OTG Daily News

AP reports : HANOI, Vietnam — A psychedelic gecko and a monkey with an "Elvis" hairdo are among 208 new species described last year by scientists in the Mekong River region of Southeast Asia, a conservation group announced Monday. The animals were discovered in a biodiverse region that is threatened by habitat loss, deforestation, climate change and overdevelopment, the WWF said in a report. The newly described species include a "psychedelic gecko" in southern Vietnam and a nose-less monkey in a remote province of Myanmar that looks like it wears a pompadour. "While this species, sporting an Elvis-like hairstyle, is new to science, the local people of Myanmar know it well," the Switzerland-based group said in its report. The region is home to some of the world's most endangered species, including tigers, Asian elephants, Mekong dolphins and Mekong giant catfish, the group said. "This is a region of extraordinary richness in terms of ...

Alan Boyle writes Today was "Black Friday" for some folks in southern climes, and not because it's the big shopping day after Thanksgiving : A partial solar eclipse made the sky just a little bit darker in areas of New Zealand, Tasmania, South Africa and Antarctica. Some observers spotted only a slight grazing of the sun, while others — such as Williams College astronomer Jay Pasachoff and his eclipse-chasing colleagues — could see the moon take an appreciable bite out of the sun's disk in the skies over Invercargill in southern New Zealand. "After an in-and-out, off-and-on-rain day, we are very pleased," Pasachoff said in a report from Sky & Telescope's Kelly Beatty . Pasachoff passed along another perspective on the eclipse, taken from the seventh-floor offices of the New Zealand Department of Conservation in Invercargill. The hand in the picture belongs to Steve Butler, who works for the government agency. "I gave him one of my sola...

The U.S. government is giving a nearly half-million dollar grant to a beer maker in Alaska that aims to install a first-of-its-kind boiler that is fueled entirely by spent grain. All brewers are confronted with mountains of spent grains — mostly barley. Many get rid of the waste by routing it to farmers for animal feed, a noble service that can help grow a steak to accompany your fine ale. For the Alaskan Brewing Co. in Juneau, this has involved an added step, since the closest market for its grains is a long-distance, boat-ride away in Seattle. To keep the grains from decomposing during transport, the brewery first dries them in a machine that is heated by a biomass burner that uses about 50 percent of the spent grain as a fuel source. Now, with the help of the $458,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Rural Energy for America program, the brewery is installing a machine that will use the dried grain to power a biomass steam boiler. "The new boiler...

(YAHOO)The world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous  climate change  and extreme weather events,  the International Energy Agency  ( IEA ) warned on Wednesday. On current trends, "rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially catastrophic climate change," the IEA concluded in its annual  World Energy Outlook  report. "The door to 2.0 C is closing," it said, referring to the 2.0 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) cap on global warming widely accepted by scientists and governments as the ceiling for averting unmanageable climate damage. Without further action, by 2017 the total CO2 emissions compatible with the 2.0 C goal will be "locked in" by power plants, factories and other carbon-emitting sources either built or planned, the IEA said. Global infrastructure already accounts for more than 75 percent of that limit. To meet energy needs while still averting climate catastrophe, governments must engineer a shift ...

Scientists on an aerial survey of Antarctica have come across an 18-mile-long break in an ice shelf — a sign that the sensitive area is giving birth to an iceberg that will be larger than New York City. "We are actually now witnessing how it happens," Michael Studinger, project scientist with NASA's IceBridge survey, said in a statement Wednesday. "It’s part of a natural process but it’s pretty exciting to be here and actually observe it while it happens." The scientists were aboard a NASA jet on Oct. 14, making measurements of Pine Island Glacier and its ice shelf, when they came across the crack. Glaciers naturally give birth to icebergs, but scientists are concerned that warming temperatures might be destabilizing those in Antarctica and Greenland by eroding the ice shelves floating on water that hold them back up against the mainland. Without the ice shelves, those glaciers could flow much faster into the ocean, raising sea levels. Scientists call ...

Discovery in man age 51 to 60 is the oldest case of prostate disease in Egypt Prostate cancer,‭ ‬one of the most common types of modern malignancies,‭ ‬did affect the ancient Egyptians,‭ ‬according to a radiological investigation of a‭ 2,250‭-‬year-old mummy. Kept at the National Archaeology Museum of Lisbon,‭ ‬and cataloged as M1,‭ ‬the unnamed wrapped Ptolemaic mummy‭ (‬c.‭ ‬285‭–‬30‭ ‬BCE‭) ‬was adorned with a cartonnage mask and bib,‭ ‬and boasted an elaborately painted shroud. The mummy is that of an adult male‭ ‬— "a view further justified by the preserved male perineal anatomy and an obvious mummified penis,‭" ‬Carlos Prates,‭ ‬a radiologist at Imagens Médicas Integradas in Lisbon,‭ ‬and colleagues write in a study now in press in the International Journal of Paleopathology.‭ The man,‭ ‬about‭ ‬5 feet, 5 inches tall,‭ ‬was between‭ ‬51‭ ‬and‭ ‬60‭ ‬years old when he died a slow,‭ ‬painful death. The researchers subjected the mummy to powerful Multi-Detector ...

Tuesday’s lunar eclipse was the first time that it has coincided with winter’s solstice since 1638, 372 years! So you tried to stay up, you tried to watch it, After about 20 Minutes you fell asleep. All the hype..... its the First solstice since 1638...the Next one wont be until 2094!! You missed the day when the Earth, Moon and Sun aligned well never fear! Stadium Status is here! we got you!

Minnesota Received 14 inches of Snow, and its said that after the storms pass, the Midwest will be hit with Below Average temperatures, some places will be up to 40 Below Zero, and up to 50 Mile per hour winds in others causing Whiteouts! Much of the upper Midwest braced for frigid temperatures and heavy snowfall Sunday as the National Weather Service warned of blizzard conditions spanning parts of eight states. The heavy storm was moving eastward a day after it dumped 20 inches of snow in parts of the region, forcing numerous road closures and even postponing for a day an NFL football game when the New York Giants were unable to get to Minneapolis to play the Minnesota Vikings. A blizzard warning was in effect Sunday for Chicago and much of northern Illinois, all of Iowa, large sections of southern Minnesota and Wisconsin, and smaller areas in North Dakota, South Dakota, Missouri and Michigan, according to the National Weather Service. Most of the rest of the region was under ...

( CNN )–Much of the upper Midwest battled blizzard conditions Saturday, with a combination of heavy snow, fierce winds and sub-zero temperatures pummeling the region 10 days before the official start of winter. A blizzard warning, issued by the National Weather Service, stretched from South Dakota to Wisconsin and down to Missouri and Illinois. The storm was expected to dump between 15 and 20 inches of snow in some locales. The storm will likely gain strength during Saturday, before bearing down on the Chicago, Illinois, area, the weather service said. Even before the current storm, Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, this season have had 16.7 inches of snow as of the first week of December. Some areas to the west and south have had more, including 22.9 inches in Chanhassen, the National Weather Service said. More snow came Saturday, with another 7 to 11 inches forecast through the afternoon. The precipitation should taper off by evening, the weather agency said, with temperatures dro...

A new species of crocodile that lived 100 million years ago has been identified from a fossil found in Thailand, researchers said Thursday. Komsorn Lauprasert, a scientist at Mahasarakham University, said the species had longer legs than modern-day crocodiles and probably fed on fish, based on the characteristics of its teeth. "They were living on land and could run very fast," said Komsorn, who noticed the skull fossil in a museum in the summer of 2006. The 6-inch-long fossil was originally retrieved from an excavation site in Nakhon Rathchasima province, also known as Korat, but had not been identified as belonging to a distinct species. Just in case you thought we were the only beings out here in the present state, science has yet again proved you wrong!