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 Topic: Random Science Posts

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  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #150 - October 29, 2013, 01:37 PM
    thanks
    "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live." -Coleridge

    http://sinofgreed.wordpress.com/
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #151 - October 29, 2013, 09:24 PM
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=polio-re-emerges-in-syria-and-israel-threatening-europe

    Polio re-emerges in Israel and Syria, moving to Europe.
    "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live." -Coleridge

    http://sinofgreed.wordpress.com/
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #152 - October 29, 2013, 09:28 PM
    Yup. Spotted that one a few days back over at New Scientist. It's a bit of a worry. It seems to have come from the border regions of Pakistan, then spread to Syria via travelling jihadi fuckwits, then on from there.

    Taliban Ban Vaccinations - Polio Spreading in Pakistan

    One advantage of being a old fart: I got teh polio vaccination at school. We all got it back then (dunno if they still do or not). Hell, I'm even vaccinated for teh smallpox.
    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #153 - October 30, 2013, 12:40 AM
    Wow. Figures they would be at the base of it all..
    "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live." -Coleridge

    http://sinofgreed.wordpress.com/
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #154 - October 31, 2013, 08:26 PM
    Random post:

    Referring to the horseshoe crab and its blueish blood, Prof Richard Fortey says: "As well as its amazing power to coagulate, copper-based blood is also more efficient than ordinary iron-based blood in oxygen-poor environments. This would have been a life-saving quality when the atmosphere and oceans turned toxic during what's usually known as the great dying. [250 million years ago]"
    "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so." -- Bertrand Russell

    Baloney Detection Kit
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #155 - October 31, 2013, 08:31 PM
    That's interesting, because I know it's less efficient under current condtions.
    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #156 - October 31, 2013, 08:43 PM
    Quote from: ateapotist on October 31, 2013, 08:26 PM
    Random post:

    Referring to the horseshoe crab and its blueish blood, Prof Richard Fortey says: "As well as its amazing power to coagulate, copper-based blood is also more efficient than ordinary iron-based blood in oxygen-poor environments. This would have been a life-saving quality when the atmosphere and oceans turned toxic during what's usually known as the great dying. [250 million years ago]"

    well Richard Fortey  is an old school Zoologist., there is nothing amazing about that binuclear copper cluster protein hemocyanin  which transports oxygen in some  invertebrate animals such as    lobsters and crabs. Even arthropods such as   tarantula, some  scorpions  and centipedes have that protein.  Also there is another  well known NON_HEME protein called   Hemerythrin  that transports oxygen in many  marine invertebrates ateapotist.,

    Interesting point is to know where and when this evolutionary branching occurred  from those proteins to  hemoglobin?  99% of living systems use hemoglobin as O2 Transporter. So some time in this history of earth biology Hemoglobin must have evolved from those little animals like  crabs. We can safely say that Crabs are much older living systems than any animals, mammals on the earth..

    Biology is real fun,,
    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim     
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #157 - October 31, 2013, 08:46 PM
    Quote
    We can safely say that Crabs are much older living systems than any mammals on the earth..

    No shit? Cheesy
    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #158 - October 31, 2013, 10:10 PM
    Quote from: osmanthus on October 31, 2013, 08:31 PM
    That's interesting, because I know it's less efficient under current condtions.

    That's what I was thinking. Is copper-based blood less efficient in oxygen-rich environments like we have on earth today?  Or is there another reason why most animals haven't evolved to have copper-based blood? Who knows?
     Thinking hard
    "Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so." -- Bertrand Russell

    Baloney Detection Kit
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #159 - November 01, 2013, 01:30 AM
    Quote from: ateapotist on October 31, 2013, 10:10 PM
    That's what I was thinking. Is copper-based blood less efficient in oxygen-rich environments like we have on earth today?  Or is there another reason why most animals haven't evolved to have copper-based blood? Who knows?
     Thinking hard


    Keep in mind that an oxygen-rich, or poor, environment need not apply on a large scale such as Earth. These can be isolated conditions in a lake or volcanic vents. A copper-based species could have once found a niche in such an environment but later expanded outside this niche due to other factors; extinction of local species, lose of environmental niches, etc
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #160 - November 01, 2013, 01:54 AM
    Quote from: ateapotist on October 31, 2013, 10:10 PM
    That's what I was thinking. Is copper-based blood less efficient in oxygen-rich environments like we have on earth today?

    Yes. Massively, by a factor of about four.
    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #161 - November 19, 2013, 09:47 PM
    In the Some People Will Fuck Anything department: Mystery human species emerges from Denisovan genome

    Quote
    The story of human evolution just got even more bizarre. The genome of an extinct hominin species, the Denisovans, contains unusual snippets of DNA that seem to have come from yet another group.

    It could be evidence of an entirely new species of hominin, as yet unknown to science. Alternatively, it could be our first genetic record of one of the many species known only from their fossils.

    The new hominin has left its traces in the genome of a Denisovan, an extinct hominin known to exist from a finger bone and two teeth found in a Siberian cave. Nobody knows what Denisovans looked like because there are so few fossils. But geneticists have managed to sequence their entire genome to a high degree of accuracy.

    David Reich of Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, has now taken a close look at the Denisovan genome and found that some stretches of it don't fit. He presented his findings at a Royal Society discussion meeting on ancient DNA in London, UK, on Monday.

    The genome shows that Denisovans were cousins of the Neanderthals – this much was already known. Their lineage branched off from ours around 400,000 years ago, before splitting into the Neanderthals and Denisovans.

    That should mean that Denisovans and Neanderthals look equally different from modern humans, but on closer inspection, Reich found that that wasn't the case. "Denisovans appear more distinct from modern humans than Neanderthals," he told the meeting. Specifically, scattered fragments amounting to 1 per cent of the Denisovan genome look much older than the rest of it.

    The best explanation is that the Denisovans interbred with an unidentified species, and picked up some of their DNA. Or as Reich puts it: "Denisovans harbour ancestry from an unknown archaic population, unrelated to Neanderthals."

    The data looks convincing, says geneticist Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany. "There's a very strong signal, difficult to question."

    Krause is one of several geneticists who have studied the Denisovan genome and wondered if it might show traces of past interbreeding. About the only thing we know from the sparse Denisovan fossils is that they had very large teeth, which look like those of a much more primitive species. If the Denisovans were breeding with an archaic species, that might explain their large gnashers.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #162 - November 22, 2013, 07:43 PM
    Hey apparently conspiracy theory psychology is now a recognised field of its own. We haz too many nutters. grin12

    Inside the minds of the JFK conspiracy theorists

    Quote
    To believe that the US government planned or deliberately allowed the 9/11 attacks, you'd have to posit that President Bush intentionally sacrificed 3,000 Americans. To believe that explosives, not planes, brought down the buildings, you'd have to imagine an operation large enough to plant the devices without anyone getting caught.

    To insist that the truth remains hidden, you'd have to assume that everyone who has reviewed the attacks and the events leading up to them - the CIA, the Justice Department, the Federal Aviation Administration, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, scientific organisations, peer-reviewed journals, news organisations, the airlines, and local law enforcement agencies in three states - was incompetent, deceived or part of the cover-up.

    And yet, as Slate's Jeremy Stahl points out, millions of Americans hold these beliefs. In a Zogby poll taken six years ago, only 64 per cent of US adults agreed that the attacks "caught US intelligence and military forces off guard". More than 30 per cent chose a different conclusion: that "certain elements in the US government knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives", or that these government elements "actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attacks".

    How can this be? How can so many people, in the name of scepticism, promote so many absurdities?

    The answer is that people who suspect conspiracies aren't really sceptics. Like the rest of us, they're selective doubters. They favour a world view, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn't about God, values, freedom, or equality. It's about the omnipotence of elites.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #163 - November 25, 2013, 09:10 PM
    Hey this one rocks. It's still experimental but has enormous potential.

    Cancer meets its nemesis in reprogrammed blood cells

    Quote
    Engineer immune cells to recognise tumour cells they would otherwise overlook and they call a halt to cancers we thought were incurable

    "THE results are holding up very nicely." Cancer researcher Michel Sadelain is admirably understated about the success of a treatment developed in his lab at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York.

    In March, he announced that five people with a type of blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL) were in remission following treatment with genetically engineered immune cells from their own blood. One person's tumours disappeared in just eight days.

    Sadelain has now told New Scientist that a further 11 people have been treated, almost all of them with the same outcome. Several trials for other cancers are also showing promise.

    What has changed is that researchers are finding ways to train the body's own immune system to kill cancer cells. Until now, the most common methods of attacking cancer use drugs or radiation, which have major side effects and are blunt instruments to say the least.

    The latest techniques involve genetically engineering immune T-cells to target and kill cancer cells, while leaving healthy cells relatively unscathed.

    Read the whole thing. It's a good one. Afro
    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #164 - November 25, 2013, 09:37 PM
    http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fungal-infection-accident-of-evolution-may-thrive-in-our-bodies

    Quote
    Sudden fungal outbreaks have long been routine among plants, and more recently, animals. A recent outbreak among humans in the Pacific Northwest raises the disturbing prospect that we are not immune either. The mystery of this outbreak’s origins is detailed in “Strange Fungi Now Stalk Healthy People” in the December issue of Scientific American.

    The outbreak is ongoing but, in spite of appearances, Cryptococcus gattii doesn't exist to plague us. The fungus prefers to live in soil and on trees, where it subsists quite happily on decaying matter. So how can an organism that seems to enjoy a full and rich life on plants and dirt possibly find itself suited to living inside humans? The answer, it turns out, may be an accident of evolution.



    "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live." -Coleridge

    http://sinofgreed.wordpress.com/
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #165 - November 25, 2013, 10:01 PM
    Love this thread.
    `But I don't want to go among mad people,' Alice remarked.
     `Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: `we're all mad here. I'm mad.  You're mad.'
     `How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.
     `You must be,' said the Cat, `or you wouldn't have come here.'
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #166 - November 28, 2013, 11:57 PM
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/28/black_hole_ultraluminous/

    Quote
    Astroboffins have long been puzzled over the source of ultraluminous X-ray light in an arm of the Pinwheel Galaxy, just off the handle of the Big Dipper. While they could ascertain that the source, called ULX-1, was a system made up of a black hole and a star orbiting each other, they couldn't make the maths on its estimated mass and brightness add up.

    The light was shining so brightly that the system had to be either twice as luminous or much more massive than it seemed. If it was much more massive than it could be an example of an intermediate -mass black hole, one that's between a hundred and a thousand times the size of the Sun, which scientists have theorised could be the jumping-off point for the formation of supermassive black holes.

    Boffins still aren't sure how supermassive black holes, the core of most galaxies, form and the theory that intermediate ones coalesce into supermassive ones can't be tested until they find an intermediate one to study.

    "This has been a very frustrating field to work in," said Joel Bregman, professor of astronomy at the University of Michigan. "We've been looking for indirect measurements that we thought would tell us something, but you'd get ten pieces of information and five would be on one side and five on the other. You'd think, 'This could all be solved if I could just measure the mass directly'."

    Eventually, an international team of brainiacs, including Bregman, were able to do just that and found that the black hole was actually a fairly typical size, but was somehow shining much more brightly than it should have been able to.

    "As if black holes weren't extreme enough, this is a really extreme one that is shining as brightly as it possibly can. It's figured out a way to be more luminous than we thought possible," he said.

    The black hole is a stellar kind, which forms when a star up to around 200 times the size of the Sun collapses at the end of its life, and this particular one is only between 20 and 30 times the size of the Sun. But the luminosity of the black hole shows that something strange is going on in its accretion - the process by which it gorges itself on passing material, growing and indirectly radiating when its meal throws off X-rays as it is rent asunder.

    "These findings show that our understanding of black hole accretion is incomplete and needs revision," said Jifeng Liu, formerly of Michigan university and now at the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii for the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

    The team has yet to figure out why the black hole is shining so madly, although it could be to do with its diet. It's possible that the collapsed star is feeding off its companion's stellar wind - a stream of charged particles that would give off more light than other material. Another possibility is that bubbles are forming in the disc of material that's falling in, creating additional radiation.

    Whatever is causing the light, Liu said it could change the search for intermediate black hole candidates, now that ultraluminous X-ray sources are not guaranteed to be massive black holes.

    "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live." -Coleridge

    http://sinofgreed.wordpress.com/
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #167 - December 05, 2013, 09:10 PM
    I love this just because it's totally bonkers use of extreme technology.

    Get yer shit together with synchrotron x-ray microtomography!

    Quote
    During the reign of the dinosaurs, more than 65 million years ago, the humble cockroach ensured the ground wasn't always covered in a layer of dung, according to a new study.

    Like cattle, camels and other herbivores of our time, sauropods (large plant-eating dinosaurs) ate a lot of plant material, and as a result left a lot of dung in their wake.

    Today the job of breaking down dung is mostly performed by flies and dung beetles. Without them, the ground becomes 'suffocated' and grasses are unable to grow.

    <snip>

    But dung beetles and flies were rare during the Mesozoic. So who was responsible for breaking down dino dung?

    The answer has been found by a team of scientists, led by Peter Vršanský of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, looking at an ancient family of cockroaches known as Blattulidae.

    The team examined a cockroach, along with coprolites (or fossilised faeces) it had "extruded", which were trapped in an amber deposit found in Lebanon. They used synchrotron x-ray microtomography, which allowed the researchers to build a 3D image of the roach and it's droppings, without breaking it from its amber encasing.

    Like other cockroaches from that time, the contents of the gut and the coprolites showed the insect had a varied diet. But there was something else that caught their eye.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #168 - December 28, 2013, 01:32 AM
    Dark lightning.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=OBOolkHVG_Q
    "Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, and hope without an object cannot live." -Coleridge

    http://sinofgreed.wordpress.com/
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #169 - February 28, 2014, 04:29 PM
    http://kepler.nasa.gov/Mission/discoveries/
    Kepler telescope has thus far confirmed the existence of 961 planets with many more to be found. Judging from the fact that Kepler has so far observed a fraction of our galaxy, there could be many billion Earth-sized planets orbiting in the habitable zones of sun-like stars just within the Milky Way alone. If you thought the Earth was special before, think again.
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #170 - February 28, 2014, 09:32 PM
    What does everyone think the implications for Abrahamic religions would be if we discovered/made contact with ('intelligent') alien life?

  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #171 - February 28, 2014, 09:44 PM
    Quote from: kepticsay on February 28, 2014, 09:32 PM
    What does everyone think the implications for Abrahamic religions would be if we discovered/made contact with ('intelligent') alien life?


    NOTHING............ zippo..zero., 

     any ways that is great news from Kepler telescope .,  Damn that was launched just 4 years ago...

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yok0Jdr3_Nw

    NASA Kepler Launch Countdown (March 6, 2009) and it sits in space some   40 million miles away from earth to search these planets



    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQVlDqOchSA

    Well that is 1 hr tube on Kepler.....
    Do not let silence become your legacy.. Question everything   
    I renounced my faith to become a kafir, 
    the beloved betrayed me and turned in to  a Muslim     
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #172 - February 28, 2014, 10:08 PM
    Quote from: kepticsay on February 28, 2014, 09:32 PM
    What does everyone think the implications for Abrahamic religions would be if we discovered/made contact with ('intelligent') alien life?




    Denial. Especially seeing as even if we did discover some evidence for such life, the distance would be so large that it would be unlikely to have any kind of impact in the near future.
    Quote from: yeezevee on February 11, 2016, 02:05 PM
    how fuck works without shit??


    Let's Play Chess!

    harakaat, friend, RIP
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #173 - March 02, 2014, 09:50 AM
    Interesting, if somewhat depressing, article on the BBC website. Ways we might extinct *  ourselves without even trying.

    http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22002530


    *   A new verb? Extinguish sounds too much like putting out a fire - although some cynical people may say that that may not be a bad analogy.
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #174 - March 04, 2014, 09:29 PM
    This one has potential. Smiley

    Silk screws are strong enough to mend broken bones

    Quote
    Silk is tougher than it looks. Weight for weight, the shiny stuff is as strong as steel when stretched – and now it seems it can also be fashioned into screws so tough that they can cut through bone.

    Metal alloy screws and plates can hold fractured bones together but if they start to corrode a second operation is required to remove them. Biodegradable alternatives can trigger inflammation and are time-consuming to implant – the polymers are so soft that you first have to drill a hole in the bone and fashion a helical ridge around the inside - the inner thread - to hold the screw in place.

    Samuel Lin at the Harvard Medical School and David Kaplan at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts, wondered if silk screws and plates could work better. To find out, they dissolved silk in alcohol, poured the solution into moulds shaped like the implants and baked them.

    In rats, the team found that their silk screws were tough enough to carve their own threads into bone as they are screwed into a hole, just as metal alloy screws do. The silk naturally biodegrades with time, like the polymer alternatives but without causing inflammation.

    "Clinical trials will hopefully begin in the near future," says Lin.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #175 - March 07, 2014, 07:31 PM
    An interesting one, what with all the current concern about climate change.

    Two-hundred-year drought doomed Indus Valley Civilization

    Quote
    Monsoon hiatus that began 4,200 years ago parallels dry spell that led civilizations to collapse in other regions.

    The decline of Bronze-Age civilizations in Egypt, Greece and Mesopotamia has been attributed to a long-term drought that began around 2000 bc. Now palaeoclimatologists propose that a similar fate was followed by the enigmatic Indus Valley Civilization, at about the same time. Based on isotope data from the sediment of an ancient lake, the researchers suggest that the monsoon cycle, which is vital to the livelihood of all of South Asia, essentially stopped there for as long as two centuries.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #176 - March 07, 2014, 07:44 PM
    Ooooooooooooooooooooo! This is clever. I like this. dance

    Batteries of ice, iron and glass store renewable power

    Quote
    WHEN the wind stops blowing and turbines slow down, we have to resort to coal and gas-powered stations for our energy needs. This unpredictability makes it hard to rely on renewable sources for a constant energy supply. Storage is one solution, but traditional batteries that can hold enough power are expensive. So Portland General Electric (PGE) in Oregon has turned to ice. The company will soon start a pilot programme using icy slush to store energy from wind turbines when they overproduce, tapping into it when the turbines fall still.

    PGE's icy solution, a Thermal Approach to Grid Energy Storage (TAGES), was developed by a company called Applied Exergy. It uses a heat pump, driven by excess energy from wind turbines or solar panels, to cool water into a pumpable icy slush, which is then stored. The slush is run through the heat pump the other way to retrieve the energy, powering a turbine as it melts. Using waste heat from a coal plant to power the heat pump can mean 80 per cent of the energy put into the slush can be retrieved.

    And Energy Storage Systems (ESS), also in Portland, Oregon, is using a flow battery containing a solution of iron and water. Electricity is stored in the system by seeding iron ions with excess electrons. When that electricity is needed, the iron is pulled between two electrodes, which strip it of the excess electrons.

    An even more familiar material is being used for energy storage – glass. Halotechnics of Emeryville, California, has developed a phosphate-based glass with a melting point low enough for it to become a storage medium. "We're developing a glass that you can pump like a liquid," says Halotechnics CEO Justin Raade. "It has a viscosity orders of magnitude below traditional window glass, and at 400 °C is about the viscosity of honey." The glass could be pumped to where energy is needed. As it cools and solidifies, it releases heat that drives a steam turbine to make electricity.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #177 - March 10, 2014, 08:43 PM


    Elephants recognize the voices of their enemies

    Quote
    African elephants can distinguish human languages, genders and ages associated with danger.

    Humans are among the very few animals that constitute a threat to elephants. Yet not all people are a danger — and elephants seem to know it. The giants have shown a remarkable ability to use sight and scent to distinguish between African ethnic groups that have a history of attacking them and groups that do not. Now a study reveals that they can even discern these differences from words spoken in the local tongues.

    <snippity>

    Fascinated by their findings, McComb, Shannon and their colleagues wondered whether the Maasai language on its own was a danger signal, or whether the animals were responding to the combination of the language and the voice of an adult male who was likely to wield a spear. To find out, they recorded Maasai women and boys saying the same phrase, and monitored elephant-family responses to them.

    Careful listeners

    The differences were similar to what they saw with the Kamba. The elephants were less likely to flee from the voices of Maasai women and boys than they were from Maasai men, and they bunched together less closely. Most intriguingly, the researchers noted that elephant families led by matriarchs more than 42 years old never retreated when they heard the voices of boys, but those led by younger matriarchs retreated roughly 40% of the time.

    Elephants are clever buggers. parrot
    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Random Science Posts
     Reply #178 - March 21, 2014, 12:04 AM
    Genetic mugshot recreates faces from nothing but DNA

    Quote
    A MURDER has been committed, and all the cops have to go on is a trace of DNA left at the scene. It doesn't match any profile in databases of known criminals, and the trail goes cold. But what if the police could issue a wanted poster based on a realistic "photofit" likeness built from that DNA?

    Not if, but when, claim researchers who have developed a method for determining how our genes influence facial shape. One day, the technique may even allow us to gaze into the faces of extinct human-like species that interbred with our own ancestors.

    It's already possible to make some inferences about the appearance of crime suspects from their DNA alone, including their racial ancestry and some shades of hair colour. And in 2012, a team led by Manfred Kayser of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, identified five genetic variants with detectable effects on facial shape. It was a start, but still a long way from reliable genetic photofits.

    To take the idea a step further, a team led by population geneticist Mark Shriver of Pennsylvania State University and imaging specialist Peter Claes of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium used a stereoscopic camera to capture 3D images of almost 600 volunteers from populations with mixed European and West African ancestry. Because people from Europe and Africa tend to have differently shaped faces, studying people with mixed ancestry increased the chances of finding genetic variants affecting facial structure.

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
  • Crows as 'clever' as human seven-year-old
     Reply #179 - March 26, 2014, 11:58 PM
    Crows as 'clever' as human seven-year-old

    Quote
    A species of crow can solve a problem based on an Aesop's fable as well as an average seven-year-old, a new study shows.

    Like their counterparts in Aesop's tale of the Crow and the Pitcher, New Caledonian crows 'understand' that dropping rocks into a partially filled tube of water will raise its level high enough to access a reward.

    However a paper published today in PLOS One shows this knowledge has its limits and gives an insight into the evolution of an understanding of cause and effect.

    <snip>

    However Sarah Jelbert from the University of Auckland, who led the latest study, wanted to test the boundaries of crow knowledge.

    "These [previous] studies tend to show how well the birds perform certain tasks," she says.

    "But fewer look at when they fail, that is, explore the limits of their understanding of cause and effect relationships."

    <snip>

    To replicate the tale, six, wild-caught crows were given a week's basic training, which taught them dropping stones into a tube would produce a reward.

    They were then given six tasks to complete. Over the course of the experiments the researchers found the crows preferred to drop stones into a water-filled tube instead of a sand-filled tube, Jelbert says.

    They also learned to drop heavy objects that sank and displaced more water rather than floating objects, and chose solid objects rather than hollow objects.

    "[This] is a difficult concept to understand and showed they are sensitive to quite subtle differences in their tools," says Jelbert.

    The crows also opted to drop objects into a tube with a high water level rather than a low one.

    "The results show the crows possess a sophisticated understanding of the causal properties of volume displacement, similar to that of five- to seven-year-old children," Jelbert adds.

    <sinp>

    Pushing the boundaries

    However despite their impressive early achievements, when it came to choosing between wide and narrow tubes, and understanding the relative effort involved in raising water levels in the different tubes, things fell apart.

    They showed no preference for either tube, and simply didn't recognise that the narrow tube needed only a few stones to raise the level compared with the wide tube.

    One of the six crows was so demoralised by its lack of success after depositing all 12 of its stones into the wide tube for no reward, it wouldn't participate in any further experiments.

    <snip>

    "These results are striking as they highlight both the strengths and limits of the crows' understanding," Jelbert says.

    "In particular, the crows all failed a task which violated normal causal rules, but they could pass the other tasks, which suggests they were using some level of causal understanding when they were successful.

    "While there is more work to be done, this research is helping to build our understanding of animals' cognition and how intelligence has evolved in animal species other than humans."

    Devious, treacherous, murderous, neanderthal, sub-human of the West. bunny
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