David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.
In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.
“I have never seen anything like it,†Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.â€
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Since the 1960s scientists have known that chimpanzees are able to make and use tools—behavior once thought to be an exclusively human trait.
Now National Geographic-funded researcher Jill Pruetz has observed toolmaking behavior that further blurs the line between the apes and humans: chimps in Senegal sharpening sticks into crude spears and thrusting them into tree hollows, presumably to hunt small mammals.
Jill Pruetz’s work with chimpanzees will be featured in an upcoming NOVA/National Geographic special on PBS (airdate to be determined). National Geographic News is part of the National Geographic Society.
Whatever its moral status, there is certainly some evidence to suggest that gossip is a deep-seated human instinct: evolutionary psychologists have compared the evolution of gossip in humans with the practice of ’social grooming’ among chimps – where the animals spend hours grooming each other’s fur, even when they are perfectly clean, as a form of social bonding. This would indicate that gossip, far from being a trivial pastime, actually performs a vital and socially therapeutic function.
Until now, however, there has been no specific research on the role played by mobile phones in this context. Given the important social functions of gossip – and the role of mobile phones as a modern medium for gossiping – this is a significant omission.
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The three dimensional coordinate system provides the three physical dimensions of space — height, width, and length.
The coordinates in a three dimensional system are of the form (x,y,z). As an example, two points are plotted in this system P(3,0,5) and Q(−5,−5,7). The axes are depicted in a world-coordinates orientation with the z-axis pointing up.
The x-, y-, and z-coordinates of a point can also be taken as the distances from the yz-plane, xz-plane, and xy-plane respectively.
long live wikipedia
