Category: New Zealand

New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key confirms he is not a shape-shifting reptilian alien

On By A.P.In Alien life, New Zealand, Open Information Act, Space and Time, Stupidity1 Comment

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‘I’ve taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both have confirmed I’m not a reptile.’ New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key promises that he has no extraterrestrial agenda.

Politicians are often likened to snakes.

But one world leader has been bizarrely forced to deny he is a cold-blooded extraterrestrial hell-bent on controlling the planet.

New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key went officially on record this week to categorically state he was not a shapeshifting reptilian alien.

He was forced to make the comical statement after an Auckland man filed an Open Information Act request.

It asked Key to prove he wasn’t a “shapeshifting reptilian alien ushering humanity towards enslavement.”

While Key’s office confessed it couldn’t offer up any concrete proof he wasn’t an other world intruder, the man himself did promise he was 100% human.

“I’ve taken the unusual step of not only seeing a doctor but a vet, and both have confirmed I’m not a reptile,” he told reporters.

“I’ve never been in a spaceship, I don’t have a little green suit and never been to outer space,” he added to 3News.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/new-zealand-leader-claims-shapeshifting-reptilian-alien-article-1.1617047#ixzz2udivBcZQ

Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold

On By A.P.In Alpine Fault, Australia, Australian National University, Canberra, Dion Weatherley, Earthquake, flash vaporization, gold, Imperial College London, Jamie Wilkinson, Nature Geoscience, New Zealand, OurAmazingPlanet, quartz, Queensland, Richard Henley, Science, United Kingdom, University of QueenslandLeave a comment

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The tyrannosaur of the minerals, this gold nugget in quartz weighs more than 70 ounces (2 kilograms).

Earthquakes have the Midas touch, a new study claims.

Water in faults vaporizes during an earthquake, depositing gold, according to a model published in the March 17 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience. The model provides a quantitative mechanism for the link between gold and quartz seen in many of the world’s gold deposits, said Dion Weatherley, a geophysicist at the University of Queensland in Australia and lead author of the study.

When an earthquake strikes, it moves along a rupture in the ground — a fracture called a fault. Big faults can have many small fractures along their length, connected by jogs that appear as rectangular voids. Water often lubricates faults, filling in fractures and jogs.

About 6 miles (10 kilometers) below the surface, under incredible temperatures and pressures, the water carries high concentrations of carbon dioxide, silica and economically attractive elements like gold.

During an earthquake, the fault jog suddenly opens wider. It’s like pulling the lid off a pressure cooker: The water inside the void instantly vaporizes, flashing to steam and forcing silica, which forms the mineral quartz, and gold out of the fluids and onto nearby surfaces, suggest Weatherley and co-author Richard Henley, of the Australian National University in Canberra.

While scientists have long suspected that sudden pressure drops could account for the link between giant gold deposits and ancient faults, the study takes this idea to the extreme, said Jamie Wilkinson, a geochemist at Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the study.

“To me, it seems pretty plausible. It’s something that people would probably want to model either experimentally or numerically in a bit more detail to see if it would actually work,” Wilkinson told OurAmazingPlanet.

Previously, scientists suspected fluids would effervesce, bubbling like an opened soda bottle, during earthquakes or other pressure changes. This would line underground pockets with gold. Others suggested minerals would simply accumulate slowly over time.

Weatherley said the amount of gold left behind after an earthquake is tiny, because underground fluids carry at most only one part per million of the precious element. But an earthquake zone like New Zealand’s Alpine Fault, one of the world’s fastest, could build a mineable deposit in 100,000 years, he said.

Surprisingly, the quartz doesn’t even have time to crystallize, the study indicates. Instead, the mineral comes out of the fluid in the form of nanoparticles, perhaps even making a gel-like substance on the fracture walls. The quartz nanoparticles then crystallize over time.

Even earthquakes smaller than magnitude 4.0, which may rattle nerves but rarely cause damage, can trigger flash vaporization, the study finds.

“Given that small-magnitude earthquakes are exceptionally frequent in fault systems, this process may be the primary driver for the formation of economic gold deposits,” Weatherley told OurAmazingPlanet.

Quartz-linked gold has sourced some famous deposits, such as the placer gold that sparked the 19th-century California and Klondike gold rushes. Both deposits had eroded from quartz veins upstream. Placer gold consists of particles, flakes and nuggets mixed in with sand and gravel in stream and river beds. Prospectors traced the gravels back to their sources, where hard-rock mining continues today.

But earthquakes aren’t the only cataclysmic source of gold. Volcanoes and their underground plumbing are just as prolific, if not more so, at producing the precious metal. While Weatherley and Henley suggest that a similar process could take place under volcanoes, Wilkinson, who studies volcano-linked gold, said that’s not the case.

“Beneath volcanoes, most of the gold is not precipitated in faults that are active during earthquakes,” Wilkinson said. “It’s a very different mechanism.”

Understanding how gold forms helps companies prospect for new mines. “This new knowledge on gold-deposit formation mechanisms may assist future gold exploration efforts,” Weatherley said.

In their quest for gold, humans have pulled more than 188,000 tons (171,000 metric tons) of the metal from the ground, exhausting easily accessed sources, according to the World Gold Council, an industry group.

http://www.livescience.com/27953-earthquakes-make-gold.html

‘Extinct’ whale found: Odd-looking pygmy whale traced back 2 million years

On By A.P.In Dr. Lutter, Felix Marx, Nature, New Zealand, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, pygmy right whale, Science, University of Otago, WhalesLeave a comment

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The pygmy right whale, a mysterious and elusive creature that rarely comes to shore, is the last living relative of an ancient group of whales long believed to be extinct, a new study suggests.

The findings, published Tuesday, Dec. 18, in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, may help to explain why the enigmatic marine mammals look so different from any other living whale.

“The living pygmy right whale is, if you like, a remnant, almost like a living fossil,” said Felix Marx, a paleontologist at the University of Otago in New Zealand. “It’s the last survivor of quite an ancient lineage that until now no one thought was around.”

The relatively diminutive pygmy right whale, which grows to just 21 feet (6.5 meters) long, lives out in the open ocean. The elusive marine mammals inhabit the Southern Hemisphere and have only been spotted at sea a few dozen times. As a result, scientists know almost nothing about the species’ habits or social structure.

The strange creature’s arched, frownlike snout makes it look oddly different from other living whales. DNA analysis suggested pygmy right whales diverged from modern baleen whales such as the blue whale and the humpback whale between 17 million and 25 million years ago. However, the pygmy whales’ snouts suggested they were more closely related to the family of whales that includes the bowhead whale. Yet there were no studies of fossils showing how the pygmy whale had evolved, Marx said.

To understand how the pygmy whale fit into the lineage of whales, Marx and his colleagues carefully analyzed the skull bones and other fossil fragments from pygmy right whales and several other ancient cetaceans.

The pygmy whale’s skull most closely resembled that of an ancient family of whales called cetotheres that were thought to have gone extinct around 2 million years ago, the researchers found. Cetotheres emerged about 15 million years ago and once occupied oceans across the globe.

The findings help explain how pygmy whales evolved and may also help shed light on how these ancient “lost” whales lived. The new information is also a first step in reconstructing the ancient lineage all the way back to the point when all members of this group first diverged, he said.

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/1219/Extinct-whale-found-Odd-looking-pygmy-whale-traced-back-2-million-years

Thanks to Dr. Lutter for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

Maori stones hold magnetic clues

On By A.P.In AGU, American Geophysical Union, andesite, BBC News, Central North Island, Gillian Turner, hangi, Kebmodee, Magnetism, Maori, Maori steam ovens, Maori stones, New Zealand, radiocarbon analysis, Victoria University, Wellington, white hot heatLeave a comment

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Scientists are studying the Earth’s magnetic field using the stones that line Maori steam ovens.

The cooking process generates so much heat that the magnetic minerals in these stones will realign themselves with the current field direction.

An archaeological search is under way in New Zealand to find sites containing old ovens, or hangi as they are known.

Abandoned stones at these locations could shed light on Earth’s magnetic behaviour going back hundreds of years.

“We have very good palaeomagnetic data from across the world recording field strength and direction – especially in the Northern Hemisphere,” said Gillian Turner from Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand.

“The southwest Pacific is the gap, and in order to complete global models, we’re rather desperate for good, high-resolved data from our part of the world,” she told BBC News.

Dr Turner was speaking here at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall meeting, the world’s largest annual gathering of Earth scientists.

The NZ researcher is working on a project to retrieve information about changes in the Earth’s magnetic field stretching back over the past 10,000 years.

For data on the last few centuries, she would ordinarily have turned to pottery.

When these objects are fired, the minerals in their clay are heated above the Curie temperature and are demagnetised.

Then, as the pots cool down, those minerals become magnetised again in the direction of the prevalent field. And the strength of the magnetisation is directly related to the strength of that field.

Unfortunately for Dr Turner, the first settlers on New Zealand 700-800 years ago – the Maori – did not use pottery. However, the researcher has hit upon a fascinating alternative.

She is now exploiting the Maori cooking tradition of the steam oven.

These were pits in the ground into which were placed very hot stones, covered with baskets of food and layers of fern fronds soaked in water.

The whole construction was then topped with soil and left to cook for several hours.

Dr Turner and colleagues experimented with a modern-day hangi to see if the stones at the base of the pit could achieve the necessary Curie temperatures to reset their magnetisation – to prove they could be used as an alternative data source for their study.

“The Maori legend is that the stones achieve white hot heat,” she explained.

“Well, red hot is about 700 degrees and so white hot would be a good deal more than that. But by putting some thermocouples in the stones we were able to show they got as high as 1,100C, which of itself is quite surprising. At that temperature, rock-forming minerals start to become plastic if not melt.”

By placing a compass on top of the cooled hangi stones Dr Turner’s team was able to establish that a re-magnetisation had indeed taken place.

It turns out that hangi stones were carefully chosen, and one of the most popular types was an andesite boulder found in Central North Island.

“The Maori prefer these volcanic boulders because they don’t crack and shatter in the fire, and from our point of view they’re the best because magnetically they behave better – they’re formed with a high concentration of magnetite,” the Wellington scientist said. “But there are some sedimentary rocks which we can use also.”

Dr Turner’s team is now scouring New Zealand for archaeological digs that have uncovered hangi ovens. It is crucial that a date is recovered with the stones. This can be provided by a radiocarbon analysis of the charcoal left from the firewood used to light the oven.

Hangi stones are only likely to take Dr Turner back to the 1200s. For magnetic data deeper in time, she needs to go to other sources.

“We’re also studying volcanic rocks because they’re erupted above the Curie temperature. And the other source of information is lake sediments. Long-core sediments can give us a continuous record at specific places.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20520454

Thanks to Kebmodee for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

World’s rarest whale seen for the first time

On By A.P.In A.R., Mesoplodon traversii, Nature, New Zealand, Opape Beach, Rochelle Constantine, spade-toothed beaked whale, University of Auckland, WhalesLeave a comment

The world’s rarest whale, previously only known from a few bones, was seen for the first time on a New Zealand beach, according to a new Current Biology paper.

The elusive marine mammal is the spade-toothed beaked whale (Mesoplodon traversii). The good news is that it was seen at all, revealing that it still exists. The bad news is that the sighting was of a mother and her male calf, both of which became stranded and died on the beach.

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“This is the first time this species — a whale over five meters (about 16.5 feet) in length — has ever been seen as a complete specimen, and we were lucky enough to find two of them,” Rochelle Constantine of the University of Auckland said in a press release. “Up until now, all we have known about the spade-toothed beaked whale was from three partial skulls collected from New Zealand and Chile over a 140-year period. It is remarkable that we know almost nothing about such a large mammal.”

The discovery actually happened two years ago, when the whales live-stranded and died on Opape Beach, New Zealand. It’s only after DNA analysis that the identification of the rare species was made. At first, they were incorrectly identified as being the much more common Gray’s beaked whales.

“When these specimens came to our lab, we extracted the DNA as we usually do for samples like these, and we were very surprised to find that they were spade-toothed beaked whales,” Constantine said. “We ran the samples a few times to make sure before we told everyone.”

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Constantine suspects that the whales “are simply an offshore species that lives and dies in the deep ocean waters and only rarely wash ashore. New Zealand is surrounded by massive oceans. There is a lot of marine life that remains unknown to us.”

http://news.discovery.com/animals/worlds-rarest-whale-seen-for-the-first-time-121105.html

 

Thanks to A.R. for bringing this to the attention of the It’s Interesting community.

New Zealand Hokitika Wildfoods Festival

On By A.P.In Celebration, Festival, Food, Hokitika Wildfoods Festival, horse, horse semen, Human Behavior, Nature, New Zealand, semenLeave a comment

The main attraction at the Hokitika Wildfoods Festival this Saturday was horse semen.

The event has gained notoriety over the last two years after it started offering shots of horse semen to festival-goers and surprisingly the stall has become one of the most popular.

Even the mayor of Hokitika, Maureen Pugh, didn’t shy away from the stallion juice.

Mr Walsh, a vineyard worker in Blenheim, was attending his third Hokitika Wildfoods Festival on Saturday.

The protein shot was definitely the craziest thing yet, the 24-year-old said.

“I don’t like calling it horse semen. I just call it milkshake because that’s what it tastes like.”

Mr Walsh, originally from Palmerston North, hadn’t planned on trying the equestrian smoothie, he said.

“It was a blend of people urging me to do it and the girls I was with paying for it. Then the guy [stall holder] said `take a knee’ so I did.”

The taste wasn’t that bad, he said. “I thought it would be creamy and curdled. The grossest part was it hitting me in the face.”

The stall had a microscope so punters could see the live semen, he said.

“I didn’t look in,” he said. “That would have freaked me out.”

The 23rd Wildfoods Festival had other delicacies on offer, including mountain oysters (sheep’s testicles), live huhu grubs and grasshoppers.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/marlborough-express/news/6564102/Don-t-ask-what-hes-drinking

http://www.wildfoods.co.nz/index.cfm/1,51,0,0,html