Short science bits

Just a couple of short science bits for today:

Bird Songs Change with the Landscape

"When the going gets rough, the tough apparently sing slower. As vegetation reclaimed formerly cleared land in California, Oregon and Washington over the last 35 years, male white-crowned sparrows have lowered their pitch and slowed down their singing so that their love songs would carry better through heavier foliage. "This is the first time that anyone has shown that bird songs can shift with rapid changes in habitat," says biologist Elizabeth Derryberry who made the finding as part of her dissertation research at Duke University.

She compared recordings of individual birds in 15 different areas with some nearly forgotten recordings made at the same spots in the 1970s by a California Academy of Sciences researcher, and found that the musical pitch and speed of the trill portion of the sparrows' short songs had dropped considerably."

COOL!

And since we're speaking of monitoring foliage:

Key NPOESS Sensor Starts Thermal Vacuum Testing

"The Visible Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS) flight unit was placed in a thermal vacuum chamber, where it will be subject to the extreme hot and cold cycles typical of the space environment to determine its flight worthiness. Thermal vacuum testing will be conducted over nearly 100 days to ensure the sensor will operate in space as designed. ...... "VIIRS will collect data on atmospheric conditions, Earth radiation, ocean color and surface temperature in nearly two dozen spectral bands, with high spatial resolution. VIIRS will produce operational data in color instead of black and white, enabling military and civilian users to distinctly see features such as aircraft contrails and dust storms that are challenging to detect with current sensors."

It's about time, considering that this program is already roughly $6-7 billion dollars over budget and somewhere around 3-5 years behind schedule. But who's counting?