GPS uncovers possible Southwest quake risk

The U.S. Southwest isn't particularly known for its seismic activity, but the Rio Grande Rift, a series of faults and basins that runs from central Colorado south through New Mexico, is alive and stretching, new research shows.

Scientists had suspected the rift might be dead, but measurements of its movement varied widely and were riddled with uncertainties. Now, thanks to state-of-the-art GPS technology, geophysicists have found the rift is indeed extending ? just very slowly.

And of course, anytime a large chunk of the Earth's crust moves, the issue of earthquakes arises.

"There's certainly potential for earthquakes in this region," said Anne Sheehan, a seismologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who co-authored the new study. "They would be very low-probability events but, like all earthquakes, they could have large consequences if they do happen."

Not dead, but not thriving
Sheehan began studying the region after noticing something odd in the mantle underlying the Rio Grande Rift. Studies had shown that seismic waves move through this part of the mantle very slowly, hinting that it could be quite hot. It could also mean that the overlying continental crust is spreading apart, Sheehan thought.

Using a large network of GPS stations ? nearly 300 sites ? her team monitored the rift's movement over four years. They found that the rift is in fact spreading very slowly, at a rate of about 0.1 millimeters per year.

"That's really pretty small," Sheehan told OurAmazingPlanet. "The rift is not dead, but it's not really thriving, either."

More surprisingly, the team found that the spreading isn't focused at the rift itself, but is spread across a span of more than 370 miles (600 kilometers).

"That wasn't what we expected, because the deformation at the surface has been along faults that are relatively narrow," said Henry Berglund, a geophysicist at UNAVCO who led the study. "Instead, we observed the deformation is likely much broader than that ? at least the width of the state of New Mexico."

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A real earthquake risk?
As for earthquake risks, Berglund explained, "It's not a predictive tool, but it does tell us that, if the deformation is broader, maybe we're more likely to have earthquakes in more places than we previously expected.?

There was a magnitude-5.3 quake near Trinidad, Colo., last August, and a larger earthquake with an estimated magnitude of 6.6 in north-central Colorado in 1882. A magnitude-5.5 quake shook Dulce, N.M., in 1966. Future quakes in the region could also fall in the magnitude-5 or -6 range, but likely not much higher, Sheehan said.

"We can't use this to say we expect to see a big earthquake anywhere in the region," Sheehan cautioned. "But a more worrisome aspect is that we don't really expect earthquakes here, so our building codes aren't as strict as they are in, say, California."

The team's findings appear in the January issue of the journal Geology.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/46132907/ns/technology_and_science-science/

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Summary Box: Stocks waver as Greece talks go on (AP)

EURO UP: The euro rose to a three-week high against the dollar on hopes that the Greek government will reach a deal with creditors to trim the country's debt.

GAS GAIN: Natural gas prices rose after Chesapeake Energy said it will cut production in response to cheap prices and rising supplies. Stocks of gas producers jumped.

STEADY CLIMB: The S&P 500 index edged up 0.62 points Monday to close at 1,316. The stock market is off to a strong start in 2012. Better-than-expected job growth in the U.S. and easing worries about Europe's debt woes have pushed the S&P 500 up 4.6 percent for the year.

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/stocks/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20120123/ap_on_bi_ge/us_wall_street_summary_box

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Improving crops from the roots up

ScienceDaily (Jan. 24, 2012) ? Research involving scientists at The University of Nottingham has taken us a step closer to breeding hardier crops that can better adapt to different environmental conditions and fight off attack from parasites.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS), the researchers have shown that they can alter root growth in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, or thale cress, by controlling an important regulatory protein.

Dr Ive De Smet, a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) David Phillips Fellow in the University's Division of Plant and Crop Science, said: "The world's population is increasing, and a new green revolution is even more pressing to deliver global food security. To achieve this, optimising the root system of plants is essential and these recent results will contribute significantly to our goal of improving crop growth and yield under varying environmental conditions."

The work was carried out by an international team of researchers. Led by scientists from the Plant Systems Biology Department in the life sciences research institute VIB in Flanders, Belgium, and Ghent University, the study also involved experts from Wake Forest University in the US and the Albrecht-von-Haller Institute for Plant Sciences in Germany.

Plant root biology is essential for healthy plant growth and, while the so-called hidden half of the plant has often been overlooked, its importance is becoming increasingly recognised by scientists.

Despite this, particularly in view of the critical role plants play in global food security, improving plant growth by modulating the biological architecture of root systems is an area which is largely unexplored.

In this latest research, the scientists modulated levels of the protein, transcription factor WRKY23, in plants, analysed the effects on root development and used chemical profiling to demonstrate that this key factor controls the biosynthesis of important metabolites called flavonols.

Altered levels of flavonols affected the distribution of auxin, a plant hormone controlling many aspects of development, which resulted in impaired root growth.

The results of the research can now be used to produce new plant lines, such as crops which are economically valuable, which have an improved root system, making them better able to resist environmental changes which could lead to plant damage or poor yield.

In addition, WRKY23 was previously found to play a role in the way plants interact with types of nematode parasites, which could lead to further research into how to prevent attacks from the creatures during the early stages of plant growth.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Nottingham, via AlphaGalileo.

Note: Materials may be edited for content and length. For further information, please contact the source cited above.


Journal Reference:

  1. W. Grunewald, I. De Smet, D. R. Lewis, C. Lofke, L. Jansen, G. Goeminne, R. Vanden Bossche, M. Karimi, B. De Rybel, B. Vanholme, T. Teichmann, W. Boerjan, M. C. E. Van Montagu, G. Gheysen, G. K. Muday, J. Friml, T. Beeckman. Transcription factor WRKY23 assists auxin distribution patterns during Arabidopsis root development through local control on flavonol biosynthesis. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2012; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1121134109

Note: If no author is given, the source is cited instead.

Disclaimer: Views expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of ScienceDaily or its staff.

Source: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124140101.htm

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Another side of Ai Weiwei shown in Sundance film (omg!)

Director Alison Klayman talks to the media before the screening of the film "Ai Weiwei - Never Sorry" during the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah January 22, 2012. REUTERS/Jim Urquhart

PARK CITY, Utah (Reuters) - A new documentary film offers a glimpse into the life of Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei, conveying a creative, brave, yet humble man who has become more cautious following his 81-day government detention in 2011.

"Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," which premiered at the Sundance film festival on Sunday, features interviews China's leading artists and activists and people who surround Ai in is life.

It includes footage that humanizes the man, showing suprising tears from his mother worried about his safety, the artist playing with his young son, and highlights from his projects such as a poor response to the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

Ai, who was named the world's most powerful artist by U.K-based ArtReview magazine in October since his release, appears in interviews only before his detention, but not after his release.

The 54-year-old bearded, burly Chinese artist wanted to attend the Sundance screening "but felt it was just going to invite too much trouble," the film's director Alison Klayman told the audience after a standing ovation in Park City, Utah, where the festival takes place.

Ai became a symbol for China's crackdown on artists and dissidents when his disappearance and secret detention after battling Chinese authorities sparked an international outcry.

Last November he paid a bond of 8.4 million yuan (then $1.3 million) on a tax evasion charge, which he denies, while his supporters continued to raise the full, combined bill of 15 million yuan (then $2.4 million.)

Klayman spent several years chronicling his rise to prominence and told the audience she believed the detention of the artist, which became a rallying point for China's free speech and other movements, had changed him.

"There was absolutely a change. I really think about it as: there was the time before the detention and there was the time after," she said. "The big thing is that he is constantly changing, he always has been, so I don't know where it is going to end up."

INSIGHT INTO AI

The film offers audiences some insight into Ai's childhood, family, formative time spent living for years in New York and his reasons for often criticizing China's government, which is expressed in many of his contemporary works.

"If you don't act, the danger becomes stronger," says Ai, who had a hand in designing the Bird's Nest stadium at the 2008 Beijing Olympics and has had installations at some of the world's major museums including London's Tate Modern Gallery.

"Never Sorry" shows his efforts gathering and listing more than 5,000 names of students who died in the Sichuan earthquake,

pointing to shoddy school construction and claiming that he was punched in the head by police in Sichuan's capital Chengdu.

But it also offers glimpses of a loving father and stoic son rarely publicly separated from his art and activism.

"Every night I can't sleep," his mother, Gao Ying, says to him in the film before breaking down in tears because she is worried she will not see him again.

"We'll endure what we can," he answers calmly, before later calling himself "an eternal optimist."

Klayman, who doubted there would be a public screening of the film in China, told the audience it was clear that being a father had altered Ai's life, too, along with detention.

He seems more careful, she said, when talking about footage in the documentary showing that upon his release, Ai uncharacteristically speaks little to reporters.

"He does have to be a lot more cautious. If this was a year ago he would be here," said Klayman.

(Reporting By Christine Kearney; Editing by Bob Tourtellotte)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/entertainment/*http%3A//us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/external/omg_rss/rss_omg_en/news_another_side_ai_weiwei_shown_sundance_film025202351/44268495/*http%3A//omg.yahoo.com/news/another-side-ai-weiwei-shown-sundance-film-025202351.html

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How to Make Cheap Whiskey Taste Like Fancy Whiskey [Video]

You like whiskey. You looooove good whiskey. You can't afford to drop hundreds of dollars on a high-end bottle. You stick with rotgut, right? Nope. There's a new process of hyper-aging booze that apparently turns run-of-the-mill whiskey into dark and delicious firewater of the gods. More »


Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/9MTn2sTIIzU/how-to-make-cheap-whiskey-taste-like-fancy-whiskey

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Captain For Life: My Story as a Hall of Fame Linebacker

While football star Walter Payton's biography is making headlines, don't miss 'Captain for Life,' Harry Carson's poignant and revealing autobiography.

Without question, the blockbuster football book of this season has been ?Sweetness: The Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton.? But there is another work that shouldn?t be lost under the pile of recent releases. That?s Harry Carson?s Captain for Life: My Story as a Hall of Fame Linebacker.

Skip to next paragraph

Payton, once a megawatt running back for the Chicago Bears, is surely is the better known of the two players, and his story, as told by biographer Jeff Pearlman, is a legitimate page-turner. Carson?s book, however, is every bit as fascinating, revealing, and poignant as Payton?s.

In a number of ways, the two players' stories are similar ? yet also widely divergent. Both, for example, grew up in the deep South as integration dawned. Both were band members who emerged as high school football stars, went on to play at historically black colleges (Jackson State and South Carolina State), and captained pro teams in major Northern cities (Chicago and New York) that shed losing images to win Super Bowls. They also both played for coaches with outsized personalities (Payton for Mike Ditka and Carson for Bill Parcells) and were both elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame, although in far different ways ? Payton in his first year of eligibility, Carson in his 13th.

Payton became addicted to painkillers, while Carson, in the most disturbing development of his career, had to submit to random drug tests two or three times a week during his final season. The order came after he tested ?dirty? in training camp, a finding Carson viewed as outrageously false and demeaning. The regular urine tests, which never provided any substantiating evidence, were kept quiet, but they still managed to create an awful cloud over an honorable player winding up an outstanding career.?

The differences in personal lives of Carson and Payton are striking, with Payton a tragic, ultimately lonely and troubled, man who died at age 45, just 12 years after his football retirement. Carson, by contrast, is a rock of consistency, a person whose teammates came to depend on and trust him. He is the Walter Camp Football Foundation?s 2011 ?Man of the Year,? a character award based on a person?s service to the game and the public. (The award presentation was made on Jan. 14 in New York).

That Carson?s Hall of Fame enshrinement took so long may have been due to his playing alongside Lawrence Taylor with the Giants. Carson was the hard-hat middle linebacker, charged with stopping inside runs amid the blur of bodies. Taylor, a flashy outside linebacker, used his speed and ferocity to become an electrifying defender and one of the foremost pass rushers in NFL history.

Source: http://rss.csmonitor.com/~r/feeds/csm/~3/yz37yIEy_fA/Captain-For-Life-My-Story-as-a-Hall-of-Fame-Linebacker

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Some Chinese aggrieved find inspiration in rebel village (Reuters)

WANGGANG, China (Reuters) ? As China gears up for a leadership transition, a small fishing village that stood up to official corruption and rural land grabs has become a touchstone for other communities striving to fight back against grassroots abuses.

Since the uprising late last year in Wukan, a coastal village of 15,000 in southern China's Guangdong province that challenged and won key concessions from provincial officials, other rural communities have taken note, and in some isolated cases, sprung to action.

About 1,000 residents of Wanggang, a gritty suburb of leather factories and shabby tenement blocks, recently massed outside the gates of the Guangdong provincial capital Guangzhou, holding a rare large-scale protest against a major Chinese city government.

For some of them, Wukan has become a new rallying cry for their own battle against public graft.

"If China doesn't change and help ... vulnerable residents in villages, every village might develop into a Wukan," said a stocky 33-year-old surnamed Li, who took part in the rally against Wanggang's Communist Party village chief, Li Zhihang, whom they accuse of plundering land and widespread fraud.

While few expect Wukan to be a catalyst for any broader tumult across China, it is emerging as a new benchmark of rural activism in some communities, a symbol of hope for residents suffering longstanding abuses of power from corrupt local officials often in collusion with businessmen.

Guangdong province has seen its share of unrest, from strikes to riots in Zengcheng over oppressive behavior against migrant workers. The province's prominent party boss, Wang Yang, must avoid serious policy mistakes damaging his prospects for promotion in a watershed leadership transition late this year.

By invoking the name of Wukan, Wanggang villagers believe they won a swifter response from edgy officials.

"They are forcing us to take this road," Li said, giving an interview in a Wanggang hotel room for fear of putting his family at risk of reprisals.

After the villagers threatened to turn Wanggang into a "second Wukan," a Guangzhou vice mayor, Xie Xiaodan, met them and swiftly promised a probe into alleged abuses.

"He said he'd give a clear and comprehensive account to us by February 19th," said another villager, also with the family name Li, speaking in the same hotel.

Despite their bravado, Wanggang is no Wukan.

Wukan's residents were in open revolt, expelling officials and police and barricading themselves in for 10 days until provincial government intervention brought an end to the siege.

Wangang appears less united, its residents split among numerous clans. Most are city dwellers holding urban jobs, less desperate to reclaim farmland for subsistence than those in Wukan.

"WUKAN CASE UNIQUE"

An aura of suspicion and fear also pervaded Wanggang's wet markets and alleys, a marked contrast from the intense solidarity in Wukan, where villagers ransacked government offices and police stations, detained party officials and barricaded the village against riot police.

For Wukan, Wang Yang chose conciliation instead of brute force, sending a key deputy to intervene and offer concessions on seized land. In a remarkable twist, the rebel village leader Lin Zuluan, 65, was later named party secretary of Wukan.

"In terms of society, the public's awareness of democracy, equality and rights is constantly strengthening, and their corresponding demands are growing," Zhu told officials recently during a meeting about preserving social stability, the official Guangzhou Daily newspaper reported.

Despite the softer approach, some experts say Wukan will not change China's iron-fisted approach to dissent, deeply embedded in the Communist Party's control-obsessed psyche.

"The fact that Wang Yang decided to use more conciliatory methods regarding Wukan doesn't mean a change of policy on the part of Beijing, nor does it mean that leaders in other provinces will follow," said Willy Lam, an academic and veteran China watcher in Hong Kong.

"So far, it's been restricted to Guangdong ... The Wukan case is quite unique. The leaders of other provinces cannot afford to allow the Wukan case to become a sort of a model because this will damage the authority of the party, this will encourage more people to be bolder and this is something they cannot afford to allow to happen."

INTIMIDATION, STRUGGLE

China's economic transformation has brought growing income disparity and a heightened risk of unrest and underlying rural strains show little sign of easing. Villagers often harbor scant faith in the courts, and barely disguise scorn towards the ability of the police to uphold justice.

Chinese experts put the number of "mass incidents," a euphemism for protests, at about 90,000 a year in recent years. Premier Wen Jiabao has repeatedly stressed the need for better farmer's land rights protection and collective income distribution.

On the outskirts of Wanggang, villagers showed how once verdant farmland, bursting with rice and crops, had become a giant dumpsite for construction waste.

To the north, beyond a stinking stream, a sprawling train repair depot had been built on village land, serving Guangzhou's underground mass transit railway.

Much of their ire is directed at Li Zhihang, a former soldier in his mid-thirties who became village chief in 2009. Five villagers interviewed by Reuters said he had misused his powers to lease off collective land for commercial and dumping use, siphoning off millions of yuan of proceeds.

"He allowed all these trucks to come and dump this earth that has covered our farmland. We couldn't stop him," spat an elderly farmer harvesting celery from a small lot surrounded by four-meter (12-foot) high mounds of earth and rubble.

Wanggang residents said they sued and petitioned provincial officials to intervene in vain. They said Li had a strong patronage network and a band of hired thugs from northern China, which have cast a pall of fear and intimidation over the area.

"Don't talk to me, I don't want to be beaten," said an elderly shopkeeper squinting into a television in a corner store on a road lined with small factories making shoes and handbags.

Attempts to contact Li for a comment were unsuccessful, while sources said he had not recently been seen in the village.

It remains to be seen if the Wukan siege will have lasting resonance beyond an isolated village incident. But soon after the truce was brokered in December, protesters in Haimen, a town

down the coast, invoked Wukan as a model of defiance as they clashed with riot police over a proposed new power plant.

The legacy of Wukan still echoes quietly in other villages around Wanggang. A man surnamed Huang in Luogang village complained about officials bragging about their new cars, as he dug up taro roots and spring onions in a rubbish-strewn field.

"We want to be like Wukan, all the villagers here do," said the elderly man, dressed in a black sports jacket and rolled up trousers as he squelched through the muck barefoot.

"It's very encouraging, we hope everywhere can fight back and beat the corrupt officials."

($1 = 6.3167 Chinese yuan)

(Editing by Brian Rhoads and Ron Popeski)

Source: http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/rss/asia/*http%3A//news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20120123/wl_nm/us_china_village_unrest

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China braces for Year of the Dragon travel rush

By David Lom

?

As hundreds of millions of Chinese head home to celebrate the New Year with their families, the country's transportation system is struggling to accomodate nearly 3.2 billion passenger trips.

BEIJING ? It?s as if the entire population of the United States took to the road several times over. During China?s ?chunyun? or Spring Festival travel season, the 40-day period that began earlier this month, more than 3.2 billion passenger-trips will tax the country?s transportation system in what is thought to be the world's largest human migration ever.


On the Chinese lunar calendar, 2012 will be the Year of the Dragon, which is of special importance to the Chinese.? As legend goes, the Chinese consider themselves descendants of the dragon, the only mythic creature in the Chinese 12-animal zodiac.

According to age-old tradition, the festival to greet the Chinese New Year that begins on Monday is a time for family reunions. Since millions of Chinese are migrant workers who spend most of the year separated from their families working hundreds of miles from home, the New Year holiday is the often the one time they go home.

About a quarter billion travelers will load onto China?s over-burdened rail network.? Despite a new online ticketing system and hotlines, many have complained of difficulties and delays in buying train tickets.? Still, for many Chinese, the ticketing problems and prospect of long ride in crowded condition are small price to pay for the once-in-a-year family reunions.

Watch NBC News? David Lom report from the scene above.

Source: http://behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/20/10199312-china-braces-for-year-of-the-dragon-travel-rush

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Monkey long believed extinct found in Indonesia

In this undated photo released by Ethical Expeditions, Miller's Grizzled Langurs sit on a tree branch in Wehea forest in eastern Borneo, Indonesia. Scientists working in the dense jungles of Borneo have rediscovered the large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct. (AP Photo/Ethical Expeditions, Eric Fell) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES

In this undated photo released by Ethical Expeditions, Miller's Grizzled Langurs sit on a tree branch in Wehea forest in eastern Borneo, Indonesia. Scientists working in the dense jungles of Borneo have rediscovered the large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct. (AP Photo/Ethical Expeditions, Eric Fell) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES

In this undated photo released by Ethical Expeditions, a Miller's Grizzled Langur sits on the forest floor in Wehea forest in eastern Borneo, Indonesia. Scientists working in the dense jungles of Borneo have rediscovered the large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct. (AP Photo/Ethical Expeditions, Eric Fell) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES

In this undated photo released by Ethical Expeditions, a Miller's Grizzled Langur sits on a tree branch in Wehea forest in eastern Borneo, Indonesia. Scientists working in the dense jungles of Borneo have rediscovered the large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct. (AP Photo/Ethical Expeditions, Eric Fell) MANDATORY CREDIT, NO SALES

JAKARTA, Indonesia (AP) ? Scientists working in the dense jungles of Indonesia have "rediscovered" a large, gray monkey so rare it was believed by many to be extinct.

They were all the more baffled to find the Miller's Grizzled Langur ? its black face framed by a fluffy, Dracula-esque white collar ? in an area well outside its previously recorded home range.

The team set up camera traps in the Wehea Forest on the eastern tip of Borneo island in June, hoping to captures images of clouded leopards, orangutans and other wildlife known to congregate at several mineral salt licks.

The pictures that came back caught them all by surprise: groups of monkeys none had ever seen.

With virtually no photographs of the grizzled langurs in existence, it at first was a challenge to confirm their suspicions, said Brent Loken, a Ph.D. student at Simon Fraser University in Canada, and one of the lead researchers.

The only images out there were museum sketches.

"We were all pretty ecstatic, the fact that, wow, this monkey still lives, and also that it's in Wehea," said Loken.

The monkey, which has hooded eyes and a pinkish nose and lips, once roamed the northeastern part of Borneo, as well as the islands of Sumatra and Java and the Thai-Malay peninsula. But concerns were voiced several years ago that they may be extinct.

Forests where the monkeys once lived had been destroyed by fires, human encroachment and conversion of land for agriculture and mining and an extensive field survey in 2005 turned up empty.

"For me the discovery of this monkey is representative of so many species in Indonesia," Loken told The Associated Press by telephone.

"There are so many animals we know so little about and their home ranges are disappearing so quickly," he said. "It feels like a lot of these animals are going to quickly enter extinction."

The next step will be returning to the 90,000 acre (38,000 hectare) forest to try to find out how many grizzly langurs there are, according to the team of local and international scientists, who published their findings in the American Journal of Primatology on Friday.

They appear in more than 4,000 images captured over a two-month period, said Loken, but it's possible one or two families kept returning.

"We are trying to find out all we can," he said. "But it really feels like a race against time."

Experts not involved in the study were hugely encouraged.

"It's indeed a highly enigmatic species," said Erik Meijaard, a conservation scientist who spent more than eight years doing field research in the area.

In the past they were hunted to near extinction for their meat and bezoar "stones," he said, which can, on occasion, be found in their guts.

Bezoars, as Harry Potter fans know from lectures given by Prof. Snape to first year students, are believed by some to neutralize poison.

Meijaard said the animal has long been considered a subspecies of the Hose's Leaf Monkey, which also occurs on the Malaysian side of Borneo, but it now looks like that may not be the case.

"We think it might actually be a distinct species," he said, "which would make the Wehea discovery even more important."

Associated Press

Source: http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/b2f0ca3a594644ee9e50a8ec4ce2d6de/Article_2012-01-20-AS-Indonesia-Extinct-Monkey/id-0b9926eaa31c48199b3a52e1cd37a608

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