Category: Science

Dogs have been dumbed down by being domesticated. Wolves are much smarter. Right?

Not!

It turns out that by rubbing shoulders with brainy humans for so long (and being bred by brainy humans) dogs may have had some human smarts rub off on them.

That’s what some scientists are concluding.

Dogs even compare favorably in some tests with critters with a much higher brain rep, like chimpanzees.

EXCERPT:

Chimpanzees, our closest relatives, have been shown to follow a human’s gaze, but they do very poorly in a classic experiment that requires them to extract clues by watching a person. In that test, a researcher hides food in one of several containers out of sight of the animal. Then the chimp is allowed to choose one container after the experimenter indicates the correct choice by various methods, such as staring, nodding, pointing, tapping, or placing a marker. Only with considerable training do chimps and other primates manage to score above chance.

Dogs, however, performed marvelously, and even outdoor dogs with no particular master could solve the problem immediately. (The researchers controlled for the scent of the food.) By 2001 a raft of experiments by Mr. Csányi’s team and another led by Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, Germany, showed that dogs were far more skilled then either chimps or wolves at using human social cues to find food. Those results left researchers with this question: If dogs can pick up on human cues, do they turn the tables and put out cues for humans to understand?

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Despite appearances, it’s not one hideous evil vampiric eyeball creature sucking the life out of another in the Easter Bunny’s sunken laboratories.

It’s a diagram of a piece of actual, working nanotechnology: Specifically, it’s the world’s smallest motor.

The motor was designed by the Easter Bunny in his sunken labs using evil vampiric eyeball creaturesa team of researchers at U.C. Berkeley.

EXCERPTS:

Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence.

The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows – but never gets as big as the other droplet – and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.

The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the amount of energy produced is small — 20 microwatts — it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.

Among other things, nanomotors could be used in optical circuits to redirect light, a process called optical switching. Futurists envision a day when nanomachines, powered by nanomotors, roam inside your body to find disease and repair damaged cells.

GET THE STORY.

Despite appearances, it’s not one hideous evil vampiric eyeball creature sucking the life out of another in the Easter Bunny’s sunken laboratories.

It’s a diagram of a piece of actual, working nanotechnology: Specifically, it’s the world’s smallest motor.

The motor was designed by the Easter Bunny in his sunken labs using evil vampiric eyeball creaturesa team of researchers at U.C. Berkeley.

EXCERPTS:

Scientists recently unveiled the tiniest electric motor ever built. You could stuff hundreds of them into the period at the end of this sentence.

The motor works by shuffling atoms between two molten metal droplets in a carbon nanotube.

One droplet is even smaller than the other. When a small electric current is applied to the droplets, atoms slowly eek off the larger droplet and join the smaller one. The small droplet grows – but never gets as big as the other droplet – and eventually bumps into the large droplet. As they touch, the large droplet rapidly sops up the atoms it had previously sloughed off. This quick shift in energy produces a power stroke.

The motor, a surface-tension-driven nanoelectromechanical relaxation oscillator, was built by a team of researchers led by Alex Zettl at the University of California, Berkeley.

Although the amount of energy produced is small — 20 microwatts — it is quite impressive in relation to the tiny scale of the motor. The whole setup is less than 200 nanometers on a side, or hundreds of times smaller than the width of a human hair. If it could be scaled up to the size of an automobile engine, it would be 100 million times more powerful than a Toyota Camry’s 225 horsepower V6 engine, the researchers say.

Among other things, nanomotors could be used in optical circuits to redirect light, a process called optical switching. Futurists envision a day when nanomachines, powered by nanomotors, roam inside your body to find disease and repair damaged cells.

GET THE STORY.

The Sea Life Park in Hawaii needs suggestions:

“The only whale-dolphin mix in captivity has given birth to a playful female calf, officials at Sea Life Park Hawaii said Thursday.

“The calf was born on December 23 to Kekaimalu, a mix of a false killer whale and an Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Park officials said they waited to announce the birth until now because of recent changes in ownership and operations at the park.

“The young as-yet unnamed wholphin is one-fourth false killer whale and three-fourths Atlantic bottlenose dolphin. Her slick skin is an even blend of a dolphin’s light gray and the black coloring of a false killer whale.”

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From our Local-News-Department comes the announcement that the San Diego Zoo’s own Bai Yun, a giant panda on loan from China, has successfully mated in "the only successful natural insemination of a panda this year in the United States, officials said." Perhaps the success was due in part to Bai Yun’s beauty routine, which made her irresistable to fellow giant panda Gao Gao:

"[Don] Lindburg [‘the zoo’s giant panda conservation team leader’] said Bai Yun had displayed signs of being receptive to mating in recent days, including yipping and raising her tail, walking through water and scraping pine tree bark onto her head and face.

"’It’s getting her perfume on for the date,’ Lindburg said.

"Zoo officials then lifted the gate that separates the two for much of the year on Friday to let the mating begin."

"[S]craping pine tree bark onto her head and face"? Oh, the tortures women must go through to be beautiful for men. Considering the lengths to which Bai Yun went for him, what I really wanted to know was whether Gao Gao also spruced himself up for the occasion, but the article didn’t mention that.

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Bush is a microbrained insect who couldn’t care less about humanity and has a fondness for slime-molds.

It’s true!

The same goes for Cheney and Rumsfeld.

No! I haven’t been reading Daily Kos!

And I’m not talking about our nation’s esteemed leaders!

I’m talking about three new species of slime-mold beetles that have been named after our nation’s leaders.

And guess what: The gent who named them wasn’t trying to insult them but to honor them.

EXCERPT:

Wheeler, who is now head of entomology at the Natural History Museum in London, said that the choice to name beetles after President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was out of admiration for their principles, not because they look like the beetles.

GET THE STORY.

Hooo-EEEEE!

Man!

That thing will break mirrors, won’t it!

This here critter is a naked mole rat, as you may know, and it has been voted one of the top 10 ugliest animals on LiveScience.Com.

Personally, I don’t agree with all the votes.

In fact, the contest has an INEXPLICABLE omission: It left out the ugliest critter of all time, the sanity-shattering STAR-NOSED MOLE.

Nevertheless, there’s some critters over at LiveScience.Com whose visages will curdle milk, make paint peel, and send small children scurrying away in fright.

AMBLE BY AND GAWK AT THEM!

Guestblogger <Rule 15b>Chris Weathers</Rule 15b> writes:

A paralyzed man is the first person in the world to have his thoughts read by a computer chip…he is now able to move objects with his mind! Telekenesis through technology…the potential applications are very exciting.

"He can think his TV on and off, change channels and alter the volume thanks to the technology and software linked to devices in his home."

Aside from the ability to use his mind as a remote control (the ultimate couch-potato gadget), he can do some more useful things.

"Mr Nagle has also been able to use thought to move a prosthetic hand and robotic arm to grab sweets from one person’s hand and place them into another."

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What is it?

A still from Episode VI from a walker on the forrest moon of Endor?

A still from Episode III from a walker on Kashyyk?

Neither!

It’s not on an alien planet (even in the movies), and it has nothing to do with science fiction.

It’s a shot taken from the cabin of THIS:

YES! That’s RIGHT! We now have walker technology here on Earth!

As you can see, it hasn’t evolved very far and is still at the grashopper stage, but it’s still real-life walker tech!

The above application is used to cut down trees.

And, as you can tell from the distinctive paint job, it’s made by John Deere!

YEE-HAW!

GET THE STORY.

Also,

PEEP WHAT THEY’RE THINKING ABOUT BUILDING.

FLASH! GIRLS AND BOYS ARE NOT THE SAME!

Yes! That’s the shocking conclusion reached by

THIS SCIENTIST.

He’s confirmed something that other studies have shown before–that girl babies respond more to faces than boy babies do–but the twist is, he’s shown it earlier in life than previous studies have. Specifically: He’s shown that the phenomenon exists 24 hours after birth.

It’s interesting to see the politically correct environment he has to deal with in his field. Folks have been so determined to explain ALL sex differences based on training and environment that he actually feels the need to say things like this:

The results of the experiment were that we found more boys than girls looked longer at the mechanical mobile. And more girls than boys looked longer at the human face. Given that it was a sex difference that emerged at birth, it means that you can’t attribute the difference to experience or culture. Twenty-four hours old. Now you might say, well, they’re not exactly new-born, it would have been better to get them at 24 minutes old — or even younger. But obviously we had to respect the wishes of the parents and the doctors to let the baby relax after the trauma of being born. And let the parents get to know their baby. So strictly speaking, it might have been one day of social experience. But nonetheless, this difference is emerging so early that suggests it’s at least partly biological.

His story also goes into a lot of related, interesting subjects, such as the origin of autism and the effects later in life of prenatal exposure to testosterone. Fascinating reading.

GET THE (COMMON SENSE) STORY.