Another new species of monkey discovered in Burma …BBC - Earth News - New species of snub-nosed monkey discovered in Myanmar
How wonderful that yet another large (-ish) mammal has been discovered, this time related to other snub-nosed monkeys found in Vietnam and China.
This is a genuine good news story, at least for me (Whopping Antenna in Space to Provide 4G Wireless Service Soon | LiveScience)
You see I can’t get a decent Virgin 3G signal here in Dunblane and entirely perversely can get a good one in a cave in the Maghreb Sahara!
Well it looks like the science budget has not been cut as much as feared (BBC News - 'Vital' science spared deep cuts).
This is good news and will enable “science” to get on with the jobs that are vital to all our futures. Expect to see a raft of new research programmes designed to better previous endeavours such as :
The BBC is carrying this astonishing story BBC News - On how the leopard got its spots
It seems, following a research programme, that leopards have spots so they can hide in trees and not be seen – Doh!
Now I guess everyone probably knows this because it is intuitively obvious.
Cutting the science budget is possibly no bad thing if it is spent on this sort of ridiculous research!
It feels good to be able to blog about the discovery of yet another unknown carnivore, this time from Madagascar - BBC - Earth News - New carnivorous mammal species found in Madagascar.
The importance of the discovery of new mammalian predators cannot be overestimated. The existence of mammalian predators is indicative of a healthy ecology. When a habitat starts to degrade the first species to go are the predators because the food chain “dries up”.
In this case the mammal is a vontsira (Salanoia durrelli), a little known animal of the family Eupleridae whose best known member is the Fossa, a type of true mongoose:
It has been given the common name Durrell’s vontsira in honour of Gerald Durrell, the founder of Jersey Zoo. It is thought that it lives in marshland and may prey on molluscs and crustaceans.
And we know who’s to blame don’t we. Macavity’s not there:he’s gone for good. Hallelujah!
Tory Conference: Labour left 'ghastly legacy' over Armed Forces, says Liam Fox - Telegraph
Stuxnet, the malware that infiltrates Siemens plant control software and trashes it, has come to public notice since its attack on an Iranian nuclear reactor. Indeed one could say that it has become an Important Issue having been featured on the Today Programme this morning.
I listened with fascination as the two “experts” talked with great gravitas about it. Unfortunately the female professor, though articulate in that BBC way of speaking to the prols, couldn’t manage anything much more enlightening than it might be serious and showed new ways that bad people could attack in cyberspace.
Now call me old-fashioned but I happen to think that an ability to trash an oppressive and lunatic regime’s nuclear weapons facility remotely without a body count can hardly be called bad.
As I have previously blogged Stuxnet and its ilk may be the future of warfare and if that is the case then we need to plough significantly more resources into research and operations involving cyber war – particularly defending against cyber attacks-if we can do it to them they can do it to us. Probably more than buying two new aircraft carriers which already are probably vulnerable to a Stuxnet –like attack.
There is worrying evidence that the defence review is looking in the wrong place. Instead of bickering about the numbers of fast jets and special forces soldiers we should be going flat out to build our cyberwar capability at a fraction of the cost. What’s needed is brainpower not kit.
Building our defence doctrine on the assertion that “Whatever happens we have got the SAS [or Trident] and they have not” (with apologies to Hilaire Belloc) is hardly a way of future-proofing the nation.
