Apparently a few hundred million of you were zoned out the day your a) mother b) father c) elementary school teacher told you that if you make a mess, you clean it up. And it appears that the smokers of the world had a higher absentee rate than others.

Volunteers on coasts and lakes picked up more than six million pounds of bottles, bags and butts last September 15, during The Ocean Conservancy’s annual International Coastal Cleanup. The organization has just released a detailed analysis of the litter they picked up along 33,000 miles of shoreline.

Top 10 debris items collected worldwide:

• cigarette filters 27%
• food wrappers/containers 9%
• caps lids 9%
• bags 8%
• beverage bottles (plastic) 6%
• cups plates forks knives spoons 5%
• glass bottles 4%
• cigar tips 4%
• straws/stirrers 4%
• beverage cans 4%

The most dangerous items to ocean creatures: plastic bags, balloons, fishing traps, fishing line, and six pack beverage holders. Volunteers also found condoms, diapers, syringes, light bulbs, shotgun shells, and appliances.

Some of the 378,000 volunteers in 76 countries learned firsthand how deadly trash can be to wildlife. Those scouring beaches found 81 birds, 63 fish, 49 invertebrates, 30 mammals 11 reptiles and one amphibian entangled in debris during the cleanup effort. Among the volunteers were 8300 divers, who averaged 20 pounds of trash each.

Data collected in earlier beach cleanups has helped craft marine debris legislation, and helps find simple answers to litter problems.

“It’s a wonderful event, engaging people to do something positive,” said Laura Capps, Senior Vice President of the Ocean Conservancy. “It also gives us tangible data to identify sources and problems,” she said.

Many of the answers to reducing coastal litter do NOT involve rocket science.

Capps said 80% of the beach trash comes from land based sources. And solutions may be as simple as providing more bins on beaches for people to put their picnic litter.

So what about the other 364 days a year when volunteers are not cleaning up?

Sometimes the volunteers who pick up trash on the official cleanup day get active in their communities to make beach beautification a year-round effort.

“For many people the ocean is big and vast and dark, out of sight and out of mind,” said Capps. She said people who say they would never leave trash at the beach don’t realize that flicking a cigarette out the window or not chasing down a straw wrapper from their kids are creating litter that can just as easily end up in a waterway.

One of the sponsors of the coastal cleanup is a company whose products make up a big part of the trash problem.

Paige Magness, spokeswoman for Philip Morris, said there are simple answers to reducing some cigarette trash.

She said the cigarette manufacturer works with the national non-profit Keep America Beautiful organization to place cigarette receptacles at the entrances of non-smoking buildings. In 2007, she said that effort reduced cigarette litter by 54% in the 180 participating communities.

Cans and bottles also make up a big part of ocean trash. Coca-Cola has been working with the Ocean Conservancy and its cleanup efforts for 12 years.

“We have an extensive research and development program, we are always looking at the next innovation in packaging,” said Lisa Manley, Director of Environmental Communications at Coke headquarters in Atlanta.

She said the company was among the first to use recycled content, and to invest on “bottle to bottle” facilities, taking used plastic and turning it into new bottles.

The Ocean Conservancy says it wants to stress the positive aspect of hundreds of thousands of people making a difference in cleaning up coastal areas.

And maybe some of those “things you should have learned in kindergarten” need a little review. It could be your bottle or your cigarette butt responsible for killing some of the million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles that die from eating or becoming tangled in marine trash every year.

–Marsha Walton, Producer, CNN Science and Technology

We all know one fish and one fish make two fish, but recent evidence suggests that fish may know that too. In fact, mosquitofish can count up to four, according to results from a team of researchers led by Angelo Bisazza of the University of Padua in Italy.

In each test, a lone female mosquitofish had two options for shoals to join, each containing between two and eight other fish. The results showed the lone fish would usually choose the shoal that was larger by just one fish, consistently picking the shoal of four fish over the one with three, and the shoal of three fish over the one with two.

But when one of the choices was larger than four fish, the fish could no longer discriminate. Monkeys and one-year-old children exhibit the same limit, Bisazza said.

Experiments examining what the fish would do when confronted with larger numbers found that, for shoals of more than four fish, they could still tell the difference between the quantities if there was at least a 2:1 ratio. That is, they would choose a shoal of eight fish over the one with four, but they could not discriminate between a shoal of 12 and a shoal of eight. These results are consistent with mathematical abilities observed in birds and mammals.

Similar performance has also been observed in people who speak languages that contain limited vocabularies for numbers, Bisazza said. For instance, speakers of the Amazonian language Munduruku only have words for numbers from one to five, and do not have names for numbers beyond that. Though they are able to solve nonverbal number tasks involving quantities up to 70, in exact arithmetic they do not do well with numbers larger than four or five, he said.

Besides fish, other non-human creatures that have shown at least some rudimentary mathematical abilities in studies include chimpanzees, macaques, dolphins, dogs, parrots and pigeons.

“Many researchers are now convinced that mammals and birds may share common mechanisms to count objects and compare quantities,” Bisazza said.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

Animals may not model swimsuits, but they still need to avoid becoming overweight. Zoos are getting savvier about nutrition for their captive wild animals, coming up with more ways to curb obesity and related problems like diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

The Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago puts gorillas like these on a diet system like Weight Watchers, staff nutritionist Jennifer Watts told CNN affiliate WLS. Each food item has a specific point value attached, and animals have limits for how many points they can accumulate. A gorilla gets two points for a cube of sugary fruit juice, while a polar bear gets one point for each of its beloved granola bars.

Zoo Atlanta doesn’t use an official point system, but strives to provide a low-calorie, healthy diet for its animals too. This zoo has moved away from fruit juices for primates - now their orangutans and gorillas get Crystal Light. It may have less sugar, but they like the low-calorie alternative just as much, the zoo’s senior veterinarian Dr. Maria Crane said in an interview for this blog.

Zoo animals have a particular risk for becoming overweight because they do not have to forage or hunt for food the way they would in the wild, Crane said. To encourage the animals to move about, zoo staffers put food in the enclosed habitats such that the animals have to go forage for it.

“As we use food for enrichment also, it not only contributes to physical needs of animal but also psychological needs,” she said.

The same principles for people who are maintaining good body condition go for animals, such as “balance consumption with activity,” she said.

The field of zoo nutrition is evolving, and zoos are receiving more information about what animals eat in the wild.

When plants and fruits from an animal’s native habitat aren’t available, Zoo Atlanta tries to provide substitutes that are as similar as possible.

“You don’t find fruit juice stands in the wild,” she said.

-Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

A robotic spy plane currently under development would be perfect for Batman – that is, if he were smaller than a paper clip.

Source: Eric Maslowski, research computer specialist in the University of Michigan 3D Lab

Researchers sponsored by the U.S. Army are not designing this small bat-like aircraft to have passengers. Instead, the six-inch-long plane will direct itself, collecting information in urban combat zones and sending signals to soldiers through radio, the University of Michigan News Service said.

Dubbed “the bat,” this small autonomous aircraft would incorporate a navigation system and a tiny low-power radar to get around in the dark. Soldiers could get real-time information from the little robot as it perches on a building, for example.

The Army is joining forces with industry and academia to make the concept for the vehicle a reality. Each of four designated research centers has the mission of developing a different bat-like subsystem of the little robot.

Researchers at the University of Michigan, which received a $10 million Army grant for the project, say they expect to develop an autonomous navigation system 1,000 times smaller and more energy efficient than mechanisms currently in use. This would allow the plane to move by itself, without a third party directing it. They also expect to develop a communication system 10 times smaller than current technologies.

Live bats find their way around by generating sounds and using the echoes from those sounds to determine their distance relative to objects, as well as the size and direction of objects. This navigation system is called echolocation.

The robotic plane will also have auditory sensitivity, using small microphones to gather sound waves from different directions, that will enable sophisticated navigation in the dark. But this bat is not blind – researchers also envision the little aircraft to have stereo vision through small cameras.

The bat may also be able to determine whether there’s nuclear radiation or poisonous gas around, using special sensors.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

For all you geckophiles out there who may still be basking in the gecko-fix we gave you last week at the cnn.com/TECH page on the topic of gecko bandages, you may be interested to know there is more gecko-news this week.

Source: Getty Images

Geckos, of course, are known as some of the most sure-footed climbers in the animal kingdom…with hairy toes that can stick and unstick themselves to a surface in just milliseconds, making it possible to run 15 body lengths up a vertical incline in 1 second flat. Fast, yes…and stable too. But what happens if he misses a step?

Publishing in this week’s edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of California, Berkeley shot high-speed film of geckos running up a vertical climbing surface that had been outfitted with a slippery patch. Slow motion playback clearly shows that when the gecko looses his footing, he instantaneously swings his tail into action — tapping it down like a fifth leg to stabilize himself. In extreme cases, he even plants it like a kickstand to give himself a chance to recover.

What if he should fall? It turns out geckos are like cats…they always land on their feet. The tail comes into play there, too…the gecko rotates it in midair until he rights his body in time to glide to a graceful landing.

So what are the practical implications of this research? Engineers are already putting it to work, designing gecko-inspired climbing robots that are programmed to put their tails to good use.

–Kate Tobin, Senior Producer, CNN Science & Technology

The giant panda may be beloved for its wide-eyed cuteness, but a slew of mysteries lie beneath its furry surface. Scientists at the Beijing Genomics Institute at Shenzhen will explore the genetic underpinnings of this endangered species through the newly-announced International Giant Panda Genome Project.

The genome project could provide important information for panda conservation, and contribute to the protection and monitoring of this rare creature. There are only about 1,600 giant pandas alive today, and their reproductive rate is low, says the San Diego Zoo. What’s more, humans invading panda habitats may create bamboo shortages or render the pandas homeless entirely. Pandas also fall into hunting traps.

Sequencing the giant panda’s genome will help scientists better understand pandas in the present and the past, the genomics institute says in its announcement. The results of the project could help determine how big the giant panda population has been historically, to what extent these creatures currently inbreed, and other unsolved panda questions.

The giant panda’s genome is about the same size as yours, and is thought to have between 20,000 and 30,000 genes, BGI-Shenzhen says. Though there has been speculation over the giant panda’s relationship to raccoons, genetic research has revealed that pandas belong to the bear family.

Besides being the subject of this study, the giant panda is a mascot for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. The animal is also a hit on YouTube — this video of a baby panda sneezing has received more than 8 million views.

–Elizabeth Landau, Associate Producer, CNN.com

This post might have Kermit’s undivided attention.

I just spoke with paleontologist David Krause at Stony Brook University who described an amazing find in Madagascar: a gigantic fossil frog. It was the size of a squashed beach ball and — at a whopping 10 lbs. — may be the heaviest frog ever.

The 16-inch ancient frog did its hopping at the end of the age of dinosaurs, about 65-70 million years ago. Krause’s team started calling it the “frog from hell,” which prompted fellow researcher Catherine Forster to give it the official genus name Beelzebufo.

She combined “Beelzebub,” the Hebrew word for devil, with the Latin “bufo”, meaning frog or toad.

But here’s the kicker: Beelzebufo’s closest living relative is half-a-world away in South America!

So how does a fossil group on an island off the east coast of Africa have contemporary cousins in the western hemisphere? Krause has started a bit of controversy. I’ll explain in a bit.

Field researchers first discovered bits and pieces of the devil frog back in 1993, but it took 15 years to collect enough fragments – about 75 of them – to make sense of the skeleton.

Finally they had enough specimens to assemble about 75 percent of the animal’s skull and 10 percent of its body. Knowing the anatomy of related forms, Krause suspected he had a froggy find. But he needed help in identifying what kind. He collaborated with fossil frog experts Susan Evans and Marc Jones of the University College London. Evans was the first to suggest that thought that Beelzebufo resembled the “ceratphyrines” of South America, which have enormous mouths.

In fact, some people call them “pac-man” frogs after the big-mouthed videogame character from the 1980s. Evans and Jones concluded that the discovery of Beelzebufo is the first time fossils in Madagascar have been connected with living relatives in South America.

You can read their complete findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

So why is the Madagascar-South America link controversial? Frogs like these don’t disperse over big bodies of water, so you need a land connection.

Paleontologists like Krause have to look millions of years back in time, to when scientists think the enormous “Pangaea” supercontinent connected most of the world’s landmasses.

Most geoscientists think that Pangaea broke into two supercontinents about 180 million years ago (“Gondwana” to the south and “Laurasia” to the north), and that Gondwana’s break-up about 160 million years ago separated Madagascar from Africa.

But if Beelzebufo existed around 65-70 million years ago – and is in fact related to South American ceratphyrines – it means that Madagascar was not isolated from other land masses by that time.

Krause says this is a fairly hot debate in scientific circles. The question also lingers whether Antarctica – which was much warmer in the Late Cretaceous period – could have been the land connection.

– CNN’s Alex Walker

If you like birds, this Presidents Day weekend is the time to get out your binoculars. Thousands of birders, from novice to expert, will be looking skyward for the 11^th annual Great Backyard Bird Count.

This event is not just for fun (although it is that).

Organizers of the Count want you to enter the types and numbers of birds you spot at www.birdcount.org . Last year, participants reported a record-breaking 11 million birds and more than 600 species. Scientists use the information to learn more about how birds in North America are faring and what that means for the environment.

The Count includes an online photo gallery and contest.

But new this year — participants can upload video of their sightings on YouTube and tag it “Great Backyard Bird Count.” The best clips will be posted on the Bird Count web site.

So whether you count robins for 15 minutes from your kitchen window, or make a four-day trek through an Arkansas swamp in search of the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, the Great Backyard Bird Count wants to know what you see. Details are at www.birdcount.org .

– Diane Hawkins-Cox,  senior producer, CNN Sci-Tech Unit