At 5:12 a.m. on April 18, 1906, San Franciscans woke up to a quick shake. For the next 20-25 seconds, everything was silent. And then the great earthquake broke loose. Buildings fell, the city’s downtown crumbled and broken gas lines burst into flame. The city burned for three days and over 80% of San Francisco was destroyed.
Now, more than 100 years later, photographer Shawn Clover decided to combine the photos taken right after the 1906 earthquake with the modern-day San Fransisco. [Read more…]
He tried to find the exact spot the photographer stood, the equivalent focal length and the same high off the ground where the camera was. Unfortunately, he found that it was impossible to replicate many of the original photos because they were taken in places where new buildings stand today.
Nevertheless, Shawn created a striking series of composite photographs, entitled “1906 + 2010: The Earthquake Blend”. Here are some of our favorite photos.
Biologists have long suspected early mammals were nocturnal, taking advantage of (most) dinosaur sleeping patterns, and only shifted to daytime activity after their fearsome competitors disappeared. Although this makes sense, it’s been very hard to prove, but now a study of thousands of species provides powerful evidence for the theory. The legacy of a nocturnal past has survived in most mammals’ retinas.
If you were designing an eye for nocturnal and diurnal species you would produce something very different. Since evolution doesn’t start from scratch, not all animals have eyes with architecture best suited to their current lifestyle, a fact that remains one of the best pieces of evidence against claims of “intelligent design”.
Fish, reptiles, and birds that hunt in daylight have a part of the retina called a fovea that sharpens their vision in well-lit conditions by packing lots of light receptors together. Among mammals, however, only certain primates, ourselves included, have a fovea. Similarly, the color-blindness of most mammals, a result of only having two types of optical cones rather than three or even four, is a hindrance to hunting during the day, but not one large enough to stop mammals becoming the apex predators of most ecosystems.
The theory that this pattern is a result of a nocturnal past for mammalian ancestors dates back to the 1940s but has been hard to prove, since fossils seldom tell us when an animal was active. Professor Kate Jones of University College, London, may have changed this. In Nature Ecology and Evolution, Jones categorized the activity patterns of 2,415 species with representatives from 90 percent of the surviving mammalian families as nocturnal, diurnal, cathemeral (active in both day and night), crepuscular (active during twilight) and ultradian (active in cycles of a few hours). She then mapped the relationships between these species using the two most popular theories of mammals’ evolutionary history.
Tracing back the mammal family tree, Jones found either a 74 percent or a 59 percent probability that the last common ancestor of all surviving mammals was nocturnal, depending on which evolutionary theory you choose. Abandoning nocturnality prior to the great extinction event might seem improbable until you remember dinosaurs were in decline for 15 million years before the asteroid finished them off (birds aside, of course).
“It’s very difficult to relate behaviour changes in mammals that lived so long ago to ecological conditions at the time, so we can’t say that the dinosaurs dying out caused mammals to start being active in the daytime. However, we see a clear correlation in our findings,” Jones said in a statement.
Mammals didn’t suddenly jump from being nocturnal to diurnal, instead going through a long cathermal phase, where some stayed. One possible mammal family tree has this beginning shortly after the extinction of the non-avian dinosaurs, but the other places it at least 9 million years earlier. Either way, it took about 10 million years until mammals actually preferred the light.
As mammals diversified to fill the newly opened evolutionary niches, primates were fortunate enough to experience mutations that enabled eyesight well suited to a daytime lifestyle. Most other mammals had to make the best of what they had. Of course, some humans, particularly during their teenage years, prefer to revert to the daily cycle resembling their ancient ancestors.
The architecture of the non-primate mammalian eye suits lions just fine, since they will hunt at any time, but prefer the night. di_ryan/Shutterstock
The fallout from Apple’s Maps debacle was among the top headlines this past weekend. Mashable brought you those stories, as well as other tech and social media news while you were out of the office.
Our staff kept tabs on all the latest happenings, so don’t worry if you missed a few articles. Check out all the coverage here, in our handy Weekend Recap. Take a look at the links, below.
When it comes to whether or not there are more selfies or more pictures of cats on the Internet, its a pretty close competition. Thats why when you combine the two a picture of a cat taking a selfie with dogs its all the ammo the people of Reddit need to make the most of that situation.
How?
By engaging in a Photoshop battle that finds our feline friend making the most of his nine lives.
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Here’s the original. Just another cat taking a selfie with man’s best friend.
Wikipedia might be the key to predicting Mitt Romney’s pick for a running mate as the political world scrambles to figure out his nominee before the campaign’s official announcement, according to a new report.
Sarah Palin and Joe Biden, 2008’s VP nominees, both saw a considerable spike in the number of edits made to their Wikipedia pages in the hours before they were announced as the candidates. Micah Sifry, co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, wrote for TechPresident Monday reminding the political world of the hereunto mostly overlooked fact.
“Sarah Palin’s Wikipedia page was updated at least 68 times the day before John McCain announced her selection, with another 54 changes made in the five previous days previous,” wrote Sifry. “The same burst of last-minute editing appeared on Joe Biden’s Wikipedia page, Terry Gudaitis of Cyveillance, told the Washington Post.”
Essentially, Sifry is suggesting that political candidates’ staff are making these changes to Wikipedia pages in order to clean up the pages prior to the public unveiling of the VP pick.
That hasn’t been proven, but Wikipedia is a publicly-editable knowledge database that’s become a go-to source for information about almost any subject, political candidates included. Therefore, it makes sense that politicians’ staff would edit a possible VP’s page before the candidate is thrust into the public eye and millions visit the site for information about their history and political stances.
Mashable covered the “Wikipedia Effect” in politics earlier this year, finding that Mitt Romney’s page saw a considerable spike in edits just before, during and immediately after primary elections — a sign that Wikipedia users may have been trying to influence voters by changing details about Romney’s history on the site.
Does Wikipedia’s publicly-editable nature make it a less reliable source for information about current events, such as politics? Share your thoughts in the comments.
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