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An Antarctic fur seal has been caught on camera trying to have sex with a penguin.

This seems to be the first known example of a sexual escapade between a mammal and another kind of vertebrate such as a bird, reptile or fish, “although some mammals are known to have attempted sexual relief with inanimate, including dead things, objects,” said researcher Nico de Bruyn, a mammal ecologist at the University of Pretoria in South Africa.

One summer morning, scientists observing elephant seals on a beach on Marion Island near the Antarctic spotted a young male Antarctic fur seal subduing a king penguin. “At first we thought it was hunting the penguin, but then it became clear that his intentions were rather more amorous,” de Bruyn recalled. The roughly 240-pound fur seal, in fact a species of sea lion, rather than a true seal, subdued the 30-pound adult penguin by lying on it. The hapless bird of unknown sex struggled, rapidly flapping its flippers and attempting to stand and flee, without luck. The fur seal then alternated between resting on the penguin and thrusting its pelvis at the bird in vain attempts to insert its penis for 45 minutes.

Natural, unsuccessful sexual escapades by this variety of fur seal with members of its own species may last as long as this penguin assault did, “but yes, it is quite a long time and thus unusual,” de Bruyn told LiveScience. The fur seal then abruptly gave up, moving to sea and completely ignoring the target of its affections. The penguin apparently did not suffer any injury. The scientists detailed their findings in the May issue of the Journal of Ethology.

Sexual harassment is common in the animal kingdom. “Homo sapiens are often testimony to that,” de Bruyn said. Many species perform some form of sexual harassment on members of their own species, “for a variety of reasons many of which are hotly debated,” he added. Many species of seals and sea lions are polygynous , where one male mates with many females. The males often fight each other to control females. “This system thus promotes extreme aggression in males towards each other, and if a male cannot control a beach, this aggression may spill over to sexual aggression directed at outlying females, pups or even in rare cases other seal species,” de Bruyn said.

And this sexual aggression apparently might leap well beyond the species gap. The Antarctic fur seals of Marion Island are the only ones known that eat king penguins. The thrill of the hunt felt by the seal the researchers saw may have channeled into its sex drive, as the mating season had just come to an end. “It may have wanted to eat [the penguin] and half-way through the chase changed its mind,” de Bruyn speculated. “I personally believe the link between aggressive and sexual behavior is evolutionarily far closer linked than we currently believe. This has obvious implications for humans.”

On the other hand, the amorous fur seal may simply have been sexually inexperienced and playful, and wanted practice, the researchers conjectured. “There are many things that we do not understand about ourselves that are mirrored in other species,” de Bruyn said. “Thus by continuing with research efforts on other vertebrates we could learn a great deal about the whys behind human behaviors.”

Following Facebook and Myspace, Google will join the social network data portability crowd to allow its users to port user data to partner sites, media reported Monday.

Google’s Friend Connect will be a set of “APIs for Open Social participants to pull profile information from social networks into third party websites,” speculated TechCrunch.

Google has been taking a more open and distributed approach with its OpenSocial API, which allows compliant applications to work across any social network. By extension, Friend Connect would provide glue to allow any site to add a social dimension and build connections to other social networks.

Facebook Connect announced on Friday it would make it easier for people to share their favorite pictures, information and applications with family and friends anywhere on the Internet. MySpace on Thursday announced Data Availability, with Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter as initial partners for its effort to let members port their data.

The key for all the data portability efforts is that users have granular controls to manage their data and to maintain privacy and security. Facebook and MySpace have not fully disclosed how their privacy controls will work yet.

David Glazer, Google director of engineering, said in March the big challenge isn’t the technology but applying existing and emerging standards, such as OATH (secure API authentication), OpenID (identity management) and OpenSocial APIs (application integration).

The first draft of Charles Darwin’s “On The Origin Of Species” is among a wealth of papers belonging to the intensely private man who changed science being published on the Internet on Thursday for the first time.

Comprising some 20,000 items and 90,000 images, the release on http://darwin-online.org.uk is the largest in history, according to the organisers from Cambridge University Library which holds all the Darwin papers.

“This release makes his private papers, mountains of notes, experiments, and research behind his world-changing publications available to the world for free,” said John van Wyhe, director of the project. “His publications have always been available in the public sphere - but these papers have until now only been accessible to scholars.”

The collection includes thousands of notes and drafts of his scientific writings, notes from the voyage of the Beagle when he began to formulate his controversial theory of evolution, and his first recorded doubts about the permanence of species. It also contains photographs of Darwin and his family, newspaper clippings, reviews of his books and much more.

Giving a more personal insight, there is also his wife Emma’s cookbook including recipes for delicacies such as ‘Ilkley pudding’ and a rudimentary recipe for boiling rice, written by Darwin himself. Other papers include caricatures and notes with his boyhood musings on birds.

Publication in 1859 of Origin of Species after years of prevarication established Darwin, already known to the public after publication of The Voyage of the Beagle, as a leading scientific thinker. But it also sparked a major public debate and a bitter denunciation by the Church of England, which regarded the book as heretical.

“Darwin changed our understanding of nature forever. His papers reveal how immensely detailed his researches were,” said van Wyhe. “The release of his papers online marks a revolution in the public’s access to - and hopefully appreciation of - one of the most important collections of primary materials in the history of science.” 

Salesforce.com Inc, a maker of business software for tracking sales calls, on Monday started integrating its products with Google Inc’s e-mail service.

Google’s Gmail - as well as its word processor, spreadsheet and other office productivity programs - were scheduled to be available to Salesforce customers on Monday morning, the two companies said in a press release.

Salesforce is not charging customers for the Google office applications. The programs have long been available for free from Google.

The advantage of accessing the Google programs through Salesforce, which distributes its software over the Web, is that customers will be able to automatically integrate information from the Google documents with data entered into their Salesforce accounts, the companies said.

A Dutch student has provoked an international incident by posting on YouTube a clip of him flashing his penis at the Taj Mahal.

The director of his school, the Euro College in Rotterdam, has formally apologised to the Indian Ambassador to Holland. And the school is also considering legal action against the student for damaging their proud reputation, reports GVA.

The young man is seen on the clip giggling as he takes his penis out of his trousers. The camera then pans around to show the famous backdrop.

The student was suspended immediately when teachers found out about the incident which happened during a school trip to India.