A world worth saving
Today, the NY Times features some amazing photographs from Joel Sartore, a freelance photographer for National Geographic.
May 23
Common Pesticide a Culprit in Declining Bee Colonies
The following article by Carl Zimmer appeared in the New York Times on 29 March 2012.
“Scientists have been alarmed and puzzled by declines in bee populations in the United States and other parts of the world. They have suspected that pesticides are playing a part, but to date their experiments have yielded conflicting, ambiguous results. In Thursday’s issue of the journal Science, two teams of researchers published studies suggesting that low levels of a common pesticide can have significant effects on bee colonies”. Read More
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Memorize This!
This fascinating video of Ayumu the chimp excelling at memory tasks has been going around the net. The results of the study in the video were published by Sana Inoue and Tetsuro Matsuzaw (Current Biology 17:1004-1005). Ayumu performed better at this memory task than humans, and younger chimps performed better than older ones. They concluded that this ability was due to having better eidectic memory, which is ‘the memory capability to retain an accurate, detailed image of a complex scene or pattern’. Pretty amazing, but I wonder how good you or I would be if this is all we did for years.
You can read more about eidectic memory here.
The Clever Hans Effect
In Berlin in a courtyard surrounded by high apartment buildings in the summer of 1904, there is a man and his horse. The man is Herr von Osten who taught mathematics to grade school children. His horse is Hans and the two are obviously very close and von Osten is very gentle with his horse. Herr von Osten asks Hans questions, usually mathematical ones, and the horse answers by tapping out his right foot on the ground. A shake of the head is zero. When the answer is large, Hans taps quickly, when the answer is small he taps slowly, as though he knew the answer in advance. Read more
What to study??
Soon after trying to uncover the magic formula that colleges use to make admission decisions, students are faced with another vexing question: What subjects and what majors should they choose to ensure their long-term success?
Read the full article here
The world is as you see it…
When considering animal behavior, it’s important to think about and understand how animals perceive their environment. Most people observe behavior and immediately think they understand what the animals are doing. This comes from the constant necessity of having to interpret human behavior. Most people think they know what an animal is thinking and what it is responding to. But animals live in remarkably different sensory and experiential worlds from humans, i.e. they have a different Umwelt. Read more
