History, archaeology, food, books, etc.
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Feb 13th, 2012
From the Atlantic: How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy. Jaroslav Flegr is no kook. And yet, for years, he suspected his mind had been taken over by parasites that had invaded his brain. So the prolific biologist took his science-fiction hunch into the lab. What he’s now discovering will startle you. Could tiny organisms [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Dec 24th, 2008
From Science Daily: Honey Bees On Cocaine Dance More, Changing Ideas About The Insect Brain. In a study that challenges current ideas about the insect brain, researchers have found that honey bees on cocaine tend to exaggerate. Normally, foraging honey bees alert their comrades to potential food sources only when they’ve found high quality nectar [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, DNA, history & archaeology on Nov 20th, 2008
From the New York Times: Regenerating a Mammoth for $10 Million. Scientists are talking for the first time about the old idea of resurrecting extinct species as if this staple of science fiction is a realistic possibility, saying that a living mammoth could perhaps be regenerated for as little as $10 million. The same technology [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, dogs on Nov 6th, 2008
From Ananova: Baby monkey gets his own guard dog. A Chinese zoo has given an orphan monkey its own guard dog to stop it being bullied by bigger primates. Keepers at Jiaozuo City Zoo said the monkey was always being bullied and they had intervened to save his life several times. "So we put a [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Oct 28th, 2008
From nature.com: Early bird gets the better song. Birds that come from the earlier eggs in a brood are more likely to be better singers, scientists have found. In most bird species, song is used by males to demonstrate their fitness to potential mates, and many studies have shown that the healthiest males tend to [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, BC, outdoors on Sep 29th, 2008
If you were here I would take you to the beach in the mornings, right after coffee. In addition to the usual seaside delights, we now have Dead Jellyfish Season: every morning there are dozens of dead Lion’s Mane jellyfish sparkling on the beach. Some are small — just a foot or so across — [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Sep 22nd, 2008
From NewScientist: Wasps have a good memory for a face. Wasps can remember each other after a busy week apart, according to new research. It’s a level of social memory never seen before in insects, which were long thought to be too small-brained for such a feat. [continue]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, strange stuff on Sep 9th, 2008
From the BBC: DR Congo frees goats from prison. A minister in DR Congo has ordered a Kinshasa jail to release a dozen goats, which he said they were being held there illegally. Deputy Justice Minister Claude Nyamugabo said he found the goats just in time during a routine jail visit. The beasts were due [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Sep 5th, 2008
From the BBC: Bumblebees outwit robotic spiders. Scientists have found that bumblebees learn from their "near-death" encounters with crab spiders and adapt their future foraging strategies. They watched real bees in an artificial meadow — containing yellow "flowers" and robotic crab spiders. Bees that had been "captured" spent longer inspecting flowers during subsequent foraging trips. [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Sep 5th, 2008
From Christopher Howse’s article in The Telegraph: Bees are eating Lichfield Cathedral. Bees are eating Lichfield Cathedral. It sounds like science fiction, but it is science fact. I might take back the kind words I had for bees in this column (June 28), except that the cathedral-eating kind are not our beleaguered honey bees. The [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Sep 4th, 2008
From AFP: Elephant kicks heroin habit with China island rehab. An elephant has kicked his heroin habit after a three-year stint on an island rehab in southern China, an official and state media said Thursday. The four-year-old Asian elephant, called Xiguang, has now being transported to a wildlife reserve in southwest China after being cured [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, history & archaeology on Sep 3rd, 2008
From New Scientist: Ancient mouse offers clues to royal shipwreck. Remains of a long dead house mouse have been found in the wreck of a Bronze Age royal ship. That makes it the earliest rodent stowaway ever recorded, and proof of how house mice spread around the world. [continue]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Sep 3rd, 2008
How did I miss this? From the Times: Just right for the garden: a mini-cow. It’s the little cow with a big future. Rising supermarket prices are persuading hundreds of families to turn their back gardens into mini-ranches stocked with miniature cattle. Registrations of the most popular breed, the Dexter, have doubled since the millennium [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, BC on Sep 2nd, 2008
From the Beeb: Wolves prefer fishing to hunting. Wolves in western Canada prefer to fish for salmon when it is in season rather than hunt deer or other wild game, researchers have found. Scientists studied the eating habits of wolf packs in British Columbia. Deer is the staple food of the wolves in the spring [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Aug 31st, 2008
We walked in the rain the other day, through the forest and out to the bluff. When the rain stopped the world sparkled, and this dragonfly stood out like some kind of gem. The full size photo is way too large to put here, but, oh, the level of detail is lovely. See? I took [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Aug 26th, 2008
From the BBC: Cattle shown to align north-south. Have you ever noticed that herds of grazing animals all face the same way? No, actually. They do? Images from Google Earth have confirmed that cattle tend to align their bodies in a north-south direction. Wild deer also display this behaviour — a phenomenon that has apparently [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Aug 22nd, 2008
Oh, too cute! A greyhound puppy has adopted a baby owl. From the Mail Online: In the childhood fairytale it was the owl and the pussycat who were the very best of friends. But in real life it is this greyhound and owl who have formed a rather bizarre friendship at an animal centre. The [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Aug 19th, 2008
This delights me. From the Beeb: Wild dolphins tail-walk on water. A wild dolphin is apparently teaching other members of her group to walk on their tails, a behaviour usually seen only after training in captivity. The tail-walking group lives along the south Australian coast near Adelaide. One of them spent a short time after [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, Norway on Aug 15th, 2008
From the BBC: Military penguin becomes a ‘Sir’. A penguin who was previously made a Colonel-in-Chief of the Norwegian Army has been knighted at Edinburgh Zoo. Penguin Nils Olav has been an honorary member and mascot of the Norwegian King’s Guard since 1972. Over the years, he has been promoted through the ranks after being [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, BC, health on Aug 14th, 2008
Now here’s a public service announcement. Do you have a weed in your neighbourhood that has cheery yellow flowers about now, like a bunch of miniature yellow daisies? Take a moment to see if it’s tansy ragwort. And if it is, you’ll want to yank it out or cut it so that the plant doesn’t [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, science on Aug 9th, 2008
From discovery.com: Bees, Fish Analyzed to Understand Serial Killers. Studying species in the animal world helps police catch human criminals — and vice versa. Originally developed to catch serial killers, a method called geographic profiling is now being used to study great white sharks, bats and bees. In turn, criminologists expect that these biological studies [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, environment, strange stuff on Aug 6th, 2008
What if you’d bought a house in a good neighbourhood, moved in, and then realized that you had a major rat problem caused by the old ladies next door? The LA Weekly tells of Scott and Liz Denham, who had that very problem: Unchallenged by Health Officials, Elderly Twins Fed Local Vermin Population. "You start [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Jul 29th, 2008
From the Beeb: Small shrew is heavyweight boozer. A tiny tree-shrew that lives on alcoholic nectar could — pound for pound — drink the average human under the table, scientists have discovered. Malaysia’s pen-tailed tree-shrew waits until nightfall to binge on fermented nectar from the bertam palm. The animal could give insights into how humans’ [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Jun 25th, 2008
From EurekAlert: Migrating songbirds learn survival tips on the fly. Migrating songbirds take their survival cues from local winged residents when flying through unfamiliar territory, a new Queen’s University-led study shows. It’s a case of "When in Rome, do as the Romans do," says biologist Joseph Nocera, who conducted the research while working as an [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Jun 20th, 2008
From discovery.com: Apes Plan for the Future. What goes on in an ape’s mind might be more similar to our own way of thinking than previously realized, suggests a new study that found chimpanzees and orangutans plan for their futures. [continue]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on Jun 18th, 2008
From Carl Zimmer at The Loom: Stockholm Syndrome For Moths. A caterpillar’s life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps that use caterpillars as hosts [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, strange stuff on Jun 11th, 2008
From discovery.com: One-Horned ‘Unicorn’ Deer Born in Italy. A deer with a single horn in the center of its head — much like the fabled, mythical unicorn — has been spotted in a nature preserve in Italy, park officials said Wednesday. "This is fantasy becoming reality," Gilberto Tozzi, director of the Center of Natural Sciences [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, health on May 26th, 2008
From the New York Times: Comfort Food, for Monkeys. The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. (…) In fact, the dominant females [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc on May 17th, 2008
From discovery.com: Olympic Swimmers Learn From Sharks, Dolphins. When winning an Olympic gold medal in swimming is the goal, it helps to take inspiration from some of the best swimmers in the world — sharks and dolphins — and that is exactly what U.S. Olympic team swimmers have been doing as they train. From suits [...]
Posted in animals, birds, insects, etc, environment, food on May 11th, 2008
From Discover Magazine: Want to Help the Environment? Eat Insects. David Gracer lifts a giant water bug, places his thumbs in a pre-sliced slit in its underside, and flips off its head. "Smell the meat," he says, sniffing the decapitated creature, and the people gathered around the table willingly oblige. Members of the New York [...]