Good morning,
Whitewater’s forecast for today is for a breezy day, with a high of sixty-three degrees.
There will be a charter school listening session at the Cravath Lakefront Center this afternoon, from 4 to 6 p.m.
There’s also a district-wide science night tonight, at the high school, from 6:30 – 8 p.m. Here’s my science-oriented contribution, from Wired‘s science news: how elephants run. The story, entitled, ” Video: Elephants Run Like No Other,” describes their unique running technique:
A biomechanical analysis of running elephants has revealed that Earth’s largest land animals do some strange things at high speed.
Unlike every other quadruped, they use all four legs for braking and propulsion, rather than rather dividing those tasks between hind and front legs.
Elephants also prove to be extremely inefficient while running. Compared to animals like horses, they perform quite poorly. Then again, given their size, running itself is quite an achievement.
“It’s pretty cool that they can run at all. And they do it in such a weird way,” said John Hutchinson, an evolutionary biologist at the University of London.
In a study published March 29 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Hutchinson’s team videotaped six Asian elephants as they ran across mechanical plates that measured the force of each stride. By combining gait models distilled from the video with force measurements, they could quantify the elephants’ biomechanics.
Here’s a video of the Hutchinson’s observations:
Link:
http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid46203255001?bclid=46205328001&bctid=74491839001
On this day in 1867, Secretary of State Seward came to an agreement with Russia to purchase Alaska, at a cost of around seven million dollars. That’s less than a single office building today, and the building would lack reserves of oil, other diverse plants and animals, and a famous former governor.