There is a special place I discovered a few years ago in Northern Israel called The Iyon Stream and the Tanur Waterfall. I first went on a hike here on March 21, 2013 and then returned again the following year, on June 7, 2014. I was with different people both times. In 2013, I hiked the entire trail, which took a few hours, with my business partner Dennis Bair (of The BairFind Foundation ) and then in 2014 I invited my sister Esther and a good friend named Matt to come explore this beautiful nature reserve. I wanted to capture that sense of magic I had in 2013, but I realized it wasn't the same sort of discovery I had the first time, despite being with good company. Nevertheless, the second time around the weather was hotter and perfect for cooling off under a waterfall, something I didn't experience with Dennis in 2013.

This amazing park has many, many different waterfalls in fact, not just that one called the "Tanur", which happens to be the highest one at 30 meters (100 feet high). My favorite waterfall is the Tahanah (Flourmill) Waterfall, which is 21 meters high (nearly 70 ft.). It is named this because of an old flour mill located near the foot of the waterfall. The views are simply spectacular, with vistas and vast expanses opening up in the upper part of the trail. The Iyon Stream has its sources 7 km north of Metulla in the country of Lebanon and was also mentioned in the Talmud as the “path of Iyon.”

All photographs are Copyright © 2013-2014 Jonathan Wayne.

March 21, 2013

June 7, 2014

KANO, Nigeria—Hundreds of languages are spoken in this country: So which one do you teach a parrot?

It is a decision the pet shops of Nigeria confront every time a talking bird lands in their possession. Last year, a babbling grey parrot arrived at Salisu Sani’s bird stand in this northern city.

There was only one problem. She spoke one of the country’s lesser-known tongues.

“I told her: ‘This is a rubbish language. Try my own,’ ” recalled the lifelong parrot distributor, who spent weeks teaching the animal greetings in Hausa, a more widely spoken vernacular.

Nigeria is one of the world’s easier places to buy a parrot—the garrulous birds are a status symbol for some civil servants. In traffic jams, young salesmen approach car windows holding up cages with birds inside. African greys sell for about $60.

But they sell closer to $100 if you can get them to speak.

The question is what Nigerians want their pets to say. The country’s 182 million people speak 520 different languages, according to Ethnologue, an atlas of the world’s linguistic boundaries, published by the International Linguistics Center in Dallas. Church services drag for hours as deacons translate their pastor’s sermons into three, sometimes four languages. Customer service lines begin with a plethora of options: one for English, two for Hausa, three for Yoruba, four for Igbo.

It makes the parrot business complicated, too.

A parrot will make almost any noise you throw its way. Leave one by a doorbell and it might say “ding-dong.” A rising number of pet parrots re-create the sound of their owner’s ringtone.

So parrots raised among a polyglot populace often wind up speaking the wrong language.

A few years ago in this northern city, Salim Mohammad’s cohort sourced a Cameroonian grey through Lagos, 500 miles to the south. By the time it arrived in Kano, it had picked up Yoruba, a language spoken only in Nigeria’s south. It took several months of standing on the side of the road with the caged bird before a motorist agreed to buy it.

The opposite problem confronts Murphy Taiwo’s Yoruba-speaking parrot peddlers down in Lagos. None of his half dozen bird handlers speak Hausa, but many of his customers do.

Three hundred miles north, in Abuja, parrot tender Awula Salisu and his co-workers are all Hausa-speakers. They coach parrots on sayings like “ina kwana” (good morning) or “aku” (parrot). But most of their customers speak Yoruba. Frequently, shoppers walk away, unhappy with the selection.

The 37-year-old bird handling veteran could, of course, hire a Yoruba person to come train his parrots. But that person wouldn’t be able to join in on their conversations.

“We are Hausa here,” he said. “He wouldn’t belong.”

The language barrier means some pollys can accidentally squawk parrot profanities.

In Kano, Mr. Mohammad bought a secondhand parrot from an American or possibly British expat leaving Nigeria. When he peered into the cage, the bird blared back: “Waka, waka!”

In Hausa, this is a very bad thing for a bird to say. Roughly translated, it means “your mother.”

“That one was misbehaving,” Mr. Mohammad recalled. “It took a long time to see."

Nigeria isn’t the only place where languages and parrots fly around with equal abandon. By a quirk of geography, parrots tend to live in the most multilingual corners of the world: the Amazon, Indonesia, Central Africa. In these lands, people sometimes struggle to communicate with the village a few miles away.

As it turns out, parrots face some of the same language barriers. There are untold hundreds of different parrot dialects. For example, birds in different parts of Costa Rica don’t use the same greetings, termed “contact calls” by ornithologists.

“In the north, they sound like ‘wah, wah! wah, wah!’ ” said Tim Wright, professor at New Mexico State University’s biology department. “Then in the south, they sound like ‘weep! weep! weep!’ ”

“After many years, I’ve managed to learn these,” he added.

Like humans, parrots tend to stick with birds that speak the same language. It’s how they create close-knit communities that rely on each to find food and avoid danger.

But dropped into a new environment, parrots—especially young ones—will try to crack the local vocabulary. Birds that grow in bilingual forests, where multiple parrot dialects are spoken, are also good at code switching between groups.

“That sociology is a very important part of being a parrot: It’s a survival strategy,” said Rowan Martin, researcher at the World Parrot Trust. “It’s really calls that promote group cohesion, so they’re all saying ‘I’m here! How are you?’ And it’s also saying. ‘I’m one of you.’ ”

This is why parrots mimic human voice, once caged and raised around humans. They’re trying to fit in with us.

These days, West Africa’s languages are slowly disappearing—dozens of Nigerian languages are spoken by less than 100 people. Parrots seem headed down the same path.

The parrots that survive find themselves in a noisier setting. The several birds that Atef Fawaz has owned in Kano have made the sound of cars, honking at his gate. One made the shrill beep that his fuse box emits anytime the power goes out, as it does daily: “He memorized that sound very well,” said Mr. Fawaz, a Lebanese businessman.

At Awula Salisu’s pet stand in Abuja, police routinely blare past, sirens wailing as they escort politicians across the capital. So his birds often make siren sounds.

In August, he received a bird that spoke Igala, the mother tongue of less than 1% of Nigerians. Mr. Salisu figured he would be stuck with the animal for months.

But days later, an Igala-speaking businessman showed up, delighted to find a bird that could talk his language. The man drove away with a broad smile.

Of course, Mr. Salisu had no idea what the bird—or its owner—were saying to each other, he said: “There are too many languages in this country.”

Write to Drew Hinshaw at drew.hinshaw@wsj.com

Dane Wigington
geoengeneeringwatch.org

Posted by Gary Lindner
Director Planet Sanctuary

How big does the climate engineering elephant in the room need to be before it can no longer be hidden in plain site? How much more historical proof do we need of the ongoing climate engineering/weather warfare before the denial of the masses crumbles? When will populations around the globe bring to justice all those responsible for the ongoing and rapidly worsening worldwide weather warfare assault? At the bottom of this post is a PDF file containing the entire congressional report from 1978 that we have recently located. This report is just under 750 pages in length (20 key excerpts are posted below to give a general overview). It is a mountain of information that further confirms the ongoing extensive involvement of our government in climate modification/weather warfare. This document also confirms the involvement of foreign governments around the globe, even governments that would otherwise have been considered "hostile to US interests". Within this text a great many aspects and consequences of the ongoing national and global weather modification programs are discussed. Legal implications (including the need for total immunity from any form of prosecution), biological implications, societal implications, environmental implications, etc. Named in the document are federal agencies involved as well as major universities. Again, because the entire document is a long and arduous read, some excerpts are posted below to give insight into the documents contents. The mountain of data to confirm the ongoing climate engineering insanity continues to grow. One additional example of documents already located is an ICAS report to the executive office of the president on climate engineering from 1966, it can be found HERE. The attached extensive congressional document is a revealing and detailed addition to the data that has already been compiled. My most sincere gratitude to Steve Grimwood for locating this very important document.

Click on this to see the report!!!!!!

http://www.geoengineeringwatch.org/massive-us-senate-document-on-national-and-global-weather-modification/

North Atlantic cold "BLOB"
Weather Channal
When NOAA released its report on the first seven months of 2015, the map of the globe was almost completely covered in red to signify that most of the planet was experiencing above-average temperatures for the year.

But there was one big chunk of the North Atlantic Ocean that was a deep, dark blue. Some saw the below-average temperatures of that region as the lone silver lining on the entire map while others questioned why that area was having its coldest year on record.

Some experts theorize that the cold water south of Iceland shows the Atlantic Ocean's circulation is slowing, according to a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change. In short, warm and cold water should work together to balance out the temperature of the oceans, Inhabitat said. Cold, salty water should be pushed down below the surface, and warm water should rise up to replace it. Likewise, the warm salt water should move north with the current, and cold water should go south.

But the massive ice melt occurring in the Arctic has introduced a lot of cold, fresh water into the mix, and it's not behaving the same as cold salt water. It's preventing the sinking that usually happens with cold water, as fresh water is less dense than salt water, and that could be weakening the circulation.

"The fact that a record-hot planet Earth coincides with a record-cold northern Atlantic is quite stunning," Stefan Rahmstorf, one of the authors of the study published in Nature Climate Change, told the Washington Post. "There is strong evidence — not just from our study — that this is a consequence of the long-term decline of the Gulf Stream System, i.e. the Atlantic ocean’s overturning circulation AMOC (Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), in response to global warming."

Rahmstorf also told the Washington Post he doesn't expect the blob to remain at record cold levels indefinitely, though the circulation should continue to decline. Everything is connected, and climate scientists believe that connection will drive temperatures, and sea levels, higher and higher.

What Exxon knew about
the Earth's melting Arctic
By SARA JERVING, KATIE JENNINGS, MASAKO MELISSA HIRSCH AND SUSANNE RUST
OCT. 9, 2015

This story is so well written that its needs no introduction The risk of climate change is real and warrants action!!!!

Back in 1990, as the debate over climate change was heating up, a dissident shareholder petitioned the board of Exxon, one of the world’s largest oil companies, imploring it to develop a plan to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from its production plants and facilities.

The board’s response: Exxon had studied the science of global warming and concluded it was too murky to warrant action. The company’s “examination of the issue supports the conclusions that the facts today and the projection of future effects are very unclear.”

Yet in the far northern regions of Canada’s Arctic frontier, researchers and engineers at Exxon and Imperial Oil were quietly incorporating climate change projections into the company’s planning and closely studying how to adapt the company’s Arctic operations to a warming planet.

Ken Croasdale, senior ice researcher for Exxon’s Canadian subsidiary, was leading a Calgary-based team of researchers and engineers that was trying to determine how global warming could affect Exxon’s Arctic operations and its bottom line.

“Certainly any major development with a life span of say 30-40 years will need to assess the impacts of potential global warming,” Croasdale told an engineering conference in 1991. “This is particularly true of Arctic and offshore projects in Canada, where warming will clearly affect sea ice, icebergs, permafrost and sea levels.”

Between 1986 and 1992, Croasdale’s team looked at both the positive and negative effects that a warming Arctic would have on oil operations, reporting its findings to Exxon headquarters in Houston and New Jersey.

The good news for Exxon, he told an audience of academics and government researchers in 1992, was that “potential global warming can only help lower exploration and development costs” in the Beaufort Sea.

But, he added, it also posed hazards, including higher sea levels and bigger waves, which could damage the company’s existing and future coastal and offshore infrastructure, including drilling platforms, artificial islands, processing plants and pump stations. And a thawing earth could be troublesome for those facilities as well as pipelines.

As Croasdale’s team was closely studying the impact of climate change on the company’s operations, Exxon and its worldwide affiliates were crafting a public policy position that sought to downplay the certainty of global warming.

The gulf between Exxon’s internal and external approach to climate change from the 1980s through the early 2000s was evident in a review of hundreds of internal documents, decades of peer-reviewed published material and dozens of interviews conducted by Columbia University’s Energy & Environmental Reporting Project and the Los Angeles Times.

Documents were obtained from the Imperial Oil collection at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and the Exxon Mobil Historical Collection at the University of Texas at Austin’s Briscoe Center for American History.

“We considered climate change in a number of operational and planning issues,” said Brian Flannery, who was Exxon’s in-house climate science advisor from 1980 to 2011. In a recent interview, he described the company’s internal effort to study the effects of global warming as a competitive necessity: “If you don’t do it, and your competitors do, you’re at a loss.”

::

The Arctic holds about one-third of the world’s untapped natural gas and roughly 13% of the planet’s undiscovered oil, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. More than three-quarters of Arctic deposits are offshore.

Imperial Oil, about 70% of which is owned by Exxon Mobil, began drilling in the frigid Arctic waters of the Canadian Beaufort Sea in the early 1970s. By the early 1990s, it had drilled two dozen exploratory wells.

The exploration was expensive, due to bitter temperatures, wicked winds and thick sea ice. And when a worldwide oil slump drove petroleum prices down in the late 1980s, the company began scaling back those efforts.

But with mounting evidence the planet was warming, company scientists, including Croasdale, wondered whether climate change might alter the economic equation. Could it make Arctic oil exploration and production easier and cheaper?

“The issue of CO2 emissions was certainly well-known at that time in the late 1980s,” Croasdale said in an interview.

Since the late 1970s and into the 1980s, Exxon had been at the forefront of climate change research, funding its own internal science as well as research from outside experts at Columbia University and MIT.

With company support, Croasdale spearheaded the company’s efforts to understand climate change’s effects on its operations. A company such as Exxon, he said, “should be a little bit ahead of the game trying to figure out what it was all about.”

Exxon Mobil describes its efforts in those years as standard operating procedure. “Our researchers considered a wide range of potential scenarios, of which potential climate change impacts such as rising sea levels was just one,” said Alan Jeffers, a spokesman for Exxon Mobil.

The Arctic seemed an obvious region to study, Croasdale and other experts said, because it was likely to be most affected by global warming.

That reasoning was backed by models built by Exxon scientists, including Flannery, as well as Marty Hoffert, a New York University physicist. Their work, published in 1984, showed that global warming would be most pronounced near the poles.

Between 1986, when Croasdale took the reins of Imperial’s frontier research team, until 1992, when he left the company, his team of engineers and scientists used the global circulation models developed by the Canadian Climate Centre and NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies to anticipate how climate change could affect a variety of operations in the Arctic.

These were the same models that — for the next two decades — Exxon’s executives publicly dismissed as unreliable and based on uncertain science. As Chief Executive Lee Raymond explained at an annual meeting in 1999, future climate “projections are based on completely unproven climate models, or, more often, on sheer speculation.”

One of the first areas the company looked at was how the Beaufort Sea could respond to a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which the models predicted would happen by 2050.

Greenhouse gases are rising “due to the burning of fossil fuels,” Croasdale told an audience of engineers at a conference in 1991. “Nobody disputes this fact,” he said, nor did anyone doubt those levels would double by the middle of the 21st century.

Using the models and data from a climate change report issued by Environment Canada, Canada’s environmental agency, the team concluded that the Beaufort Sea’s open water season — when drilling and exploration occurred — would lengthen from two months to three and possibly five months.

They were spot on.

In the years following Croasdale’s conclusions, the Beaufort Sea has experienced some of the largest losses in sea ice in the Arctic and its open water season has increased significantly, according to Mark Serreze, a senior researcher at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo.

For instance, in Alaska’s Chukchi Sea, west of the Beaufort, the season has been extended by 79 days since 1979, Serreze said.

An extended open water season, Croasdale said in 1992, could potentially reduce exploratory drilling and construction costs by 30% to 50%.

He did not recommend making investment decisions based on those scenarios, because he believed the science was still uncertain. However, he advised the company to consider and incorporate potential “negative outcomes,” including a rise in the sea level, which could threaten onshore infrastructure; bigger waves, which could damage offshore drilling structures; and thawing permafrost, which could make the earth buckle and slide under buildings and pipelines.

::

The most pressing concerns for the company centered on a 540-mile pipeline that crossed the Northwest Territories into Alberta, its riverside processing facilities in the remote town of Norman Wells, and a proposed natural gas facility and pipeline in the Mackenzie River Delta, on the shores of the Beaufort Sea.

The company hired Stephen Lonergan, a Canadian geographer from McMaster University, to study the effect of climate change there.

Lonergan used several climate models in his analysis, including the NASA model. They all concluded that things would get warmer and wetter and that those effects “cannot be ignored,” he said in his report.

As a result, the company should expect “maintenance and repair costs to roads, pipelines and other engineering structures” to be sizable in the future, he wrote.

A warmer Arctic would threaten the stability of permafrost, he noted, potentially damaging the buildings, processing plants and pipelines that were built on the solid, frozen ground.

In addition, the company should expect more flooding along its riverside facilities, an earlier spring breakup of the ice pack, and more-severe summer storms.

But it was the increased variability and unpredictability of the weather that was going to be the company’s biggest challenge, he said.

Record-breaking droughts, floods and extreme heat — the worst-case scenarios — were now events that not only were likely to happen, but could occur at any time, making planning for such scenarios difficult, Lonergan warned the company in his report. Extreme temperatures and precipitation “should be of greatest concern,” he wrote, “both in terms of future design and … expected impacts.”

The fact that temperatures could rise above freezing on almost any day of the year got his superiors’ attention. That “was probably one of the biggest results of the study and that shocked a lot of people,” he said in a recent interview.

Lonergan recalled that his report came as somewhat of a disappointment to Imperial’s management, which wanted specific advice on what action it should take to protect its operations. After presenting his findings, he remembered, one engineer said: “Look, all I want to know is: Tell me what impact this is going to have on permafrost in Norman Wells and our pipelines.”

As it happened, J.F. “Derick” Nixon, a geotechnical engineer on Croasdale’s team, was studying that question.

He looked at historical temperature data and concluded Norman Wells could grow about 0.2 degrees warmer every year. How would that, he wondered, affect the frozen ground underneath buildings and pipelines?

“Although future structures may incorporate some consideration of climatic warming in their design,” he wrote in a technical paper delivered at a conference in Canada in 1991, “northern structures completed in the recent past do not have any allowance for climatic warming.” The result, he said, could be significant settling.

Nixon said the work was done in his spare time and not commissioned by the company. However, Imperial “was certainly aware of my work and the potential effects on their buildings.”

::

Exxon Mobil declined to respond to requests for comment on what steps it took as a result of its scientists’ warnings. According to Flannery, the company’s in-house climate expert, much of the work of shoring up support for the infrastructure was done as routine maintenance.

“You build it into your ongoing system and it becomes a part of what you do,” he said.

Today, as Exxon’s scientists predicted 25 years ago, Canada’s Northwest Territories has experienced some of the most dramatic effects of global warming. While the rest of the planet has seen an average increase of roughly 1.5 degrees in the last 100 years, the northern reaches of the province have warmed by 5.4 degrees and temperatures in central regions have increased by 3.6 degrees.

Since 2012, Exxon Mobil and Imperial have held the rights to more than 1 million acres in the Beaufort Sea, for which they bid $1.7 billion in a joint venture with BP. Although the companies have not begun drilling, they requested a lease extension until 2028 from the Canadian government a few months ago. Exxon Mobil declined to comment on its plans there.

Croasdale, who still consults for Exxon, said the company could be “taking a gamble” the ice will break up soon, finally bringing about the day he predicted so long ago — when the costs would become low enough to make Arctic exploration economical.

Amy Lieberman and Elah Feder contributed to this report.

About this story: Over the last year, the Energy and Environmental Reporting Project at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, with the Los Angeles Times, has been researching the gap between Exxon Mobil’s public position and its internal planning on the issue of climate change. As part of that effort, reporters reviewed hundreds of documents housed in archives in Calgary’s Glenbow Museum and at the University of Texas. They also reviewed scientific journals and interviewed dozens of experts, including former Exxon Mobil employees. This is the first in a series of occasional articles.

Additional credits: Digital producer: Evan Wagstaff. Lead photo caption: Ice in the Chukchi Sea breaks up in open water season, making oil exploration cheaper and easier.

::

Nicoletta Fagiolo: The Lends of Activism.

Nikki Fagiolo is an independent documentary filmmaker and a social justice activist who work has been published and screened in many film festivals around the globe. Fagiolo is based in Roma and has directed numerous documentary film projects such as, The Independent Diplomat, Slow Food, The Pen in Exile and the Rebels of 9th Art; portraying the work three African cartoonists, Jonathan Zapiro, a well-known commentary cartoonist in South Africa, the Cameroonian human rights activist Issa Nyaphaga and the Willy Zekid, the narrator in the film from Congo Brazzaville.

Nikki as her friends like to call her, focuses her subject matters on freedom, mostly human rights violations, freedom of the expression, free speech and even freedom to eat healthy – Slow Food. In the early 1990s Fagiolo was one of the former UNHCR staff members who contributed to write and publish the online “Gallery of Prominent Refugees” for the agency's 50th anniversary. During her time at the UNHCR, Nicoletta conducted research and evaluations in countries experiencing conflict and crisis.

Nicoletta is not only a committed and a talented director, she is also a visionary intellectual. She was one of the first filmmakers to make a documentary film about Muhammad Yunnus, the founder of the Grahmeen Bank. Fagiolo collaborated with Yunnus before he received the Nobel Prize for his innovative microcredit program 2006.

Nicoletta is currently working on several projects to eradicate impunity of the imperial states.
In 2007 in Paris, Nikki Fagiolo followed Nike Robintson an English man who climbed the Eiffel Tower to protest against the French oil company TOTAL that was the main supporter of the Burmese in regime in Rangoon at the time. Fagiolo lives and works in Paris.

The latest productions of Nicoletta focus on the current socio-political the realities of some African states such as, the Ivoirian crisis with the unfair trial to prosecution of on the ex president Laurent Gbagbo at the ICC at La Hague; and after a profound investigation, Fagiolo has also published an articles on the Rwandan Genocide.

The latest productions of Nicoletta focus on the current socio-political the realities of some African states such as, the Ivoirian crisis with the unfair trial to prosecution of on the ex president Laurent Gbagbo at the ICC at La Hague; and after a profound investigation, Fagiolo has also published an articles on the Rwandan Genocide.

EVALUATION OF ALLEGED SASQUATCH FOOTPRINTS
AND THEIR INFERRED FUNCTIONAL MORPHOLOGY
D. JEFFREY MELDRUM, Department of Biological Sciences, Idaho State University Here is a the most famous footage that to this day can not be proven to be a fake. I also want you to watch a video of MK davis with the truth behind the patterson film very interesting. Please post any interesting stories or information you might have on the subject.

Patterson Gimlin Bigfoot film 1967, the best stabilization of all 5 parts of the film.

MK Davis break down of the Patterson film. Shows that it is a female big foot.

Introduction
Throughout the twentieth century, thousands of eyewitness reports of giant bipedal apes, commonly referred to as Bigfoot or Sasquatch, have emanated from the montane forests of the western United States and Canada. Hundreds of large humanoid footprints have been discovered and many have been photographed or preserved as plaster casts. As incredulous as these reports may seem, the simple fact of the matter remains -- the footprints exist and warrant evaluation. A sample of over 100 footprint casts and over 50 photographs of footprints and casts was assembled and examined, as well as several examples of fresh footprints.

Tracks in the Blue Mountains
The author examined fresh footprints first-hand in 1996, near the Umatilla National Forest, outside Walla Walla, Washington. The isolated trackway comprised in excess of 40 discernible footprints on a muddy farm road, across a plowed field, and along an irrigation ditch. The footprints measured approximately 35 cm (13.75 in) long and 13 cm (5.25 in) wide. Step length ranged from 1.0 - 1.3 m. Limited examples of faint dermatoglyphics were apparent, but deteriorated rapidly under the wet weather conditions. Individual footprints exhibited variations in toe position that were consistent with inferred walking speed and accommodation of irregularities in the substrate. A flat foot was indicated with an elongated heel segment. Seven individual footprints were preserved as casts.

Evidence of a Midtarsal Break
Perhaps the most significant observation relating to this trackway was the evidence of a pronounced flexibility in the midtarsal joint. Several examples of midfoot pressure ridges indicate a greater range of flexion at the transverse tarsal joint than permitted in the normal human tarsus. This is especially manifest in the footprint figured below, in which a heel impression is absent. Evidently, the hindfoot was elevated at the time of contact by the midfoot. Due to the muddy conditions, the foot slipped backward, as indicated by the toe slide-ins, and a ridge of mud was pushed up behind the midtarsal region.

Patterson-Gimlin Film Subject
In October 1967, Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin claimed to have captured on film a female Bigfoot retreating across a loamy sandbar on Bluff Creek, in northern California. The film provides a view of the plantar surface of the subject's foot, as well as several unobstructed views of step cycles. In addition to a prominent elongated heel, a midtarsal break is apparent during midstance and considerable flexion of the midtarsus can be seen during the swing phase. The subject left a long series of deeply impressed footprints. Patterson cast single examples of a right and a left footprint. The next day the site was visited by Robert Laverty, a timber management assistant and his sales crew. He took several photographs including one of a footprint exhibiting a pronounced pressure ridge in the midtarsal region. This same footprint, along with nine others in a series, was cast two weeks later by Bob Titmus, a Canadian taxidermist. A model of inferred skeletal anatomy is proposed here to account for the distinctive midtarsal pressure ridge and "half-tracks" in which the heel impression is absent. In this model the Sasquatch foot lacks a fixed longitudinal arch, but instead exhibits a high degree of midfoot flexibility at the transverse tarsal joint. Following the midtarsal break, a plastic substrate may be pushed up in a pressure ridge as propulsive force is exerted through the midfoot. An increased power arm in the foot lever system is achieved by heel elongation as opposed to arch fixation.

Conclusions
Human walking is characterized by an extended stiff-legged striding gait with distinct heel-strike and toe-off phases. Bending stresses in the digits are held low by selection for relatively short toes that participate in propulsion at the sacrifice of prehension. Efficiency and economy of muscle action during distance walking and running are maximized by reduced mobility in the tarsal joints, a fixed longitudinal arch, elastic storage in the well developed calcaneal tendon, plantar aponeurosis and deep plantar ligaments of the foot.
In contrast, the Sasquatch appear to have adapted to bipedal locomotion by employing a compliant gait on a flat flexible foot. A degree of prehensile capability has been retained in the digits by maintaining the uncoupling of the propulsive function of the hindoot from the forefoot via the midtarsal break. Digits are spared the peak forces of toe-off due to the compliant gait with its extended period of double support. This would be a efficient strategy for negotiating the steep, broken terrain of the dense montane forests of the Pacific and Intermountain West, especially for a bipedal hominoid of considerable body mass, The dynamic signatures of this adaptive pattern of gait are generally evident in the footprints examined in this study.

How many species are left to be discovered on this planet? The estimates of discovered species on a yearly basis is up to 15000. Most species that make this list are very small however still unidentified. Estimates from scientists are that the planet holds somewhere between 5million and 10 million species and we only discovered around 1.5 million another concrete reason to protect habitat. Here are some examples of recently discovered animals and plants. The cover picture is a tasmanian tiger here is a video about this animal.

Zoologists at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. actually spent years being frustrated about their resident olinguitos’ inability to mate. But the olinguito is a small carnivore in the raccoon family, commonly confused with its identical-looking cousin the olingo. They were trying to mate the olinguito with an olingo, not realizing that it was an entirely different species.

An Olinguito (above) not to be confused with an Olingo (below) (Photo: Mark Gurney/WikiCommons CC BY 3.0)

(Photo: Jeremy Gatten/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 2.0)
That doesn’t mean the well-explored parts of the world have no surprises left for us: just last year, a new species of frog was discovered in New York City, of all places. However, if you want to discover a new animal, less-trodden areas are a better bet. The most rewarding spots tend to be the tropics, since there are a wider variety of plants and animals there than in temperate regions.

There are plenty of places in the tropics that haven’t been thoroughly sifted through, though. “Typically, if you were interested in finding new species, a very good thing to look at would be to understand where people have done research and surveys in the past, and then find the holes, the blank areas of the map that have been under-studied,” says Raxworthy.
The reasons why some places remain unexplored are not what you would expect. Inaccessibility, for example, is not really a problem in the modern age. Sure, there might not be any direct flights from a research institution to Motuo, China (no roads go there) or the desolate Kerguelen Islands in the southern Indian Ocean (you can only get there with a six-day boat ride from an island off the coast of Madagascar), but that doesn’t bother contemporary researchers much.

The remote Kerguelen Islands are one of the most isolated places on earth, and lie more than 2051miles away from the nearest populated location (Photo: MapData © 2015 Google)
“People who really enjoy fieldwork, they enjoy exploration, so they'd be up for the challenge,” says Raxworthy. And with the relatively cheap cost of international travel (compared to decades past, at least), a geographically remote place wouldn’t discourage researchers intent on finding new species–it might even encourage them.
So if it’s not physical inaccessibility, why are there still blank spots on the map? “I think a lot of it is really driven by politics,” said Raxworthy. The political situation can unnerve researchers far more than a long and uncomfortable boat ride, and national and regional instability can lead to waves of scientists alternately heading to (or avoiding) large swaths of land.
In the next few years, for example, expect to see a whole clutch of new species emerging from Cuba. American or U.S.-based researchers have long been barred due to economic sanctions from entering the country. But with the loosening of travel restrictions, a new crop of scientists are lining up to visit. Raxworthy, a U.S-based Englishman, is hoping to head to Cuba to study the island’s reptiles and amphibians within the year, and he won’t be the only one.
Cuba is an extreme example; more often, areas become possible to explore in stages as they become more stable. “In Colombia, different regions of the country fall under the control of different drug barons,” says Raxworthy. “So one year you can go to this mountain and do work over there, and the next year that's totally off limits and would be really dangerous to go there.” Tropical Africa falls along the same lines. Much of the Eastern Congo is frustrating for scientists, as it’s comparatively unexplored and likely to host a wide variety of new species, but dozens of warring factions make it an exceptionally dangerous destination.
Then there are the parts of the world that, right now, are simply a no-go. “I think for example, if you wanted to do work right now in a place like Somalia, you'd be crazy,” said Raxworthy. Northern Mali, near Timbuktu, is also largely off-limits thanks to the high chance of getting kidnapped. Afghanistan would be another tough one. But stability comes in waves, and at some point, it’ll become more safe for researchers to head out there—and as soon as they can, they will, and we’ll start seeing more new discoveries from those areas.

One look at Smiley, and you can tell how he earned the name.

But it’s the smiles the Golden Retriever puts on the faces of other people that may be his most lasting legacy.

Excerpt retrieved from Global News:
http://globalnews.ca/news/1879093/meet-smiley-blind-golden-retriever-brings-joy-to-ontario-town/

“People were so drawn to him, so inspired by him,” Smiley’s owner Joanne George told CBS News. “I realized this dog has to be a therapy dog — I have to share him.”

Smiley was born without eyes, and also suffers from dwarfism, meaning his legs are shorter than most dogs of his breed.

George said she found Smiley in a “puppy mill” when he was around two years old. According to a post on her website, Training the K9 Way, she knew his disabilities had left him neglected as a pup.

“He was extremely destructive and had zero housetraining. He was nervous and had many anxieties about coming into a home,” George wrote. “He cowered at the sound of another dog eating – the scars on his face and ears told me the stories of what it was like living with so many dogs in such deplorable conditions.”

Raising Smiley proved a challenge, as George had to teach a dog with no prior formal training, while overcoming his inability to see.

“He did not know one verbal command – I communicated only through my energy to him,” George wrote. “He did not see my body language – he used his nose and his keen sense of hearing to get around.”

Over a decade later, Smiley has found a unique way to bring some smiles to his community of Stouffville, Ontario.

Today he’s a certified therapy dog with the St. John Ambulance therapy dog program, a job he’s held for over seven years.

Whether it’s stopping in to visit local schools, playing with special needs children at the local library, or offering companionship to the residents of a nursing home – Smiley helps to bring some joy to people young and old.