these transits was three times greater than the corresponding drop in optical light.

"The X-ray data suggest there are extended layers of the planet's atmosphere that are transparent to optical light but opaque to X-rays," study researcher Jurgen Schmitt of Hamburger Sternwarte in Hamburg, Germany, explained in a statement. "However, we need more data to confirm this idea."

The scientists already knew that ultraviolet and X-ray radiation from the planet's star was destroying its atmosphere over time, and they estimate that this evaporation is occurring at a rate of 220 million to 1.3 billion pounds (100 million to 600 million kilograms) of mass per second.

The main star in HD 189733b's system has higher levels of magnetic activity and appears about 30 times brighter in X-ray observations compared to its dim red companion star. And researchers think it can thank the huge exoplanet for its young looks.

"This star is not acting its age, and having a big planet as a companion may be the explanation," Poppenhaeger said. "It's possible this hot Jupiter is keeping the star's rotation and magnetic activity high because of tidal forces, making it behave in some ways like a much younger star."

The research will be detailed in the Aug. 10 edition of The Astrophysical Journal.

http://news.yahoo.com/alien-planet-eclipse-seen-x-ray-light-cosmic-111120910.html