Ralph the bald penguin gets a wetsuit

A bald penguin has been given a specially-designed wetsuit to help protect him from the risk of sunburn.

Penguins moult every year, which usually takes between four to six weeks to complete. However, Ralph, a nine year old Humboldt penguin, lost all of his feathers in one day, exposing his pale pink skin to the sun. The wetsuit will protect Ralph’s sensitive skin until his new feathers have grown through, which his keepers think will take another two to three weeks.

Ralph’s keepers made the wetsuit out of the leg of an adult wetsuit donated by a member of our staff. The stretchy material lets Ralph move around normally, and after a few minutes adjusting he was happily back to swimming around in the penguin pool.

David Schofield, Head Keeper for the penguins said: “At first the other penguins were curious but it wasn’t long before they recognised and accepted Ralph again. He doesn’t seem to mind the wetsuit and is able to swim and move around normally. It was quite easy to fit and we were able to customise it by creating the extra openings for his flippers once he was in it.”

Humboldt penguins live along the coats of Peru and Chile within the reaches of Humboldt Current, a cold current of water running from the Antarctic to the equator, from which they take their name. Humboldt penguins are thought to be declining in number, possibly due to El Nino increasing water temperatures and reducing food supply.

 

 http://www.marwell.org.uk/

 

Last month, we began testing new versions of Search with a small group of people on Facebook. Based on the success of those tests, we're rolling out a new version of Search to everyone on the site beginning today.
You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people's profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.
To search for a particular term, just enter your query in the search box in the upper-right corner of any page. Once you're taken to the search results, use the filters on the left-hand side of the page to view only posts by friends or posts by everyone. If you're searching for a specific person, Page, group or application, you also can filter by those results. By being able to search more types of content that are being shared on the site, you can easily find out your friends' evening plans and recently frequented restaurants by searching for "dinner," discover which of your friends are following Michael Schumacher's comeback during the "Formula 1" season by searching for the race series, or query "economy" to see if people or your favorite news sources feel that the recession is turning around. You also can search for a company or product to learn what people are saying about that brand.

 

 http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=115469877130

The social networking giant has taken major steps into the increasingly pivotal realtime search market this week by launching a completely overhauled search engine and sealing the $50m acquisition of FriendFeed.

"You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan," said Facebook engineering manager Akhil Wable. "If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people's profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications."

Combine this with the addition of FriendFeed, an online content sharing service, and you create in one fell swoop a realtime search and content sharing platform that covers 250m Facebook users - a sizeable segment of the online community.

Now factor in the growing trend amongst web users to filter Internet information by friend recommendations and discussion forums and you suddenly create a far more structured and inviting search sandbox than the daunting open space of a Google search box. After all, with Facebook you are searching within content that has already been filtered for you by people you know/once met at a bus stop for five minutes and never talked to again. Yes, these are tiny baby steps and numerous holes to plug, but the core theory is solid. After all, if Google can challenge Microsoft by building through the (then) backdoor of search, could Facebook challenge Google by building through our friends and colleagues?

 

 http://www.trustedreviews.com/software/news/2009/08/11/Facebook-Seals--50m-FriendFeed-Deal--Enters-Realtime-Search/p1

Tweetboard is True Twitter Conversation for your website.

 

Test out our new TWEETBOARD                  It's on the left hand side of the page

Tweetboard is a fun and engaging micro-forum type application for your website. It pulls your Twitter stream in near real-time (max 1 min delay), reformatting tweets into threaded conversations with unlimited nesting. Conversations that spun off the original conversation are also threaded in-line, giving your site visitors full perspective of what's being discussed.

Tweetboard is also a powerful viral tool that engages your website visitors. Each time someone posts (or replies) via your board, a link back to the corresponding conversation is appended to their tweet, creating a viral stream of Twitter traffic to your website.

With less than nine hours to go the top bid on a queen sized bed with a free grand old home and guesthouse attached in Westport has reached $277,000.

A Westport couple are selling the six-bedroom historical home on TradeMe - under the beds category - with a reserve of $1.

Owners Wayne Saggers and Kathy Wahrlich said they were dead serious about selling their Derby Street home.

The house, known as the Stone House, has a QV of $300,000 and is listed with a real estate agency at $370,000. The couple put the house on TradeMe on June 25.

It was listed as a queen sized bed with a free grand old home and guesthouse attached.

The auction closes at 6:24pm today.

This morning 290 bids had been placed.

At the time of listing Mr Saggers said the house had already been on the market for six months.

"Everybody who's put offers on it never had any finance. And we just got sick of waiting and waiting, so we decided to take the plunge. We're just getting to the stage where we want to get out so we thought, well, we'll do it. You can either say big balls or stupid - or both."

The couple agreed it was a risk but said there was no turning back.

"If it [the price] stayed at $20 we would have to sell it at $20. I think we are pretty honourable people and we would have to do it. So we've taken a gamble."

The couple have a mortgage on the house but said if the auction did not pay it off family would help them cover it. The buyer of the property would be bound to a six-month rental agreement with a contracting company.