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If you have no knowledge of how the Earth and Sun and Moon move, an eclipse is a scary thing. With no warning, the Sun goes black and your world turns dark. An eclipse, however, is really just the shadow of the Moon passing over the Earth, as seen in the above photo (a NASA image taken by an astronaut on the International Space Station). But the phenomenon still hasn’t lost all of its magic in modern times; there are people who chase them across the globe. They can do so because solar eclipses are now completely and easily predictable.

The first predicted eclipse ended a war. On this day in 585 B.C., after five years of battle in Asia Minor, the Lydians and Medians stopped fighting when the Moon eclipsed the Sun, according to the Greek historian Herodotus. Solar eclipses had been recorded prior to this, but the one in 585 (though it may have been 610 B.C., depending on which historian you ask) was the first to be predicted, by Greek philosopher Thales of Milete.

Some call the 585 eclipse the “birth of science,” which would make science 2,595 years old today. Happy birthday, science!

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For the first time, scientists have tracked the movements of tropical orchid bees using radio-transmitters. The bees, studied at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, fly up to 3 miles from their home areas and patrol up to 285 acres of rainforest in their hunt for food and mates.

Orchid bees congregate on a scented stick in Panama, photo by Brendan Borrell

Just thinking about orchid bees brings back the minty odor of methyl salicylate and the cinnamon scent of eugenol, fumes of which I inhaled nearly every day during my PhD research. Male orchid bees collect scents from the specialized orchids they pollinate, and an old tropical “magic trick” is to set out filter paper loaded with the gunk and watch these metallic bees appear. The bees likely harvest the scents for mating, but no one knows for sure. What scientists do know is these bees fly really fast and really far.

In one failed attempt to study the movements of orchid bees, my intrepid assistant Matt Medeiros balanced himself on the prow of our motorboat holding an airspeed gauge in one hand and a butterfly net in the other. The goal was to measure their flight speeds as they raced across the Panama canal. We could have used more horsepower. Our success rate was less than impressive.

Even then, I remember there was talk of attaching radio transmitters on bees. Martin Wikelski of the Max Planck Institute of Ornithology in Germany had set up a series of radio towers on Barro Colorado Island, which Megan Gambino recently wrote about for Smithsonian.com. The towers have allowed monkey, sloth, and frog researchers automatically track their research subjects, but back in 2002 radio-tracking insects still sounded pretty far-fetched. Then, in 2007, a graduate student Alex Eaton-Mordas of the University of Arizona at Tucson, told me it finally happened. He went to Panama that March, attached transmitters on the biggest bees, and managed to get up to 10 days’ worth of data. For technical reasons, they had to track them with hand-held and helicopter-mounted antennas.

The study has now been published in the journal PLoS one and there’s even video. The study demonstrates once and for all that male bees are not “vagabonds,” as one tropical ecologist has suggested, but they maintain a home area they retire to at night. It’s a nice coup, but the transmitters are still on the heavy side, weighing about half as much as the insects. The bees can normally carry that much nectar, but it definitely slows them down.

Brendan Borrell will be guest blogging this month. He lives in New York and writes about science and the environment; for Smithsonian magazine and Smithsonian.com, he has covered the ecology of chili peppers, diamonds in Arkansas and the world’s most dangerous bird.

Bonobo Handshake, by Vanessa Woods

I once told a friend about bonobos—”they’re like chimpanzees,” I said, “but they’re peaceful and have sex all the time”—and he thought I was making them up. My computer doesn’t think they exist either; it suggests alternative spellings including “bonbons” and “bongos.” Bonobos are our closest living primate cousins (along with chimpanzees), sharing 98.7 percent of their DNA with us, but most people don’t know anything about them.

Chimpanzees have been studied longer and there are more of them: Bonobos weren’t discovered until 1933, 150 years after their better-known cousins. And there are only some 10,ooo to 40,000 bonobos in the wild (about one-tenth the chimpanzee population), all in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which makes them more endangered than chimps. Bonobos have also lacked a Jane Goodall or a Dian Fossey to champion their cause, and there are few books about them.

Now there is a new book, Bonobo Handshake, by Vanessa Woods. Woods mixes bonobo science with her own personal tale. She meets, falls in love with (and later marries) a young primatologist, Brian Hare, and follows him to Congo, one of the most dangerous places on the planet (the U.S. State Department warns of armed rebels, kidnappings and deadly diseases). They go to Lola Ya Bonobo, a sanctuary for young bonobos orphaned by the bushmeat trade or rescued from being pets. Hare was there to learn more about the bonobos and discover how they differed from their chimpanzee cousins. Woods, a journalist, was just along for the ride at first but she was quickly drafted as research assistant to Hare when it turned out that the bonobos trusted only women.

The story follows Woods and Hare through research experiments, moves from country to country and even during marital spats. Woods eventually finds her purpose: saving the bonobos. She helps to care for the sanctuary’s orphans. She works with the organization, Friends of the Bonobos, that runs Lola. And she eventually becomes a research scientist in her own right.

Woods’ tale is interspersed with plenty of information about bonobos and how they interact with each other. Bonobos easily share and cooperate, unlike chimpanzees. They like to eat slowly and love sugarcane. They are afraid of doors. Despite their peaceful nature, they can still be mean or jealous or violent. Young bonobos can be very fragile. And yes, they really do have sex all the time, though not as often in the wild as in a zoo.

The book also details the (so far mostly successful) attempt to reintroduce the rescued bonobos back into the wild, an incredible feat in a country torn by violence. (Woods gives one of the best accounts I’ve read of Congo’s history and the effect of that violence on the people who live there.) Last June, nine bonobos were transferred to a site near the village of Basankusu. The local people work as trackers and administrative staff. The bonobos have brought jobs, schools and a clinic to the villagers.

It’s easy to look at a country like Congo and wonder whether the money spent on cute furry primates would be better put to use on food or medicine for an impoverished population. But saving wildlife can have benefits for the local people, too, as evidenced by the bonobo reintroduction. And the bonobos may have even more important lessons for us. Scientists keep trying to answer the question of what makes us human. They look to our own species, of course, and to our ancestors and our primate relatives. “Most of the time, bonobos have no hunger, no violence, no poverty. And for all of our intelligence, all of our things, bonobos have the most important of all possessions—peace,” Woods writes. “If we lose bonobos, we will never learn their secret. And even more tragically, because they share so much of what makes us human, we will never understand ourselves.”

Mangrove forest, courtesy of Flickr user peyri

There’s nothing that conservationists would like better than proving that protecting nature is good for people too, which is one reason why I try to remain skeptical about such claims. After all, when you fence in forests and wildlife, you’re eliminating an important source of income, food and land for locals. In addition, protected areas are often located in the most impoverished areas, where communities have little chance of opposing pressure for conservation.

But a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides some powerful new evidence that protected areas in Costa Rica and Thailand have boosted livelihoods. Although people near protected areas are still less well-off than the rest of the country, researchers found this had more to do with confounding variables such as forest cover, land productivity and access to transportation, which influenced both the placement of parks and the livelihood of residents. After removing those effects, the researchers found that the presence of parks reduced poverty in Costa Rica and Thailand by 10 percent and 30 percent, respectively.

The new study isn’t the only evidence that conservation is good for the economy. In the current issue of Nature Conservancy magazine, I examined the value of mangrove forests to local communities. Off the Gulf of California in Mexico, for instance, fishermen living near the biggest mangroves reel in the most fish and crab. Specifically, each acre of mangrove brought in about $15,000 per year in seafood, a dollar amount 200 times higher than the forest’s timber value.

Mangroves also save lives. Their spidery roots can reduce the force of waves pummeling the land during severe storms. Saudamini Das, an economist with India’s Institute of Economic Growth, estimates that mangroves saved nearly 20,000 lives during the 1999 Orissa Cyclone in the Indian Ocean.

On the other hand, not every ecosystem will have as many tangible benefits as mangroves, and not every country can be Costa Rica, which has set aside a quarter of its land for conservation. As the Nature Conservancy’s chief scientist, Peter Kareiva, puts it, “Quantifying ecosystem services will not protect all of the nature you want to protect, but it will generate public support for an awful lot of conservation.”

Brendan Borrell will be guest blogging this month. He lives in New York and writes about science and the environment; for Smithsonian magazine and Smithsonian.com, he has covered the ecology of chili peppers, diamonds in Arkansas and the world’s most dangerous bird.

Bangladeshi women filter water through sari cloth (courtesy University of Maryland)

Water is something that’s easy to take for granted, especially in a developed country where the taps run clean and clear. But the story is very different in the rest of the world, where nearly one billion individuals lack access to clean and safe water, and women and children can spend hours each day toting gallons of liquid from source to home.

Sometimes the solutions are simple, though. Back in 2003, University of Maryland microbiologist Rita Colwell and her colleagues reported that teaching women in villages in Bangladesh to filter water through folded sari cloth reduced the incidence of cholera by 48 percent. Cholera is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae, which attaches itself to the gut of a tiny zooplankton that lives in standing freshwater. Untreated, the disease kills 60 to 80 percent of those infected and is especially hard on the elderly and children younger than 5. The sari fabric filters out the zooplankton and reduces exposure to the bacteria.

But what happened after the researchers left and the village women stopped getting lessons and reminders on water filtration? A new study, published in mBio, answers that question.

The researchers returned to Bangladesh and surveyed 7,000 women who had participated in the study five years earlier. The scientists found that 31 percent of the women continued to filter their water and that 60 percent of those women used sari cloth. In addition, 26 percent of women who had been in the control group and not received any education about water filtration were now filtering their water. Fewer people were hospitalized for cholera over those five years, and even households that did not filter their water had a lower incidence of the disease if they lived among many people who had continued the practice.

But many of the women who used the sari filters used less than four layers of cloth, which could reduce their effectiveness. And the researchers witnessed only a few women actually using the sari cloth during the hours of observation in the follow-up study.

So, although the method works and many of the villagers continued to use it without reminders, Colwell suggests that “active reinforcement” would likely be needed to ensure the higher protection level seen in the earlier pilot study.