Have you tasted Nigerian Foods before? If not, then, check this out.

Here are the names of the Foods:
1.)egg salads...... e.t.c( Nigerian-English foods)
2.)Different types of Nigerian rice recipes.
3.)Edikan ikon with fufu(ponded yam). This is a southern Nigerian food
4.)Egusi soup with fufu(pounded yam). Now, this my cultural and favorite food. The ethnic name for the food is [iyan].
5.)Coconut rice with fish stew and plantain. I love this food too.
You can go to http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://murphysplacedallas.com/images/Egusi%2520Soup%2520Fufu%2520(Pounded%2520Yam).jpg&imgrefurl=http://murphysplacedallas.com/menu.html&h=107&w=143&sz=152&tbnid=CLN0RUJfvioJ:&tbnh=107&tbnw=143&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpounded%2Byam&hl=en&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=1&ct=image&cd=2
for informations on how to prepare the food or the resturant that is serving the food. Guyz, you need to give this food a kiss!

Bomb Threat At Erasmus

There was a bomb threat at Erasmus Hall Campus on May 6, 2008. The building was evacuated for a few hours while students had to stand outside in the hot sun, until later moved to another school. Later they said everyone was safe to return to school but we had to go through scanning again which caused disturbance among students. People tried to force their way into the school. Well in the end everyone was safe.

Martin (S-16 All DAY BANNAZ)

NBA Playoffs 2008

The NBA playoffs have been going on for quite long. Every year teams from the East Coast faces teams from the West Coast and see who is the best. This year it has been fun. The Celtics, Cavaliers, Magic, and the Pistons are the teams who have a better chance to qualify in the Easy Coast. On the West Coast, the teams are the Lakers, Jazz, Hornets, and Spurs also have a better chance. Kobe Bryant just got an award for the Lakers Most Valuable Players of all times.

http://www.nba.com/playoffs2008/index.html

Rodney's Post

THIS IS LAGOS, NIGERIA

The city of Lagos lies in south-western Nigeria, on the Atlantic coast in the Gulf of Guinea, west of the Niger River delta, located on longitude 3° 24' E and latitude 6° 27' N. On this stretch of the high-rainfall West African coast, rivers flowing to the sea form swampy lagoons like Lagos Lagoon behind long coastal sand spits or sand bars. Some rivers, like Badagry Creek flow parallel to the coast for some distance before finding an exit through the sand bars to the sea.


One of the lagoons surrounding Lagos. The three major urban islands of Lagos in Lagos Lagoon are Lagos Island, Ikoyi, and Victoria. These islands are separated from the mainland by the main channel draining the lagoon into the Atlantic, which forms Lagos Harbour. The islands are separated from each other by creeks of varying sizes and are connected to Lagos Island by bridges. However the smaller sections of some creeks have been built over or filled in so today in places there is scarcely any water dividing Lagos Island and Ikoyi, or Victoria Island and Maroko.

You can go to: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagos to read more about lagos, with interesting pics.

WHAT ARE THE CAUSES OF MASS EXTINCTION?

In definition, extinction is the disappearance of an entire species. Over the last 50 years, about half of the world's tropical rain forests have been burned to make pasture and farmland or have been cut for timbers. Many thousands of square miles more will be destroyed this year. The people responsible, often poor farmers, view the forests lands as a resource to be developed, much as American view North American forests as a century ago.

The problem is that as the rain forests disappear, so do their inhabitants. No one knows how many species are being lost. To find out, scientists carefully cataloged all of the residents of one small segments of forest and then extrapolate their data. That is, scientists use what they know to predict what they do not know.


The resulting estimates vary widely, but it is clear that Earth is losing many species. Some 10 percent of well-known species teeter on the brink of extinctions. Worst-case estimates are that we will lose up to one-fifth of the world's species of plants and animals-about 1 million species-during the next fifty years. An extinction of this size has not occurred in at least 65 million years, since the end of the age of the dinosaurs.

The tragedy of extinction is that as species disappear, so do our chances to learn about them and their possible benefits. This situation is comparable to burning library before reading the books-we lose forever the knowledge that we have might gained. For example, two potent anticancer drugs have been isolated from the rosy periwinkle, a flower that occurs naturally only on Madagascar, an island being devastated by deforestation.

Any the time the rate of individuals within a species is greater than the birth rate, extinction is a possibility. Generally, extinction occurs when the environment changes. Temperature change; sea levels rise and fall. Grasslands become deserts; clear lakes become polluted. The variation of organisms within a species will survive the changing environments,
the species will become extinct.

The fossil record shows that throughout geological time, millions of species have evolved, survived for a while, then failed to adapt successfully, and finally became extinct. It is a surprisingly common process. In fact, from the number of fossils of extinct organisms found, it is apparent that a majority of the species that ever lived on Earth is now extinct.

Extinctions of species can also be caused by the introduction of nonnative species. Some species move from one ecosystems to another on their own. Animals may migrate to new areas, and seed can be varied by wind or water to different places. Even humans can influence the spread of nonnative species to other ecosystems, sometimes accidentally and sometimes on purpose.

Starlings, for instance, were purposely brought to the United States. In the 1800s, a few dozen European starlings were released in New York City. The birds rapidly multiplied , and today there are millions of them across the United States.

Both starlings and native North American bluebirds nest in holes in tree trunks and fence posts. As a result, the two species compete for shelter. The bluebirds nearly lost the battle. Concerned citizens launched a multi state effort to build and distribute bird boxes. These boxes, specially designed with small entrances, provided nesting nesting places for the blue birds and kept larger starlings out.

In conclusion, in its new environment, the nonnative species may have no natural enemies to keep its numbers in check. As a result, its members can quickly multiply and take over an ecosystem. The new competing species may wipe out an existing native species and cause changes in the ecosystem.

Source:http://www.helium.com/items/898067-definition-extinction-disappearance-entire

EVIDENCE OF EVOLUTION

FOSSIL RECORD
Have you ever looked at a series of maps that show how a city has grown? Buildings and streets are added, changed, or destroyed as the years pass by. In the same way, fossils of animals show a pattern from early ancestors to modern descendants. Fossils offer the most direct evidence that evolution takes place. Recall that a fossil is the preserved or mineralized remains or imprint of an organism that lived long ago. Fossils, therefore, provide an actual record of Earth's past life forms. Change over time(evolution) can be seen in the fossil record. Fossilized species found in older rocks are different from those found in newer rock, as we all know, fossils of early multicellular life forms, such as the crinnoid, occur in 800-million-year-old rocks found in Indiana. Fossils of the pterodactyl, an extinct reptile, occur in 140-to 210-million-year-old rocks.

After observing such differences, Darwin predicted that intermediate form between the great groups of organisms would eventually be found. Since Darwin's time, some of these intermediates have been found, while others have not. For example, fossil intermediaries have been found between fishes and amphibians, between reptiles and mammals, adding valuable evidence about the fossil history of the vertebrates.

Today, Darwin's theory is almost universally accepted by scientists as the best available explanation for the biological diversity on Earth. Based on a large body of supporting evidence, most scientists agree on the following three major points:

1. Earth is about 4.5 billion years old.
2. Organisms have inhabited Earth for most of its history.
3. All organisms living today share common ancestry with earlier, simpler life-forms.

FORMATION OF FOSSILS
The fossil record, and Thus the record of he evolution of life, is not complete. Many species have lived in the environments where fossils do not form. Most fossils form when organisms and traces of organisms are rapidly buried in fine sediments deposited by water, wind, or volcanic eruptions. The environments that are most likely to cause fossil formation are wet lowlands, slow-moving streams, lakes, shallow seas and areas near volcanoes that spew out volcanic ash. The chances that organisms living in upland forests, mountains, grassland, or deserts will die in just the right place to be buried in sediments and fossilized are very low. Even if an organisms lives in environment where fossils can form, the chances are slim that its dead body will be buried in sediments before it decays. For example, it is very likely to be eaten and scattered by scavengers.

Furthermore, the bodies of some organisms decay faster than others do. For example, an animal with a hard exoskeleton(such as a crab) would have a better chance of becoming fossilized than would a soft-bodied organisms, such as an earthworm.
Although the fossils record will never be complete, it presents Strong evidence that evolution has taken place. When a fossils is discovered, paleontologists(scientists who study fossils) analyze the sediments around it.

By radiometric dating certain types of rocks and minerals in those sediments, paleontologists can arrange the fossils in order from oldest to youngest. When this is done, orderly patterns of evolution can been seen. Based on existing fossils, Whales are thought to have evolved from an ancestral line of four-legged mammals, which are represented by there fossils and artistic reconstruction showing what scientists think that they may have looked like. They are arranged in the order that they evolved, based on their fossil's age as determined by radiometric dating.

Source:http://www.helium.com/items/918828-fossil-record-looked-series

NATURAL SELECTION

Natural selection played a very important role in evolution. Natural selection is the process by which species adapt to their environment. Natural selection leads to evolutionary change when individuals with certain characteristics have a greater survival or reproductive rate than other individuals in a population and pass on these inheritable genetic characteristics to their offspring.The reason that natural selection is important is that it's the central idea, stemming from Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace, that explains design in nature. It is the one process that is responsible for the evolution of adaptations of organisms to their environment.Darwin's book On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection caused quite a stir when it appeared in 1859. Evidence to support evolution and natural selection, of course, has accumulated over time, and now science accepts that evolution is a fact and that natural selection explains very well how adaptive evolution takes place.

The idea that life evolves may have been first proposed by Lucretius, a Roman philosopher who lived about 2,000 years ago before he modern theory of evolutions was proposed. Then, in 1859, the English naturalists Charles Darwin published convincing evidence that species evolve, and he proposed a reasonable mechanism explaining how evolution occurs.

Like all scientific theories, the theory of evolution has developed through decades of scientific observation and experimentation. The modern theory of evolution began to take shape as a result of Darwin's work. Today almost all scientists accept that evolution is the basis for the diversity of life on Earth.

Darwin realized that Thomas Malthus's hypothesis about human population apply to all species. Every organism has the potentials to produce many offspring during its lifetime. In most cases, however, only a limited number of those offspring survive to reproduce. Considering Malthus view and his own observations and experience in breeding domestic animals. Darwin made a key association, "individuals that have physical or behavioral traits that better suit their environments are more likely to to survive and reproduce more successfully than those that do not have such traits. Darwin called this differential rate of reproduction by natural selection. In time, the number of individuals that carry favorable characteristics that are also inherited will increase in a population. And thus the nature of the population will change-a process called evolution.

Darwin further suggested that organisms differ from place to place because their habitats present different challenges to, and opportunities for, survival and reproduction. Each species has evolved and has accumulated adaptations in response to its particular environments. An adaptation is an inherited trait that has become common in a population because the trait provides selective language.

In 1844, Darwin finally wrote down his ideas about evolution and natural selection in any early outline that he showed to only a few scientists he knew and trusted. At about this time, both a newly published book that claimed that evolution occurred, and Lamarck's hypothesis about evolution were harshly criticized. Shrinking from such controversy, Darwin put aside his manuscript.

Darwin decided to publish after he received a letter and essay in June 1858 from the young English naturalists Alfred Russel Wallace(1823-1913), who was in Malaysia at the time. Wallace's essay described a hypothesis of evolution by natural selection! In his letter, he asked if Darwin would help him get the essay published. Darwin's friend arranged for a summary of Derwin's manuscript to be presented with Wallace paper at a public scientific meeting.

Natural selection is only the process of adaptation within species, and we see many examples of that. Under some circumstances natural selection does play a role in the origin of new species, by which I mean a splitting of one species lineage into two different lineages that do not interbreed with one another - for example, the splitting of one ancestral primate lineage into one that became today's chimpanzee and the other that became the hominid line resulting in our own species. The process of splitting and becoming reproductively isolated, that is, incapable of breeding with one another, can often involve natural selection but perhaps not always.

Source:http://www.helium.com/items/919103-natural-selection-played-important