Adventure Ausrama Blog

You have to be careful buying new tech products. There is a belief out there that a new version is always better than the old one. This is not always the case. Take for instance the new Nexus 7. A lot has been written about this with some rave reviews. I don't know what some of these reviewers are on, but they certainly are not seeing things clearly - some bias is there. The widely held view that buying the latest Nexus 7 is the road to Nirvana is wrong. If you have another Android device with the same login you will not get an automatic restore. It just does not work because Google picks up the two Android devices. A trip into the Play Store will be necessary. Click on the icon in the top left and "My Apps" will be shown. You have to click "All" to see the apps you have paid for. Re-installing each one in turn is the requirement and don't think all your data is automatically backed up. You discover that you should have backed up the data

Young women are becoming shorter. This not just from the weight pulling one down and stooping, i.e., bending over at the shoulder. It is because girls have a poor diet and are overweight. They do not grow to their full potential height. Women in the 18 to 24 are 1.1cm shorter on average than their mothers. Oddly, young men have "shrunk" by only 0.2xm when compared to their fathers. The reason for this discrepancy is not yet known. Today this age group of women is 27 per cent fatter than the same age group in 1995. This is a larger gain than people of all other groups. The main problem is that young women do not eat foods that contain calcium - thus the spine bends and compresses. They eat "on the run", consuming just about anything that is tasty and fills them up. Preparing meals is not something young women do. Furthermore, fad diets are notoriously lacking in essential vitamins and minerals. It is older women who are doing the exercise. The

Drilling techniques in industry have not changed for decades. Oil rigs are built in he same old way. Now something has come along that will improve drilling enormously. The Deep Exploration Technologies Cooperative Research Centre based in Adelaide has announced a new type of drill. It is constructed with coiled tubing. Costs will fall dramatically as drilling is faster . Australia's mines are mostly over 30 years old. New mines have to be established. We can only rely on the old mines for another 20 years. No longer is it necessary to keep stopping to add a new drilling section. The new drill is a continuous coil of tubing. Being smaller and lighter transportation is easy. The motor is at the bottom of the shaft, not at the top. The tubing no longer twists during drilling. Any twisting will occur in the other direction as the motor pulls the tubing around. Less drilling power is needed as the tubing is being pulled around in already drilled space. A lot

We see the platypus as a quiet curious animal always on the go, but millions of years ago it was twice as big and had vicious teeth. It hunted turtles crayfish and frogs. Paleontologists have called it Platypus Godzilla because it would have been quite vicious. The modern platypus, Obdurodon tharalkooschild, is only half a meter long. Its quiet, secretive life could indicate that it is heading for extinction. Identifying platypus fossils is easy if teeth are found, because they are so different from other species. Platypus teeth are blunt. The animals must have "bruised" their prey to death. Fossils of the ancient platypus were not ancestors of modern platypus. They were a side branch "experimenting' with being a larger size. Just why platypus millions of years old had functioning teeth while modern ones have virtually lost theirs is not known. Despite being good a hunter Godzilla did itself go extinct. Modern tharalkoo live in a narrow niche.

Pensioners have gray hair. They are also entering a gray area, politically, socially and economically. Most people reaching pension age have never paid superannuation and others have only been paying it for a few years of their working lives. The amount saved by super is certainly not enough to live on. This group relies on the government to provide them with an income. Calls are coming from all sides for an increase in the pension to a "livable" level. Basic costs like council rates, rents, electricity, gas, water and sewerage have gone through the roof in the last decade. There is no solid reason why this should be so. Electricity companies keep saying the old infrastructure has to be renewed. Surveys show they have actually over-spent, pushing the cost onto consumers. Giving those who could afford solar power a massive discount for feeding electricity back into the grid is appalling political decision making. Pensioners could not afford solar. They are s

The Announcement that skeletons found in South Africa belong to a new species of Man is premature.  They were found in a cave near Johannesburg. The "new species" was named Australopithecus sediba . It was claimed to be the "rosetta stone" into the past. They were also the most complete skeletons ever discovered. The creatures walked upright, had long arms and powerful hands. Unfortunately, they were small brained. Paleoanthropologists not involved in the find say the name chosen is just a "wastebasket" category. They are not ancestors of Man. Furthermore, some animals in the species could have had larger or smaller brains. It could still be transitional in evolution to Man, but very distant. It may fit into Homo . Perhaps it is a sister species to Homo habilis . The brain size of Australopithecus sediba is the same as Homo floresiensis , the Hobbit, of Indonesia. The features in sediba are similar to those in other Homo species. Paleoanthropologi

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Life may have begun on land not in the sea, Multicellular fossils, ancestors of marine life, lived on land. These were microbial colonies like lichen. Ediacaron fossils over 600 million years old have been found in South Australia. High-tech investigative technology showed the ancient forebears lived on land. The soil they were in had "old elephant skin' over it. This phenomenon forms in sandstone beds. It is much like the surface of modern sandy deserts with close wavy lines. Ediacaran fossils were direct ancestors of marine animals, not mammals. The chain of life leading to humans came during the Cambrian era long after these old multicellular fossils. Apparently, the presence of salt and even too much water are barriers to initial life formation. There was more animals diversity on land than in the sea during the Cambrian. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/AdventureAustralia http:/

A fossil find in Victoria, Australia, throws light on the origin of baleen whales. The artifact is 25 million years old. It is the 45 cm long skull of Mammalodon colliveri . Information about it has remained open since its discovery in 1932. Though it had teeth it spent its time sucking mud in the search for prey on the seafloor. A short, blunt snout made this possible. This type of feeding led to the filter method of modern whales. The baleen whale was only three meters long, a far cry from the monsters that followed. Its ancestors though were also very large. Other fossils have been found in Torquay , Victoria, notably Janjucetus hunderi which was unique to the area. This region is believed to be the cradle of tiny whales. Some form of isolation must have occurred for this to happen. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/AdventureAustralia http://www.technorati.com/blogs/ http://adventure--australi

"You know I'm three mum!." http://vistacomputersolutions.blogspot.com/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Funny Animal Photos

"Come on inside with us mum." http://vistacomputersolutions.blogspot.com/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Funny Animal Photos

"What Do you mean, lazy? " http://vistacomputersolutions.blogspot.com/ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Funny Animal Photos

More silly research comes to useful conclusions. A survey has found that older people, men and women who go shopping "frequently" live longer. This is true for Taiwanese anyway. Subject women were 28 per cent less likely to die in the 10 years after the study. Men were 27 per cent less likely. Apparently, going shopping once a week is absolutely no good whatsoever. One has to shop, shop, shop to have a positive outcome. Researchers reached the following conclusion: "Shopping captures several dimensions of personal wellbeing , health and security as well as contributing to the community's cohesiveness and economy, and may represent or actually confer increased longevity." This conclusion is not soundly based on the data, however. It is just drawn "out of the air". In other words it is just an opinion. Maybe shopping is an ideal way of getting regular exercise. Note, those who lived longer were healthier to begin with. And poor health meant les

It makes one wonder how much money is wasted on research into seemingly trivial and irrelevant issues. Nonetheless, some of this research does result in useful findings. Why would there be tests on old cars to find out whether they are healthier than new vehicles? Well, research has been done and older cars are healthier largely because they let more air in through seals that do not fit anymore. Most drivers and passengers jump into the modern vehicle and turn the air conditioning on, thus locking themselves into a sealed capsule. This may be comfortable but it can cause illness. To make the air conditioner function better it is common to choose the recycle setting, so we breath stale air. This is more damaging than taking in pollutants from outside. When you go for a drive in future you should be careful about who you are travelling with. If a passenger has the flu, everyone else will probably get it. Set the air conditioner to the ventilation setting or leave a window slightl