Good morning.
Unseasonably warm weather awaits Whitewater today: a partly sunny day with a high temperature of fifty. In the primary state of New Hampshire, Manchester will see a day of mostly cloudy skies and a high temp of thirty-nine.
Quick note on comments: I’ve opened up comments on posts, to be moderated against profanity and trolls, and to remain open automatically for two days’ time for each post. A few posts here or there may be closed to comments, but most will be open. I’ll craft a more complete comments policy, but for now, this will do.
Mark your calendars: 2012 will be a bit longer due to the decision of the ‘International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service (IERS)’ to add a leap second on June 30th:
A positive leap second will be introduced at the end of June 2012.
The sequence of dates of the UTC second markers will be:2012 June 30, 23h 59m 59s
2012 June 30, 23h 59m 60s
2012 July 1, 0h 0m 0s
Over at Wired, there’s a story about the imitative abilities of spiders: Clever Spiders Steal Rivals’ Dance Moves.
A team of biologists has discovered that male spiders spy on their rivals during courtship ceremonies, so they can mimic and pinch their most successful dance moves.
The researchers put male wolf spiders (Schizocosa ocreata) in front of tiny television sets and made them watch videos of other males perform a sexy, leg-tapping mating dance. The test spiders copied the on-screen males, adjusting the rate of leg-tapping to match and even outperform their rivals.
The spiders used in this study were collected from the field. Naive, lab-raised spiders who weren’t exposed to male courtship toward females didn’t understand the dance and the results were inconclusive. But spiders from the field, who knew what the leg-tapping was all about, behaved as if their on-screen rival was courting a nearby female.
There’s video proof of these findings: