inkbluesky

coastal ireland

Bats Could Fly Before They Had ‘Radar’

A fossil found in Wyoming has apparently resolved a long-standing question about when bats gained their radar-like ability to navigate and locate airborne insects at night. The answer: after they started flying.

The discovery revealed the most primitive bat known, from a previously unrecognized species that lived about 52 million years ago.
Its skeleton shows it could fly, but that it lacked a series of bony features associated with “echolocation,” the ability to emit high-pitched sounds and then hear them bounce back from bjects and prey, researchers said.

Makes sense in terms of natural selection. Those bats that managed to locate prey and avoid collisions would be more likely to mate and pass on those traits, like the formation of a skeletal structure that aided in prey location to their offspring.

night phone

Refugee Crisis Threatens Future of Iraq

The population of the United States is now just over 300,000,000. The population of Iraq at the time of the U.S. invasion was perhaps in the 26-27 million range. Between March 2003 and today, a number of reputable sources place the total of Iraqis who have fled their homes — those who have been displaced internally and those who have gone abroad — at between 4.5 million and 5 million individuals. If you take that still staggering lower figure, approximately one in six Iraqis is either a refugee in another country or an internally displaced person.

Now, consider the equivalent in terms of the U.S. population. If Iraq had invaded the United States in March 2003 with similar results, in less than five years approximately 50 million Americans would have fled their homes, assumedly flooding across the Mexican and Canadian borders, desperately burdening weaker neighboring economies. It would be an unparalleled, even unimaginable, catastrophe.

Unfortunately politicians don’t take some oath where they swear to do more good then harm and Bush ignores the oath he took anyway.