Latest news with #Springer
Boston Globe
a day ago
- Science
- Boston Globe
Scientists in Barbados rediscover world's smallest-known snake
'After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,' said Blades, project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados. The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, allowing it to elude scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, Blades placed it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate, and leaf litter. Several hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the West Indies, Blades looked at the specimen. It wriggled in the petri dish, making it nearly impossible to identify. Advertisement 'It was a struggle,' Blades recalled, adding that he shot a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to a still image. It had pale yellow dorsal lines running through its body, and its eyes were located on the side of its head. 'I tried to keep a level head,' Blades recalled, knowing that the Barbados threadsnake looks very much like a Brahminy blind snake, best known as the flower pot snake, which is a bit longer and has no dorsal lines. On Wednesday, the Re:wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local environment ministry, announced the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake. 'Rediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant,' said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer for Re:wild, who helped rediscover the snake along with Blades. 'It reminds us that we still have something important left that plays an important role in our ecosystem.' Advertisement The Barbados threadsnake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 plant, animal, and fungi species that Re:wild described as 'lost to science.' The snake is blind, burrows in the ground, eats termites and ants, and lays one single, slender egg. Fully grown, it measures up to four inches or 10 centimeters. 'They're very cryptic,' Blades said. 'You can do a survey for a number of hours, and even if they are there, you may actually not see them.' But on March 20 at around 10:30 a.m., Blades and Springer surrounded a jack-in-the-box tree in central Barbados and started looking under rocks while the rest of the team began measuring the tree, whose distribution is very limited in Barbados. 'That's why the story is so exciting,' Springer said. 'It all happened around the same time.' S. Blair Hedges, a professor at Temple University and director of its center for biology, was the first to identify the Barbados threadsnake. Previously, it was mistakenly lumped in with another species. In 2008, Hedges' discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife. 'I spent days searching for them,' Hedges recalled. 'Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I turned over looking for this thing without success, I do think it is a rare species.' That was June 2006, and there were only three other such specimens known at the time: two at a London museum and a third at a museum collection in California that was wrongly identified as being from Antigua instead of Barbados, Hedges said. Advertisement Hedges said that he didn't realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis. 'The aha moment was in the laboratory,' he said, noting that the discovery established the Barbados threadsnake as the world's smallest-known snake. Hedges then became inundated for years with letters, photographs, and emails from people thinking they had found more Barbados threadsnakes. Some of the pictures were of earthworms, he recalled. 'It was literally years of distraction,' he said. Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat. A lot of endemic species on the tiny island have gone extinct, including the Barbados racer, the Barbados skink, and a particular species of cave shrimp. 'I hope they can get some interest in protecting it,' Hedges said. 'Barbados is kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least amount of original forest, outside of Haiti.'
a day ago
- Science
Scientists overturn hundreds of rocks to rediscover world's smallest-known snake
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world's smallest-known snake. Some scientists worried that maybe the Barbados threadsnake had become extinct, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted a rock in a tiny forest in the eastern Caribbean island and held his breath. 'After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,' said Blades, project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados. The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, so it was able to elude scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, Blades placed it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate and leaf litter. Several hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the West Indies, Blades looked at the specimen. It wriggled in the petri dish, making it nearly impossible to identify. 'It was a struggle,' Blades recalled, adding that he shot a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to a still image. It had pale yellow dorsal lines running through its body, and its eyes were located on the side of its head. 'I tried to keep a level head,' Blades recalled, knowing that the Barbados threadsnake looks very much like a Brahminy blind snake, best known as the flower pot snake, which is a bit longer and has no dorsal lines. On Wednesday, the Re:wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local environment ministry, announced the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake. 'Rediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant,' said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer for Re:wild who helped rediscover the snake along with Blades. 'It reminds us that we still have something important left that plays an important role in our ecosystem.' The Barbados threadsnake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 plant, animal and fungi species that Re:wild described as 'lost to science.' The snake is blind, burrows in the ground, eats termites and ants and lays one single, slender egg. Fully grown, it measures up to four inches (10 centimeters). 'They're very cryptic,' Blades said. 'You can do a survey for a number of hours, and even if they are there, you may actually not see them.' But on March 20 at around 10:30 a.m., Blades and Springer surrounded a jack-in-the-box tree in central Barbados and started looking under rocks while the rest of the team began measuring the tree, whose distribution is very limited in Barbados. 'That's why the story is so exciting,' Springer said. 'It all happened around the same time.' S. Blair Hedges, a professor at Temple University and director of its center for biology, was the first to identify the Barbados threadsnake. Previously, it was mistakenly lumped in with another species. In 2008, Hedges' discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife. 'I spent days searching for them,' Hedges recalled. 'Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I turned over looking for this thing without success, I do think it is a rare species.' That was June 2006, and there were only three other such specimens known at the time: two at a London museum and a third at a museum collection in California that was wrongly identified as being from Antigua instead of Barbados, Hedges said. Hedges said that he didn't realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis. 'The aha moment was in the laboratory,' he said, noting that the discovery established the Barbados threadsnake as the world's smallest-known snake. Hedges then became inundated for years with letters, photographs and emails from people thinking they had found more Barbados threadsnakes. Some of the pictures were of earthworms, he recalled. 'It was literally years of distraction,' he said. Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat. A lot of endemic species on the tiny island have gone extinct, including the Barbados racer, the Barbados skink and a particular species of cave shrimp. 'I hope they can get some interest in protecting it,' Hedges said. 'Barbados is kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least amount of original forest, outside of Haiti.'
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Science
- Winnipeg Free Press
Scientists in Barbados overturn hundreds of rocks to rediscover world's smallest-known snake
SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico (AP) — For nearly two decades, no one had spotted the world's smallest-known snake. Some scientists worried that maybe the Barbados threadsnake had become extinct, but one sunny morning, Connor Blades lifted a rock in a tiny forest in the eastern Caribbean island and held his breath. 'After a year of searching, you begin to get a little pessimistic,' said Blades, project officer with the Ministry of Environment in Barbados. The snake can fit comfortably on a coin, so it was able to elude scientists for almost 20 years. Too tiny to identify with the naked eye, Blades placed it in a small glass jar and added soil, substrate and leaf litter. Several hours later, in front of a microscope at the University of the West Indies, Blades looked at the specimen. It wriggled in the petri dish, making it nearly impossible to identify. 'It was a struggle,' Blades recalled, adding that he shot a video of the snake and finally identified it thanks to a still image. It had pale yellow dorsal lines running through its body, and its eyes were located on the side of its head. 'I tried to keep a level head,' Blades recalled, knowing that the Barbados threadsnake looks very much like a Brahminy blind snake, best known as the flower pot snake, which is a bit longer and has no dorsal lines. On Wednesday, the Re:wild conservation group, which is collaborating with the local environment ministry, announced the rediscovery of the Barbados threadsnake. 'Rediscovering one of our endemics on many levels is significant,' said Justin Springer, Caribbean program officer for Re:wild who helped rediscover the snake along with Blades. 'It reminds us that we still have something important left that plays an important role in our ecosystem.' The Barbados threadsnake has only been seen a handful of times since 1889. It was on a list of 4,800 plant, animal and fungi species that Re:wild described as 'lost to science.' The snake is blind, burrows in the ground, eats termites and ants and lays one single, slender egg. Fully grown, it measures up to four inches (10 centimeters). 'They're very cryptic,' Blades said. 'You can do a survey for a number of hours, and even if they are there, you may actually not see them.' But on March 20 at around 10:30 a.m., Blades and Springer surrounded a jack-in-the-box tree in central Barbados and started looking under rocks while the rest of the team began measuring the tree, whose distribution is very limited in Barbados. 'That's why the story is so exciting,' Springer said. 'It all happened around the same time.' S. Blair Hedges, a professor at Temple University and director of its center for biology, was the first to identify the Barbados threadsnake. Previously, it was mistakenly lumped in with another species. In 2008, Hedges' discovery was published in a scientific journal, with the snake baptized Tetracheilostoma carlae, in honor of his wife. 'I spent days searching for them,' Hedges recalled. 'Based on my observations and the hundreds of rocks, objects that I turned over looking for this thing without success, I do think it is a rare species.' That was June 2006, and there were only three other such specimens known at the time: two at a London museum and a third at a museum collection in California that was wrongly identified as being from Antigua instead of Barbados, Hedges said. Hedges said that he didn't realize he had collected a new species until he did a genetic analysis. 'The aha moment was in the laboratory,' he said, noting that the discovery established the Barbados threadsnake as the world's smallest-known snake. Hedges then became inundated for years with letters, photographs and emails from people thinking they had found more Barbados threadsnakes. Some of the pictures were of earthworms, he recalled. 'It was literally years of distraction,' he said. Scientists hope the rediscovery means that the Barbados threadsnake could become a champion for the protection of wildlife habitat. A lot of endemic species on the tiny island have gone extinct, including the Barbados racer, the Barbados skink and a particular species of cave shrimp. 'I hope they can get some interest in protecting it,' Hedges said. 'Barbados is kind of unique in the Caribbean for a bad reason: it has the least amount of original forest, outside of Haiti.'
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Business Insider
Inside the 12 hours it took for an awkward moment at a Coldplay concert to go viral
The Coldplay kiss cam video shows how fast someone's 15 seconds of fame can ricochet around the world. The clip caught a tech CEO and his head of HR embracing and led to the chief's resignation Here's a play-by-play of how the scandal unfolded — and why it caught so much attention. By now, we've all seen the Coldplay kiss cam fiasco. What happened in the hours and days afterward is a case study in how fast someone's 15 seconds of fame (or infamy) can truly ricochet around the world. A tech CEO and his HR head were caught embracing on the jumbotron at Gillette Stadium. They looked horrified and quickly untangled, with the woman turning away and the man dodging the camera. Front man Chris Martin suggested they could be having an affair. The fleeting moment — a fraction of a nightly segment during which Martin addresses various members of the audience — stuck with some concertgoers. In the early morning hours following the show, at least a few took to the internet to post about it. A Reddit user who said they attended the show asked if anyone else was wondering about the couple. One TikTok user said Martin had caught "a couple having an affair" at the show, and another said that they were "constantly refreshing the TikTok search in hopes that someone recorded the couple caught red-handed at the Coldplay concert tonight." They were in luck. Grace Springer, who had fewer than 15,000 TikTok followers at the time, had been recording in the hopes of landing on the jumbotron herself and capturing the moment. Shortly before 1 a.m. ET on Thursday, she posted a 15-second clip on TikTok captioned "trouble in paradise??" "In the moment when I filmed it, I didn't think much of it," Springer, who didn't respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, said during an interview on the British daytime program "This Morning." "But it wasn't until after the concert, where I was debriefing the moment with my friends, and I said, 'Let's review the footage, let's see if it really looks that bad.' And I think it does." Then the algorithm did its thing, pushing the video onto For You pages the world over. The TikTok spread like wildfire. It didn't take long for internet sleuths to identify the pair as Andy Byron, the then-CEO of tech upstart Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, Astronomer's head of HR. Their names came up in the comments of Springer's TikTok video, though it was unclear who was the first to recognize them because the platform doesn't display the timestamp of comments. By 3 a.m., two hours after Springer posted the video, people were starting to look them up by name, according to data from Google Trends, which monitors search volume. The story had changed from an awkward interaction to a corporate scandal. Soon, people all over the world — from Ireland to Singapore — would know their names. "It's really sort of as we're waking up into the day on the 17th, where we see it start to spread," Molly Dwyer, the head of insights for social media monitoring company Peak Metrics, told Business Insider. The amateur internet sleuths then deployed their talents to find the pair's social profiles and those of Byron's wife. Commenters began bombarding Byron and Cabot's profiles, as well as those of Astronomer, which had turned off the ability to comment on posts across channels by Thursday afternoon Meme accounts had a heyday. "That's sort of the bread and butter of clickbait content — laughing at people's poor decisions — and the fact that then it plays into an anti-corporate element just further fanned the flames," Dwyer said. He noted that there has been an uptick in interest in content that is opposed to CEOs. "It was sort of a perfect storm of things that are really viral on social media right now, all coming together." Storyful, a social-media research company, used ticket stubs and raw footage from Springer to corroborate she was at the concert, according to John Hall, an editor for the site. One by one, mainstream news organizations around the world started covering the story. The online chatter kicked into high gear later on Thursday. Peak Metrics tracked 30,000 X posts in the 11 a.m. hour. Byron's name had been Googled more than 2 million times by that afternoon, and more than $65,000 was traded on Polymarket about his chances of remaining as CEO and predictions about his marital status. Brands like Netflix and Nando's jumped in, posting reactions to the clip or commenting on Springer's videos on social media. Think pieces about the surveillance state, sachenfreude, corporate America, and Coldplay proliferated. The saga shows how quickly a single moment can take on a life of its own in the social media age — a lesson others have learned before. While it seemed everyone had something to say, the pair at the center of it all stayed silent. (A fake apology from Byron that quoted the Coldplay song "Fix You" spread on Thursday afternoon before the company said it wasn't real.) Astronomer, a then little-known data startup, broke the silence on Friday with a statement that said the board was investigating the matter. Later that day, Byron was placed on leave. By Saturday, he'd resigned, and one of the company's cofounders, Pete DeJoy, had taken his place. The company found a silver lining in the scandal. "The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies—let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world—ever encounter," DeJoy wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. "The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name." As with any viral moment, the attention was fleeting — and one that must've caught Coldplay off guard, too. "We'd like to say hello to some of you in the crowd," Martin said on Saturday, when the band took the stage for the first time since Wednesday's concert. Then a warning: "We're going to use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen. If you haven't done your makeup, do your makeup now."
The Star
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
Opinion: As the Coldplay kiss-cam couple fades into the bushes, here's what the Internet hath wrought
As the story of the Coldplay kiss-cam couple ducks out of camera range and into history, and we ride that dead horse into the sunset, let us take a moment to examine what the Internet hath wrought. First off, singer Chris Martin may have added a new riff to his concert script, post-kerfuffle, warning people at Saturday's Coldplay show in Wisconsin about the kiss-cam to come. Or has he? Folks on Reddit who seem to know many things say no, he definitely has not. The 'fan cam' – turns out it's not a kiss-cam at all, go figure – is a gimmick the band has been using for quite a while. Martin picks out some people in the crowd and spins up a little original song about them. '[T]hey've been doing this at their concerts for yearrrrrrrrrs . First time this has really happened,' one Redditor said. 'We'd like to say hello to some of you in the crowd. How we're gonna do that is we're gonna use our cameras and put some of you on the big screen,' Martin said Saturday, as seen in video taken at the show, which some may notice is followed by comments from many media outlets requesting permission to post the video. 'So please, if you haven't done your makeup,' Martin continued, 'do your makeup now.' Sounds like a fairly anodyne introduction that could easily be followed by, 'Oh, look at these two. All right, c'mon. You're OK. Oh, what? Either they're having an affair or they're just very shy.' But hey, that's been done , amirite? Grace Springer, the concertgoer who posted the video of the alleged cheaters in the first place, reassured viewers of a UK morning show that her TikTok was 'not monetised,' so she made exactly zero dollars from kicking off the dust-up. Then again, Springer is the same person who said, 'A part of me feels bad for turning these people's lives upside down, but, play stupid games … win stupid prizes,' so it would have been kinda perfect if she got rich off the viral moment. She also revealed on This Morning that the moment almost didn't happen, because she didn't think much of the video when she shot it, she said. 'It wasn't until after the concert, where I was debriefing with my friends and I said, 'Let's review the footage, let's see if it really looks that bad'. And I think it does,' Springer explained. So of course, she had to post it. Because of course, she did. Clearly, her friends should bear some of the blame. Someone get on that. Now, over at the Free Press , writer Kat Rosenfield had thoughts about all of this bad behaviour. 'It was a full-bore public shaming, imbued with an unhinged and vicious glee that we hadn't experienced since, well, the last time millions of strangers rallied to the cause of destroying someone's life – but magnified by the fact that everything and everyone involved was a standard menu item at the Things You Love to Hate buffet,' she wrote. 'Adultery. CEOs. HR representatives. Rich people with linen shirts and expensive highlights. Coldplay , for that matter.' And she was right. The guy tendered his resignation as chief exec at software development firm Astronomer, and the company announced it was launching an investigation into the situation. The original function of public shaming, she wrote, was to keep community bonds strong and hold people who would weaken them accountable. But, Rosenfield said, 'When we take joy in the distress and ruination of other people, we make monsters of ourselves,' in that the Internet has turned public shaming into a gleeful, global spectator sport. Excellent point. That said, the video really was entertaining. Irresistible, perhaps, if only because the man in question was married and the woman in question was his human resources subordinate who got caught breaking all the rules that are usually laid out by our friends in, well, human resources. That aside, Astronomer's interim chief executive, co-founder Pete DeJoy, did take a moment to put things in perspective for the business itself, which was somewhat of a non-player character in this twisted game. 'The events of the past few days have received a level of media attention that few companies – let alone startups in our small corner of the data and AI world – ever encounter,' DeJoy wrote Monday as part of a larger post on LinkedIn. 'The spotlight has been unusual and surreal for our team and, while I would never have wished for it to happen like this, Astronomer is now a household name.' A household name. We ask again – is it, really? The Internet jury remains out on that one. Also, speaking of human resources, remember Alyssa Stoddard, the senior director of HR that Astronomer felt compelled to announce as NOT at the concert with former chief exec Andy Byron and top HR honcho Kristin Cabot? That was because numerous stories were written claiming Stoddard was the 'other' woman on the kiss-cam/fan-cam/video, the one who was laughing and smiling and looking forward the entire time. Then there were stories saying that the first stories – some of which reportedly said she had been fired? – were mistaken. And it was all somehow blamed on a rumour that started on the social media platform now known by the very silly name X. 'As confirmed, I was not at the Coldplay concert on Wednesday night and I am not the brunette woman in the circulating videos. I am not involved in this,' Stoddard wrote on LinkedIn, sounding like she was neither laughing nor smiling. 'Being wrongly identified and then publicly harassed has been unnerving to say the least and incredibly difficult, both personally and professionally. 'I kindly ask that my privacy be respected, and that I be left out of this.' If only it were that easy, Ms. Stoddard. If only it were that easy. – Los Angeles Times/Tribune News Service
