{ Chaser, a border collie who lives in Spartanburg, S.C., has the largest vocabulary of any known dog. She knows 1,022 nouns, a record that displays unexpected depths of the canine mind and may help explain how children acquire language. | NY Times | full story }
Vladimir Nabokov may be known to most people as the author of classic novels like “Lolita” and “Pale Fire.” But even as he was writing those books, Nabokov had a parallel existence as a self-taught expert on butterflies.
He was the curator of lepidoptera at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and collected the insects across the United States. He published detailed descriptions of hundreds of species. And in a speculative moment in 1945, he came up with a sweeping hypothesis for the evolution of the butterflies he studied, a group known as the Polyommatus blues. He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.
bonus:
{ Butterflies are characterized by their scale-covered wings. The coloration of butterfly wings is created by minute scales. These scales are pigmented with melanins that give them blacks and browns, but blues, greens, reds and iridescence are usually created not by pigments but the microstructure of the scales. This structural coloration is the result of coherent scattering of light by the photonic crystal nature of the scales. | Wikipedia | Continue reading }
{ imp photographed by paul nett }
One in every 10,000 chickens is born gynandromorphic: half male and half female.
Developmental biologist Michael Clinton expected to find that the birds had abnormal cells. Instead he found healthy male and female cells. These cells keep their identity even when injected into an embryo of the opposite sex, indicating that their gender is innate.
The discovery that each cell in a chicken can be inherently male or female is a huge departure from biological dogma, which holds that hormones control sex characteristics in vertebrates. Gender-imprinted cells may exist in us, too. Male and female cells might respond slightly differently to hormonal signals, which may partially explain differences in male and female behavior and susceptibility to some diseases.
photo { Brandon Pavan }
{ Brett Fryzuk }
Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as “non-human persons”.
Studies into dolphin behaviour have highlighted how similar their communications are to those of humans and that they are brighter than chimpanzees. These have been backed up by anatomical research showing that dolphin brains have many key features associated with high intelligence.
Study found that out of 25 species of primate, orang-utans had developed the greatest power to learn and to solve problems. The controversial findings challenge the widespread belief that chimpanzees are the closest to humans in brainpower.
There is also evidence from a study with animals in zoos in Japan that elephants have considerable numerical skills.
Elephants have proved adept at recognising the difference between two quantities of objects as they were placed into buckets. It is a test which has also been done with a range of primates, including human children.
According to Professor Byrne, elephants outperformed all those other species. “Their abilities didn’t seem to be limited in quite the same way as monkeys, apes and children would be.”
Chinese netizens have already started selecting the Internet catchphrases of 2010. (…)
Geili Geili used to be a word only spoken in the northern dialect literally meaning “giving power,” but is now widely accepted as an adjective describing something “cool,” “awesome,” or “exciting.” Its antonym “bugeili” means “far from desirable,” “dull” or “boring.”
Magic horse is just floating cloud. “Magic horse” actually does not refer to a horse, but is rather a homophone of “shen me” meaning “what.” “Magic horse” replaced its predecessor “xia mi” as the most popular phrase in the Chinese Internet community shortly after its emergence. “Floating cloud” here indicates “purely imaginary” or “disappearing quickly.” Altogether, the phrase means “nothing is worth mentioning.”
Is it OK to boil a lobster? (…)
Let’s consider the life, or rather the death, of a lobster. In nature lobsters begin very small and die a million horrible deaths in a million horrible ways. As they get older the death rate drops. We have ample evidence that lobsters do not go gentle into that good night, dying peacefully in their sleep at a ripe old age. Instead, once mature, a lobster that doesn’t go into the pot might face off with cod, flounder, an eel or two, or one of many diseases.
Considering that one of the natural deaths a lobster may face is to be torn limb from limb by an eel, getting tossed into a pot of boiling water doesn’t seem quite so gruesome. But there is a big difference between death by eel and death by human, the eel is not human. And now we have hit upon the broader question that must be answered before we can understand the short answer given above: Are humans a part of nature, or apart from nature?
photo { Bill Owens }
Humans are known to play it safe in a situation when they aren’t sure of the odds, or don’t have confidence in their judgments. We don’t like to choose the unknown.
And new evidence from a Duke University study is showing that chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest living primate relatives, treat the problem the same way we do.
In studies conducted at the Tchimpounga Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Republic of Congo and Lola ya Bonobo Sanctuary in Democratic Republic of Congo, researchers found the apes prefer to play it safe when the odds are uncertain.
related { Neuroscience of instinct: How animals overcome fear to obtain food }
photo { Matthew Farrant }
The fact that many bats utilize echolocation to find prey is well-known. This ability is well-developed; some bats even dynamically adjust the width of the sound pulse during the pursuit of prey, thereby broadening their field of view without sacrificing attention, useful for capturing erratically-flying prey.
In contrast, much less is known regarding how echolocating bats utilize sensory cues to recognize their habitat, an ability which is clearly important to their survival. (…)
Ornithologists have investigated how echolocating bats differentiate water, often a prominent feature of their habitat, from other surfaces. Their research demonstrates that echolocation is given prominence even in the face of contradictory sensory cues, and further suggests that this recognition ability is innate (not learned).
I use a method called “Dutching” (named for 1930s New York gangster, “Dutch” Schultz, whose accountant came up with it). With Dutched bets, you make two or more bets on the same race with more money on more favored horses and less money on longer odds horses such that your profit is the same, no matter which horse wins. (…)
I haven’t bet with this strategy yet, but I have found from playing with the data that very often there are opportunities…
{ David Icke’s Official Forums | Wikipedia }
Arthur Flegenheimer, alias Dutch Shultz, was a fugitive from justice. He was wanted in 1934 for Income Tax Evasion. On October 23, 1935, Shultz and three associates were shot by rival gangsters in a Newark, New Jersey restaurant. Shultz’s death started rival gang wars among the hoodlum and underworld gangs.
{ FBI.gov | Continue reading | Read more: By the mid-1920s, Schultz realized that bootlegging was the way to make serious money. }
