To my dear visitors and commenters

Hi, everybody! I've noticed with lots of joy and happiness, that thousands of comments have been written in my posts. It's wonderful that so may people around the world appreciate my work. Therefore, I want to thank you for that and ,at the same time I want to ask you to be this blog's followers. It's fast and easy! Make it be even more visited and spread all over the world! I'm a woman, a teacher of English in Portugal, and I've been away for quite a long time because of my father's health. Unfortunately he died from Covid19 a few months ago. Now I felt it was time to restart my activity in this and other blogs I owe. I've recently created a new one in a partnership with a street photographer, Mr. Daniel Antunes. He's fabulous! https://pandpbydandd.blogspot.com I'd like you to visit it and, who knows, become our followers. The poems, chronicles and thoughts are all mine. Thank you so much! Kisses :-)

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Saturday, June 29, 2013

Rare sighting of snow leopards

Three snow leopards have been spotted in the Yushu hills in central China

The animals are endangered, which makes seeing three of them in one place all the more surprising.

Why Are Snow Leopards Endangered?

There are three main reasons that snow leopards are in trouble. The first reason is that the bones, skin and organs of large cats are valuable in traditional Asian medicine. Tigers are the prefered species for this purpose, but tigers are so rare that it is almost impossible to find one in the wild so snow leopards are substituted for tigers. When you consider that the people who live near snow leopards often earn less than 300 dollars per year and that a poacher can get perhaps $200 for a dead snow leopard (though a middleman can resell it for up to $10,000), it isn’t hard to understand why snow leopards are at risk.
local people holding a snow leopard pelt
Humans are a second reason that snow leopards are endangered. Humans have pushed ever further with their livestock into the snow leopard’s habitat. Overgrazing damages the fragile mountain grasslands, leaving less food for the wild sheep and goats that are the snow leopard’s main prey. With less food for the wild sheep and goats, there become fewer of these animals for the snow leopard. This leaves the snow leopard with little choice but to prey on the domestic livestock for their own survival. An unhappy farmer, arriving at his goat pen one morning to find that all of his goats have been killed by a snow leopard, might retaliate by killing the snow leopard if he can find it.
The Snow Leopard Conservancy is just one of many organizations that are trying to help the troubled animals of the world. There are organizations that are trying to help elephants (one is Save The Elephants) others are trying to help bats (Bat Conservation International for instance). There are organizations that are trying to help preserve the world’s plants. (The Tropical Forestry Initiative is trying to restore Costa Rica’s rainforest.)
The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (which is known as IUCN for short) is a world-wide organization whose membership is made up of many hundreds of smaller organizations devoted to every part of the effort to preserve the natural world. It is a very old and respected scientific organization. You can go to their web site and learn about them.
The IUCN has defined the criteria that indicates when a species is in trouble. If the species is in big trouble they might be listed in the IUCN’s “Red List of Threatened Species.”
CITES is a second organization that attempts to identify animal species that might be in trouble. CITES is the United Nations Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. CITES bans or strictly limits trade of animals or their body parts. CITES lists snow leopards in Appendix 1 (most endangered). As of 2007 only Tajikistan had yet to sign the CITES agreement.

A Map of the Snow Leopard’s Range

 snow leopard range map

    Quick Facts:

  • There may be 4,500 – 7,500 snow leopards left in the wild
  • Snow Leopards are confirmed to live in 12 countries of Central Asia.
  • Their range covers 1.2-1.6 sq. km. (463,000-618,000 sq. mi.)
  • A snow leopard’s home range can be as little as 12 sq.km. (4.6 sq.mi.) in productive habitat, to 500 or more sq.km. in the Gobi Desert of Mongolia
  • Up to a third of the snow leopard’s range falls along international borders. Relations between some of the countries are hostile, complicating conservation initiatives.

Friday, June 28, 2013

150 swans rescued in Thames oil spill

More than 150 swans had to be rescued from the River Thames following an oil spill on Friday.

The Environment Agency suspects it was caused by oil illegally dumped into drains
Volunteers have been working over the weekend to remove the birds from the river and clean them with washing-up liquid.
Wendy Hermon, from the Swan Lifeline charity said it was "one of the worst oil spills" she had seen.
Doug Hill, from the Environment Agency said: "We've been working over the weekend to try and locate the source of this pollution.
"We suspect it is engine oil from the smell and look of it as well as what's been cleaned off the swans who were rescued."

From CBBC News

Clean, green scooter

The Massachusetts Institute (MIT) has designed an electric scooter prototype which could replace petrol-burning scooters in cities of the future

MIT’s RoboScooter – It’s clean, green, silent, and compact!

INTRODUCING THE CUTER SCOOTER
A folding electric scooter developed by the Smart Cities Group at the Media Lab was a hit at Milan's Motor Show last fall, along with a proposal to make the scooters available for short-term rentals at convenient city locations like subway stops and convenience stores. It was also recently cited as one of the great inventions of the year by the French magazine Le Point.
The RoboScooter—affectionately known as 'the cuter scooter'—was developed under the direction of Bill Mitchell, head of MIT's Design Laboratory, in response to the growing congestion in cities and to booming auto sales that threaten to jam the streets and pollute the air still further.
Taking their lead from origami and existing folding bicycles, the Smart Cities team addressed the problem by designing a clean, green, silent scooter that can be folded in half and towed like a rolling suitcase—easy to take on trains, or indoors—or stacked in a rack for storage and battery charging.
Users could swipe a credit card to remove a scooter from the rack (which charges up the batteries), unfold it for the trip and then fold it up again to deposit at another rack at the destination. Computers would track scooter pick-ups and drop-offs to keep the system running smoothly; each scooter would show its location with a built-in GPS unit.
The viability of the one-way-rental business model has been demonstrated in Paris where a company has recently started a similar service with bicycles—a program so successful that the city is doubling the number of cycles and stacks. It is estimated that the proposed scooter system could cut the need for scooter parking in Taiwan by as much as 80%.
The multigenerational, cross-disciplinary team of designers included a core group of four graduate students along with several others who made contributions, and a group of MIT's Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program students. They completed the entire project in only eight months, from blank sheet to built concept.
The team now plans to develop the prototype further with two different production models. One will be a refinement of the folding scooter introduced in Milan, and the other will be an even simpler model, without the folding capability, to be produced for regions where low cost is most important and space restrictions are not as crucial.
RoboScooter was created in collaboration with SYM, a major scooter manufacturer in Taiwan, and with ITRI, Taiwan's Industrial Technology Research Institute. SYM recently announced its intention to take the scooter into mass production.
MIT’s scooter comes with just 150 parts and it gets electricity from a battery that gets recharged each time the vehicle is replaced to its rack. There is no conventional drive train, thanks to the specially designed wheels, each with their own motor and suspension system. It is clean, green, silent, and compact. The final show-quality prototype was presented at the Milan Motor show on November 6-9th, 2007


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