QASR AL-YAHUD, West Bank (Reuters) ? Abandoned Israeli army bunkers along the Jordan River are providing a lifeline for bats on the endangered species list, researchers say.
Soldiers left Israel's underground forts along the frontier with Jordan after a 1994 peace treaty between the two countries. With much of the former front line, some of it dotted by mine fields, still designated by the military as off-limits to civilians, bats swooped into the secluded and dark steel caverns.
Several years ago, researchers from Tel Aviv University were granted access to the ghost bunkers. Now, they say, they have identified 12 indigenous bat species in the 100-kilometre- (60 mile)-long tract between the Sea of Galilee in Israel and the Dead Sea's northern edge in the occupied West Bank.
Two of the species commonly known as the Mediterranean horseshoe bat and Geoffroy's bat are on the critical list and three others are designated as endangered.
"There is no doubt that by being in a closed military zone that has prevented human interference, the bat habitat will allow these delicate creatures to thrive," said one of the researchers, Eran Levin.
But he said it was too early to quantify the growth of the local bat population, estimated to be in the thousands, because the research project was not yet complete.
One former bunker -- overlooking the spot along the Jordan River where some Christian faithful believe Jesus was baptized by John -- has been turned into a more accommodating home for the webbed-wing mammals.
To give the bats more grip, the research team roughed up its smooth steel and concrete walls, suspended mesh sheets and wooden palates, sprayed insulating foam and stuck stones to surfaces.
Different bat species each preferred different grip surfaces, Levin said.
A thick layer of bat guano now covers the floor and metal bunk-bed frames the military left behind.
A night-vision camera follows the bats' movements during the period they inhabit the bunkers from March to October when daytime temperatures in the area soar above 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit).
Enjoying their own peace dividend, the bat population could also give something back to Israelis, Jordanians and Palestinians in the area.
Aviam Atar of Israel's Nature and Parks Authority said the bats help to reduce crop damage by eating insects at night, coming out to feed in the dark when the fields are empty.
"Because each bat can eat a few grams of insects each night, they reduce the need for the use of pesticides and this certainly has potential for facilitating green farming. The crop growers don't even know this is happening," he said.
Though the Cleveland Plain Dealer still has not acknowledged the move on its website (other than to finally remove his name and face from the roster), Tony Grossi no longer covers the Browns as a beat writer, following the accidental publication of a private Twitter message that called Browns owner Randy Lerner? (pictured) ?pathetic? and an ?irrelevant billionaire.?
Browns spokesman Neal Gulkis tells PFT that the Browns have no comment on the situation.
There?s still no evidence that the Browns pressured the Plain Dealer to make the move.? Per a source with knowledge of the situation, however, both Lerner and president Mike Holmgren refused to accept calls from Grossi after the message was posted and deleted.? We?re also told that a meeting occurred Wednesday between Plain Dealer publisher Terry Eggar and Holmgren.
The Plain Dealer has been nearly as silent as the Browns.? Managing editor Thom Fladung called the Kiley & Booms radio show on 92.3 The Fan this morning to explain the decision, and Fladung?s explanation was less than persuasive, in our opinion.
The decision to remove Grossi from the beat was driven by this ?determining factor? articulated by Fladung:? ?Don?t do something that affects your value as a journalist or the value of your newspaper or affects the perception of your value and the perception of that newspaper?s value.?
That?s a pretty broad ? and vague ? rule.? And that?s the kind of standard that gives a news organization the ability to do pretty much whatever it wants whenever it wants, because there?s pretty much always something to which someone can point as proof of ?something that affects your value as a journalist or the value of your newspaper or affects the perception of your value and the perception of that newspaper?s value.?
Making Fladung?s ?determining factor? even more confusing is the fact that he admitted that Grossi could have deliberately expressed a strong opinion about Lerner in a column published and printed in the Plain Dealer without conseqeuence.? ?Let?s say Tony had written that Randy Lerner?s lack of involvement with the Browns and their resulting disappointing records over the years has made him irrelevant as an owner, that?s defensible,? Fladung said.? ?That?s absolutely defensible.?
What?s indefensible is the failure of the Plain Dealer to acknowledge the fact that Grossi never intended to make the statements available for public view.? He fell victim to the subtle but significant differences between a ?direct message? (which is private) and a ?reply? (which is public) on Twitter.? It was an accident.? A mistake.
Let?s go back to the days of typewriters and shorthand, and let?s say that Grossi?s editor has two boxes on his desk.? One is for article submissions and one is for proposed topics.? And let?s say that Grossi scribbled out a scathing column about Lerner as a proposed topic, but Grossi accidentally put it in the box of actual submissions for print.
That?s the low-tech version of what happened here.? Grossi accidentally put his message in the wrong box.
So when Fladung says he ?felt very strongly? that the Twitter message ?was inappropriate and unprofessional and . . . it?s not the kind of opinion a journalist covering a beat can express,? Fladung presumes that Grossi actually intended to articulate that opinion to the world.? He didn?t.? It was inadvertently blurted out, like a temporary case of Twitter Tourette?s.
Some have suggested that the Twitter blunder provided the Plain Dealer with a vehicle for addressing pre-existing concerns regarding Grossi?s overall job performance.? Undercutting that theory was Fladung?s assertion during the radio interview that Grossi is a ?very good? and ?very successful? beat writer.
I?m continuing to write about this because it?s the kind of mistake that could happen to anyone, and everyone should be entitled to the benefit of the doubt in a case like this, especially when newspapers and other media companies want their writers to engage with the audience through various new technologies and platforms.? It also just ?feels? like an unjust result, whether because the Plain Dealer is being obtuse or because the Plain Dealer is cowering to the Browns or because the Browns are remaining deliberately silent in order to secure the preferred outcome of having Grossi removed from the beat.
Regardless, we?re disappointed in the Plain Dealer, in Fladung, in the Browns, in Lerner, and in Holmgren.? And we hope that one or more of them will snap out of it and do the right thing, or at least let the rest of us know in far more convincing fashion why they believe the right thing was done.
Photo by: ? Stockbyte/ThinkstockA projected 71.5 million pounds of avocados will be consumed during the Super Bowl, and it's hard to avoid all the guacamole and chips (in fact, some Super Bowl parties are first and foremost Guac Bowls, where the competition gets vicious for the title of best spread). But before attempting to throw any old ingredients together with an avocado, take some advice from the experts.
The most important ingredient is ripe avocados. The least is the avocado pit, which people often leave in guacamole bowls thanks to a belief that it will prevent the oxidation that turns guac brown. It's a common mistake, but leaving the pit won't offer any kind of protection. "It will keep the area directly under the pit from browning, but no more," says Jan DeLizer of the California Avocado Commission.?
The real solution, says Golden Door spa executive chef Curtis Cooke, is to place a piece of plastic cling wrap directly on the surface of the guacamole to protect it from oxygen exposure. "I also use lime juice, an acid, to keep my guacamole green," says Cooke.? ?
There are 500 varieties of avocados, but Hass makes the best guacamole (look for the pebbly, dark skin). Avoid the mistake of making guacamole with the smooth, green-skinned avocados. "They have higher water content and don't have the full-bodied creamy richness," says DeLizer.
Choose darker avocados that have a slight give when gently squeezed in the palm of the hand. "If you have no other choice than to buy really green avocados and you need to ripen them within a couple of days, place the green avocados in a brown paper bag and store it in the pantry," says Cooke. "To help speed up the process, you can add an apple or banana to the bag because they release ethylene gas, which naturally ripens fruits."
Finally, don't make the mistake of preparing your guacamole too far in advance. "It's a time-sensitive dish," says Cooke. "Plan to serve it within a couple of hours of making it.
"For those who have Super Bowl plans, Cooke shared his recipe.
Guacamole
3 avocados, diced
1 serrano, roasted, minced
1 tomato, roasted, diced
2 T red onion, minced
1 lime, juiced
2 T cilantro, minced
? t sea salt
Preheat an oven to 400 degrees. Place the serrano and tomato on a baking sheet and roast for 8 minutes, or until the skin is blistered on the vegetables. When the serrano and tomato are cool enough to handle, peel them and dice.
In a medium bowl, combine the avocado, salt, and lime juice. Mix well to completely incorporate all the ingredients. Fold in the serrano, tomato, red onion, and cilantro.
Add in ingredient options
? cup roasted corn (add to existing recipe)
1 ?chipotle pepper, minced (replacing the serrano)
2 T ancho chile (rehydrated and minced, replacing the serrano)
Recipe courtesy Chef Curtis Cooke -- Golden Door spa
THE ARRESTS: Police in pre-dawn sweeps Thursday arrested two top former executives of the now-defunct French company at the center of a breast implant scandal affecting tens of thousands of women worldwide.
THE ARRESTEES: Jean-Claude Mas, founder of implant-maker Poly Implant Prothese, was detained as part of a judicial probe in Marseille into manslaughter and involuntary injuries, an official said. A regional official said former No. 2 executive Claude Couty also was detained.
THE IMPLANTS: The suspect implants have been pulled from the market in several countries amid fears that they could rupture and leak silicone into the body.
A woman from Tanzania's Hadzabe tribe studies a social-networking chart.
By Alan Boyle
Hunter-gatherers exhibit many of the "friending" habits familiar to Facebook users, suggesting that the patterns for social networking were set early in the history of our species.
At least that's the conclusion from a group of researchers who mapped the connections among members of the Hadza ethnic group in Tanzania's Lake Eyasi region. The results were published in this week's issue of the journal Nature.
"The astonishing thing is that ancient human social networks so very much resemble what we see today," senior author Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist at Harvard Medical School, said in a university news release. Researchers from Harvard, the University of California at San Diego and Cambridge University worked together to document the Hadza's social networks.
"From the time we were around campfires and had words floating through the air, to today when we have digital packets floating through the ether, we've made networks of basically the same kind," Christakis said.
Another co-author of the study, UCSD's James Fowler, said the results suggest that the structure of today's social networks go back to a time before the invention of agriculture, tens of thousands of years ago.
For decades, social scientists have puzzled over the origins of cooperative and altruistic behavior that benefits the group at the expense of the individual. That seems to run counter to a basic "tooth and claw" view of evolution, in which each individual fights for survival, or at least the survival of its gene pool. One of the leading hypotheses is that a system to reward cooperation and punish non-cooperators ("free riders") grew out of a sense of genetic kinship between related individuals. But how far back did such a system arise?
Harvard Medical School researcher Coren Apicella discusses the Hadza social network.
To investigate that question, researchers spent two months interviewing more than 200 adult members of the Hadza group who still live in a traditional, nomadic, pre-agricultural setting. To chart the social connections, the researchers asked the adults to identify the individuals they'd like to live with in their next encampment. They also looked into gift-giving connections by giving their experimental subjects three straws of honey ? one of the Hadza's best-loved treats ? and asking them to assign them secretly to anyone else in the camp. That exercise produced a complex web of 1,263 "campmate ties" and 426 "gift ties."
Separately, the researchers gave the Hadza additional honey straws that they could either keep for themselves or donate for group distribution. That was used as a measure of cooperation vs. non-cooperation.
When the researchers analyzed all the linkages, they found that cooperators tended to group themselves together into one set of social clusters, while non-cooperators were in separate clusters. Even when other factors were taken into account, such as connections between kin and geographical proximity, the cooperation vs. non-cooperation distinction was significant. That finding suggested that even in pre-agricultural societies, social networking strengthened the connections between people inclined toward different kinds of behavior.
"If you can get cooperators to cluster together in social space, cooperation can evolve," said Coren Apicella, a postdoctoral researcher specializing in health-care policy at Harvard Medical School and the Nature paper's first author. "Social networks allow this to happen."
The researchers said the dynamics of the Hadza social networks ? including the kinds of ties that bind a group's most popular members and the reciprocal connections within the group?? were indistinguishable from previously gathered data about social networks in modern communities.
"We turned the data over lots of different ways," Fowler said in the news release. "We looked at over a dozen measures that social network analysts use to compare networks, and pretty much, the Hadza are like us."
Beyond the Facebook angle, the rise of relationships between cooperative individuals has larger implications for the study of human evolution. "This suggests that social networks may have co-evolved with the widespread cooperation in humans that we observe today," the researchers wrote.
Update for 2:15 p.m. ET: In a Nature commentary, University of British Columbia anthropologist Joseph Henrich said that the study provided a "glimpse into the social dynamics of one of the few remaining populations of nomadic hunter-gatherers" ? and pointed up the parallels between modern-day social networking and the kind of society in which our distant ancestors lived.
One of the more interesting findings was that non-cooperators preferred to associate with other non-cooperators, rather than with the givers in the Hadza group, Henrich told me. That could be because people tend to make those they associate with more similar to themselves ? sort of like a curmudgeonly married couple. Or it could be because non-cooperative types avoid the cooperators in the first place ? sort of like the high-school kids who shun the goody-goodies and form their own clique of bad boys and girls.
Henrich said the cooperation vs. non-cooperation distinction was surprisingly strong. "In fact, the gift-network results indicate that this extends to friends of friends: if your friend's friend is highly cooperative, you are likely to cooperate more, too."
He said the findings support the principle of homophily in social relations: "People tend to pick people like themselves." But does the cooperation connection apply to modern-day social networks as well? If you're a giving person, do you tend to friend other givers online? "We don't know," Henrich told me. That's a topic for further research.
Update for 10:35 p.m. ET: In a follow-up phone interview, Fowler told me the results that he and his colleagues are reporting add a new twist to the old nature vs. nurture debate. People aren't shaped merely by genetics and their physical environment, he said.
"Social networks were actually just as important as the other two," he said. There may even be a genetic component to the associations you make. Along with Christakis and UCSD's Christopher Dawes,?Fowler conducted research suggesting that genetic factors?affect social behaviors.?Previous studies have also shown that social networking among hunter-gatherer societies like the Hadza are not governed strictly by kin-based relationships.
"What's new here is that we've specifically tied this idea of cooperation to ties between non-kin," Fowler said.
Fowler acknowledged that studying hunter-gatherer societies are not a foolproof way to trace the evolutionary roots of the behaviors we see in modern-day society, including Facebook friending and Twitter tweeting. "This isn't necessarily the be-all and end-all of determining what we were like hundreds of thousands of years ago," he said. But considering that scientists can't interview?Stone Age social networkers, Fowler believes this is one of the best methods available to anthropologists.
More social-network science:
In addition to Apicella, Christakis and Fowler, authors of "Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers" include Cambridge University's Frank Marlowe.
Alan Boyle is msnbc.com's science editor. Connect with the Cosmic Log community by "liking" the log's Facebook page, following @b0yle on Twitter or adding Cosmic Log's Google+ page to your circle. You can also check out "The Case for Pluto," my book about the controversial dwarf planet and the search for other worlds.
'There's nothing about [Izzie] I didn't like,' Heigl tells MTV News at 'One for the Money' premiere. By Christina Garibaldi
Katherine Heigl on "Grey's Anatomy" Photo: ABC
NEW YORK — It's been more than two years since Katherine Heigl left her role as Dr. Izzie Stevens on the hit show "Grey's Anatomy." Rumors swirled that Heigl had behaved like a diva on the set, and after five seasons she left to focus on her movie career and being a mom to her adopted daughter.
Yet it seems she's had a change of heart. At the New York premiere of her new flick "One for the Money," which hits theaters on Friday, Heigl told MTV News she would love to return to "Grey's Anatomy" to find out what happened to her beloved character.
"There was something about her that I really loved. I thought she was such an interesting character and her backstory, the fact that she was raised in a trailer park and had to give a child up for adoption, put herself through med school and was standing there actually doing the work and going for it, so smart, sort of strong-willed," Heigl said. "I thought she was kind of a great character — there's nothing about her I didn't like."
Back in October 2010 Heigl told MTV News that she was certain she would not return to Seattle Grace since she didn't want to feel her plotline was forced. "I can't think of any way that she could come back gracefully that wouldn't just feel manipulative," the actress explained. "And it's hard, because I really wonder what she's doing and where she is and what happened, but that is over for me now."
Yet Heigl now seems ready to reconsider and already has an idea of what could happen to Izzie. "I've thought about this a lot, actually. I would love it if Izzie came back actually having really just sort of gotten to the next level," Heigl said. "She was always sort of one step behind and struggling with her career, and then she went though all these awful things, the death of her friend, the death of her fiancé, her own near death and then the dissolving of her own marriage. I just want the girl to win, just once. So I want her to come back and have really succeeded at whatever hospital she went to work at with her tail between her legs and maybe they've made her head of surgery or she's invented some surgical method; that would be awesome."
With all the ups and downs she experienced on "Grey's Anatomy," there is one thing she wish she could change: her acting. "I think there's a lot of scenes where I wish I had performed them better," Heigl said.
"You're always like, 'Oh, I wish I could take that back.' "
Would you be excited if Katherine Heigl returned to "Grey's Anatomy"? Let us know in the comments!
DEDHAM, Mass. ? A lawyer for an Alabama professor who could be executed for allegedly killing three colleagues asked a judge Wednesday to keep a report into the 1986 killing of her brother secret, arguing it could prejudice a jury against her.
Amy Bishop was indicted in the murder of her brother Seth in June 2010, after she was charged with opening fire on her co-workers at the University of Alabama in Huntsville in February 2010, killing three and wounding three others.
The charges in her brother's death came after a Massachusetts judge conducted a closed-door inquest.
The shooting of 18-year-old Seth Bishop at the family's Braintree home was initially ruled an accident after Amy Bishop told police she accidentally shot her brother while trying to unload her father's shotgun.
The Boston Globe challenged a judge's decision to keep the inquest records sealed, saying the release of the documents could shed light on why authorities didn't prosecute Bishop in her brother's death 26 years ago.
Bishop's lawyer, Larry Tipton, said Wednesday that releasing the "highly prejudicial information" contained in the inquest report, two months before Bishop is scheduled to go on trial in Alabama, could undermine her chances of receiving a fair trial.
"I think that that's a very important, unique consideration," Tipton argued to Norfolk Superior Court Judge Kenneth Fishman.
Deana El-Mallawany, a lawyer for the Globe, said the newspaper has been seeking the inquest report since June 2010.
"There's a strong interest in knowing the adequacy of law enforcement investigation," El-Mallawany said.
She said Bishop's lawyer in Alabama has already said Bishop will use an insanity defense, and her Massachusetts lawyer hasn't shown that releasing the inquest report would taint the jury pool.
But the judge challenged the assertion that publicity about the report wouldn't affect Bishop's trial in Alabama, saying it could "potentially weigh heavily" on her lawyer's ability to defend her in the university killings.
Fishman did not immediately rule on the defense request to keep the report sealed.
Last month, the highest court in Massachusetts ruled that the inquest report into Seth Bishop's death could be released publicly. But it also said Bishop's lawyer could go to court to argue that there was "good cause" why it should remain sealed.
The Supreme Judicial Court's decision also outlined new rules for the release of inquest materials. The high court said the automatic impoundment of the records ends after the subject of the inquest is indicted by a grand jury or after prosecutors decide not to present the case to a grand jury.
