ATHENS: Panagis hauls himself out of the pool at a rehabilitation center in Greece and scurries over for a delectable lunch: whole mackerel. It’s been about three months since the orphaned seal pup was found struggling in the coastal waters of Cyprus. Soon, he’ll be well enough to go home.
Panagis is one of dozens of Mediterranean monk seals, or Monachus monachus, that have been nursed back to health by Greece’s MOm, a charity dedicated to the care and protection of the rare marine mammal whose population had dwindled so dramatically that at one point it faced extinction.
Thanks to conservation efforts, the seals with the big, round eyes and prominent whiskers are now making a remarkable comeback. Nearly half of their estimated global population of 800 live in Greek waters, where the extensive coastline offers an abundance of sea caves that provide shelter for females to rear their young.
From near extinction to recovery
Sleek and remarkably fast in the water, the monk seal is a skillful hunter and can consume up to 3 kilograms (6 pounds) of fish, octopus and squid a day. But it’s not averse to a ready meal, and can rip through fishing nets to steal fish — which led fishermen to view them as pests.
For decades, they were hunted, contributing to a major population decline between the 1960s and 1980s that led the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN, to list them as critically endangered.
When conservation efforts began in the 1980s, combined with outreach programs to educate the public — and fishermen — “society gradually began to change … and the population began to recover,” said Panagiotis Dendrinos.
Dendrinos, a marine biologist and coordinator of the Hellenic Society for the Study and Protection of the Monk Seal — or MOm — that has pioneered the Monachus monachus conservation program, says the monk seal is the only seal species in the Mediterranean Sea and also “one of the rarest species of seal and marine mammal in the world.”
“To protect an animal like the Mediterranean monk seal in its natural environment, you essentially have to protect the entire marine ecosystem,” he said.
Conservation efforts have paid off, and in recent years, the species climbed down a notch on the IUCN’s Red List of threatened species to “endangered.” About a year ago improved one step further, to “vulnerable.”
A unique seal rehab
Usually contacted by members of the public who find an animal in distress, MOm specialists tend to adult seals on location where possible, and transport young seals to the organization’s rehabilitation center housed in the grounds of Athens zoo, on the outskirts of the Greek capital.
There, the young mammals are looked after by veterinarians, fed a special diet to provide them with the best nutrition and hone their swimming skills in a pool.
Their carers give them names — often after the people who found them — but make sure contact with humans is kept to a minimum to prepare the animals for their return into the wild.
The young seals typically stay in the rehab center for several months, until they’ve put on enough weight and their natural hunting instinct kicks in, allowing them to fend for themselves. They are then tagged so they can be tracked, and re-introduced into the wild.
MOm, the only center of its kind in the region, has cared for about 40 seals from far and wide, both on location and in its facilities, Dendrinos said.
“This year, we had a really pleasant surprise,” he said. A female seal that had been treated and released four years ago was spotted nursing a pup.
Planes, boats and cars to the rescue
Panagis was found in Cyprus, near where the body of his mother had been found a few days earlier. Alerted by locals, the organization arranged for the seal to be flown to Athens.
“Transportation is carried out with whatever is available,” said veterinary assistant Nikitas Vogiatzis, shortly after feeding Panagis. “Either by plane, or by boat, or even by taxi. “Konstantina came in a taxi, Panagis by plane, Renos came on a boat,” he said, listing MOm’s most recent wards.
Weighing just under 15 kilograms (33 pounds) when he arrived, the now 3-month-old seal has reached over 40 kilograms (88 pounds). Panagis is nearly ready for his return trip home, which MOm experts hope will happen in May.
Back into the wild
Renos — short for Renos-Pantelis — was found in November in the small Aegean island of Anafi by a nurse and a military conscript whom he was named after.
The seal pup was shipped to MOm’s facility. He got medical treatment and was put on a special diet until he was old enough to move on to solid fish — the mackerel that Panagis is so fond of.
He recovered and on a cold, sunny February day, it was his turn to head back into the wild. MOm personnel loaded him into a crate and whisked him by speedboat to the uninhabited islet of Gyaros, the closest marine protected area to Athens.
The release location is chosen “based on there being enough food, and there being no disturbance by people, which is very important,” said Vogiatzis, the veterinary assistant.
The crate is placed near the water, he said. Then, “you open the door, you say a prayer and you say: ‘So long’.”
Renos’ crate was deposited on a beach and the door opened. The young seal sniffed the air timidly, and waited. Slowly, he inched his way out of the crate, then picked up speed as he belly-hauled his way down the beach, splashed into the sea and was gone.
The cute whiskers are back on. Rare Mediterranean monk seals cared for in a Greek rehab center
https://arab.news/4qwrn
The cute whiskers are back on. Rare Mediterranean monk seals cared for in a Greek rehab center
- Panagis, an orphaned seal pup found a few days after his dead mother’s body was located along the coast of Cyprus
- Nearly half of their estimated global population of 800 live in Greek waters
Microsoft and OpenAI dueling over artificial general intelligence, The Information reports
- The report comes at a time when one of the most pivotal partnerships in the field of AI is under strain
Microsoft and OpenAI are at odds over a contractual provision related to artificial general intelligence, The Information reported on Wednesday.
Under the current terms, when OpenAI achieves AGI, Microsoft’s access to such a technology would be void. Microsoft wants OpenAI to remove that clause but so far OpenAI has refused, the report said.
“We have a long-term, productive partnership that has delivered amazing AI tools for everyone. Talks are ongoing and we are optimistic we will continue to build together for years to come,” OpenAI and Microsoft said in a joint statement emailed to Reuters.
The report comes at a time when one of the most pivotal partnerships in the field of AI is under strain.
OpenAI needs Microsoft’s approval to complete its transition into a public-benefit corporation. But the two have not been able to agree on details even after months of negotiations, according to sources.
Microsoft partnered with OpenAI in 2019, investing $1 billion to support the startup’s development of AI technologies on its Azure cloud platform.
An Alaskan brown bear has a new shiny smile after getting a huge metal crown for a canine tooth
- The 360-kilogram Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown
- “He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said
MINNESOTA: An Alaskan brown bear at the Lake Superior Zoo in northeastern Minnesota has a gleaming new silver-colored canine tooth in a first-of-its-kind procedure for a bear.
The 800-pound (360-kilogram) Tundra was put under sedation Monday and fitted with a new crown — the largest dental crown ever created, according to the zoo.
“He’s got a little glint in his smile now,” zoo marketing manager Caroline Routley said Wednesday.
The hour-long procedure was done by Dr. Grace Brown, a board-certified veterinary dentist who helped perform a root canal on the same tooth two years ago. When Tundra reinjured the tooth, the decision was made to give him a new, stronger crown.
The titanium alloy crown, made by Creature Crowns of Post Falls, Idaho, was created for Tundra from a wax caste of the tooth.
Brown plans to publish a paper on the procedure in the Journal of Veterinary Dentistry later this year.
“This is the largest crown ever created in the world,” she said. “It has to be published.”
Tundra and his sibling, Banks, have been at the Duluth zoo since they were 3 months old, after their mother was killed.
Tundra is now 6 years old and, at his full height on his hind legs, stands about 8 feet (2.4 meters) tall. The sheer size of the bear required a member of the zoo’s trained armed response team to be present in the room — a gun within arm’s reach — in case the animal awoke during the procedure, Routley said. But the procedure went without a hitch, and Tundra is now back in his habitat, behaving and eating normally.
Other veterinary teams have not always been as lucky. In 2009, a zoo veterinarian at Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, Nebraska, suffered severe injuries to his arm while performing a routine medical exam on a 200-pound (90 kilogram) Malaysian tiger.
The tiger was coming out of sedation when the vet inadvertently brushed its whiskers, causing the tiger to reflexively bite down on the vet’s forearm.
Bears get paws on the honey in UK wildlife park escape
- The pair made a beeline for their food store where they scoffed snack’s including the seven-day supply of honey
- During the hour-long drama, the bears were “continuously monitored both on the ground and via CCTV“
LONDON: Two young bears escaped from their enclosure at a UK wildlife park and devoured a week’s worth of food store honey before falling asleep, the attraction said on Tuesday.
Mish and Lucy, both aged four, got out of their enclosure at Wildwood Devon in southwestern England on Monday afternoon.
The pair made a beeline for their food store where they scoffed snack’s including the seven-day supply of honey, a park statement said.
The bears “posed no threat to the public at any point” although visitors on site were escorted to a secure building as a precaution.
During the hour-long drama, the bears were “continuously monitored both on the ground and via CCTV” until they were returned to their enclosure by keepers and promptly “fell asleep,” Wildwood added.
Police attended the scene and an investigation was underway to determine how the animals managed to break out, it said.
The park spread across 40 acres (160 hectares) of gardens and woodland is home to an array of wildlife including brown bears, wolves and arctic foxes.
Gender not main factor in attacks on Egyptian woman pharaoh: study
- Earlier scholars believed Queen Hatshepsut’s stepson Thutmose III unleashed a posthumous campaign of defilement against her out of revenge and hatred, including because he wanted to purge any notion that a woman could successfully rule
TORONTO, Canada: She was one of ancient Egypt’s most successful rulers, a rare female pharaoh who preceded Cleopatra by 1,500 years, but Queen Hatshepsut’s legacy was systematically erased by her stepson successor after her death.
The question of why her impressive reign was so methodically scrubbed has attracted significant debate, but in new research published Monday, University of Toronto scholar Jun Wong argues far too much emphasis has been placed on her gender.
“It’s quite a romantic question: why was this pharaoh attacked after her death?” Wong told AFP, explaining his interest in a monarch who steered ancient Egypt through a period of extraordinary prosperity.
Earlier scholars believed Queen Hatshepsut’s stepson Thutmose III unleashed a posthumous campaign of defilement against her out of revenge and hatred, including because he wanted to purge any notion that a woman could successfully rule.
“The way in which (Hatshepsut’s) reign has been understood has always been colored by her gender,” Wong said, referencing beliefs that Thutmose III may have viewed her as “a kind of an evil stepmother.”
His research, which builds on other recent scholarship and is being published in the journal Antiquity, argues Thutmose III’s motivations were far more nuanced, casting further doubt on the theory of backlash against a woman in charge.
Hatshepsut ruled Egypt roughly 3,500 years ago, taking over following the death of her husband Thutmose II.
She first served as regent to her stepson, the king-in-waiting, but successfully consolidated power in her own right, establishing herself as a female pharaoh.
Experts say she expanded trade routes and commissioned extraordinary structures, including an unparallelled mortuary in the Valley of the Kings on the Nile’s west bank.
Wong reassessed a range of material from damaged statues uncovered during excavations from 1922 to 1928.
He said there is no doubt Thutmose III worked to eliminate evidence of Hatshepsut’s achievements, but his efforts were “perhaps driven by ritual necessity rather than outright antipathy,” Wong said.
Thutmose III may have been trying to neutralize the power of his predecessor in a practical and common way, not out of malice.
He also found that some of the statues depicting Hatshepsut were likely damaged because later generations wanted to reuse them as building materials.
“For a long time, it has been assumed that Hatshepsut’s statuary sustained a vindictive attack,” Wong said, arguing that a fresh look at the archives suggests “this is not the case.”
Crash dummies used in car safety tests are still modeled after men despite higher risks for women
- Maria Weston Kuhn, a survivor of a near-fatal accident, created a nonprofit to help change that
- Her organization is asking members of Congress to sign onto a bill that would mandate the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to upgrade the standards
Maria Weston Kuhn had one lingering question about the car crash that forced her to have emergency surgery during a vacation in Ireland: Why did she and her mother sustain serious injuries while her father and brother, who sat in the front, emerge unscathed?
“It was a head-on crash and they were closest to the point of contact,” said Kuhn, now 25, who missed a semester of college to recover from the 2019 collision that caused her seat belt to slide off her hips and rupture her intestines by pinning them against her spine. “That was an early clue that something else was going on.”
When Kuhn returned home to Maine, she found an article her grandma had clipped from Consumer Reports and left on her bed. Women are 73 percent more likely to be injured in a frontal crash, she learned, yet the dummy used in vehicle tests by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration dates back to the 1970s and is still modeled almost entirely off the body of a man.
A survivor becomes an activist
Kuhn, who is starting law school at New York University this fall, took action and founded the nonprofit Drive US Forward. Its aim was to raise public awareness and eventually encourage members of Congress to sign onto a bill that would require NHTSA to incorporate a more advanced female dummy into its testing.
The agency has the final word on whether cars get pulled from the market, and the kind of dummy used in its safety tests could impact which ones receive coveted five-star ratings.
“It seems like we have an easy solution here where we can have crash test dummies that reflect an average woman as well as a man,” Sen. Deb Fischer, a Nebraska Republican who has introduced the legislation the past two sessions, told The Associated Press.
Senators from both parties have signed onto Fischer’s “She Drives Act,” and the transportation secretaries from the past two presidential administrations have expressed support for updating the rules.
But for various reasons, the push for new safety requirements has been moving at a sluggish pace. That’s particularly true in the US, where much of the research is happening and where around 40,000 people are killed each year in car crashes.
Evolution of a crash test dummy
The crash test dummy currently used in NHTSA five-star testing is called the Hybrid III, which was developed in 1978 and modeled after a 5-foot-9, 171-pound man (the average size in the 1970s but about 29 pounds lighter than today’s average). What’s known as the female dummy is essentially a much smaller version of the male model with a rubber jacket to represent breasts. It’s routinely tested in the passenger seat or the back seat but seldom in the driver’s seat, even though the majority of licensed drivers are women.
“What they didn’t do is design a crash test dummy that has all the sensors in the areas where a woman would be injured differently than a man,” said Christopher O’Connor, president and CEO of the Farmington Hills, Michigan-based Humanetics Group, which has spent more than a decade developing and refining one.
A female dummy from Humanetics equipped with all of the available sensors costs around $1 million, about twice the cost of the Hybrid used now.
But, O’Connor says, the more expensive dummy far more accurately reflects the anatomical differences between the sexes — including in the shape of the neck, collarbone, pelvis, and legs, which one NHTSA study found account for about 80 percent more injuries by women in a car crash compared to men.
Such physical dummies will always be needed for vehicle safety tests, and to verify the accuracy of virtual tests, O’Connor said.
Europe incorporated the more advanced male dummy developed by Humanetics’ engineers, the THOR 50M (based on a 50th percentile man), into its testing procedures soon after Kuhn’s 2019 crash in Ireland. Several other countries, including China and Japan, have adopted it as well.
But that model and the female version the company uses for comparison, the THOR 5F (based on a 5th percentile woman), have been met with skepticism from some American automakers who argue the more sophisticated devices may exaggerate injury risks and undercut the value of some safety features such as seat belts and airbags.
A debate over whether more sensors mean more safety
Bridget Walchesky, 19, had to be flown to a hospital, where she required eight surgeries over a month, after a 2022 crash near her home in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, that killed her friend, who was driving. While acknowledging the seat belt likely saved her life, Walchesky said some of the injuries — including her broken collarbone — were the result of it pinning her too tightly, which she views as something better safety testing focused on women could improve.
“Seat belts aren’t really built for bodies on females,” Walchesky said. “Some of my injuries, the way the force hit me, they were probably worsened.”
The Alliance for Automotive Innovation, an industry trade group, said in a statement to the AP that the better way to ensure safety — which it called its top priority — is through upgrades to the existing Hybrid dummy rather than mandating a new one.
“This can happen on a faster timeline and lead to quicker safety improvements than requiring NHTSA to adopt unproven crash test dummy technology,” the alliance said.
Humanetics’ THOR dummies received high marks in the vehicle safety agency’s early tests. Using cadavers from actual crashes to compare the results, NHTSA found they outperformed the existing Hybrid in predicting almost all injuries — including to the head, neck, shoulders, abdomen and legs.
A separate review by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a research arm funded by auto insurers, was far more critical of the dummy’s ability to predict chest injuries in a frontal crash. Despite the vast expansion in the number of sensors, the insurance institute’s testing found, the male THOR dummy was less accurate than the current Hybrid dummies, which also had limitations.
“More isn’t necessarily better,” said Jessica Jermakian, senior vice president for vehicle research at IIHS. “You also have to be confident that the data is telling you the right things about how a real person would fare in that crash.”
The slow pace of changing the rules
NHTSA’s budget plan commits to developing the female THOR 5F version with the ultimate goal of incorporating it into the testing. But there could be a long wait considering the THOR’s male version adopted by other countries is still awaiting final approval in the US
A 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, which conducts research for Congress, cited numerous “missed milestones” in NHTSA’s development of various crash dummy enhancements — including in the THOR models.
Kuhn acknowledges being frustrated by the slow process of trying to change the regulations. She says she understands why there’s reluctance from auto companies if they fear being forced to make widespread design changes with more consideration for women’s safety.
“Fortunately, they have very skilled engineers and they’ll figure it out,” she said.
