Animal Planet

[brian]

Chimps do have (sorta-kinda) pointy ears.

You're getting your chimps confused with your Vulcans again.

[Xjmt]

What's that old saying? "Put 1,000 Vulcans in a room with 1.000 typewriters and you'd eventually get a Braga script?"

[Henry J]

Random critter for the day:

Hygrobiidae

Henry

[Henry J]

Giant Pandas See in Color

They may be black and white, but new research at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Zoo Atlanta shows that giant pandas can see in color. Graduate researcher Angela Kelling tested the ability of two Zoo Atlanta pandas, Yang Yang and Lun Lun, to see color and found that both pandas were able to discriminate between colors and various shades of gray.

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Tree Of Life Project Grows More Leaves and Branches

The Web-based project, a massive collaboration among scientists from all over the world, is growing more "leaves" and "branches" all the time. The project is basically a genealogy of life on Earth coupled with information about the characteristics of individual species and groups of organisms.

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[Xjmt]

That opens the old debate as to whether black and white are colors or merely the lack of color. But if lack of color then how can there be two?

[brian]

For pigments, black is all colors and white is the absence of color.

For light, the reverse is true.

[Xjmt]

You're not supposed to give away the answer NOW!!

[Henry J]

West Australian fossil find rewrites land mammal evolution

A fossil fish discovered in the West Australian Kimberley has been identified as the missing clue in vertebrate evolution, [...]

(The fish down under...)

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Irreducible Complexity as an Evolutionary Prediction

I remember once finding a mention of a biologist in the first half of the last century who predicted that evolution would sometimes make systems that seemed impossible to develop stepwise [...]

(Just can't keep things simple, can they? )

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These bacteria use radiated water as food

Researchers from Indiana University Bloomington and eight collaborating institutions report in this week's Science a self-sustaining community of bacteria that live in rocks 2.8 kilometers below Earth's surface. Think that's weird? The bacteria rely on radioactive uranium to convert water molecules to useable energy.

(Weird!)

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[Xjmt]

And here I've been thinking Mercury poisoning was the biggest fear of eating fish.

[Henry J]

Random critter for the week:

Entomobryidae (a king of springtail hexapoda arthropoda)

Henry

[Henry J]

New genetic analysis forces re-draw of insect family tree

The family tree covering almost half the animal species on the planet has been re-drawn following a genetic analysis which has revealed new relationships between four major groups of insects.

(Hope this redrawing doesn't "bug" anybody. )

[Xjmt]

Don't bug me.

[Henry J]

First Evidence to Show Elephants Recognize Themselves In The Mirror

Elephants have joined a small, elite group of species--including humans, great apes and dolphins--that have the ability to recognize themselves in the mirror, [...]
During the exposure, the elephants tested their mirrored images by making repetitive body movements and using the mirror to inspect themselves, such as by moving their trunks to inspect the insides of their mouths, a part of the body they usually cannot see.

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Henry

[Henry J]

There really is nothing as 'blind as a bat'

. . . because bats are not blind.

They are, however, the world's only flying mammal with more than 1000 species. Some are as tiny as a bumblebee, weighing about as much as a dime while the largest have wing spans approaching 1.8 metres (almost 6 feet).

[Xjmt]

Then there was the Comic Book character, Hawkman. There was a female also. Probably Hawklady or some such...