The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Many thriving species at risk from climate change Posted: 13 Jun 2013 07:32 AM PDT
The Amazon rainforest was among the places where ever more types of birds and amphibians would be threatened as temperatures climbed, it said. Common corals off Indonesia would also be among the most vulnerable. Overall, up to 41 per cent of all bird species, 29 per cent of amphibians and 22 per cent of corals were "highly climate change vulnerable but are not currently threatened", the team of scientists wrote in the journal PLOS ONE. "It was a surprise," said Wendy Foden, of the global species programme of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) who led the study. Experts had expected far more overlap between species threatened now and those vulnerable to global warming. Conservation priorities should be revised to take account of the emerging climate risks, for instance to decide where to locate protected areas for wildlife, the scientists wrote. "Climate change is not the biggest threat, yet," Foden said in a telephone interview. Loss of habitats driven by a rising human population, over-exploitation and invasive species are now the main causes of extinctions, the study said. The study drew on the work of more than 100 scientists. The IUCN groups governments, scientists and environmental groups. EMPEROR PENGUIN Birds including the Emperor Penguin and the Little Owl and amphibians such as Rose's rain frog or the Imitator Salamander – none of which are now threatened – were among those at risk as temperatures rose. The study focused on birds, amphibians – which include frogs, newts and salamanders – and corals partly because the IUCN has recently published global assessments of each. The scientists used a new scale to judge the vulnerability to climate change, based on each creature's likely exposure to climate change, sensitivity to change and the ability to adapt. Chris Thomas, a professor of biology at York University in England who was not involved in the study, welcomed the attempt to map climate risks, but said there were many uncertainties. "The tragedy of this is that we need to make a lot of decisions about conservation ... before we know what will happen," he said. A UN panel of scientists has estimated that 20 to 30 per cent of the world's species are likely to be at increasing risk of extinction if temperatures rise more than two or three degrees Celsius (3.6-5.4F) above pre-industrial levels. Almost 200 nations have set a goal of limiting warming to below 2C, a target set to be breached on current trends of rising greenhouse gases. – Reuters |
| Study probes how ‘gamers see the world differently’ Posted: 13 Jun 2013 02:20 AM PDT
"Gamers see the world differently," said Greg Appelbaum, an assistant professor of psychiatry in the Duke School of Medicine. "They are able to extract more information from a visual scene." The 125 participants in this study – both non-gamers and intensive gamers – were selected from a much larger study conducted at Stephen Mitroff's Visual Cognition Lab at Duke University. Each subject was run through a visual sensory memory task that flashed a circular arrangement of eight letters for just one-tenth of a second. After a delay ranging from 13 milliseconds to 2.5 seconds, an arrow appeared, pointing to one spot on the circle where a letter had been. Participants were asked to identify which letter had been in that spot. At every time interval, intensive players of action video games outperformed non-gamers in recalling the letter. Prior research has found that gamers are quicker at responding to visual stimuli and can track more items than non-gamers. When playing a game, especially a first-person shooter, gamers make "probabilistic inferences" about what they're seeing – good guy or bad guy, moving left or moving right – as rapidly as they can, the researchers said. Appelbaum added that with time and experience, the gamer apparently gets better at doing this. "They need less information to arrive at a probabilistic conclusion, and they do it faster." In the memory task, both groups experienced a rapid decay in memory of what the letters had been, but the gamers outperformed the non-gamers. The visual system sifts information out from what the eyes are seeing, and data that isn't used decays quite rapidly, Appelbaum said. Gamers discard the unused stuff just about as fast as everyone else, but they appear to be starting with more information to begin with. The researchers examined three possible reasons for the gamers' apparently superior ability to make probabilistic inferences – they see better, they retain visual memory longer or they've improved their decision-making. While Applebaum was able to rule out prolonged memory retention, the other two factors might both be in play – it is possible that the gamers see more immediately, and they are better able to make better correct decisions from the information they have available, he said. The findings, announced June 11, appear in the June edition of the journal Attention, Perception and Psychophysics. Access: http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758/s13414-013-0472-7 – AFP/Relaxnews |
| You are subscribed to email updates from The Malaysian Insider :: Features To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
0 ulasan:
Catat Ulasan