cafecuriosity

Nice Cup of Hot Chocolate

A confession - I am partial to the occasional cup of hot chocolate. However, I rarely spend any time at all, thinking about the journey the chocolate undertook to make its way into my cup. Echoes of a much longer and much, much older chocolate expedition caught my attention this week. Researchers announced they had discovered theobromine a chocolate marker in the shards of ceramic drinking cylinders unearthed at the Chaco Canyon settlement in New Mexico.

Kit Kat Snaps

  If you're a big cat fan and like them rare and little seen, then the Acinonyx jubatus hecki - the Saharan Cheetah is for you. Only about 250 of the graceful cats roam the Sahara desert and vast savannas of Algeria, Niger, Mail, Bukina-Faso and Togo. Naturally, scientists got all het up when four of the graceful felines were immortalized in camera traps set by a combined team fromZoological Society of London, Office du Parc Nationale de l'Ahaggar and the Universite de Bejaia.  http://www.wcs.org/353624/wcs_seeing_spots_in_the_sahara  Image: Farid Belbachir/ZSL/OPNA, Wildlife Conservation Society

Putting the Bite On the Economy

Australia's recent spate of shark attacks has me even more confused than I am normally. You see. according to George Burgess the director of the International Shark Attack File based at the University of Florida, shark attacks dropped in the U.S. in 2008 as the recession kicked in. Burgess pointed to fewer people holidaying at the beach for economic reasons. The U.S. accounts for two-thirds of shark attacks world-wide so their dip saw shark attacks fall to their lowest level in five years. Now contrary to U.S. experience, Australia has experienced three shark attacks in 18 days. Is Australia less severely impacted by the recession than the U.S? Is our economy more resilient than the U.S.? Or is this yet another case of causality gone astray in search of a headline? More likely, perhaps shark attacks have nothing to do with economics and everything to do with the distribution of surfer dudes, the banning of commercial fishing in Sydney Harbour, climate and lifestyles!   http://news.ufl.edu/2009/02/19/shark-attacks/   Image: George Burgess, director of the International Shark Attack File, University of Florida

Across India By Frog!

What do you get when you combine an Indian and a Belgian biologist? Answer - a frog finding frenzy in the leafy forests of India's Western Ghats region! Proving that instant gratification doesn't come easy in the frog world, biologists Biju and Bossuyt spent 10 long years of field studies in the Ghat. From 2005 through to 2008, Biju and Bossuyt have added 18 new species to India's frog tally.

This month they published their discovery of 12 new frog species! In the process, they rediscovered the Travancore bullfrong (Philautus travancoricus) previously considered lost to science, having not been sighted for over 100 years. The Ghats, renowned for their biological diversity are under threat from clearing for plantations and housing.   http://www.linnean.org/index.php?id=428   Image: 1. Philautus akroparallagi, 2. New species, S. Bihu, www.frogindia.org