After Sandy's New York Deluge, a Flood of Rats?

Subway survivors: Rats will have outmaneuvered Sandy's underground floods.

Hurricane Sandy's storm surge pushes seawater into New York City's Carey Tunnel on Monday.

Photograph by Andrew Burton, Getty Images

A rat emerges from a hole in a Brooklyn subway station. Photograph by Julie Jacobson, AP.

Johnna Rizzo

New York City's rats have arrived. In the wake of superstorm Sandy, residents of the city are soon likely to see them by the thousands, since the rodents have been driven from flooded subway tunnels.
When weather is drier, the rats seem to love living under the soil, and can dig deeper than water can seep. They could even have been safe in their burrows as the storm swept the city Monday. But many likely were out on the hunt for food.
"They're in the subway, in spite of the subway," said exterminator Benett Pearlman of New York-based Positive Pest Management Corp. The underground systems are the first things rats reach when breaking through the soil in search of sustenance. This perpetual hunger likely killed many as floodwaters washed back through their tunnels into their nests, probably killing the sick, the elderly, and new mothers with their young.
The many thousands that made it out alive—most using the same stairways people use, Pearlman said—were trapped aboveground on Tuesday, hunkering down behind trash bins and under cars until nightfall.
Sandy has brought a feast to their feet. New sources of food are washing out of the waterways and along flooded streets, including loads of rotting trash, other rats, pigeons, and fish. The well-fed rats will burrow beneath buildings under cover of night to establish new homes, sliding into holes as small as a half inch (1.3 centimeters)—the width of their skulls—even though their bodies can measure up to 18 inches (46 centimeters) long.
(Related: "Hurricane Sandy Pictures: Floods, Fire, Snow in the Aftermath.")
As for New York's other ubiquitous wildlife, Tufts University animal behaviorist Robert Cook thinks pigeons are in an excellent position when the city is flooded and windy. They're originally cliff-dwelling birds, so skyscrapers suit them, Cook said. They'll find a safe place to get out of the wind, then fly to new food sources.
"There's a reason rats and pigeons are so successful around humans," he says, "They're well adapted to what we do."
More: How Superstorm Sandy's Floods Can Make You Sick >>

Frogs rescued from killer fungus have 'massive' brood

The female mountain chicken frog lays its eggs into a special self-made foamy nest

Continue reading the main story

Rare tropical frogs rescued from a killer fungus in the Caribbean have produced a bumper brood in the UK.

The two female mountain chicken frogs responsible for the 76 new additions are part of an attempt to rescue the species from extinction.
All 12 frogs in the UK breeding programme came from Montserrat, where the chytrid fungus has ravaged the population.
"We're absolutely chuffed to bits," said herpetologist, Dr Ian Stephen.
The frogs, simply known as mountain chickens, were rescued as part of the conservation efforts led by the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) and the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust (DWCT).

Continue reading the main story

Frog-killer fungus

• The chytrid disease is caused by the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis
• It penetrates the skin of many amphibian species causing lesions which prevent the animals from taking in oxygen, effectively suffocating them
• According to the Global Bd Mapping Project conducted by Imperial College London, over 500 species have now been recorded as affected by the disease

• Watch video of mountain chickens being bred in captivity

"The first challenge was getting them out of the Caribbean in to Europe safely," said Dr Ian Stephen, ZSL's Curator of Herpetology.

The frogs were transported in temperature-controlled boxes to protect them and minimise stress on the long and hazardous journey.
"Although the mountain chicken is one of the biggest frogs in the world they're still a small animal so they're incredibly sensitive to temperature fluctuations and that tends to be the thing that would kill a frog during transportation."
"It's obviously quite a hairy moment when you open up the boxes," he said.
The 50 airlifted frogs were split into three groups and housed at ZSL London Zoo, the DWCT in Jersey and at Parken Zoo in Sweden in the hope of growing a healthy population of the species.
Since their arrival, the 12 UK frogs have been living in a bio-secure breeding unit at the zoo, where the eggs were laid.
Mountain chicken females produce a special foam nest into which they lay their eggs. The tadpoles then feed on deliberately unfertilised eggs laid by the female.
Dr Stephen hopes that most of the 76 will survive to adulthood and make a return trip to the Caribbean.
"Because a mountain chicken wouldn't lay hundreds or thousands of eggs like a common frog would in England, for the ones that make it to metamorphosis, you'd hope for a very high success rate."

The mountain chicken tadpoles were fed unfertilised eggs every few days

On Montserrat, mountain chicken frogs face threats from volcanic activity and predation but the biggest threat remains the chytrid fungus.
"It's an incredibly important disease because it's probably the first time where a disease is affecting an entire class of animals."
"It's moving towards driving the extinction of most of the amphibian species across the globe," Dr Stephen told BBC Nature.
The chytrid fungus was spread around the world mainly by people and it is the fear of creating a new epidemic that means in situ programmes tend to be more common these days, Dr Stephen told the BBC.
That is why the frogs are being kept in a bio-secure facility with keepers wearing full paper suits, masks and gloves "like in ET".
"Basically you're trying to prevent any new pathogens coming in to that population," he said.

‘Stop obscuring the night sky’

Each week a global thinker from the worlds of philosophy, science, psychology or the arts is given a minute to put forward a radical, inspiring or controversial idea – no matter how improbable – that they believe would change the world.

This week the UK's Public Astronomer, Marek Kukula
“If I rule the world I would replace old inefficient street lights all over the planet with modern efficient designs that only put the light where it is needed – down on the streets.
Instead of wasting it by shining it up into the sky where all it does is blot out the stars – that orange glow that mean city dwellers never see a dark sky.
Think of the difference that this would make. We would still have safe, well lit streets, but for the first time in decades people in towns and cities would be able to look up and see the wonder of the night sky. And it would not just would-be stargazers that would benefit. Less wasted light, means less waster electricity, less wasted money and a reduced carbon footprint.
Migrating birds and animals would also benefit – they would be able to navigate more easily using the moon and stars and there is even some benefit that human health would benefit from a more natural cycle of light and dark in urban areas.
So we would see many practical benefits and a natural wonder that should belong to everyone would be restored. I think this would make the world a better place because everyone would have a chance to see the stars and appreciate our place in the Universe.”

Iceberg breaks off from Greenland's Petermann Glacier

1/3

An iceberg twice the size of Manhattan has broken away from the Petermann Glacier in northern Greenland.

Images from a Nasa satellite show the island breaking off a tongue of ice that extends at the end of the glacier.
In 2010 an ice island measuring 250 square km (100 square miles) broke off the same glacier.
The process that spawns icebergs - known as calving - is a natural, periodic process affecting all glaciers that terminate at the ocean.
A previous calving event at the same glacier in 2010 created an iceberg twice the size of this one.
Scientists have raised concerns in recent years about the Greenland ice shelf, saying that it is thinning extensively amid warm temperatures.
No single event of this type can be ascribed to changes in the climate.
But some experts say they are surprised by the extent of the changes to the Petermann Glacier in recent years.
"It is not a collapse but it is certainly a significant event," Eric Rignot from Nasa said in a statement.
Some other observers have gone further. "It's dramatic. It's disturbing," University of Delaware's Andreas Muenchow told the Associated Press.
"We have data for 150 years and we see changes that we have not seen before," Mr Muenchow added.
The calving is not expected have an impact on sea levels as the ice was already floating.
Icebergs from the Petermann Glacier sometimes reach the waters off Newfoundland in Canada, posing a danger to shipping and navigation, according to the Canadian Ice Service.

What happened to Hilton’s ‘hotel on the Moon’?

• 
• It is more than half a century since the idea of a Hilton hotel on the Moon was first mooted . Ever since the plan has resurfaced periodically, making Matt Novak wonder if we are now any closer or whether there was ever a plan at all.

'Space hotel' plan unveiled

A Russian company has unveiled an ambitious plan to launch a "cosmic hotel" for wealthy space tourists.

In 1958 the Boulevard Room at the swanky Conrad Hilton Hotel in downtown Chicago offered delicious steaks, a lavish stage show, and a curious peek at the future.
At the front of the grand hall was what was billed as the “largest hotel ice rink in the country”, on which troops of tutu-wearing girls danced for the crowds of diners. It was here, in the summer heat of August that black-tie wearing customers were given the first teaser of a legend that survives to this day: Hilton Hotels was going to the Moon.
On stage, the final scene for the dancers was called “out of this world”. Although details of the performance are scarce, a Chicago-area newspaper called the Suburbanite Economist wrote that it was set in a “plush” hotel called the Lunar Hilton. The lavish show caught the writers’ imagination and he took it to its logical conclusion. As the 27 August 1958 edition put it: “this could mean that the Hilton chain is dickering with the idea of opening the first hotel on the Moon.”
Fast forward to 2009 and an episode of the popular TV series Mad Men features the louche Don Draper and his team creating a fictional ad campaign for a Hilton Hotel on the Moon. “I want a Hilton on the Moon; that’s where we are headed,” says “Connie” Hilton at one point. Although the series is fiction, it got me wondering: had Hilton hotels ever really planned to go into space?
When the writers of Mad Men were researching the programme, their go-to man was Dr Mark Young, who oversees the hotel founder’s archive at the University of Houston. He seemed like an obvious person to shed light on the story.
According to Dr Young, there’s no evidence that Conrad Hilton was behind the vision of a hotel on the Moon. “[The writers of Mad Men] contacted me to learn about Conrad Hilton so I talked with them, but when I watched it this Moon thing came out of nowhere and I thought, ‘wait a minute, that’s not Conrad Hilton at all’.”
In fact, he says, it was one of Conrad Hilton’s sons, Barron Hilton, who appears to have been the true evangelist for a Hilton on the Moon.  “He, like everyone else was very captivated by the space age,” says Dr Young.
‘Earth view’
Barron was elected as vice-president of Hilton Hotels in 1954, serving behind his father. Just four years later the Suburbanite Economist article appeared – the earliest reference to the idea I can find. I expect it will be difficult to find anything much earlier. That was the beginning of space fever in the United States, as the Russians had launched Sputnik in October of 1957, kicking off the Space Age - a period of tremendous fear and wide-eyed hope for what was to come.
Throughout later years, the idea appears again and again in popular culture. In the 28 October 1962 episode of The Jetsons, The Good Little Scouts, George brings Elroy’s scout troop to the Moon and in a quick, fleeting shot we see the Moonhattan Tilton, a clear reference to the Manhattan Hilton hotel. And in  Stanley Kubrick’s classic 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” there is an office marked “Hilton Space Station 5” on the glass exterior, where people could presumably make reservations for the Hilton hotel on the film’s orbiting space station.
Though it wasn’t Conrad’s idea he certainly didn’t discourage the idea of a hotel on the Moon. The March 1963 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine ran a long and glowing profile on Conrad Hilton as the hard-nosed businessman who understood what people wanted and would stop at nothing to give it to them. Though not a quote from “Connie” himself, the article nonetheless ends with a space age promise from the writer: “it won’t be very long before our astronauts land on the Moon and immediately behind them will be Connie Hilton with his plans for his Lunar Hilton Hotel.”
Those plans began to take off in 1967. Barron, who was then president of Hilton, told the Wall Street Journal that he was planning to cut the ribbon at an opening ceremony for a Lunar Hilton hotel within his lifetime. He described the Lunar Hilton as a 100-room hotel that would be built below the surface. Guests would gather around a piano bar in an observation dome that allowed them to gaze back at earth.
Barron’s desire to build a Hilton on the Moon - whether it was merely clever PR or something more sincere - struck a chord with people all over the world. The hotel group even printed promotional “reservations cards” for customers to reserve a hotel room on the Moon. “In the [Hilton] archive we’ve got hundreds, if not thousands, of letters of people writing in to him,” says Dr Young. “They’d seen the picture of the reservation form and they wanted to get their name on there.
“You read the letters, from all around the world - I always remember the one from Pakistan for some reason it stands out in my mind -- but people really wanted to know that sometime in [their] lifetime we’ll have hotels on the Moon.”
‘Freeze-dried steak’
The archive that Dr. Young oversees in Texas also contains promotional Lunar Hilton hotel keys which were distributed as promotional item in hotels. “The idea that we’d have a plastic key card like we do today was - I guess - just way too far out for ‘67, ‘68. And so [the Lunar Hilton key] looks like an old fashioned hotel room key, except it’s sleek,” Dr. Young said.
Just days before the first Moon landings in 1969, the Hilton lunar vision reappeared. Never one to miss an opportunity to sell the idea (or at least the hotel chain), Barron addressed the American Astronomical Society where he once again pressed that Hilton would soon be on the Moon. “I firmly believe that we are going to have hotels in outer space, perhaps even soon enough for me to officiate at the formal opening of the first,” he told the assembled crowd.
With the world gripped by Moon fever, it was an obvious story for newspapers recorded every twist and turn of the space race. For example, an article in the 15 July Lowell Sun in Lowell, Massachusetts picked up on the speech and painted a picture of the hotel of the future. Their story relies heavily on images of food and alcohol pills, an idea we examined here a few months back.
“Imagine yourself in the Galaxy Lounge of the Lunar Hilton - the first hotel on the Moon. In place of a ceiling, a transparent dome allows you to view the heavens as you never could see them from beneath the thick atmosphere covering Earth, Mars looks bigger and redder, the star do not twinkle, and you are just in time to watch an Earth-set,” it reads. “You order a martini. The bartender pushes a button and out comes a pre-measured, pre-cooled mixture of pure ethyl alcohol and distilled water -- 80 proof. Into the mixture he droops a gin and vermouth tablet. As you sip the result, the huge bright-blue Earth slips below the stark, brown horizon and you begin to think about a freeze-dried steak for dinner.”
Clearly, Barron’s vision has yet come to pass, but the idea has never fully gone away. In the late 1990s, the firm backed plans for a private orbiting space station whilst in a separate plan, British architect Peter Inston was commissioned to draw up a plan for a 5,000-room domed structure on the Moon for the hotel chain. As the plans were shown off, the then president of the firm – Peter George – reportedly repeated the hotel’s maxim: “One day soon, there will be hotels on the Moon. The Hilton wants to be the first.”
It’s difficult to know whether successive Hilton bosses actually believe this message or whether, as is perhaps more likely, they have simply hit on perhaps one of the longest and most imaginative marketing campaigns in history. Certainly, Conrad Hilton’s grandson, Steve Hilton, has suggested that it was an idea that was never meant to be taken seriously. Instead, he said in a 2009 interview following the Mad Men episode, that he thought it was meant to be “symbolic”.
Certainly the idea seems to have disappeared in recent years. But the recent surge of commercial activity in space means that perhaps it could soon return. If, and when it does, Hilton may have to compete with another hotelier in the race to the Moon.
In 2006, Robert Bigelow, the former owner of the Budget Suites of America chain, launched an inflatable habitat capsule into space. In 2007 another followed, and his company – Bigelow aerospace – has begun working on a full scale capsule which could, he has said, form the basis of a Moon habitat.
Whether the plan is anything more than an idea worthy of Don Draper, only time will tell.

Nature's big picture: Rarest snake

Conservationists confirm that the Saint Lucia racer is the world's rarest species of snake, with fewer than 18 surviving in the wild. Populations of the small, non-venomous snake suffered rapid declines after mongooses were introduced from India in the late 19th Century. They were actually declared extinct in 1936 but an individual was discovered in 1973. To fully understand the state of the population, an international team of researchers undertook a five month study on the Caribbean island nation. They micro-chipped 11 snakes and are now investigating how to protect the species. "It was a huge relief to confirm that a population of the racer still survives," said Matthew Morton, Eastern Caribbean Programme Manager for Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust who were involved in the research, "but that relief is tempered by the knowledge of how close we still are to losing it forever."

Palau: Is it the world's cannabis capital?

Continue reading the main story

A small group of Pacific islands with the population of a small town has been named as the country with the highest consumption of beer and cannabis. Is that really true?

The United Nations' 2012 World Drugs Report, published in June, contains at least one surprising number - the nation with the highest level of cannabis use among adults is Palau.
This tiny island nation in the western Pacific Ocean is home to just 21,000 people, where - according to the UN - a quarter of adults use cannabis.
Not only are Palauans ahead of everyone else on this measure, they're ahead by a long way. The country with the next highest rate of cannabis use is Italy, where - the report says - some 15% of adults use the drug.
If the idea that Palau is some sort of hedonist's retreat sounds familiar, that may be because the island topped a 2011 World Health Organisation chart examining another vice.
According to the WHO's global status report on alcohol and health, Palauans drink more beer per capita than any other nation in the world.

Beer		Cannabis
Source: World Health Organisation, United Nations Beer - litres of alcohol consumed annually per capita aged 15+ Cannabis - prevalence of use as % of population, 15-64, countries only
Palau	8.68	Palau	24.2
Czech Republic	8.51	Italy	14.6
Seychelles	7.15	New Zealand	14.6
Irish Republic	7.04	Nigeria	14.3
Lithuania	5.60	USA	14.1

So what on earth is going on in Palau? Is it really an island of beer-swilling cannabis smokers?
Let's look at beer drinking first. The WHO report was published in 2011 but it compared data from 2005.

Continue reading the main story

Republic of Palau

• Area: 508 sq km (196 sq miles) of more than 200 volcanic and coral islands
• Capital: Melekeok
• Politics: Became independent in 1994 after being run by the US
• Leader: President Johnson Toribiong (above)
• Economics: Heavily dependent on US aid. Some tourism. Fishing by foreign fleets contributes to national income
• International: One of few countries to recognise Taiwan

• Palau country profile

That's important because, for some reason, Palauans appear to have gone on a drinking spree that year. They simply drank more beer than usual in 2005. In other years, they slide down the chart.

More importantly, perhaps, while Palauans seem to drink a lot of beer, they don't drink much of anything else.
If one looks at the total amount of alcohol consumed - rather than just beer - Palau slips down to 42nd place out of 188. On that measure, the Czech Republic has the dubious honour of occupying the top spot.
The UN's 2012 figures on cannabis use in Palau are more problematic than the WHO's data on beer drinking.
The report's authors could not obtain survey data for adults in Palau. So they used a survey of cannabis use among state high school pupils and extrapolated those results to estimate a figure for the whole adult population.
There is one state high school in Palau, with a student population of 742. The surveyors found that about 60% of the 565 respondents in that school had used cannabis at least once and almost 40% said they had used cannabis in the last month.
Not so much a high school, then, as a really high school. For comparison, a similar survey of schoolchildren carried out in the US found 23% of students say they used cannabis in the last month.
But although the numbers from the Palauan school survey are striking, it is clearly a very small sample, as well as being unrepresentative of the wider population (one might reasonably expect Palauan teenagers to smoke a lot more cannabis than, say, their middle-aged parents).

Koror is one of the most populous islands

Emery Wenty, a director for the Ministry of Education in Palau, simply does not believe the UN's figures.
"Palau is a very small island. If cannabis use is as prevalent as the UN claims," he says, "you would see it and smell it everywhere. You don't.
"You sort of know just about everybody. It's inconceivable that a quarter of the population uses cannabis."
Wenty accepts that cannabis use may be a problem in the Palauan state high school but he points that there are about 500 other high school children in Palau studying in private - and mostly religious - institutions.
He suspects that the data from the state high school is not even representative of all Palauan teenagers, let alone the entire adult population.

Continue reading the main story

The same size as Palau (roughly)

• Buxton, Derbyshire, UK
• West Pensacola, Florida, US
• Alcala, Andalucia, Spain
• Husum, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany
• Wenquan Town, Guangdong, China
• Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia

Angela Me, a UN statistician who works on the World Drugs Report, accepts some of Mr Wenty's criticisms.

There is a particular problem, she says, with collecting data from very small populations, because a small number of people changing their behaviour can create large swings in the statistics.
She points out, however, that their data - whatever its shortcomings - does suggest there is a relatively high prevalence of drug use in a number of Pacific island nations.
"We are going to have a meeting in the Pacific islands," she says, "where we hope to collect more information and also reduce the margin of error."
It would be wise to wait for the UN to complete its collection of more and better data from the Pacific islands before concluding that Palau really is the booze and drugs capital of the world.