White-tailed jack rabbits living in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem have apparently hopped their way into oblivion, according to a new study by the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
No one knows why the rabbits have disappeared.
"It could be disease, extreme weather, predation or other factors," said conservationist and lead study author Joel Berger. "Since the rabbits blipped off without knowledge, there has simply been no way to get at the underlying cause."
But Berger says the rabbits' absence is already being felt. Rabbits are a traditional prey of coyotes, who have increased their attacks upon juvenile elk, pronghorn and cattle. Berger is urging federal biologists to consider a plan to reintroduce the rabbits into both parks.
TURN UP THE LIGHT
Engineers at the University of Michigan have built a new laser whose beam intensity is comparable to focusing all of the sunlight shining on Earth onto a single grain of sand.
Much lower high-intensity lasers are used in medical research. At extreme intensities, researchers say they might be able to push the boundaries of science. One possible application: "Boiling the vacuum," or generating matter (theoretically) by merely focusing light into empty space.
VERBATIM
When a 4,700-pound pickup truck meets a 5,000-pound seal, they both lose.
- Ken Cumings of the Friends of the Elephant Seal group, describing what happens when the huge sea mammals try to cross busy California beach roads.
BRAIN SWEAT
Mandy can spell her name with only two letters. How?
M and Y
PRIME NUMBERS
167 - Estimated number of years it will take for emissions reductions gained by burning corn ethanol to make up for sharp spike in emissions caused by clearing new land for corn crops
10 - Estimated weight, in pounds, of a newly discovered frog species that lived 65 million years ago in South America. Dubbed "Beelzebufo" or "devil frog," it was 16 inches long, according to fossil remains
6 - Estimated amount of time during sleep that the average person spends dreaming over the course of a lifetime, in years
Sources: Timothy Searchinger, Princeton University; David Krause, Stony Brook University; Discover
In recent months, Japanese engineers and scientists have unveiled a robot that solves Rubik's Cube, a robot that plays the violin and a robotic snowplow that eats snow and spits it out the other end as ice blocks. Dutch inventors have developed a robot that can pump gas, eliminating the need for drivers to get out of their cars.
JUST ASKING
Why do we say that something is out of whack? What is a whack?
At the height of their power, ancient Romans considered stuffed mice to be a delicacy.
WHAT IS IT ANSWER
This is a visualization of a moment of activity in the Internet universe, created at University of California, San Diego's Supercomputer Center and currently on display at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
The exhibition, called "Design and the Elastic Mind," explores how society has changed in terms of time, space, matter and individuality. The SDSC image depicts round-trip times of data packets sent from a Web site in Herndon, Va., to hundreds of thousands of nodes on the Internet and back again. The image was created by Young Hyun and Bradley Huffaker, researchers with the center's Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis.
