Flat Cat: Act II; MIT: Completely Online; Sale of Rare Astrolabe Halted; Dehydrated DNA; Oh, to Live in Iceland. View the PDF for this page ... www.sciencemag.org/content/vol318/issue5857/r-samples.dtl -
Suspicions about purported photographs of a presumed-extinct South China tiger (Science, 9 November, p. 893) were confirmed last month when a netizen found the apparent source of the image: a 2002 Chinese lunar New Year poster. But China's obsession with the issue has continued. The China Photographers Association convened a team including biologists and forensic scientists who met in Beijing for 5 days pondering 40 digital photos of the beast. On 2 December, they noted, among other things, that the tiger was in exactly the same position in all the photos and that its eyes did not reflect the camera's flash.
Both the photographer and the State Forestry Administration (SFA), however, continue to maintain that a tiger exists in the mountains of Zhengping County. At a 4 December press conference, an SFA spokesperson reiterated that the agency plans to look for it. After the first snowfall, 10 large-carnivore experts will comb a 200,000-hectare forested region for signs of tigers, leopards, and bears. As for the photos, an SFA official offered this logic: "There are a lot of photographs of the Loch Ness monster [in Scotland]. … People care about the existence of the monster rather than the authenticity of the photos."