Chimpanzees remember the exact location of all their favourite fruit trees.
Their spatial memory is so precise that they can find a single tree among more than 12,000 others within a patch of forest, primatologists have found.
More than that, the chimps also recall how productive each tree is, and decide to travel further to eat from those they know will yield the most fruit.
Amazing. I’ll have to incorporate this into my next presentation on network monitoring. Although it seems thorough, the study left some things undone.
Intriguingly, female chimpanzees travelled shorter distances to eat than males. The researchers don’t know why, but speculate that it is either because females better remember the locations of trees, or because males simply compete with one another by ranging more widely through their territory.
Technology and data analysis can only get you so far, apparently, as the researchers leave this one open to interpretation. Who can crack the mystery of gender-based differences in chimpanzee navigation? Perhaps the females stop to ask for directions?
The documents describe the couple’s spying methods changing with the times, beginning with old-fashioned tools of Cold War spying: Morse code messages over a short-wave radio and notes taken on water-soluble paper. By the time they retired from the work in 2007, they were reportedly sending encrypted e-mails from Internet cafes.
The criminal complaint says changing technology also persuaded Gwendolyn Myers to abandon what she considered an easy way of passing information, by changing shopping carts in a grocery store. The document quoted her as saying she would no longer use that tactic. “Now they have cameras, but they didn’t then.”
Store cameras as a deterrent for international spying? That’s a new one. Wonder if I could have added it to proposals and won even more funding?
An explosion and fire in San Francisco has led authorities to advise residents to stay indoors
An underground explosion in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood has prompted fire officials to issue a shelter-in-place warning this afternoon because of toxic smoke caused by an underground explosion and fire.
About 4,500 Pacific Gas and Electric customers lost power shortly after 11:30 a.m., when an underground explosion occurred in the area of Polk and O’Farrell streets.
Firefighters used CO2 to suppress the flames, but PG&E requested they stop using it in order to allow the equipment to fail completely, fire Lt. Mindy Talmadge said.
But when firefighters stopped using the CO2, a black cloud of smoke seven stories high rose from the manhole. At one point around 1:15 p.m., flames 10 feet high shot from the manhole.
The downtown area has been seriously impacted as buildings with smoke detectors automatically have shutdown systems including elevators.
Today is the twentieth anniversary of the first “half-free” elections in Poland, when the Solidarity trade union won all available Sejm seats and all but one senate seat by a landslide. This led to the first non-communist coalition government in the Soviet Bloc and marked the fall of communism.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
