Supply glitch could delay mini iPad
NEW YORK, Oct. 4 (UPI) -- Apple's highly-anticipated "iPad mini" is four- to six weeks behind its production schedule due to manufacturing issues faced by suppliers, an analyst says.
"Similar to the iPhone 5, we sensed that suppliers have found the specs around Apple's 7.85-inch 'iPad Mini' to be a challenge and yields have been frustrating," Brian White, supply chain analyst for Topeka Capital Markets, said in a note posted Thursday.
Apple is expected to announce the iPad mini at a special event this month, with recent rumors having invitations for the event distributed Oct. 10 for an event to be held one week later, macobserver.com reported.
White said the supply problems could result in a relatively small 5 to 7 million units sold in the December quarter.
"We believe that supply constraints will initially hold back the full sales potential during the first month or so of the launch," he wrote.
However, even at an expected price in the $250 to $300 range, higher than similar offerings from Amazon and Google, the smaller iPad will share the "iconic aesthetics" of its larger sibling and would "blow away" competing products, White predicted.
Study: Wetlands drove birth of cities
COLUMBIA, S.C., Oct. 4 (UPI) -- Natural wetlands rather than irrigated fields are the fertile ground from which cities first emerged in Mesopotamia, a scientist doing research in Iraq says.
Wetlands are vital to a sustainable urban environment and the conventional wisdom about irrigation and city-building is backward, said archaeologist and anthropologist Jennifer Pournelle of the University of South Carolina..
"In most people's heads -- archaeologists, ecologists, environmental scientists -- there's the idea that cities happen because somebody invented and managed irrigation," Pournelle said.
"My argument is, 'No -- irrigation is what happened because you had cities but the marshlands were moving away from them,'" she said in a university release Thursday.
"That's what marshes do. Deltas build up, river mouths migrate, and the marshes go with them. The city's stuck where it is, so it has to start irrigating to raise crop production and replace all of the marshland resources that have moved too far away."
Pournelle, who has conducted wetlands investigations in southern Iraq, said more research is needed to establish the relation between natural marshes, irrigation, and the historical beginning and end of city occupation.
"If I can show that this model is durably true, then we need to start paying very serious attention to any city when we start depriving it of its wetlands," Pournelle said. "Things might not be immediately apparent on the scale of 10 to 20 years, but [would be] on a scale of 50, 100, 500, or 1,000 years."
Boy finds woolly mammoth carcass in Siberia
MOSCOW, Oct. 4 (UPI) -- An 11-year-old boy in Russia has discovered the almost-complete 30,000-year-old carcass of a woolly mammoth, Russian media reported.
Yevgeny Salinder found the 1,100-pound mammoth in the tundra of the Taymyr peninsula in northern Russia, Moscow News said.
Scientists using axes and steam hoses worked for a week to dig it out of the permafrost it's been encased in for centuries.
Woolly mammoths have been found in the permafrost in Siberia since at least 1929, but this is one of the best preserved with tusks, mouth and rib cage almost completely intact, NewScientist.com reported.
The mammoth is informally being called Zhenya, Yevgeny's nickname, but is officially the Sopkarga mammoth.
Paleontologists in Moscow and St. Petersburg plan to study the mammoth before it is returned to the Taymyr Natural History Museum for permanent display.
Giant spiders to be released in Britain
LONDON, Oct. 4 (UPI) -- British scientists say they've raised thousands of the country's largest spiders in preparation for reintroduction to their former stronghold in the southeast.
With a leg span of more than 3 inches, the great raft spider Dolomedes plantarius is one of Britain's largest arachnids.
Scientists said people should not be concerned about plans to release spiders into the wild, as they only live in wetlands and very few survive there currently.
A number of British zoos and wildlife facilities have been raising baby raft spiders, so named for their ability to glide across the surface of lakes and rivers in search of prey.
Ecologist Helen Smith said the project's intention is not to flood the wetlands with giant spiders, merely to repair the damage already done through habitat loss from agricultural drainage that dramatically altered the landscape in the 20th century.
"Most invertebrate groups don't receive a lot of conservation effort," Smith told the BBC. "The ones that tend to receive the attention are the big and spectacular ones. ... This is very much the case with [great raft spiders].
"They're big, they're beautiful and they have to fly the flag for other species."
