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Dan Lewis

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This bird species was contributing to the demise of another. So scientists stepped in to help.

Image by Gus Van Vliet/U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Pictured above is the marbled murrelet, a seabird native to the coasts of the Pacific Ocean.

Marbled murrelets stay mostly around Oregon, Washington, Northern California, British Columbia, and Alaska (although also somewhat in Russia and northern Japan).

They thrive in old-growth forests, and if you're a human it's rare to find one of their nests because they tend to build them hundreds of feet off the ground.

As a species, they're endangered, in part because of logging that has reduced the size of their habitat. But there's another concern as well that is also, but indirectly, human-caused.

This guy:

Image by Noel Reynolds/Flickr.

That's the Steller's jay, another species of bird.

The jay isn't a very picky eater and therefore tends to go to where the food is.

We humans go and visit old-growth forests — that part is OK — and then we toss bread or seeds or other such stuff on the ground, hoping to feed the birds.

Marbled murrelets only lay one egg per year. When jays are around, eating those eggs, it makes it hard for the marbled murrelet population to grow.

That sounds like a very nice idea — birds have to eat, after all! — but there's a downside. The jay population thrives and are attracted to this new abundance of edibles, and while they're in the neighborhood, they find something else to snack on: eggs.

That includes chicken eggs, if there happen to be some laying around, but it also includes marbled murrelet eggs.

To make matters worse, marbled murrelets only lay one egg per year. When jays are around, eating those eggs, it makes it hard for the marbled murrelet population to grow.

The good news is that jays are “really, really smart," as Elena West, a researcher with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told NPR.

And also per NPR, Portia Halbert, a park scientist at Butano State Park just outside of San Francisco, has used the jays' intelligence against them. How? With a little bit of poison.

Halbert and team take chicken eggs and paint them to look like marbled murrelet eggs. Then they inject these decoy eggs with a little bit of something called Carbocal into the eggs, which, if you're a bird, is a bad thing to eat — it'll likely make you throw up.

The jays learn that the eggs aren't good for them and, over time, learn not to eat them.

The jays learn that the eggs aren't good for them and, over time, learn not to eat them. And as smart as the jays are, they aren't quite smart enough to differentiate between chicken eggs and marbled murrelet eggs.

So eventually, the jays learn to let the marbled murrelet eggs go uneaten.

Hopefully, this will help keep the marbled murrelet population growing.

Although there's one other reason to be concerned. Halbert and her team (and similar teams in other forests) can only place tainted decoys on the ground — the nests of marbled murrelets are simply too high up for humans to reach.

Some researchers are concerned that the jays will realize that the eggs on the ground aren't safe to eat but that the ones up in the nests — and therefore, the ones most likely to hatch — make for perfectly fine snacks.

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

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How Mister Rogers made Friday the 13th less scary


Image by PBS Television/Courtesy of Getty Images.

If you're old enough to know who the man pictured above is, you're one of the lucky ones.

That's Fred Rogers, better known as Mister Rogers of the legendary PBS children's show "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

Before his passing in 2003, Rogers was a leader in the efforts to educate the mind, body, and spirit of children as well as nurturing the best in adults, too. (For an example of the latter, and you may want to have some tissues ready, watch his speech accepting a lifetime achievement Emmy award here.)

And despite the fact that he played with puppets — such as the one pictured below — he took a very rational approach to the world. For example, he wasn't afraid of Friday the 13th, and he didn't want children to grow up fearing it either.

Image via Emmy TV Legends/Archive of American Television.

If you're old enough to know who the puppet pictured above is, you're also one of the lucky ones.

That's King Friday, the ruler of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, a fictional, puppet-populated realm to which Mister Rogers traveled in most episodes of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

"We just thought that was fun because so many people are so superstitious about Friday the 13th that we thought, let's start children out thinking that Friday the 13th was a fun day."

Wikipedia describes King Friday as “relatively egocentric, irrational, resistant to change, and temperamental, although open-minded enough to listen when told he is wrong." But his name reveals another part of his biography.

His full name is King Friday XIII — that is, King Friday the 13th. That's a reference not to his lineage (there wasn't a King Friday XII), but to his birthday. King Friday XIII was born on Friday the 13th, and regardless of month or frequency, every Friday the 13th was King Friday's birthday.

In a 1999 interview with the Emmy's website, Rogers explained (full video here, and that link starts at the relevant part):

"His name was King Friday XIII. We just thought that was fun because so many people are so superstitious about Friday the 13th that we thought, let's start children out thinking that Friday the 13th was a fun day. And every Friday the 13th would be his birthday. So we would celebrate his birthday every time a Friday the 13th came. And that was so wonderful about [broadcasting a live TV show] — when a Friday the 13th came, you knew it."

As a nice bonus, if you were a kid who was celebrating a (real) birthday on a Friday the 13th, many grown-ups might have told you that your special day was cursed, but Mister Rogers was throwing the king — and you — a birthday party.

For a generation of children, Friday the 13th became a day of celebration thanks to a guy and his make-believe neighborhood.

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

Heroes

China is building another great wall — of trees. To hold back the desert.

As of this writing, the Gobi Desert in northern China/southern Mongolia is about half a million square miles (1.3 million km2) in area.

Yes, that's “as of this writing" — because the Gobi Desert is growing.

Due to something called “desertification," about 1,400 square miles (3,600 km2) of China's otherwise arable land is turned into desert each year, as the Gobi creeps further and further south.

To make matters worse, winds often pick up the sand, blowing it toward the densely populated areas in China, resulting in immense dust storms. (Here's a picture of a car windshield after Beijing's 2006 dust storm season.)

The desert in China is expanding — kinda rapidly, too. Image by Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images.

But China is fighting back. With trees.

In 2001, the BBC reported on what has been called, colloquially, the "Great Green Wall," a not-so-subtle reference to the Great Wall of China, but this "wall" is being made of trees.

The wall is part of a decades-long afforestation project that began in 1978 but isn't expected to be completed until 2050, and it hopes to ultimately make areas currently too arid for habitation or agriculture into fertile homes to both.


A tree-planting exercise on the edge of the Gobi Desert in 2007. Image by Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images.

One of the early phases was a forced participation drive — in 1981, China passed a law that required its citizens over the age of 11 to plant three to five trees each year — but in 2003, the country turned toward government works.

The Great Green Wall plan called for the creation of a 2,800 mile-long (4,480 km) belt of trees along the Gobi's border.

As Wired reported a year later, this was no small task:

"To build the wall, the government has launched a two-pronged plan: Use aerial seeding to cover wide swaths of land where the soil is less arid and pay farmers to plant trees and shrubs in areas that require closer attention. A $1.2 billion oversight system, consisting of mapping and land-surveillance databases, will be implemented. The government has also hammered out a dust-monitoring network with Japan and Korea."


A photographer looks out over the trees at the encroaching desert. Image by Peter Parks/AFP/Getty Images.

Whether it's working, though, is another question.

One Chinese news agency, citing the State Forest Administration, reported in 2007 that "more than 20 percent of the lands affected by desertification in the project areas have been harnessed and soil erosion has been put under control in over 40 percent of the areas that used to suffer soil erosion in the past."

And in 2014, the Daily Mail echoed these results, reporting that "a study says the measures are working, despite previous criticism."

However, that same year, the Economist noted that many of the trees are withering in the dry, hot conditions and concluded the opposite.

Finally, there's the middle ground, which the BBC reported in 2011: The afforestation process is working — but it'll take 300 years to reclaim the lands the Gobi has already taken.

Either way, China intends to push forward. Given its original timetable, they have 35 years left to figure it out.

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

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Heroes

Turns out, there's a method to the madness of crosswalk lights. Here it is.

About five years ago, municipalities across the United States, Canada, and likely points elsewhere began installing new technology for crosswalk safety.

Gone were many of the simple “WALK" or “DON'T WALK" signals (or corresponding hand or figure illustrations) like this one:

Image via Thinkstock.

They were replaced by ones with countdown clocks, telling pedestrians how much time they had before they could no longer safely cross the street. The video here is an example, or here's an image:

Image by Oran Viriyincy/Flickr (cropped).

These new crosswalk signals had a pretty clear goal: keep pedestrians safer by giving them advance warning as to when the traffic lights would change.

And guess what? According to a study published in 2014 written by a pair of economists (PDF available here), the crosswalks worked.

The two researchers, Sacha Kapoor and Arvind Magesan, studied the change in accident rates at nearly 2,000 intersections in Toronto and concluded the pedestrians stopped when the timer ticked too low and rushed to safety at other times — and as a result, dangerous intersections became less dangerous.

The planned outcome of the new crosswalk signals worked.

Unfortunately, the researchers discovered that pedestrians weren't the only ones making use of the countdown.

Drivers were noticing them too, and that unintended use had an unintended — and hardly positive — outcome. Toronto was left with a bunch more car accidents.

Over time, the rate of accidents at these intersections increased.

NPR explains:

The largest increase is in rear-end accidents and we think it's because two cars approaching a light, who both see the countdown, the guy behind, he sees the two or three seconds and thinks, oh, the guy in front of me is going to floor it too, I'll floor it and we'll both get through the intersection. Whereas the guy in front thinks, OK, I only have two or three seconds left, I'm going to slowdown. And this is exactly the type of accident that would happen in that case.

To make matters worse, the researchers (per NPR) discovered that “the biggest increases in crashes come at intersections that were previously safe intersections."

Further, as drivers got used to the timers, they began to realize that even having one second left on the clock is enough time to get through the intersection if they're willing to gun the engine, even if recklessly. So, over time, the rate of accidents at these intersections increased.

Unfortunately, Toronto's city government, upon hearing of the research, objected to the results and showed little interest in making any changes, at least initially.

If Toronto or any other city wishes to fix the problem, though, the solutions put forth by Kapoor and Magesan are pretty simple: either find a way to shield the countdown information from drivers or, if that proves difficult, put the old-style crosswalk signals in generally safe intersections.

That second idea wouldn't be out of the ordinary — it is exactly the strategy New York City employs.

Image via Thinkstock.

Dan Lewis runs the popular daily newsletter Now I Know ("Learn Something New Every Day, By Email"). To subscribe to his daily email, click here.

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