Nature Ramble

This time to Hollywood.

I made a boob yesterday and posted Monday Moaning instead of Nature Ramble, so you get it today.

Animals often appear in films as bit actors or main characters, but how are they portrayed?

Is it real?

How much science is there in new Planet of the Apes film?

British actor Andy Serkis plays the intelligent chimp Caesar, who is the leader of the ape community

The latest instalment in the Planet of the Apes film franchise opens in the US on Friday. The rubber masks of the 60s and 70s films have been discarded in favour of motion capture suits and CGI. But how much did science inform the new movie’s portrayal of our close relatives?

In a career spanning nearly 40 years, Frans de Waal has cemented a reputation as one of the leading authorities on the behaviour of great apes.

The Dutch-born professor at Emory University in Georgia, US, has made a major contribution to our understanding of primate communities – uncovering many parallels with human societies.

But he’s not impressed with the way our evolutionary cousins have often been portrayed on screen.

“If they were shown in a respectful way, that would be one thing. But they are usually made to be clowns, which is not helpful for the conservation case or the ethical case,” he tells me.

So what did this top primatologist think of the new instalment in the Planet of the Apes franchise?

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, which goes on release in the US on Friday, is a bold sequel to the 2011 re-boot. That movie – Rise of the Planet of the Apes – saw a group of genetically modified primates revolt against their human masters.

Aggression may be a feature of chimp society, but so is reconciliation

The new film continues the story of that rebellion’s instigator, an intelligent chimpanzee by the name of Caesar, but picks up his story after a manmade virus has devastated the human population. Amid the rubble of our civilisation, the apes are pitted against surviving pockets of Homo sapiens in a battle for mastery of the planet.

Prof de Waal calls the storyline “impressive”, adding: “I’m not usually into action films like this one, but this held my attention.

“The apes are very humanised: They walk on two legs, they talk – somewhat – they shed tears. In real life, apes do a lot of crying and screaming, but they don’t produce tears like we do.”

However, other aspects of ape behaviour in the film, he says, are true to life.

“We know chimpanzees are aggressive and territorial – they wage war. The use of tools and weapons is also a possibility,” he explains.

To quote a colleague in his field, he said: “If you gave guns to chimps, they would use them.”

The primatologist says the reconciliation following a fight between Caesar and Koba – a bonobo character in the film – rang true in terms of ape interactions. He says he also recognised real-life behaviour in a scene where the apes are seen bowing before their appointed leader.

In real groups, Prof de Waal says, “when an alpha male makes an appearance, the other apes grovel and make themselves appear small”.

If you gave a gun to a chimp, would they use it?

But he draws attention to the contrast between the thoughtful male chimp Caesar and Koba – a bonobo – who is the most aggressive character in the film.

“It’s strange because, in reality, the bonobo is a more peaceful ape than the chimpanzee. There is also the character of an orang-utan, who is interested in teaching and in books, so they have added some twists to it.”

Fans will recognise this as an allusion to the position of orangs as a clerical caste in the ape society depicted by the 60s and 70s films and the 1963 novel by French writer Pierre Boule, on which the movies were based.

In real life, orang-utan males are rather solitary, but actress Karin Konoval, who plays the orang Maurice in both Dawn and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, says she understands why the forest primates were characterised as wise elders.

“At core, they are the watchers, who are able to assess everything. They never do anything gratuitously,” she told BBC News.

“There is nothing gratuitous that I’ve ever seen with any of the orang-utans I’ve known. They are very specific and clear in every choice that they make.”

To prepare for the role of Maurice – the trusted confidant of Caesar, played by British actor Andy Serkis – Ms Konoval studied videos of the animals and read “every book that had been written” about the apes.

“The movement of a mature male orang-utan is very specific. So one of the challenges I had on Rise [of the Planet of the Apes] was getting the weight right in my performance. I’m a 120lb woman, and Maurice is a 250lb orang-utan male. One of the things we did in the original film was to weight down my arm stilts,” she says.

But she says that being invited to spend time with the five orang-utans at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle gave her a wealth of experience to bring to her performance in Dawn. Her initial introduction to the group was via a 40-year-old orang male called Tuan, who has something of an artistic streak.

Karin Konoval portrayed Maurice using a motion capture suit

“I watched him paint on a canvas for an hour, an hour-and-a-half at a time. He moves the canvas around and considers it as he goes; this is not slapping the paint around. It was a real artwork. It was amazing,” she says.

Source BBCNews Read more

Monday Moaning

The Skeptics versus Science.

The facts are clear.

Doing this and going “nah, nah, nah” doesn’t change the facts.

Get your fingers out of your sanctimonious arseholes and face the reality.

Make the New Year one of action, come down hard on politicians, wipe the sniveling noses of the skeptics, make things happen!

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Make you Fink on Friday

This is a great song written by the Aussie group Men With Day Jobs. Thanks to quakerrattled for posting from Hot Topic .

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Make you Fink on Friday

A departure from the normal.

Have you ever wondered about coffee rings. You know, those annoy stains that litter your furniture, or worse, your best white linen table cloth?

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The Physics of Coffee Rings Finally Explained

It’s Monday morning. Another work week begins; another cup of coffee to the rescue. If you’re not careful, you might spill a bit of that precious coffee and then later wonder (à la Jerry Seinfeld) — What is the deal with that coffee ring on the table? Why does it form a ring with dark, outer edges? You can imagine Seinfeld asking this, right?

Well, it turns out there’s an answer for this. And it comes straight from a laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Physics and Astronomy. Yes, my friends, it all comes down to the shape of the particles in the liquid. Coffee is made up of spherical particles, and they get distributed unevenly, with some pushing outward towards an edge and forming dark rings. Meanwhile, other liquids are made up of oblong particles that get distributed evenly, hence no rings. The UPenn video above breaks it all down for you.

Amazingly, this isn’t our first post on Physics and Coffee. Here’s a quick look at how they drink coffee at zero gravity in the International Space Station. Enjoy!

Source: Open Culture

Comment:

Why must everything be reduced to science? Can’t we just take some things as read, that happen?

Just enjoy the coffee!

A Royal Rattles the Bars

Prince Charles attacks global warming sceptics

Prince uses speech at St James’s Palace to single out ‘confirmed sceptics’ and environmentally unfriendly businesses

Prince Charles: ‘We can’t wait until we are absolutely sure the patient is dying.’ Photograph: Steve Parsons/PA

The Prince of Wales has criticised “corporate lobbyists” and climate change sceptics for turning the earth into a “dying patient”, in his most outspoken attack yet on the world’s failure to tackle global warming.

He attacked businesses who failed to care for the environment, and compared the current generation to a doctor taking care of a critically ill patient.

“If you think about the impact of climate change, [it should be how] a doctor would deal with the problem,” he told an audience of government ministers, from the UK and abroad, as well as businesspeople and scientists. “A scientific hypothesis is tested to absolute destruction, but medicine can’t wait. If a doctor sees a child with a fever, he can’t wait for [endless] tests. He has to act on what is there.”

He added: “The risk of delay is so enormous that we can’t wait until we are absolutely sure the patient is dying.”

Hosting a two-day conference for forest scientists at St James’s Palace in London, the heir to the throne – who is taking over from the Queen at this year’s meeting of the Commonwealth in Sri Lanka – savagely satirised those who stand in the way of swift action on the climate.

He characterised them as “the confirmed sceptics” and “the international association of corporate lobbyists”. Faced with these forces of opposition, “science finds itself up the proverbial double blind gum tree”, he said.

Read more

 

Legacy of the Silent Spring

Rachel Carson and the legacy of Silent Spring

Fifty years after the publication of the book that laid the foundations for the environmental movement, what have we learned from the biologist who saw the need for science to work with nature?

Rachel Carson and her family in woods near her Maryland home in 1962, the year in which Silent Spring was published. Photograph: Alfred Eisenstaedt/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image

Near a brook in south-east England, the bird-spotter JA Baker stumbled on a grim little scene in 1961. “A heron lay in frozen stubble. Its wings were stuck to the ground by frost. Its eyes were open and living, the rest of it was dead. As I approached, I could see its whole body craving into flight. But it could not fly. I gave it peace and saw the agonised sunlight of its eyes slowly heal with cloud.”

The bird’s plight was clearly unnatural. Nor was its fate unique. That year, large numbers of dead birds were found strewn across the countryside. On the royal estate in Sandringham, for example, the toll included thrushes, skylarks, moorhens, goldfinches, sparrowhawks, chaffinches, hooded crows, partridges, pheasants, and wood pigeons. Nationally, more than 6,000 dead birds were reported to the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a massive leap on previous years. “We were inundated,” says the RSPB’s conservation director, Martin Harper.

The UK was not alone. For years, reports in the US indicated that numbers of birds, including America’s national bird, the bald eagle, were dropping alarmingly. Ornithologists also noted eggs were often not being laid while many that were laid did not hatch. Something was happening to the birds of the western world.

Several causes were proposed – poisons, viruses or other disease agents – but no one had a definitive answer or seemed sure of the cause – with one exception: the biologist Rachel Carson. For most of 1961, she had locked herself in her cottage in Colesville, Maryland, to complete her book, Silent Spring. It would provide an unequivocal identification of the bird killers. Powerful synthetic insecticides such as DDT were poisoning food chains, from insects upwards.

“Sprays, dusts and aerosols are now applied almost universally to farms, gardens, forests and homes – non-selective chemicals that have the power to kill every insect, the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, to still the song of the birds and the leaping of fish in the streams, to coat the leaves with a deadly film and to linger on in the soil – all this though the intended target may be only a few weeds or insects,” she wrote. One or two authors had previously suggested modern pesticides posed dangers. None wrote with the eloquence of Carson.

Published in 1962 it remains as pertinent today as then

Serialised in the New Yorker during the summer of 1962, Silent Spring was published that September. It remains one of the most effective denunciations of industrial malpractice ever written and is widely credited with triggering popular ecological awareness in the US and Europe. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace trace their origins directly to Silent Spring. “In the 60s, we were only just waking up to the power that we had to damage the natural world,” says Jonathon Porritt, a former director of Friends of the Earth. “Rachel Carson was the first to give voice to that concern in way that came through loud and clear to society.” Or as Doris Lessing put it: “Carson was the originator of ecological concerns.”

We have much to thank Carson for: a powerful green movement, an awareness that we cannot punish our wildlife indiscriminately and an understanding of the fragility of nature’s food chain. But is the environment in better shape today? Have we saved the planet? Or is it in greater peril than ever? Fifty years after Silent Spring was published, as the world warms, sea levels rise and coral reefs crumble, these questions have acquired a new and urgent relevance.

Source: The Guardian Read more to find out the horrors that we have inflicted on the world and the persistence of farmers and industries to main the horrors and the dedication of one courageous woman, one voice crying in the wilderness. How her book can be traced as the source of all today’s environmental organisations. Rachel Carson exposes the experts to public scrutiny and makes it clear that at best they had not done their homework and at worst they had withheld the truth