First Giant Panda Is Released Into the Wild

With two barks and a charge at a film crew, Xiang Xiang the panda today became the first captive-born giant panda to be released into the wild. The four-year-old male panda was set free in the bamboo-covered mountains of Sichuan Province in southwest China—more than 40 years after the first captive-bred giant panda was born.

Xiang Xiang, whose name means lucky or auspicious, has been fitted with a collar carrying a satellite tracking device so researchers can keep tabs on his whereabouts.

On his release this morning the panda barked twice like an angry dog and ran at a National Geographic Society film crew before quickly vanishing into the forest, according to eyewitness reports.

First Giant Panda Is Released Into the Wild

Little Owl

Have you ever seen this little cute bird?

Distribution: throughout central and southern Europe, including England and Wales, but absent from Scotland, Ireland, Iceland and most of Scandinavia.

Habitat: open country, especially farmland with scattered old trees and old buildings. Also found on edges of moorland, quarries and sand-dunes.

Description: a small owl with a short flat head. Upper parts are a greyish brown, mottled and barred with white; underparts are paler with broad brown streaks. Large yellow eyes, and greenish bill. Legs and feet are covered with pale, buff feathers.

Size: about 22cm in height (not much larger than a blackbird).

Food: mainly invertebrates and small mammals, occasionally small birds.

Little Owl

fine art photography

Amazing nature from different viewpoint!

We are rushing all the time in this modern to achieve our dreams or even not clear about the dreams, but just follow the trends.

Friend, stop for a while when you on the way, to appreciate the power and beauty of the earth, and protect it for future generation.

THINK- it may be a new experience!

fine art photography

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Salvage prospect for 'junk' DNA

A mathematical analysis of the human genome suggests that so-called "junk DNA" might not be so useless after all.

The term junk DNA refers to those portions of the genome which appear to have no specific purpose.

But a team from IBM has identified patterns, or "motifs", that were found both in the junk areas of the genome and those which coded for proteins.

The presence of the motifs in junk DNA suggests these portions of the genome may have an important functional role. The findings are reported in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal.

But they will have to be verified by experimenters in the lab, the scientists behind the work point out.

Dr Andrew McCallion, who was not an author on the new paper, commented: "Up until not so long ago, we were under the impression that the vast majority of information in the genome, if not all of it, was encoded in those stretches of DNA that encoded proteins.

"We now understand there is much more complexity involved," Dr McCallion, from the McKusick-Nathans Institute of Genetic Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, US, told the BBC News website.

Lead author Isidore Rigoutsos and colleagues from IBM's Thomas J Watson Research Center used a mathematical tool known as pattern discovery to tease out patterns in the genome.

This technique is often used to mine useful information from very large repositories of data in the worlds of business and science.

Salvage prospect for 'junk' DNA