Tuesday, November 8, 2011

Warbling wrens don't just tweet

Out of this World
November 8, 2011

WASHINGTON (AP) — They may not be Sonny and Cher, but certain South American birds sing duets, taking turns as the tune goes along.

"Calling it a love song is probably too strong a word," says researcher Eric S. Fortune of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. But, he adds, the little wrens shift their heads around and move closer together as they sing.

Fortune thinks it's a test, with the female birds choosing mates based on how well the males can follow cues and keep up with the song.

Birds singing duets isn't unheard of, but it's rare and these perform the fastest and most precise songs known, Fortune said in a telephone interview.

The birds live in dense bamboo groves in the Andes Mountains in Ecuador, Fortune and colleagues report in the journal Science.

The females start the song, he said, and the males join in. Sometimes the males will drop out for a bit. He isn't sure if it's a mistake on their part, or they just can't keep up. Indeed, the birds alternate chirps so quickly it can sound like a single bird singing.

"It's as if the birds each sing their own unique part," Fortune explained. If the song had lyrics that went A, B, C, D, the female might be doing A and C while the male did B and D, he said. And, he added, the duet songs vary slightly from place to place.

Cleaning woman damages $1.1-M sculpture

BERLIN (AP) – Officials in Dortmund say a modern-art installation valued at €800,000 ($1.1 million) was seriously damaged after an overzealous cleaning woman scrubbed away a patina intended to look like a dried rain puddle.

City spokeswoman Dagmar Papajewski said Martin Kippenberger's "When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling" remains in place at the city's Ostwall museum, despite the damage from earlier this month.

Papajewski says cleaning personnel had instructions to stay at least 20 centimeters (eight inches) away from the artwork and it was not clear why the patina had fallen victim to the woman's scrubbing brush.

The Kippenberger work was on loan to the museum from a private collection. Kippenberger was a German artist who died in 1997.

Nets distributed to beat malaria

PHNOM PENH (dpa) – The Cambodian government began handing out the first of 2.7 million insecticide-treated nets early this week in a bid to eliminate malaria by 2025.

The distribution, Cambodia's largest ever, is being paid for by the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria.

A handout of nets in western provinces in 2009 saw a near immediate drop in malaria cases, according to Dr Steven Bjorge, who heads the malaria team at the Cambodia office of the World Health Organization, which is providing technical assistance.

Bjorge said the nets would be distributed in the coming months to 4,079 villages nationwide that experts had rated as being at the highest risk.

''Those areas are being covered completely,'' Bjorge said, adding that he expected the number of malaria cases to drop by at least half as a result.

''In any particular area we would expect to see a drop, but it isn't 100 per cent because some people still go to the forest without their nets and get malaria,'' he said.

''But the large majority are using the bed nets at home.''

The programme got underway Monday in the north-eastern province of Kratie, where villagers received the first 1,500 nets from November's batch of 785,000.

Two more shipments in December and January will see the remaining nets delivered to Cambodia and distributed.

In August, Dr Char Meng Chuor, the director of the National Center for Malaria Control, said the distribution would cost around 12 million dollars, paid for by the Global Fund.

WHO figures showed that deaths in Cambodia from the mosquito-borne disease had halved between 2009 and 2010 to around 135.

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