Frank Lloyd Wright
- If you would see how interwoven it is in the warp and woof of civilization ... go at night-fall to the top of one of the down-town steel giants and you may see how in the image of material man, at once his glory and his menace, is this thing we call a city. There beneath you is the monster, stretching acre upon acre into the far distance. High over head hangs the stagnant pall of its fetid breath, reddened with light from myriad eyes endlessly, everywhere blinking. Thousands of acres of cellular tissue, the city’s flesh outspreads layer upon layer, enmeshed by an intricate network of veins and arteries radiating into the gloom, and in them, with muffled, persistent roar, circulating as the blood circulates in your veins, is the almost ceaseless beat of the activity to whose necessities it all conforms. The poisonous waste is drawn from the system of this gigantic creature by infinitely ramifying, thread-like ducts, gathering at their sensitive terminals matter destructive of its life, hurrying it to millions of small intestines to be collected in turn by larger, flowing to the great sewers, on to the drainage canal, and finally to the ocean.
- Lecture to the Chicago chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution (1904); later published as "The Art and Craft of the Machine" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941)
- Pictures deface walls oftener than they decorate them.
- "In the Cause of Architecture", in The Architectural Record (March 1908)
- It is where life is fundamental and free that men develop the vision needed to reveal the human soul in the blossoms it puts forth. ... In a great workshop like Chicago this creative power germinates, even though the brutality and selfish preoccupation of the place drive it elsewhere for bread. Men of this type have loved Chicago, have worked for her, and believed in her. The hardest thing they have to bear is her shame. These men could live and work here when to live and work in New York would stifle their genius and fill their purse.... New York still believes that art should be imported; brought over in ships; and is a quite contented market place. So while New York has reproduced much and produced nothing, Chicago’s achievements in architecture have gained world-wide recognition as a distinctively American architecture.
- Lecture to the Chicago Women’s Aid (1918); later published as "Chicago Culture" in On Architecture: Selected Writings (1894-1940) (1941)
- No house should ever be on a hill or on anything. It should be of the hill. Belonging to it. Hill and house should live together each the happier for the other.
- Frank Lloyd Wright, An Autobiography (1932)
- So here I stand before you preaching organic architecture: declaring organic architecture to be the modern ideal.
- An Organic Architecture (1939)
- I'm no teacher. Never wanted to teach and don't believe in teaching an art. Science yes, business of course..but an art cannot be taught. You can only inculcate it, you can be an exemplar, you can create an atmosphere in which it can grow. Well I suppose I, being an exemplar, could be called a teacher, in spite of myself. So go ahead, call me a teacher.
- Quote from an interview on the NBC television program, Wisdom- A Conversation with Frank Lloyd Wright (1953)
- A free America, democratic in the sense that our forefathers intended it to be, means just this: individual freedom for all, rich or poor, or else this system of government we call 'democracy' is only an expedient to enslave man to the machine and make him like it.
- The Future of Architecture (1953), p. 174
- Every great architect is — necessarily — a great poet. He must be a great original interpreter of his time, his day, his age.
- The Future of Architecture (1953)
- The physician can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.
- New York Times Magazine (4 October 1953) Sometimes paraphrased: "A doctor can bury his mistakes, but the architect can only advise his clients to plant vines."
- I doubt if there is anything in the world uglier than a Midwestern city.
- Address at Evanston Illinois (8 August 1954)
- Clear out 800,000 people and preserve it as a museum piece.
- On Boston, The New York Times (27 November 1955)
- New York: Prison towers and modern posters for soap and whiskey. Pittsburgh: Abandon it.
- On New York and Pittsburgh, The New York Times (27 November 1955)
- If you’re going to have centralization, why not have it!
- On his designs for "The Illinois" a 528-story Chicago office building (10 September 1956)
- The scientist has marched in and taken the place of the poet. But one day somebody will find the solution to the problems of the world and remember, it will be a poet, not a scientist.
- As quoted in The Star (1959) and Morrow's International Dictionary of Contemporary Quotations (1982) by Jonathon Green
- I believe in God, only I spell it "Nature".
- As quoted in Quote magazine (14 August 1966)
- Nature is all the body of God we mortals will ever see.
- As quoted in The Duality of Vision : Genius and Versatility in the Arts (1970) by Walter Sorrell, p. 28
- Architecture is life, or at least it is life itself taking form and therefore it is the truest record of life as it was lived in the world yesterday, as it is lived today or ever will be lived.
- As quoted in An Organic Architecture (1970)
- Here I am, Philip, am I indoors or am I out? Do I take my hat off or keep it on?
- On Philip Johnson’s glass house, as quoted in Architectural Digest (November 1985)
- Study nature, love nature, stay close to nature. It will never fail you.
- As quoted in The Wright Style (1992) by Carla Lind, p. 3
- Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose honest arrogance and have seen no occasion to change.
- As quoted in The World's Best Thoughts on Life & Living (1981) compiled by Eugene Raudsepp; also quoted in The Michigan Daily (10 November 1998)
- God is the great mysterious motivator of what we call nature and it has been said often by philosophers, that nature is the will of God. And, I prefer to say that nature is the only body of God that we shall ever see. If we wish to know the truth concerning anything, we'll find it in the nature of that thing.
- As quoted in Truth Against the World : Frank Lloyd Wright speaks for an organic architecture (1987) edited by Patrick J. Meehan
- The thing always happens that you really believe in; and the belief in a thing makes it happen.
- As quoted in My Favorite Quotations (1990) by Norman Vincent Peale
- Human beings can be beautiful. If they are not beautiful it is entirely their own fault. It is what they do to themselves that makes them ugly. The longer I live the more beautiful life becomes. If you foolishly ignore beauty, you will soon find yourself without it. Your life will be impoverished. But if you invest in beauty, it will remain with you all the days of your life.
- Quoted in A Living Architecture : Frank Lloyd Wright and Taliesin Architects (2000) by John Rattenbury
The Living City (1958)
- The screech and mechanical uproar of the big city turns the citified head, fills citified ears — as the song of birds, wind in the trees, animal cries, or as the voices and songs of his loved ones once filled his heart. He is sidewalk-happy.
- New York is the biggest mouth in the world. It appears to be prime example of the herd instinct, leading the universal urban conspiracy to beguile man from his birthright (the good ground), to hang him by his eyebrows from skyhooks above hard pavement, to crucify him, sell him, or be sold by him.
- “The-Shadow-of-the-Wall–Primitive Instincts Still Alive”
- To look at the cross-section of any plan of a big city is to look at something like the section of a fibrous tumor.
- “Social and Economic Disease”
- All fine architectural values are human values, else not valuable.
- I find it hard to believe that the machine would go into the creative artist’s hand even were that magic hand in true place. It has been too far exploited by industrialism and science at expense to art and true religion.
- “Night Is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun”
- The present is the ever moving shadow that divides yesterday from tomorrow. In that lies hope.
- Closing words, “Night is but a Shadow Cast by the Sun”
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- There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.
- Anonymous saying, dating back at least to its citation in Natural Theology (1836) by Thomas Chalmers, Bk. II, Ch. III : On the Strength of the Evidences for a God in the Phenomena of Visible and External Nature, § 15, where the author states: "It has been said that there is nothing more uncommon than common sense."; it has since become misattributed to particular people, including Frank Lloyd Wright.
Quotes about Wright
- He's the greatest architect of the nineteenth century.
- His place in history is secure. His continuing influence is assured. This country's architectural achievements would be unthinkable without him. He has been a teacher to us all.
- Tribute after his death in The Journal of the American Institute of Architects
- So long, Frank Lloyd Wright.
I can't believe your song is gone so soon.
I barely learned the tune
- Among the great modern architects, Louis Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Louis Kahn were arguably deists. ... Wright’s use of the word “nature” did not mean only what-we-find-outdoors. It was something deeper. Wright knew that when people speak of the “nature of things” they mean their very essence, the that-which-makes-them-what- they-are, which is always and only one step away from that-who-makes- them-what-they-are. ... Wright thought not that he was God but that he brought or allowed God into the world through what he did, creating and designing. ... Wright actually thought himself a prophet, which of course is a different to being God, or an angel. ... bringing God into the world in an act of something like mid-wifery from the womb of nature, is not at all Moses-like. It is not a bringing down of Law from on high after personal coaching from God, but a bringing forth of a God already there in potential. There is no presumption of having seen or met God of the Bible. One makes the God one believes in happen.
- Professor Michael Benedikt, University of Texas at Austin, Director of the Center for American Architecture and Design, in God, Creativity, and Evolution : The Argument from Designers (2005) (PDF document)
- Frank Lloyd Wright a PBS Television documentary by Ken Burns
- Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
- Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust
- Saving Fallingwater from Collapse
- Fallingwater Photo Tour
- Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy
- Photo visits and a visit to a major work inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright
- God, Creativity, and Evolution: The Argument from Designers (2005) by Michael L. Benedikt (PDF document, University of Texas at Austin)


|2004: 150,000 to 270,000 (estimated)
1959: 25,000 (estimated)
|Regions with significant populations|
|Azerbaijan, Dagestan, Israel,
United States, Russia
|Related ethnic groups|
|Part of a series on|
|Jews and Judaism|
The Mountain Jews community originated from Ancient Persia, from 5th century AD onwards, and their language, Juhuri, has close relation to the Tat language, an ancient Southwest Iranian language which integrates many elements of Ancient Hebrew. It is believed that they had arrived in Persia from Ancient Israel as early as the 8th century BCE. The Mountain Jews survived numerous historical vicissitudes by settling in extremely remote and mountainous areas. They were known to be accomplished warriors and horseback riders.
The Mountain Jews are believed to have inhabited Caucasia since the 5th century AD. They arrived from southwest Persia/Iran. The language of the Mountain Jews, Juhuri, is an Ancient Southwest Iranian language, which integrates many elements of Ancient Hebrew. It is believed that they had arrived in Persia, from Ancient Israel, as early as the 8th century BCE. The Mountain Jews maintained a strong military tradition. Some historians[who?] believe they may be descended from Jewish military colonists, settled by Parthian and Sassanid rulers in the Caucasus as frontier guards against nomadic incursions from the Pontic steppe.
In the 18th–19th century, the Jews resettled from the highland to the coastal lowlands but carried the name "Highland Jews" or "Mountain Jews" with them. In the villages (aouls) the Highland/Mountain Jews settled in a part of their own; in towns they did the same, although their dwellings did not differ from those of their neighbours. The Highland Jews adopted the dress of the highlanders. Judaic prohibitions ensured they retained specific dishes, and they enshrined their faith in the rules for family life.
Jews in Azerbaijan
During the construction of a stadium in the town of Guba a mass grave was discovered. Two main wells and two canals with human bones were uncovered. The finds indicate that 24 skulls were of children, 28 were of women of various ages. Besides ethnic Azeris, there were also Jews and Lezgis killed and buried during March Days in 1918, when the Bolsheviks and the ARF massacred thousands of people. The names of 81 massacred Jewish civilians were found and confirmed. It's estimated by Amnesty International and Azerbaijani foreignsic scientists more than 3000 Mountain Jews were killed by Armenian Dashnaks during March Days events.
While elsewhere in the Jewish diaspora, Jews were prohibited from owning land (cf. the Jews of Central Asia), at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, the Mountain Jews owned land and were farmers and gardeners, growing mainly grain. Their oldest occupation was rice-growing, but they also raised silkworms and cultivated tobacco. The Jewish vineyards were especially notable. The Jews and their Christian Armenian neighbors were the main producers of wine, an activity prohibited for Muslims by their religion. Judaism, in turn, limited some types of meat consumption. Unlike their neighbors, the Jews raised few domestic animals. At the same time, they were renowned tanners. Tanning was their third most important economic activity after farming and gardening. At the end of the 19th century, 6% of Jews were engaged in this trade. Handicrafts and commerce were mostly practiced by Jews in towns.
The Soviet authorities bound the Mountain Jews to collective farms, but allowed them to continue their traditional cultivation of grapes, tobacco, and vegetables; and making wine. The former isolated lifestyle of the Jews has practically ended, and they live side by side with other ethnic groups.
Religious and educational institutions
Originally, only boys were educated and they attended synagogue schools. With Sovietization, Tat became the language of instruction at newly-founded elementary schools. This policy continued until the beginning of World War II. In 1928, the first native-language newspaper, Zakhmetkesh (Working People), was published. After WWII, Russian was the required language at quba schools, and the newspaper stopped publication. Mountain Jew intellectuals are active in qubai culture.
Notable Mountain Jews
- Yekutiel Adam - Israeli general and former Deputy Chief of Staff of the Israeli Defense Forces.
- Udi Adam - Israeli general and the former head of the Israeli Northern Command.
- Yaffa Yarkoni - Israeli singer, winner of the "Israel Prize" in 1998.
- Sarit Hadad - Israeli singer.
- Telman Ismailov - Businessman and entrepreneur; owner of AST group.
- Omer Adam - Israeli singer.
- Albert Agarunov - A Starshina of the Azerbaijani Army who died during the Nagorno-Karabakh War.
- Israel Tsvaygenbaum - Russian-American artist (Polish Father; Mountain Jewish Mother)
- Semen (Zalman) Divilov (1914-1988) – scientist-economist, member of government Azerbaijan Republic from 1952 to 1982 years.
- Khayyam Nisanov - Azerbaijani Pop Star.
- Lior Refaelov - Israeli Football Player.
- Mountain Jews: customs and daily life in the Caucasus, Leʼah Miḳdash-Shemaʻʼilov, Liya Mikdash-Shamailov, Muzeʼon Yiśraʼel (Jerusalem), UPNE, 2002, page 17
- Mountain Jews: customs and daily life in the Caucasus, Leʼah Miḳdash-Shemaʻʼilov, Liya Mikdash-Shamailov, Muzeʼon Yiśraʼel (Jerusalem), UPNE, 2002, page 9
- Mountain Jews: customs and daily life in the Caucasus, Leʼah Miḳdash-Shemaʻʼilov, Liya Mikdash-Shamailov, Muzeʼon Yiśraʼel (Jerusalem), UPNE, 2002, page 19
- "Б. Сафаров. Установить всех жертв поименно не удастся". Эхо. Retrieved June 9, 2011.
- "Mass Grave Found in Northern Azerbaijan". Visions. Spring 2007. Retrieved June 9, 2011.
- "Rovshan Mustafayev: "More than 3000 Mountain Jews were killed by Armenians during 1918-1919"". news.az. Retrieved 1 June 2013.
- Richard Butler evidence to the Krstic trial 19 July 2000 ICTY transcript p 5431 . Retrieved 7 April 2010.
- Witness PW-139 evidence to the Popovice et al., 7 November 2006, ICTY transcript p 3690 http://www.icty.org/x/cases/popovic/trans/en/061107ED.htm
- query.nytimes.com, New York Times
- juhuro.com, website created by Vadim Alhasov in 2001. Daily updates reflect the life of Mountain Jewish (juhuro) community around the globe.
- newfront.us, New Frontier is a monthly Mountain Jewish newspaper, founded in 2003. International circulation via its web site. «Новый Рубеж» является ежемесячной газетой Горско-Еврейской общины США. Она издается с мая месяца 2003 года. Отражая жизнь общины не только в пределах своей страны, она информирует о новостях и событиях происходящих в Горско-Еврейских общинах во всем мире.
- keshev-k.com, Israeli website of Mountain Jews.
- gorskie.ru, Mountain Jews, website in Russian language.
- "Judæo-Tat", Ethnologue


Alphabetic Index : A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Gasoline /ˈɡæsəliːn/, or petrol /ˈpɛtrəl/ is a transparent, petroleum-derived liquid that is used primarily as a fuel in internal combustion engines. It consists mostly of organic compounds obtained by the fractional distillation of petroleum, enhanced with a variety of additives. Some gasolines also contain ethanol as an alternative fuel. In North America, the term gasoline is often shortened in colloquial usage to gas, but some people use the term petrol, which is the common name in the UK and elsewhere in the Commonwealth of Nations. Under normal ambient conditions, its material state is liquid, unlike liquefied petroleum gas or natural gas.
Gasoline is more volatile than diesel oil, Jet-A, or kerosene, not only because of the base constituents, but also because of additives. Volatility is often controlled by blending with butane, which boils at −0.5 °C. The volatility of petrol is determined by the Reid vapor pressure (RVP) test. The desired volatility depends on the ambient temperature. In hot weather, petrol components of higher molecular weight and thus lower volatility are used. In cold weather, too little volatility results in cars failing to start.
In hot weather, excessive volatility results in what is known as "vapor lock", where combustion fails to occur, because the liquid fuel has changed to a gaseous state in the fuel lines, rendering the fuel pump ineffective and starving the engine of fuel. This effect mainly applies to camshaft-driven (engine mounted) fuel pumps which lack a fuel return line. Vehicles with fuel injection require the fuel to be pressurized within a set range. Because the camshaft speed is nearly zero before the engine is started, an electric pump is used. It is located in the fuel tank so the fuel may also cool the high-pressure pump. Pressure regulation is achieved by returning unused fuel to the tank. Therefore, vapor lock is almost never a problem in a vehicle with fuel injection.
In the US, volatility is regulated to reduce the emission of unburned hydrocarbons by the use of so-called reformulated gasoline that is less prone to evaporation. In Australia, summer petrol volatility limits are set by state governments and vary among states. Most countries simply have a summer, winter, and perhaps intermediate limit.
Volatility standards may be relaxed (allowing more gasoline components into the atmosphere) during gasoline shortages. For example, on 31 August 2005, in response to Hurricane Katrina, the US permitted the sale of nonreformulated gasoline in some urban areas, effectively permitting an early switch from summer to winter-grade gasoline. As mandated by EPA administrator Stephen L. Johnson, this "fuel waiver" was made effective until 15 September 2005.
Modern automobiles are also equipped with an evaporative emissions control system ( 'EVAP system' in automotive jargon), which collects evaporated fuel from the fuel tank in a charcoal-filled canister while the engine is stopped, and then releases the collected vapors to the engine for consumption when the engine is running (usually after it has reached normal operating temperature). The evaporative emissions control system also includes a sealed gas cap to prevent vapors from escaping via the fuel filler tube.Octane rating For more details on this topic, see octane rating.
Spark ignition engines are designed to burn gasoline in a controlled process called deflagration. But in some cases, the unburned mixture can autoignite, which results in rapid heat release and can damage the engine. This phenomenon is often referred to as engine knocking or end-gas knock. One way to reduce knock in spark ignition engines is to increase the gasoline's resistance to autoignition, which is expressed by its octane rating.
Octane rating is measured relative to a mixture of 2,2,4-Trimethylpentane (an isomer of octane) and n-heptane. There are different conventions for expressing octane ratings, so a fuel may have several different octane ratings based on the measure used. Research octane number (RON) for commercially-available gasoline varies by country. In Finland, Sweden, and Norway, 95 RON is the standard for regular unleaded petrol and 98 RON is also available as a more expensive option. In the UK, ordinary regular unleaded petrol is 91 RON (not commonly available), premium unleaded petrol is always 95 RON, and super unleaded is usually 97-98 RON. However, both Shell and BP produce fuel at 102 RON for cars with high-performance engines, and the supermarket chain Tesco began in 2006 to sell super unleaded petrol rated at 99 RON. In the US, octane ratings in unleaded fuels can vary between 86 and 87 AKI (91-92 RON) for regular, through 89-90 AKI (94-95 RON) for mid-grade (European premium), up to 90-94 AKI (95-99 RON) for premium (European super).
The octane rating became important as the military sought higher output for aircraft engines in the late 1930s and the 1940s. A higher octane rating allows a higher compression ratio or supercharger boost, and thus higher temperatures and pressures, which translate to higher power output. Some scientists even predicted that a nation with a good supply of high octane gasoline would have the advantage in air power. In 1943, the Rolls Royce Merlin aero engine produced 1,320 horsepower (984 kW) using 100 RON fuel from a modest 27 litre displacement. Towards the end of the second world war, experiments were conducted using 150 RON fuel.Stability
Quality gasoline should be stable almost indefinitely if stored properly. Such storage should be in an airtight container, to prevent oxidation or water vapors mixing, and at a stable cool temperature to reduce the chance of the container's leaking. When gasoline is not stored correctly, gums and solids may accumulate, resulting in "stale fuel". The presence of these degradation products in fuel tank, lines, and carburetor or fuel injection components, make it harder to start the engine. Upon resumption of regular vehicle usage, the buildups should eventually be cleaned out by the flow of fresh petrol. A fuel stabilizer can be used to extend the life of fuel that is not or cannot be stored properly. Fuel stabilizer is commonly used for small engines, such as lawnmower and tractor engines, to promote quicker and more reliable starting. Users have been advised to keep gasoline containers more than half full and properly capped to reduce air exposure, to avoid storage at high temperatures, to run an engine for ten minutes to circulate the stabilizer through all components prior to storage, and to run the engine at intervals to purge stale fuel from the carburetor.Energy content (high and low heating value)
Energy is obtained from the combustion of gasoline by the conversion of a hydrocarbon to carbon dioxide and water. The combustion of octane follows this reaction:2 C8H18 + 25 O2 → 16 CO2 + 18 H2O
Gasoline contains about 35 MJ/L (9.7 kW·h/L, 132 MJ/US gal, 36.6 kWh/US gal) (higher heating value) or 13 kWh/kg. Gasoline blends differ, and therefore actual energy content varies according to the season to season and producer by up to 4% more or less than the average, according to the US EPA. On average, about 19.5 US gallons (16.2 imp gal; 74 L) of gasoline are available from a 42-US-gallon (35 imp gal; 160 L) barrel of crude oil (about 46% by volume), varying due to quality of crude and grade of gasoline. The remaining residue comes off as products ranging from tar to naptha.
A high-octane-rated fuel, such as liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) has an overall lower power output at the regular compression ratio of an engine run at on gasoline. However, with an engine tuned to the use of LPG (i.e. via higher compression ratios, such as 12:1 instead of 8:1), this lower power output can be overcome. This is because higher-octane fuels allow for a higher compression ratio, hence a higher cylinder temperature, which improves efficiency. Also, increased mechanical efficiency is created by a higher compression ratio through the concomitant higher expansion ratio on the power stroke, which is by far the greater effect. The higher expansion ratio extracts more work from the high-pressure gas created by the combustion process. The applicable formula is . An Atkinson cycle engine uses the timing of the valve events to produce the benefits of a high expansion ratio without the disadvantages, chiefly detonation, of a high compression ratio. A high expansion ratio is also one of the two key reasons for the efficiency of Diesel engines, along with the elimination of pumping losses due to throttling of the intake air flow. A high compression ratio can be viewed as a necessary evil to have a high expansion ratio.
The lower energy content (per litre) of LPG in comparison to gasoline is due mainly to its lower density. Energy content per kilogram is higher than for gasoline (higher hydrogen to carbon ratio, see for example Standard_enthalpy_of_formation#Examples:_Inorganic_compounds_.28at_25_.C2.B0C.29).Density
The specific gravity (or relative density) of gasoline ranges from 0.71–0.77 kg/l (719.7 kg/m3 ; 0.026 lb/in3; 6.073 lb/US gal; 7.29 lb/imp gal), higher densities having a greater volume of aromatics. Gasoline floats on water; water cannot generally be used to extinguish a gasoline fire, unless used in a fine mist.Chemical analysis and productionA pumpjack in the United StatesAn oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico
Gasoline is produced in oil refineries. Material that is separated from crude oil via distillation, called virgin or straight-run gasoline, does not meet the required specifications for modern engines (in particular octane rating; see below), but will comprise part of the blend.Some of the main components of gasoline: isooctane, butane, 3-ethyltoluene, and the octane enhancer MTBE.
The bulk of a typical gasoline consists of hydrocarbons with between four and 12 carbon atoms per molecule (commonly referred to as C4-C12).
The various refinery streams blended to make gasoline have different characteristics. Some important streams are:
The terms above are the jargon used in the oil industry, but terminology varies.
Overall, a typical gasoline is predominantly a mixture of paraffins (alkanes), naphthenes (cycloalkanes), and olefins (alkenes). The actual ratio depends on:
Currently, many countries set limits on gasoline aromatics in general, benzene in particular, and olefin (alkene) content. Such regulations led to increasing preference for high octane pure paraffin (alkane) components, such as alkylate, and is forcing refineries to add processing units to reduce benzene content.
Gasoline can also contain other organic compounds, such as organic ethers (deliberately added), plus small levels of contaminants, in particular organosulfur compounds, but these are usually removed at the refinery.Additives See also: List of gasoline additives Antiknock additivesA plastic container for storing gasoline used in Germany
Most countries have phased out leaded fuel. Different additives have replaced the lead compounds. The most popular additives include aromatic hydrocarbons, ethers and alcohol (usually ethanol or methanol).Tetraethyl lead
Gasoline, when used in high-compression internal combustion engines, has a tendency to autoignite (detonate) causing damaging "engine knocking" (also called "pinging" or "pinking") noise. Early research into this effect was led by A.H. Gibson and Harry Ricardo in England and Thomas Midgley and Thomas Boyd in the United States. The discovery that lead additives modified this behavior led to the widespread adoption of their use in the 1920s, and therefore more powerful, higher compression engines. The most popular additive was tetra-ethyl lead. With the discovery of the extent of environmental and health damage caused by the lead, however, and the incompatibility of lead with catalytic converters found on virtually all newly sold US automobiles since 1975, this practice began to wane (encouraged by many governments introducing differential tax rates) in the 1980s.In the US, where lead had been blended with gasoline (primarily to boost octane levels) since the early 1920s, standards to phase out leaded gasoline were first implemented in 1973 — due in great part to studies conducted by Philip J. Landrigan. In 1995, leaded fuel accounted for only 0.6% of total gasoline sales and less than 2000 short tons (1814 t) of lead per year. From 1 January 1996, the Clean Air Act banned the sale of leaded fuel for use in on-road vehicles. Possession and use of leaded gasoline in a regular on-road vehicle now carries a maximum $10,000 fine in the US. However, fuel containing lead may continue to be sold for off-road uses, including aircraft, racing cars, farm equipment, and marine engines. Similar bans in other countries have resulted in lowering levels of lead in people's bloodstreams.
Gasolines are also treated with metal deactivators, which are compounds that sequester (deactivate) metal salts that otherwise accelerate the formation of gummy residues. The metal impurities might arise from the engine itself or as contaminants in the fuel.Detergents
Gasoline, as delivered at the pump, also contains additives to reduce internal engine carbon buildups, improve combustion, and to allow easier starting in cold climates. High levels of detergent can be found in Top Tier Detergent Gasolines. These gasolines exceed the U.S. EPA's minimum requirement for detergent content. The specification for Top Tier Detergent Gasolines was developed by four automakers: GM, Honda, Toyota and BMW. According to the bulletin, the minimal EPA requirement is not sufficient to keep engines clean. Typical detergents include alkylamines and alkyl phosphates at the level of 50-100 ppm.Ethanol European Union
In the EU, 5% ethanol can be added within the common gasoline spec (EN 228). Discussions are ongoing to allow 10% blending of ethanol (available in Finnish and French gas stations). Most gasoline sold in Sweden has 5-15% ethanol added.Brazil
In Brazil, the Brazilian National Agency of Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP) requires gasoline for automobile use to have from 18 to 25% of ethanol added to its composition.Australia
Legislation requires retailers to label fuels containing ethanol on the dispenser, and limits ethanol use to 10% of petrol in Australia. Such petrol is commonly called E10 by major brands, and its price per litre is less than that of regular unleaded petrol.United States
In most states, ethanol is added by law to a minimum level which is currently 5.9%. Most fuel pumps display a sticker stating the fuel may contain up to 10% ethanol, an intentional disparity which allows the minimum level to be raised over time without requiring modification of the literature/labelling. Until late 2010, fuels retailers were only authorized to sell fuel containing up to 10 percent ethanol (E10), and most vehicle warranties (except for flexible fuel vehicles) authorize fuels that contain no more than 10 percent ethanol. In parts of the United States, ethanol is sometimes added to gasoline without an indication that it is a component.India
The government of India in October 2007 decided to make 5% ethanol blending (with petrol) mandatory. Discussions are ongoing to increase the blending of ethanol to 10%.Dye Main article: Fuel dyes
In Australia, petrol tends to be dyed a light shade of purple.
In India petrol is dyed red.
In the United States, aviation gasoline (avgas) is dyed to identify its octane rating and to distinguish it from kerosene-based jet fuel, which is clear.
In the U.S., many rural states offer 'off road diesel' that contains a red dye. It is chemically the same as undyed diesel but can be purchased without paying a road tax. Its use is for off road vehicles, such as tractors. However, if the fuel is used in on road vehicles, the dye will be transferred to fuel filters and other components. Offenders with marked components are liable for tax evasion.
Oxygenate blending adds oxygen-bearing compounds such as MTBE, ETBE and ethanol. The presence of these oxygenates reduces the amount of carbon monoxide and unburned fuel in the exhaust gas. In many areas throughout the US, oxygenate blending is mandated by EPA regulations to reduce smog and other airborne pollutants. For example, in Southern California, fuel must contain 2% oxygen by weight, resulting in a mixture of 5.6% ethanol in gasoline. The resulting fuel is often known as reformulated gasoline (RFG) or oxygenated gasoline, or in the case of California, California reformulated gasoline. The federal requirement that RFG contain oxygen was dropped on 6 May 2006 because the industry had developed VOC-controlled RFG that did not need additional oxygen.
MTBE use is being phased out in some states due to issues with contamination of ground water. In some places, such as California, it is already banned. Ethanol and, to a lesser extent, the ethanol-derived ETBE are common replacements. Since most ethanol is derived from biomass, such as corn, sugar cane or grain, it is referred to as bioethanol. A common ethanol-gasoline mix of 10% ethanol mixed with gasoline is called gasohol or E10, and an ethanol-gasoline mix of 85% ethanol mixed with gasoline is called E85. The most extensive use of ethanol takes place in Brazil, where the ethanol is derived from sugarcane. In 2004, over 3.4 billion US gallons (2.8 billion imp gal/13 million m³) of ethanol was produced in the United States for fuel use, mostly from corn, and E85 is slowly becoming available in much of the United States, though many of the relatively few stations vending E85 are not open to the general public. The use of bioethanol, either directly or indirectly by conversion of such ethanol to bio-ETBE, is encouraged by the European Union Directive on the Promotion of the use of biofuels and other renewable fuels for transport. Since producing bioethanol from fermented sugars and starches involves distillation, though, ordinary people in much of Europe cannot legally ferment and distill their own bioethanol at present (unlike in the US, where getting a BATF distillation permit has been easy since the 1973 oil crisis).Safety Environmental considerations
Combustion of 1 US gallon (3.8 L) of gasoline produces 8,788 grams (19.37 lb) of carbon dioxide (2.3 kg/l), a greenhouse gas.
The main concern with gasoline on the environment, aside from the complications of its extraction and refining, is the potential effect on the climate. Unburnt gasoline and evaporation from the tank, when in the atmosphere, react in sunlight to produce photochemical smog. Addition of ethanol increases the volatility of gasoline, potentially worsening the problem.
The chief risks of such leaks come not from vehicles, but from gasoline delivery truck accidents and leaks from storage tanks. Because of this risk, most (underground) storage tanks now have extensive measures in place to detect and prevent any such leaks, such as monitoring systems (Veeder-Root, Franklin Fueling).Toxicity
The material safety data sheet for unleaded gasoline shows at least 15 hazardous chemicals occurring in various amounts, including benzene (up to 5% by volume), toluene (up to 35% by volume), naphthalene (up to 1% by volume), trimethylbenzene (up to 7% by volume), methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) (up to 18% by volume, in some states) and about ten others. Hydrocarbons in gasoline generally exhibit low acute toxicities, with LD50 of 700 – 2700 mg/kg for simple aromatic compounds. Benzene and many antiknocking additives are carcinogenic.Inhalation
Huffed gasoline is a common intoxicant that has become epidemic in some poorer communities and indigenous groups in Australia, Canada, New Zealand,and some Pacific Islands. In response, Opal fuel has been developed by the BP Kwinana Refinery in Australia, and contains only 5% aromatics (unlike the usual 25%) which weakens the effects of inhalation.FlammabilityUncontrolled burning of gasoline produces large quantities of soot.
Like other alkanes, gasoline burns in a limited range of its vapor phase and, coupled with its volatility, this makes leaks highly dangerous when sources of ignition are present. Gasoline has a lower explosion limit of 1.4% by volume and an upper explosion limit of 7.6%. If the concentration is below 1.4% the air-gasoline mixture is too lean and will not ignite. If the concentration is above 7.6% the mixture is too rich and also will not ignite. However, gasoline vapor rapidly mixes and spreads with air, making unconstrained gasoline quickly flammable. Many accidents involve gasoline being used in an attempt to light bonfires; the gasoline readily vaporizes after being poured and mixes with the surrounding air.Usage and pricing Main articles: Gasoline usage and pricing and Peak oilUK petrol prices
The United States account for about 44% of the world’s gasoline consumption. In 2003 The US consumed 476.474 gigalitres (1.25871×1011 US gal; 1.04810×1011 imp gal), which equates to 1.3 gigalitres of gasoline each day (about 360 million US or 300 million imperial gallons). The US used about 510 billion litres (138 billion US gal/115 billion imp gal) of gasoline in 2006, of which 5.6% was mid-grade and 9.5% was premium grade.
Western countries have the highest usage rates per person.Europe
Unlike the US, countries in Europe impose substantial taxes on fuels such as gasoline. The price of gasoline in Europe is typically more than twice that in the US. In Italy, due to the amendments imposed by Monti's Government in December 2011, the price of gasoline has passed, in the period of two weeks, from 1.50 €/l (7.48 US$/gal) to 1.75 €/l (8.72 US$/gal); on March, 17th, in a Gasoline Station located near Ancona, has reached the psychological threshold of 2 €/l: the price was € 2.001/l (this means 9.97 US$/gal) This chart needs to be compared to the USA national average price of gasoline of 0.71 €/l .
From 1998 to 2004, the price of gasoline fluctuated between $1 and $2 USD per U.S. gallon. After 2004, the price increased until the average gas price reached a high of $4.11 per U.S. gallon in mid-2008, but receded to approximately $2.60 per U.S. gallon by September 2009. More recently, the U.S. experienced an upswing in gas prices through 2011, and by 1 March 2012, the national average was $3.74 per gal.
Unlike most consumer goods, the prices of which are listed before tax, in the United States, gasoline prices are posted with taxes included. Taxes are added by federal, state and local governments. As of 2009, the federal tax is 18.4¢ per gallon for gasoline and 24.4¢ per gallon for diesel (excluding red diesel). Among states, the highest gasoline tax rates, including the federal taxes as of 2005, are New York (62.9¢/gal), Hawaii (60.1¢/gal), and California (60¢/gal). However, many states' taxes are a percentage and thus vary in amount depending on the cost of the gasoline.
About 9% of all gasoline sold in the US in May 2009 was premium grade, according to the Energy Information Administration. Consumer Reports magazine says, “If says to use regular fuel, do so—there’s no advantage to a higher grade.” The Associated Press said premium gas—which is a higher octane and costs several cents a gallon more than regular unleaded—should be used only if the manufacturer says it is “required”. Cars with turbocharged engines and high compression ratios often specify premium gas because higher octane fuels reduce the incidence of "knock", or fuel pre-detonation. If regular fuel is used the engine computer will usually switch to a less aggressive fuel map in order to protect the engine, and performance is decreased.History
The first automotive combustion engines, so-called Otto engines, were developed in the last quarter of the 19th century in Germany. The fuel was a relatively volatile hydrocarbon obtained from coal gas. With a boiling point near 85 °C (octanes boil about 40 °C higher), it was well suited for early carburetors (evaporators). The development of a "spray nozzle" carburetors enabled the use of less volatile fuels. Further improvements in engine efficiency were attempted at higher compression ratios, but early attempts were blocked by knocking (premature explosion of fuel). In the 1920s, antiknock compounds were introduced by Migley and Boyd, specifically tetraethyl lead (TEL). This innovation started a cycle of improvements in fuel efficiency that coincided with the large-scale development of oil refining to provide more products in the boiling range of gasolines. In the 1950s oil refineries started to focus on high octane fuels, and then detergents were added to gasoline to clean the jets and carburetors. The 1970s witnessed greater attention to the environmental consequences of burning gasoline. These considerations led to the phasing out of TEL and its replacement by other antiknock compounds. Subsequently, low-sulfur gasoline was introduced, in part to preserve the catalysts in modern exhaust systems.Etymology and terminology
"Gasoline" is cited (under the spelling "gasolene") from 1863 in the Oxford English Dictionary. It was never a trademark, although it may have been derived from older trademarks such as "Cazeline" and "Gazeline".
Variant spellings of "petrol" have been used to refer to raw petroleum since the 16th century. "Petrol" was first used as the name of a refined petroleum product around 1870 by British wholesaler Carless, Capel & Leonard, who marketed it as a solvent. When the product later found a new use as a motor fuel, Frederick Simms, an associate of Gottlieb Daimler, suggested to Carless that they register the trade mark "Petrol", but by this time the word was already in general use, possibly inspired by the French pétrole, and the registration was not allowed. Carless registered a number of alternative names for the product, while their competitors used the term "motor spirit" until the 1930s.
In many countries, gasoline has a colloquial name derived from that of the chemical benzene (e.g., German Benzin, Dutch Benzine, Italian benzina, Chile bencina, Thai เบนซิน). Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay use the colloquial name nafta derived from that of the chemical naphtha.
The terms "mogas", short for motor gasoline, or "autogas", short for automobile gasoline, are used to distinguish automobile fuel from aviation gasoline, or "avgas". In British English, gasoline can refer to a different petroleum derivative historically used in lamps, but this usage is relatively uncommon.See also


Whenever you see a face in a cloud or the man in the moon you’re experiencing a phenomenon called “pareidoliac apophenia.” One example is the apparent face that emerged from the shadows of a mesa on Mars.
The term apophenia was coined by Klaus Conrad in 1958. It refers to our tendency to find meaningful patterns or to draw connections in random sets of data.
In east Asian folklore, by the way, they don’t see a man in the moon; they see a rabbit.
Another example of apophenia is the apparent synchronicity between the 1939 film Wizard of Oz and the Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon. If you watch this YouTube clip of the album playing as the movie soundtrack, meaningful connections seem to emerge.
Pareidolia is a specific kind of apophenia where faces or other patterns emerge from random shapes. The Rorschach test is a classic example. It also explains the remarkable discovery in 1978 of the face of Jesus in the burn marks of a tortilla, and the appearance of the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich.
In September of 2007, a monkey god was observed in a car-damaged tree in Singapore. Pilgrims have flocked there ever since then to offer bananas to the monkey deity.
As artists, we can have some fun with this phenomenon. Whenever I sense a face emerging from the randomness of the world, I like to sketch it, accentuating the pareidolia just slightly. Maybe I’m going crazy, but last week I saw a face in the dormer windows of a building, and did this quick sketch to push it just a little.
Another time on a hike I stopped in my tracks when I saw a face in the rocky cliff. I did this sketch to accentuate the forms just enough to make it apparent, but without making it too obvious, hopefully. Rackham did the same thing with tree roots.
Though I didn’t know the name for it at the time, I used the idea in The World Beneath (1995), where Lee Crabb sees a skull (center) and Oriana sees a mother figure (right) in an apparently random grouping of stalagmites (left). Designing a form that could be interpreted in two different ways was a real brain-teaser.
Wikipedia entries on pareidolia and apophenia and Dark Side of the Rainbow
More on the Monkey Tree phenomenon, link.
Man in the Moon, link.
Rabbit in the Moon, link.
Alien face in duck x-ray, link.


Copyright Institute of Social Science, University of Tokyo. All rights reserved.
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JAPANESE politicians, it seems, will do anything but face their war crimes, and will even try to justify them. The Japanese Foreign Ministry has persuaded the American government not to invite Prime Minister Murayama to Pearl Harbor, arguing that it would "harm the relationship between the two nations." A member of the Hosokawa cabinet said the Nanking massacre was a myth. And a steady stream of cabinet ministers, Dietmembers, and leading journalists have claimed that Japan liberated Asia from the colonial powers.
These statements might suggest that the Japanese, unlike the Germans, have never confronted their past in an objective manner. However, such was not always the case. Japanese "amnesia" about the war, exemplified in the above comments, has emerged as a part of a revisionist literature which argues that mainstream Japanese historians, and intellectuals generally, were wrong in their postwar denunciation of the Japanese military and its actions. The revisionists, such as former Minister of Education Fujio and former Minister of Justice Nagano, are so zealous that they keep whitewashing Japan's role in the war even at the risk of losing office (in fact, their insistence that little killing took place in Nanking is correct: the worst massacres happened in the suburbs of Nanking). Justification of the war is a recent development in postwar intellectual history, although one may rightly argue that the arguments are logical extensions of the infamous prewar Ajiashugi, or "Asianism."
The new surge of nationalism has been in part fostered by the recent industrial development of East Asia. Pointing to the region's rapidly growing economies, nationalist-revisionists argue that the East has prevailed over the West, and that the Pacific War was only an initial step in this direction. By arguing this, they confirm something Namier once wrote:
"One would expect people to remember the past and to imagine the future, [b]ut in fact, when discoursing or writing about history, they imagine it in terms of their own experience ... they imagine the past and remember the future."(1)
The new nationalists are certainly imagining their past - in a manner that suits their egos.
Maruyama's critique of fascism led to his famous defense of the Constitution's Article 9, which bans the maintenance of armed forces in Japan, and has served as a guiding light for a whole generation of scholars, students, and citizens. The arguments of Japanese pacifism are simple: all wars betray noble purposes, militarism is the worst enemy of democracy, and we must struggle to eliminate any legacy of militarism from our soil in order to establish a full-fledged democracy. Moreover, the establishment of democracy is essential to avoid future wars; but a government enmeshed in Cold War institutions and US-dominated foreign policy is not a democracy, even though its formal political procedures may make it seem one. Hence the rebellion against the Security Treaty with the Americans and the widespread antinuclear movements.
I grew up in this pacifist intellectual environment, but now I am puzzled by its hypocrisies. It says little about the atrocities committed by the Japanese military abroad.(3) It also has little to say about the kind of foreign policy necessary to establish a war-free community of nations. As pacifists, we were supposed to defend our constitution against the Cold Warriors and the Americans; but it was the American Occupation forces who virtually dictated the draft of our Constitution. The Japanese almost always appeared as victims of war, victims of the irresponsible militarist government. We used Hiroshima as a symbol of antinuclear peace, but seldom referred to Nanking or, for that matter, Manila. While we proclaimed our victimization, outside Japan very few people cared to hear about Japanese suffering during the war.
There is something very moving, however, in the way the Japanese are horrified by memories of Hiroshima. Their passionate discussions of the atomic bombings call forth a vision of dusk and death, an age about to end, and a mankind foolish enough to exterminate itself. Perhaps this apocalyptic vision seems excessive, even bizarre. But substitute "Japanese people" for "mankind," and the meaning of the war for the Japanese becomes clear. The war put an end to everything. The bombing of Hiroshima quite literally wiped out a whole city. Aside from any political propaganda, this stark vision of total destruction was what Hiroshima has meant to most of us.
It is quite possible that few Japanese care about the atrocities Japan committed overseas. At the same time, many Japanese do care about the Japanese victims, and about the grotesque violence their militarist government brought down on their heads. Hiroshima signifies the ugliest dimension of all this. Those who emphasized Hiroshima during the Cold War were not necessarily making apologies for the Soviets or parading their anti-American nationalism; Hiroshima, to many Japanese, simply showed what you get when you start a foolish war.
Moreover, beneath the pacifism lies a fatalistic vision of a future war. This nightmare image is not confined to the intellectual argument of the sengo keimo, or "Postwar Enlightenment." A strange aspect of postwar Japanese mass culture is the prevalence of a vision of doomsday, of total annihilation in a world war. Dystopic scenarios are seen not only in the likes of Akira, Japan's decadent version of Blade Runner, but also in Doraemon, a popular TV cartoon series which caters to middle-class children (including my daughters).
Buruma is wrong in attributing the Japanese view of Hiroshima to simple hypocrisy. It is actually worse than that. Hiroshima is a lesson through which the Japanese learn a frozen, remembered version of the future. When the Americans started to reduce their military presence in Okinawa, Okinawans simply could not believe it, for a major military operation involving US forces in Okinawa was supposed to bring destruction to the whole island. When the Americans and the Soviets agreed on nuclear disarmament, pacifists (again, including myself) could not believe that either, as it threatened our remembered future, however dystopian it was. Confronting the specter of fascism and the nightmare of nuclear war were noble and necessary acts; but what future is left for a Japanese intellectual when the specters and nightmares are gone?
The nationalist-revisionists, with their ridiculous attempts to invent our past, are irrelevant. We should be busy constructing blueprints for a better world in the wake of the Cold War. But our ability to imagine such a world is weak, atrophied by our long past of remembering the future.
Lewis Namier, "Symmetry and Repetition," in his Conflicts. London: Macmillan, 1942.
Maruyama Masao, Thought and Behaviour in Modern Japanese Politics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963.
During the past decade, however, Japanese historians have produced an impressive range of documents and academic studies of Japanese colonial and/or military rule in Asia. See, for example:
Kindai nihon to shokuminchi (Modern Japan and the Colonies), 8 vols., Iwanami Shoten, 1992-93.
KURASAWA Aiko, Senryouka no Jawa nouson no henyou (Transformation of a Javanese Village under Japanese Occupation), Soushisha, 1992.
Nihon no senryouka ni kansuru shiryou chousa fooramu, ed., Nihon no Firipin senryou (The Japanese Occupation of the Philippines), Ryuukei Shosha, 1994, ISBN 4-8447-8370-X.
Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan. New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994, p.96.
Electronic mail email@example.com


By Dasha Afanasieva
LONDON (Reuters) - An ambitious British plan to search for minute forms of life in an ancient lake beneath Antarctica's ice has been suspended because of technical problems, the scientist leading the project said on Thursday.
In a move that clears the way for U.S. and Russian teams to take the lead, Professor Martin Siegert said technical problems and a lack of fuel had forced the closure on Christmas Day of the 7-million-pound ($11 million) project, which was looking for life forms and climate change clues in the lake-bed sediment.
"This is of course, hugely frustrating for us, but we have learned a lot this year," said Siegert of the University of Bristol, principal investigator for the mission, which was headed by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).
"By the end, the equipment was working well, and much of it has now been fully field-tested," he said on the BAS website.
Experts from Britain's Lake Ellsworth mission had expected to find minute forms of life in the lake three km (two miles) under Antarctica's ice, the most remote and extreme environment known on Earth.
They had also hoped that by dating bits of seashell found in the water they would have been able to ascertain when the ice sheet last broke up and to better understand the risks of it happening again.
Scientists from the United States and Russia are hot on Britain's heels when it comes to drilling through Antarctic ice to lakes that have been hidden for thousands of years.
The U.S. team is aiming to start drilling in Lake Whillans, one of 360 known sub-glacial lakes in Antarctica, in January or February 2013.
Russia was the first to pierce 3,769 meters (12,365 ft) of solid ice to reach Lake Vostok early in 2012. But some scientists believe their samples may have been contaminated by drilling fluids.
The British scientists decided to abandon the mission after trying for 20 hours to connect two holes in the ice that were needed for the hot-water drill to work, said a BAS spokeswoman.
Without a connection between the two holes, the hot water would seep into the porous surface layers of ice and be lost, reducing the pressure and rendering the drill ineffective.
The team tried to melt and dig more snow to compensate for the water loss, but without success.
As a result of the extra time taken to fix the problem, fuel stocks had been depleted to such a level as to make the operation unviable.
Asked how long the delay might be before the project could be resumed, Siegert told the BBC: "It will take a season or two to get all our equipment out of Antarctica and back to the UK, so at a minimum we're looking at three to four, maybe five years I would have thought."
However, he said he felt this year's mission had not been a complete loss.
The BAS spokeswoman said: "It's very possible that either the U.S. or Russia may take the lead but I think the one thing we've learned here is that anything can go wrong."
"We've never depicted this as a race. All sub-glacial lakes would give different information," she said.
(Editing by Andrew Osborn)


Natural Resources Law
This course provides a survey introduction to federal natural resources law, with an emphasis on living resources. In a mixed lecture and seminar format, we will examine the theoretical conflicts that underlie various approaches to resource management, as well as the special qualities of natural resource problems that render management efforts so difficult. Topics will include the legal treatment of wildlife and biodiversity, living marine resources, water, forests, protected public lands, and an introduction to energy law. Throughout the course, we will probe the interplay between environmental, economic, cultural, and political factors in natural resource decision making. In lieu of a final exam, students will produce a 20-page final paper and participate in a weekly online discussion group.
Please note that the paper will not meet the WIE or Capstone requirement.
This is a survey course that focuses on the non-public land aspects of natural resources law. The course explores the field of natural resources law on a function-by-function approach, looking at how nature is divided into use rights, allocating those use rights, resolving conflicts over use rights, integrating use rights into landscapes, and adjusting and reallocating use rights over time. The class will also consider which use rights spring from land ownership, and which are severed, available for separate acquisition. The focus is mostly on state law with an examination of numerous natural resources, including water, wildlife, oil and gas, and mining, and even ice and seaweed.


Christopher C. Brown, Professor, Reference Technology Integration Librarian
We can think of the history of Penrose Library in terms of three historic phases of library-wide technology.
Phase I – Card Catalog Days
When Penrose Library opened in 1972 the most noticeable feature on the main level would have been the expansive card catalog furniture. Access to books was available via the “dictionary catalog.”
Users could explore the Penrose collection by author, title, subject, or series, but that was all. Since keyword searching didn’t exist, all searches were “left anchored” phrase searching, meaning that the filing and lookup element was the left-most part of the term. Authors names had to be inverted, of course, just like in a phone book (another relic of the past!). For title searching users had to omit initial articles (a, an, the).
Phase II – The Online Catalog
What a revolution the online catalog was! In the late 1980s Penrose went live with the CARL online catalog. The technology shift here was the fact that library catalogers didn’t have to sit at typewritters hammering out numerous catalog cards. Instead, libraries could download records from a shared (union) cataloging source, such as the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC).
The transformational technology for public users was the ability to search library catalog records by keyword. No longer was access only possible by left-anchored phrase searching, the online environment enabled searching keywords across any searchable field, including author, title, subjects, and notes.
Phase III – Full Discovery
As revolutionary as keyword searching was, it paled in significance when compared with Web search engines, full text digitization projects, and library discovery tools, such as Summon (which Penrose Library uses). Think of it this way: a very high percentange of the books Penrose Library owns are full-text searchable through one or more of the existing book scanning projects (Google Books, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive).
Whereas in Phase II library catalog records are searchable – in Figure 2 above fewer than 20 words are searchable for a 290 page book – every word is searchable in the full text digital projects mentioned above. Even if copyright restrictions prohibit viewing or downloading most entire works, nevertheless, with every word searchable in the not-so-distant future, deep discovery can take place in a manner never before imagined.
Penrose Library was initially built at the end Phase I, and when the Academic Commons reopens early in 2013 the emphasis on emerging technologies will continue to push University of Denver students into Phase III discovery of primary and secondary sources.


Language Instruction for Immigrant and Non-English Speaking Children
Title III of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 provides Federal financial support to state and local educational agencies to supplement English language instruction in order to ensure that all English Language Learners, including immigrant children and youth, attain English proficiency, develop high levels of academic language proficiency in English, and meet the same challenging State academic achievement standards as all Maryland students are expected to meet.
To comply with these requirements, the Title III office of the Maryland State Department of Education works with local school districts to ensure that quality, research based ESL programs are offered to language minority students.
Title III, Secs. 3101, 3102 Part A


Don't feel like exercise? Scientists find compound that may help you work out harderJune 12th, 2012 in Medical research /
As science rushes to develop safe weight loss drugs, a new research report approaches this problem from an entirely new angle: What if there were a pill that would make you want to exercise harder? It may sound strange, but a new research report appearing online in The FASEB Journal suggests that it might be possible.
That's because a team of Swiss researchers found that when a hormone in the brain, erythropoietin (Epo), was elevated in mice, they were more motivated to exercise. In addition, the form of erythropoietin used in these experiments did not elevate red blood cell counts. Such a treatment has obvious benefits for a wide range of health problems ranging from Alzheimer's to obesity, including mental health disorders for which increased physical activity is known to improve symptoms.
"Here we show that Epo increases the motivation to exercise," said Max Gassmann, D.V.M., a researcher involved in the work from the Institute of Veterinary Physiology, Vetsuisse-Faculty and Zurich Center for Integrative Human Physiology at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. "Most probably, Epo has a general effect on a person's mood and might be used in patients suffering from depression and related diseases."
To make this discovery, Gassmann and colleagues used three types of mice: those that received no treatment, those that were injected with human Epo, and those that were genetically modified to produce human Epo in the brain. Compared to the mice that did not have any increase in Epo, both mouse groups harboring human Epo in the brain showed significantly higher running performance without increases in red blood cells.
"If you can't put exercise in a pill, then maybe you can put the motivation to exercise in a pill instead," said Gerald Weissmann, M.D., Editor-in-Chief of The FASEB Journal. "As more and more people become overweight and obese, we must attack the problem from all angles. Maybe the day will come when gyms are as easily found as fast food restaurants."
More information: Beat Schuler, Johannes Vogel, Beat Grenacher, Robert A. Jacobs, Margarete Arras, and Max Gassmann. Acute and chronic elevation of erythropoietin in the brain improves exercise performance in mice without inducing erythropoiesis. FASEB J. doi:10.1096/fj.11-191197
Provided by Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
"Don't feel like exercise? Scientists find compound that may help you work out harder." June 12th, 2012. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2012-06-dont-scientists-compound-harder.html


What is More Than a Score?
It’s not about the test. It’s about kids. It’s about connecting with our students so they get the education they deserve. A world-class education … For every single student … In every single school… That means we have to do more than we ever have before. It’s not enough to have the best schools in Kentucky or the nation. We are preparing students to excel in a global society.
A profound gap exists between what most U.S. students learn in school and the knowledge and skills they need for success in their communities and workplaces. Kentucky was the first state to adopt new, more rigorous, national content standards designed to ensure college and career success for all graduates.
To track our progress, students took more challenging state tests last spring. The new proficiency targets are harder for kids to meet. School benchmarks are more stringent. At first, scores may be lower than we’ve seen before. This site provides information about the new standards, new tests, and new scores.
Most importantly, this site provides information about what we’re doing to prepare kids to enter careers that do not yet exist, using technology that has not yet been invented to solve problems that haven’t even become problems yet. Because our children are more than a score. They’re the future.


This week, Christians begin a new liturgical year and enter into the rich and ancient four-week season of Advent. For most American Christians, Advent passes virtually unnoticed, as the celebration of "Christmas" as a secular and intensely commercial feast begins the day after Thanksgiving. Yet the time of Advent offers us an opportunity to dive deeply into a counter-cultural time of quiet reflection, a space of hopeful and patient waiting and discernment about how God's incarnation has meaning and is at work in our world today.
Before the middle of the fourth century, there were no liturgical seasons, such as Advent or Lent, or any idea of a "liturgical year," something many Christians take for granted today. The great Paschal Easter feast was the central focus of the Christian year, along with the Sunday gatherings, considered "little Easters." Advent is first noted around the year 350, about the same time Christmas is first mentioned as being celebrated. The date of Christmas might well have been placed near the winter solstice as a replacement to the pagan solstice celebrations of the Roman Empire.
The liturgical year, with its broad seasons of Advent-Christmastide and Lent-Eastertide, evolved within this world of the Roman Empire -- a northern hemispheric world. People living in the empire identified and adapted parallels between the natural world they inhabited and the words, music and images of their sacred time in worship. As the daylight dwindled, they yearned and leaned toward the return of light. And as they saw God's hand in the rhythm of the seasonal changes, they believed and proclaimed that the birth of Jesus, "the light of the world," would herald that longed-for return of light that presaged God's reign of peace and harmony (Isaiah 2:1-5, from Advent 1 in the "A" cycle).
First Sunday of Advent
As in the other yearly liturgical cycles, the readings of this Advent season reflect a movement through the four weeks from an apocalyptic and cosmic in-breaking of God in the first Sundays to the more intimate stories, including Mary as a central figure, in the fourth Sundays that prepare us for God's incarnation in the most unexpected and unpredictable manner -- as an infant in an occupied country to a poor and unwed teenager.
All three of the readings this Sunday are messages of encouragement and future hope. Jeremiah prophesies to Israel and Judah that God's appointed one will bring in a reign of justice, righteousness and safety. Paul, writing to the fledgling Christian community in Thessalonika (and believing, like them, that Christ's second coming was immanent), prays they might be strengthened in their faith and abounding in love as they patiently wait. While Jesus' words of warning in the Gospel might seem stern, they are not nearly as harsh as the same message from Mark (read last Advent). Jesus' encouragement in Luke's Gospel includes, "... [when these things take place] raise your head, because your redemption is drawing near." One of the challenges in choosing and introducing Advent music is to be faithful to be these texts with their diverse images while working to create a sense of prayerful engagement in the midst of a hectic time of the year.
Even though the carols and hymns of Advent are not as familiar as Christmas carols, there is a long, diverse and beautiful repertoire of texts and music available to us. When I was working full-time as a parish musician, I often dropped much or all of the instrumental accompaniment for the hymns, songs and chants at Mass through the entire season up to Christmas, just as all singing in worship was unaccompanied for more than the first thousand years of the church. Our planning team also tried to add more silence and less artificial lighting throughout worship. It was an attempt to reflect the quietness of the natural world and help people connect to the cycles of light and darkness. Many times, members of the community showed appreciation for creating a meditative and attentive space within worship during a time when the rest of life was filled with activities, responsibilities and events.
"Conditor Alme Siderum" ("Creator of the Stars of Night") is a beautiful Advent hymn used by religious communities for Vespers services in Advent. The original text dates to the sixth or seventh century, set to a lilting and gentle chant. The text was substantially revised in the 17th century; however, the first few lines provide a beautiful echo of both Jeremiah's vision and Jesus' call to be aware.
Here are the first lines of the original Latin and a prose translation:
Conditor alme siderum,
aeterna lux credentium,
Christe, redemptor omnium,
exaudi preces supplicum.
Loving Creator of the stars,
eternal Light of believers,
O Christ, redeemer of all,
hear the prayers of supplicants.
"My Soul in Stillness Waits" was written at my first full-time job as a parish music director. I wanted both the music and the text to quiet and deepen our sense of waiting within worship. The text is a very loose adaptation of the "O" antiphons (best known in the hymn, "O Come, O Come Emmanuel"), which were prayed in religious communities each evening of the week immediately before Christmas.
The music of Advent should reflect both the cosmic dimension of Christ's reign coming in its fullness (as proclaimed last week on Christ the King Sunday) and the immanence of an incarnate God, as close as our next breath. And so we begin this holy season, in which the secular world is as frantic as any time in the year, with strong messages of hope and a call (to Israel, to early Christians in Thessalonika, to Jesus' disciples, to us) for true awareness and a deepening of faith and love in our lives and in our communities.
[Marty Haugen is a composer of liturgical music for Roman Catholic and Protestant congregations, with more than 400 compositions published by GIA, Augsburg Fortress and other publishers.]


by J.D. LaRock
Senior Analyst, Innovation and Measuring Progress Division, Directorate for Education
As any student can attest, pursuing a higher education requires an investment in time, effort – and in a number of OECD countries, significant financial resources. But the economic costs of higher education go beyond tuition fees. Because people with higher education tend to have higher earnings, they’re likely to pay more in income taxes and social welfare contributions. There’s also the “opportunity cost” of foregone earnings when people enter university instead of the labour market.
Given these long-term economic costs, do the long-term economic benefits of having a higher education make it worthwhile? As the latest issue of the OECD’s brief series Education Indicators in Focus details, analyses based on the most recent year of available data – 2007 for most countries – suggest that the return on investment is very good.
For example, the long-term economic advantage of having a tertiary degree instead of an upper secondary degree, minus the associated costs, is over USD 175 000 for a man and just over USD 110 000 for a woman, on average across OECD countries. The payoff is particularly strong for men in Italy, Korea, Portugal and the United States, where obtaining a higher education degree generates a long-term benefit of more than USD 300 000 for the average man, compared to a man with an upper secondary education only.
Meanwhile, the advantage for women is strongest in Ireland, Korea, Portugal, Slovenia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where having a tertiary education yields an average long-term benefit of USD 150 000 or more, compared to a woman with an upper secondary education.
As the chart above shows, OECD analyses also find that the long-term payoff on the amount of taxpayer funds used to support people in higher education generates a strong return. Taxpayer costs include funds used to lower the direct costs of higher education to individuals, as well as support for grant and loan programs. They also include indirect costs, such as foregone tax revenues and social contributions to the government while people are in university.
On average, OECD countries directly invest more than USD 30 000 in public sector funds to support an individual pursuing higher education. However, they’ll recoup this investment – and then some – through greater tax revenues from these higher-educated people, as well as savings from the lower level of social transfers these people typically receive.
On average, OECD countries will receive a net return of USD 91 000 on the public costs to support a man in tertiary education – more than three times the amount of the public investment. In Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Slovenia and the United States, this return is especially high, topping USD 150 000. The net return on the public costs to support a woman in higher education is somewhat lower – USD 55 000, on average – but are still positive in almost every OECD country.
Of course, the fallout from the global economic crisis will likely change this cost-benefit equation – but whether it will make it better or worse overall is unclear. For example, the higher unemployment rates spurred by the crisis are likely to have reduced the opportunity cost of foregoing work in order to attend university. However, they also may have reduced some of the benefits of having a higher education, because unemployment rates rose among tertiary-educated people during the crisis.
Likewise, the continued global expansion of higher education could have different effects. As the supply of highly-educated individuals grows, the relative economic benefits of having a tertiary education may go down over time. However, if economies continue to become more knowledge-based – increasing the demand for highly-educated people even more – the economic benefits of higher education could continue to expand.
For more informationOn the OECD’s education indicators, visit:
Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators www.oecd.org/edu/eag2011
On the OECD’s Indicators of Education Systems (INES) programme, visit:
INES Programme overview brochure
See also: IMHE General Conference 2012 "Attaining and Sustaining Mass Higher Education", Paris, 17-19 September 2012
Chart Source: Education at a Glance 2011: OECD Indicators, Indicator A9 (www.oecd.org/edu/eag2011).
Note: Data for Australia, Belgium and Turkey refer to 2005. Data for Italy, the Netherlands, Poland,
Portugal and the United Kingdom refer to 2006. All other data refer to 2007.
Countries are ranked in descending order of the net present value.


McGarvie, Dave W.; Burgess, Raymond; Tindle, Andrew G.; Tuffen , Hugh and Stevenson, John A.
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The Torfajökull central volcano lies in Iceland’s southern flank zone (a non-rifting zone) and last erupted in the 15th century. Peralkaline rhyolites from its pre-Holocene formations have been dated by the Ar-Ar method. Ages from 67±9 ka to 384±20 ka indicate Pleistocene eruptions, with the oldest age (384 ka) also being from the most evolved rhyolite (a pantellerite). The oldest age indicates that a mature and evolved magmatic-volcanic system was well established by the mid-Pleistocene and that the central volcano has been active for at least 400 ka. Good correlation is found between the Ar-Ar ages of sustained rhyolite eruptions into ice sheets (i.e. rhyolite tuya formation) and oxygen isotope stages dominated by cold conditions. This is the first stage of developing a new proxy that uses rhyolitic glaciovolcanic edifices to provide estimates of past Icelandic ice sheet thicknesses. The geochemistry of the dated samples corroborates earlier work showing a simple but enigmatic trend of steadily-decreasing alkalinity towards the present (i.e. older rocks are more evolved). The new ages reveal a hitherto-unrecognised drop in rhyolite alkalinity after 83 ka, which may be linked to the evacuation of c. 16 km3 of rhyolite during a subglacial eruption into the last (Weichselian) ice sheet, for which two new and overlapping Ar-Ar ages of 67±9 ka and 72±7 ka have been obtained. This rhyolite eruption, which is the largest known from Torfajökull, heralded a major change in the magma system as all subsequent eruptions are of small volume (<0.3 km3), dominated by subalkaline compositions, and characterised by interactions with mafic magmas. This change may be linked to lower rhyolite magma replenishment rates and/or to the increasing influence of rift zone volcano-tectonics.
|Item Type:||Journal Article|
|Copyright Holders:||2006 Glaciological Society of Iceland|
|Academic Unit/Department:||Science > Environment, Earth and Ecosystems
|Interdisciplinary Research Centre:||Centre for Earth, Planetary, Space and Astronomical Research (CEPSAR)|
|Depositing User:||Dave McGarvie|
|Date Deposited:||13 Feb 2012 17:06|
|Last Modified:||15 Feb 2012 12:44|
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A monosexual is someone who is sexually attracted to one sex (or gender) only, monosexuality being this capacity for attraction or sexual orientation. A monosexual can be either heterosexual or homosexual. The term is fairly uncommon, mostly used in discussions of bisexuality to denote everyone other than bisexuals (with the exception of asexuals, who are sexually attracted to no-one). It is sometimes considered derogatory.
The proportion of people who fit into the category depends on how one uses the word. If the term is used to mean exclusively monosexual, then according to Alfred Kinsey's controversial studies, only 5% to 10% of people are in this group. If the term is used in a non-exclusive sense the proportion would be lower and many people think that Kinsey's figure is too low, saying that no-one is exclusively monosexual, and that the 90 to 95% testing as such were just in denial or closeted because of biphobia. Freud thought that no one was born monosexual and that it had to be taught by parents or society though most people appear to believe that monosexuals are in fact the majority and identify as such.
Fred Maus (2004, p.164) compares the criticism of Béla Bartók's works for their use of tonality and nontonal methods unique to each piece to the bias towards monosexuality and against bisexuality (see biphobia).
The term “monosexuality” has also been used to describe the sexuality of people who only wish to have sex with one specific person, regardless of gender.  This becomes important when considering partners that choose to remain in their relationship with a transsexual or transgender person. Note that this meaning is quite contradictory to the usual meaning of the term, since someone who chooses to remain in such a relationship cannot reasonably be considered either homosexual or heterosexual.
- Maus, Fred (2004). "Sexual and Musical Categories", The Pleasure of Modernist Music. ISBN 1580461433.
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We hear a lot about the coming of the cashless society, with wave and pay stickers, apps that let you ping money to each other and more innovations trumpeting that if cash is king, then the king is dead.
But while children are growing up in this brave new world, they are denied access to it. Unless you have a credit or debit card, you can’t pay for a single MP3.
So what’s the solution? Well one company thinks it’s giving children as young as eight their own debit cards.
Pktmny – which launched this week – offers children between the ages of eight and 16 a contactless prepaid Visa debit card. Parents can personalise the card for their children and set controls on where and how much they can spend on it. You can read more of the details on the “how it works” section of pktmny site.
You can set up a standing order to add money to the card on a weekly or monthly basis, while friends and relatives can also add money to the account. The people behind it also have smartphone apps planned that allow children to see the balance on their cards and parents top this up if needed. It costs £5 to open an account and there’s a £1 monthly charge (that comes from the parent’s account, not the child’s).
The hope is that this will allow children to learn about spending, saving and budgeting – as well as offering them some independence – in the same way traditional pocket money has.
“Children will live in a completely cashless world. Yet they are forced to interact with money in a way even adults have moved on from. It’s time for a dramatic change,” said clinical child psychologist Dr Elizabeth Kilbey.
“By allowing children to start taking control of their money in a safe and secure environment they will be able to grow with money, learn from their mistakes and ultimately understand the value of money.”
But would you trust a child with a card? Let us know below.


Now that we have burned our image of Linux we will be able to check that your existing computer is compatible with Linux by loading the Linux distribution from the CD without actually installing it. This allows you to try Linux without touching your current operating system. To check multimedia compatibility I suggest that you prepare a few audio and video files on your hard disk to test the audio and video subsystems. If you are testing with Linux Mint these can be in almost any format, but if you are using Ubuntu it is better to have then in the free OGM, OGG or WAV format, as with Ubuntu the non-free decoders have to be installed.
This will be a two part post. In the first part we see how to boot from the live CD, while in the second part we will see how to check that our computer is Linux compatible.
How to boot from the CD.
Place the linux Min or Ubuntu live CD in your drive and restart your computer. If your BIOS is correctly configured Linux should load when you restart your computer. If Windows loads instead this means that you Bios is not configured to start from the CD drive. This will need to be changed: restart your computer again, and when you see your computer manufacturer's logo press the "delete" key to enter the Bios. On some computers it's the F2 key instead. In any case you should see the mention "hit XXX to enter setup" XXX is the key you should push. Note that you may have to hit that key repeatedly, as it will only register during a specific part of the boot process. If you see the Windows logo it means that you were too slow and that you will have to restart the computer and start again.
Once in your bios try to find the "boot order" menu and ensure that CD/DVD is before (i.e. higher) than HDD. If you are using a nebook with an USB CD drive or thumb drive you may not have a CD/DVD option; If that is the case select USB instead. There should be instructions on how to navigate the menus on the screen, as this is different for various brands of computers I can hardly help much.
Once the change is done you need to "quit and save" the bios to make your changes effective. This is usually done by pressing the "F10" key.
After the changes are done restart the computer, and you should notice that it boots from the CD instead of the hard disk. You should be presented with a boot menu. Select the option to start the live CD. Let the computer boot up. This may take quite some time because a CD is not designed to be used as you boot device. Rest assured that if you actually install Linux on your hard drive it will boot much faster. If you see a login prompt with a countdown just wait for the countdown to finish and the boot will proceed. At some point you should hear the little Ubuntu or Mint "boot music" and finally be presented with the Ubuntu or Mint desktop. Congratulation, you successfully started Linux!
In the next episode we will see how to check that you computer hardware is supported by Linux.
4 millions Windows 8 upgrades, that's not much!
7 months ago


Science Fair Project Encyclopedia
Anatolia (Greek: ανατολή anatolē or anatolí, "rising of the sun" or "East"; compare "Orient" and "Levant", by popular etymology Turkish Anadolu to ana "mother" and dolu "filled"), also called by the Latin name of Asia Minor, is a region of Southwest Asia which corresponds today to the Asian portion of Turkey.
Because of its strategic location at the intersection of Asia and Europe, Anatolia has been a cradle for several civilizations since prehistoric ages, with neolithic settlements such as Catal Höyük (pottery neolithic), Cayönü (Pre-Pottery Neolithic A to pottery Neolithic), Nevali Cori (PPN B), Hacilar (pottery neolithic), Göbekli Tepe (PPN A) and Mersin. The settlement of Troy starts in the Neolithic, but continues up into the Iron age.
Major civilizations and peoples that have settled in or conquered Anatolia include the Hattians, Luwians, Hittites, Phrygians, Cimmerians, Lydians, Persians, Celts, Tabals, Meshechs, Greeks, Pelasgians, Armenians, Romans, Goths, Kurds, Byzantines, Seljuk Turks and Ottomans. These peoples belonged to many varied ethnic and linguistic traditions. Through recorded history, Anatolians have spoken both Indo-European and Semitic languages, as well as many languages of uncertain affiliation. In fact, given the antiquity of the Indo-European Hittite and Luwian languages, some scholars have proposed Anatolia as the hypothetical center from which the Indo-European languages have radiated. Other authors have proposed an Anatolian origin for the Etruscans of ancient Italy.
Today the inhabitants of Anatolia are mostly native speakers of the Turkish language, which was introduced with the conquest of Anatolia by Turkic peoples and the rise of the Ottoman Empire in the 13th century. However, Anatolia remained multi-ethnic until the early 20th century (see Young Turks). A significant Kurdish ethnic and linguistic minority still exists in the southern regions.
The contents of this article is licensed from www.wikipedia.org under the GNU Free Documentation License. Click here to see the transparent copy and copyright details


Phylogenetic Analysis of Mexican Cave Scorpions Suggests Adaptation to Caves is Reversible
NEW EVIDENCE THAT SPECIALIZED ADAPTATIONS ARE NOT EVOLUTIONARY DEAD ENDS
Blind scorpions that live in the stygian depths of caves are throwing light on a long-held assumption that specialized adaptations are irreversible evolutionary dead-ends. According to a new phylogenetic analysis of the family Typhlochactidae, scorpions currently living closer to the surface (under stones and in leaf litter) evolved independently on more than one occasion from ancestors adapted to life further below the surface (in caves). The research, currently available in an early online edition, will be published in the April issue of Cladistics.
"Our research shows that the evolution of troglobites, or animals adapted for life in caves, is reversible," says Lorenzo Prendini, Associate Curator in the Division of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History. "Three more generalized scorpion species living closer to the surface evolved from specialized ancestors living in caves deep below the surface."
Scorpions are predatory, venomous, nocturnal arachnids that are related to spiders, mites, and other arthropods. About 2,000 species are distributed throughout the world, but only 23 species found in ten different families are adapted to a permanent life in caves. These are the specialized troglobites.
This study concentrates on the family Typhlochactidae that includes nine species of scorpions endemic to the karstic regions of eastern Mexico. These species were initially grouped together by Robert Mitchell in 1971 but were elevated to the rank of family for the first time last year, based on morphological data published by Prendini and Valerio Vignoli of the Department of Evolutionary Biology, University of Siena, Italy, in the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Prendini, Vignoli, and Oscar F. Francke of the Departmento de Zoologia, Instituto de Biolog’a at the Universidad Nacional Aut—noma de México, Mexico City, also created a new genus, Stygochactas, for one species in the family and described a new surface-living species,Typhlochactas sissomi, in a separate American Museum Novitates paper. All species in the family have adapted to the dark with features such as loss of eyes and reduced pigmentation. The family contains the most specialized troglobite scorpion,Sotanochactas elliotti, one of the world's smallest scorpions, Typhlochactas mitchelli, and the scorpion found at the greatest depth (nearly 1 km below the surface), Alacran tartarus. Three of the species (including T. mitchelli) live closer to the surface and are more generalized morphologically than the other six, making this family an excellent model with which to test and falsify Cope's Law of the unspecialized (novel evolutionary traits tend to originate from a generalized member of an ancestral taxon) and Dollo's Law of evolutionary irreversibility (specialized evolutionary traits are unlikely to reverse).
For the current research paper, Prendini and colleagues gathered data for 195 morphological characteristics, including a detailed mapping of the positions of all trichobothria (sensory setae) on the pedipalps, among the species of Typhlochactidae. The resulting phylogenetic tree shows that adaptation to life in caves has reversed among this group of scorpions: two of the less specialized, surface-living species, T. mitchelli and T. sylvestris, share a common ancestor with a much more cave-adapted species, and a similar pattern was found for the third less specialized, surface-living species, T. sissomi.
"Scorpions have been around for 450 million years, and their biology is obviously flexible," says Prendini. "This unique group of eyeless Mexican scorpions may have started re-colonizing niches closer to the surface from the deep caves of Mexico after their surface-living ancestors were wiped out by the nearby Chicxuluxb impact along with non-avian dinosaurs, ammonites, and other species."
The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Fund, and a SYNTHESYS grant.
Media Inquiries: Department of Communications, 212-769-5800


Gerrymandering is the deliberate drawing of district lines in such a way as to distort representation of subgroups of the population.
Consider Case 1: Suppose that a population is divided 60%/40% over some longstanding, continuing dispute. The A's have 60%, the B's have 40. The B's typically live in urban areas, the A's in suburbs and rural areas.
There are five districts, each of which elects one representative to the legislature.
If the A's are drawing the…
Added by John B Hodges on January 16, 2013 at 7:16am — No Comments


Nursing animals to health
December 16, 2003
Veterinary technicians are often called animal nurses because they care for animal patients the way nurses care for humans.
But veterinary technicians’ responsibilities extend beyond nursing, combining duties of many human healthcare jobs. In addition to providing general nursing, technicians help to administer and monitor anesthesia just as surgical nurses do, take x rays and sonograms like radiologic technicians, clean teeth like dental technicians, provide rehabilitation like physical therapy aides, monitor surgical equipment like surgical technicians, and conduct laboratory tests like clinical laboratory technicians.
Veterinary technicians, sometimes called veterinary technologists, work as part of a healthcare team. They are supervised by veterinarians, who diagnose disease and injury, prescribe treatments, and perform surgery on animals. Technicians also work with veterinary assistants, who groom and comfort animals, clean cages, and do other nonmedical work.
Veterinary technicians and technologists had median hourly earnings of $10.78 in 2001. That means that 50 percent of those workers earned more than that amount, and 50 percent earned less. The highest paid 10 percent were paid more than $15.97 an hour. The lowest paid 10 percent earned $7.65.
These data are from the Occupational Employment Statistics program. For more information, see "Veterinary technicians: Nursing animals to health" by Henry Kasper and Olivia Crosby, Occupational Outlook Quarterly, Fall 2003. Note about the chart: deciles divide the dataset into 10 equal-size groups and quartiles divide the dataset into 4 equal-size groups.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Editor's Desk, Nursing animals to health on the Internet at http://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2003/dec/wk3/art02.htm (visited June 19, 2013).
Spotlight on Statistics: Productivity
This edition of Spotlight on Statistics examines labor productivity trends from 2000 through 2010 for selected industries and sectors within the nonfarm business sector of the U.S. economy. Read more »


Reformatio ecclesiarum Hassiae
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discussed in biography
...reformer Jakob Sturm, who recommended him to the landgrave Philip of Hesse, the German prince most favourably inclined toward the Reformation. Encouraged by Philip, Lambert drafted Reformatio ecclesiarum Hassiae (“The Reformation of the Churches of Hesse”), which was submitted by Philip to the synod at Homberg (1526). Lambert’s document called for democratic...
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Although it seems like robots modeled after snakes and worms could be used for a wide variety of applications, the majority are designed for only two uses.
Many are created as rescue robots -- for detecting danger or victims or for taking supplies to survivors. Their shape, size, and locomotion style give them access to places people can't or shouldn't go, such as collapsed buildings and nuclear reactors that are damaged or being decommissioned.
The other main use for snake and worm robots is in medical applications. Skinny, snaky tubes are just right for inserting into blood vessels or abdominal cavities to assist in minimally invasive surgery. Or they can go exploring to locate problems such as tumors and send back data about size and location.
Click the image below to see 10 examples of these writhing robots.
The Slim Slime Robot from the Tokyo Institute of Technology's Hirose Fukushima Lab is a pneumatically driven active cord mechanism. It is used to inspect pipes in chemical laboratories or nuclear plants, detect unexploded mines, and help first responders find victims in collapsed buildings. A series of six connected modules are driven by pneumatic actuators. Compressed air is forced from the main tube of each module into that module's bellows, or flexible pneumatic actuators, which are located along the main tube's length. The Slim Slime can creep like a snake, make pivoting turns, roll laterally, and move with a pedal-like motion that emulates snails and limpets. Its total length is 730-1,120mm (28.7-44 inches). It weighs 12kg (26.4 pounds), and its top speed is about 60mm (2.36 inches) per second. (Source: Hirose Fukushima Lab)
robatnorcross, I had a similar thought, although I'm not afraid of snakes--unless they're venomous, that is. This one's "skin" pattern is camouflage, but it looks a lot like some venomous western rattlers I've seen. Even without fear of snakes, this would still give one pause if you were trapped and couldn't move.
Everything dates everyone, doesn't it? But I'm with you--I can imagine an engineer looking at Slinky's movements and wondering how to motorize and automate them. First there's a design that uses a helical shape, gravity, and momentum, and then the big jump to motors.
At the Design News webinar on June 27, learn all about aluminum extrusion: designing the right shape so it costs the least, is simplest to manufacture, and best fits the application's structural requirements.
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.