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Originally Posted by Dave Lane:
I'm calling BS on this whole article. The ancients were primitive peoples. They had no knowledge we don't possess today. They were simpletons as we will be in a couple thousand years to the cultures then.
Any article athat mentions the Bagdad battery as some sign of anything other than possibilites needs to have the article dismissed out of hand.
Not saying I agree with the article, but they haven't figured out how to make Greek Fire or whatever that napalm stuff they shot from boats is or how to make it.
But yeah. On the whole, I doubt the premise of the article. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Buehler445:
Not saying I agree with the article, but they haven't figured out how to make Greek Fire or whatever that napalm stuff they shot from boats is or how to make it.
But yeah. On the whole, I doubt the premise of the article.
We don't have the Byzantiums formula verbatim but we do know what they used to make it. Sadly we have improved the delivery mechanisms and killing effect in modern times. [Reply]
Little off topic..........My son is making noises that he wants a PHD in astrophysics. I'm thinking I need a higher paying job. :-)
Any experience in here with schools? Know anyone that went down this path.
I don't think he realizes the work that will be needed to pull this off. But anyhow, he's thinking bachelors in engineering, minor in Physics. Master in AstroPhysics and Astronomy in 4 years and then on to the PHD in Astrophysics. [Reply]
Originally Posted by Dave Lane: I'm calling BS on this whole article. The ancients were primitive peoples. They had no knowledge we don't possess today. They were simpletons as we will be in a couple thousand years to the cultures then.
Any article athat mentions the Bagdad battery as some sign of anything other than possibilites needs to have the article dismissed out of hand.
Of course you are, that's all I really need to know it has merit. [Reply]
Originally Posted by BigRedChief:
Little off topic..........My son is making noises that he wants a PHD in astrophysics. I'm thinking I need a higher paying job. :-)
Any experience in here with schools? Know anyone that went down this path.
I don't think he realizes the work that will be needed to pull this off. But anyhow, he's thinking bachelors in engineering, minor in Physics. Master in AstroPhysics and Astronomy in 4 years and then on to the PHD in Astrophysics.
What does he want to do with it? Teach? Research? [Reply]
Aug. 6, 2013 — Dolphins can recognize their old tank mates' whistles after being separated for more than 20 years -- the longest social memory ever recorded for a non-human species.
The remarkable memory feat is another indication that dolphins have a level of cognitive sophistication comparable to only a few other species, including humans, chimpanzees and elephants. Dolphins' talent for social recognition may be even more long-lasting than facial recognition among humans, since human faces change over time but the signature whistle that identifies a dolphin remains stable over many decades.
"This shows us an animal operating cognitively at a level that's very consistent with human social memory," said Jason Bruck, who conducted the study and received his Ph.D. in June 2013 from the University of Chicago's program in Comparative Human Development. His study is published in the current issue of the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B.
To establish how well dolphins could remember their former companions, Bruck collected data from 53 different bottlenose dolphins at six facilities, including Brookfield Zoo near Chicago and Dolphin Quest in Bermuda. The six sites were part of a breeding consortium that has rotated dolphins and kept records on which ones lived together, going back decades.
"This is the kind of study you can only do with captive groups when you know how long the animals have been apart," Bruck said. "To do a similar study in the wild would be almost impossible."
"Signature whistles" offer means to test memory
In recent years, other studies have established that each dolphin develops its own unique signature whistle that appears to function as a name. Researchers Vincent M. Janik and Stephanie L. King at Scotland's University of St. Andrews reported earlier this year that a wild bottlenose dolphin can learn and repeat signatures belonging to other individuals, and answer when another dolphin mimics its unique call.
Bruck played recordings of signature whistles to dolphins that had once lived with the animals that made the calls. Determining whether the dolphins recognized their old companions required a methodical comparison of how they responded to familiar calls versus calls belonging to dolphins they had never met.
First, Bruck would play recording after recording of signature whistles that the target dolphins had never heard before. His initial studies showed that these "dolphins get bored quickly listening to signature whistles from dolphins they don't know." Once they were habituated to the unfamiliar calls, Bruck would play a recording of an animal that he knew the target dolphin had lived with.
The familiar calls often would perk up the dolphins and elicit an immediate response.
"When they hear a dolphin they know, they often quickly approach the speaker playing the recording," Bruck said. "At times they will hover around, whistle at it, try to get it to whistle back."
To check that the response was the result of recognition, Bruck also would play a test recording of an unfamiliar bottlenose that was the same age and sex as the familiar animal. All the behavior was scored according to how quickly and to what degree the animals responded.
A clear pattern emerged in the data: Compared with unfamiliar calls, dolphins responded significantly more to whistles from animals they once knew, even if they had not heard the calls in decades.
An audio reunion of old companions
In one notable example, Bruck played a recording of a female dolphin named Allie, who currently lives at the Brookfield Zoo, for Bailey, a female now in Bermuda. The pair had last lived together at Dolphin Connection in the Florida Keys when Allie was 2 and Bailey was 4. But 20 years and six months after their last contact, Bailey still recognized the recording of Allie's signature whistle.
That kind of performance after decades apart was typical, leading Bruck to conclude that dolphins maintain lifelong memories of each others' whistles. In the wild, bottlenose dolphins have an average life expectancy of around 20 years, though longer-lived individuals can survive up to 45 years or more.
In fact, Bruck's study appears to show the longest pure memory of any kind in a non-human species. Anecdotally, an elephant can remember a mother after 20 years, but testing animals' long-term memories outside of family relationships requires more systematic study of multiple relationships.
Exactly why dolphins' social memories persist so long remains unclear. Dolphins exhibit sophisticated social connections that follow a "fission-fusion" model. In the open ocean, dolphins may break apart from one group and "fuse" with other groups many times over. Such relationships could have required a growth in memory capacity. But it's also possible that memory is just one facet of the advanced mind that evolved in dolphins for other reasons.
"Why do they need this kind of memory? I'm not sure they do," Bruck said. "The cognitive abilities of dolphins are really well developed, and sometimes things like this are carry-along traits. But to test whether this kind of social memory capacity is adaptive, we would need more demographic data from multiple populations in the wild to see if they experience 20-year separations."
The emergence of advanced memory in marine mammals as well as in humans shows that in evolution, "there are lots of ways to get from point A to point B," Bruck said. "It's nice to see this kind of ability in a non-primate, as this is a great example of convergent evolution."
Probing similarities to human names
Another big question such research raises is how similar dolphins' signature calls are to human words and names. So far no one has been able to test what signature whistles signify in a dolphin's mind.
"We know they use these signatures like names, but we don't know if the name stands for something in their minds the way a person's name does for us," Bruck said. "We don't know yet if the name makes a dolphin picture another dolphin in its head."
For his next round of research, Bruck said, "That's my goal -- show whether the call evokes a representational mental image of that individual." [Reply]
What do you get when you cross jelly fish DNA with a cuddly bunny? If researchers from universities in Hawaii and Turkey have anything to say about it, the combination could result in cheaper, more effective drugs for genetic diseases.
Scientists have cloned a litter of rabbits which have been given a gene from a glowing jellyfish, effectively creating two glow-in-the-dark bunnies. Under normal light the rabbits appear just as normal and healthy as their siblings, but in a dark room the animals shine a bright fluorescent green.
The scientists say the transgenic bunnies aren’t harmed at all by the foreign DNA and have only been created as a proof of concept. That 25 percent of the cloned rabbits glow tells the scientists they successfully incorporated another animal’s DNA into their genome and, if it can be done here, it may be possible in humans as well. They hope that this approach might eventually be used in humans so people with genetic diseases could benefit from receiving a transplant of healthy DNA.
Associate professor Stefan Moisyadi with the University of Hawaii told the Independent the cloned bunnies shine as brightly as LED lights when the room goes dark.
“And on top of it, their fur is beginning to grow and the greenness is shining right through their fur. It’s so intense,” he said.
These tiny rabbits were born just last week in the lab at the University of Istanbul after the scientists injected a fluorescent protein from jelly fish DNA into the mother rabbit’s embryo. Once these embryos were genetically altered, they were given back to the mother and allowed to gestate.
Out of a litter of eight rabbits, two of them were born with the glowing gene. In a statement, Moisyadi said he was quite pleased with the results, noting their method achieves a higher success rate than previously seen when cloning rabbits.
Now that this gene has been introduced to the rabbits, the scientists hope to find the same jellyfish protein in the milk of the female glowing rabbits. This, says the team, could lead to better, more efficient ways to produce medicines.
“[For] patients who suffer from hemophilia and they need the blood clotting enzymes in their blood, we can make those enzymes a lot cheaper in animals with barrier reactives rather than a factory that will cost billions of dollars to build,” said Moisyadi.
Moisyadi and University of Hawaii professor emeritus Ryuzo Yanagimachi began this work in 2011 when they traveled to Turkey to discuss a collaboration with the University of Istanbul and Marmara University. Yanagimachi, already a renowned geneticist, has also invented a technique which inserts sperm directly into an egg, a technique that is now used in many fertility clinics. He’s also been able to use this same method to create transgenic mice in previous studies.
Though the glow-in-the-dark bunnies have been developed in a lab, other animals with eye-popping colors have been spotted in the wild. For instance, just months ago researchers discovered hot pink slugs in the sub-alpine rocks of Australia. These animals are reportedly “as bright pink as you can imagine” and can cover the ground on a good morning. [Reply]
