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by Cordelia » Sat Sep 30, 2017 2:27 pm
by Sounder » Sun Oct 01, 2017 6:28 am
Sounder wrote:Some have observed that the most self-righteous are also the most lacking in conscience.
Burnt Hill wrote...
If someone is only conscious of love, are they lacking in conscience?
What if the self righteous man is also an honorable and fair man?
by mentalgongfu2 » Sun Oct 01, 2017 9:04 am
by Cordelia » Sun Oct 01, 2017 10:00 am
by Cordelia » Sun Oct 01, 2017 2:25 pm
by Cordelia » Thu Oct 05, 2017 7:07 am
Here's the never-before-seen 'octopus city' scientists recently discovered
Arielle Berger
Sep. 21, 2017
A group of scientists discovered an underwater "octopus city" off the coast of Australia in Jervis Bay, and they've named it "Octlantis."
This discovery of octopuses interacting in a high-density den challenges scientists' previously held belief that octopuses are solitary and antisocial creatures.
http://www.businessinsider.com/octopus- ... red-2017-9
by Cordelia » Fri Oct 27, 2017 7:16 am
Are Trees Sentient Beings? Certainly, Says German Forester
By Richard Schiffman • November 16, 2016
In his bestselling book, The Hidden Life of Trees, Peter Wohlleben argues that to save the world’s forests we must first recognize that trees are “wonderful beings” with innate adaptability, intelligence, and the capacity to communicate with — and heal — other trees.
As a student in forestry school, Peter Wohlleben was trained to look at trees exclusively as an economic commodity. But after joining a German forestry agency and managing a community forest, he soon became disillusioned with practices like clear-cutting, chemical use, and mechanical harvesting that put short-term profits before sustainability.
Wohlleben was eventually hired by the local mayor to look after the same forest in an eco-friendly way. Today, he manages the forest without using insecticides or heavy machinery, and the trees are harvested by hand and hauled out by horses. He also has started a “living gravestone” project in which townspeople pay the equivalent of the commercial value of an ancient tree to have their ashes interred at its base. The woodland has gone from a money-losing operation to a profitable one.
In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Wohlleben, author of The Hidden Life of Trees, discusses how trees are sophisticated organisms that live in families, support their sick neighbors, and have the capacity to make decisions and fight off predators. He has been criticized for anthropomorphizing trees, but Wohlleben, 52, maintains that to succeed in preserving our forests in a rapidly warming world, we must start to look at trees in an entirely different light.e360: How exactly do trees cooperate with one another?
Wohlleben: One thing is that mother trees suckle their children, they feed the young tree just enough sugars produced by its own photosynthesis to keep it from dying. Trees in a forest of the same species are connected by the roots, which grow together like a network. Their root tips have highly sensitive brain-like structures that can distinguish whether the root that it encounters in the soil is its own root, the root of another species, or the roots of its own species. If it encounters its own kind, I don’t know if scientists yet know how this happens, but we have measured with radioactive-marked sugar molecules that there is a flow from healthy trees to sick trees so that they will have an equal measure of food and energy available.
Full interview.....
https://e360.yale.edu/features/are_tree ... _wohlleben
by Luther Blissett » Mon May 14, 2018 7:52 pm
Science news: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago
OCTOPUSES are “aliens” which evolved on another planet before arriving on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago as “cryopreserved” eggs via a process known as panspermia, radical new research has suggested.
The extraordinary claims were made in a report entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? which was co-authored by a group of 33 scientists and published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal.
The paper suggests that the explanation for the sudden flourishing of life during the Cambrian era – often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion – lies in the stars, as a result of the Earth being bombarded by clouds of organic molecules.
But the scientists go on to make an even more extraordinary claim concerning octopuses, which seem to have evolved on Earth quite rapidly something like 270 million years ago, 250 million years after the Cambrian explosion.
The paper states: “The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.
“One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth”
Study authors
“Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.
“The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.
“One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth - most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs.
“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus' sudden emergence on Earth circa 270 million years ago.”
The suggestion is all the more interesting because octopuses have frequently been touted as a possible model for extraterrestrial beings.
In his 1898 sci-fi classic Martians in War of The Worlds, HG Wells conceived his Martians as octopus-like creatures with massive brains.
Meanwhile the 2016 film Arrival concerns first contact with an alien cephalopod race.
Cephalopods, especially octopuses are regarded as the most intelligent of all non-vertebrates, with the highest brain-to-body ratio.
One study has suggested they are capable of observational learning, ie by observing others.
They have even been spotted assembling discarded coconut shells and using them to construct a shelter.
In his book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, author Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote: “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.
“This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
by seemslikeadream » Mon May 14, 2018 8:05 pm
seemslikeadream » Mon Oct 30, 2017 6:49 am wrote:Dozens Of Octopuses Found Mysteriously Crawling On Welsh Beach
BY GAYATHRI ANURADHA ON 10/30/17 AT 7:17 AM
Dozens of octopuses were spotted emerging from the ocean every night for the past few days along the Welsh coast in what is being touted as a rare occurrence.
As many as 25 curled octopuses were seen three nights in a row including Friday at New Quay beach in Ceredigion in west Wales. Brett Stones, the owner of SeaMor Dolphin Watching Boat Trips which ran dolphin tours in Cardigan Bay told the BBC he saw the octopuses as he returned from a day at sea and added it was unusual for them to come onto land.
"It was a bit like an end of days scenario," he said. "There were probably about 20 or 25 on the beach. I have never seen them out of the water like that." He also offered a possible explanation for their behavior: "Maybe they are getting confused by the bright lights in New Quay harbor and maybe they are dying off after summer or getting knackered after the recent storms."
Pictures and videos of the octopuses were also posted on social media.
Stones encouraged people to help the octopuses back into the sea when they saw them and said some of the wayward creatures had later washed up on the beach and were found dead.
He told the Telegraph: "They usually hide in the rocks some two or three meters below the surface. We’ve tried to put them back in the sea where we can but we have found a few dead ones on the beach in the mornings which suggests they may have got confused and stranded."
The curator at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, James Wright, also told the newspaper that while he was aware of two other incidents of curled octopuses roaming in north Devon and Wales in the past week, the number witnessed in Ceredigion was very unusual.
"This account of a number on the same beach is quite odd," he stated. "But them even being found in the intertidal is not common and suggests there is something wrong with them I am afraid."
"As the areas where they are exhibiting this odd behavior coincides with the two areas hit by the two recent low-pressure depressions and associated storms of Ophelia and Brian, it could be supposed that these have affected them,” Wright added. "It could simply be injuries sustained by the rough weather itself or there could be sensitivity to a change in atmospheric pressure."
Steve Simpson, a lecturer in marine biology at the University of Bristol, said it was incredibly rare for octopuses to venture on dry land: "They are fairly vulnerable on land and it’s hard to imagine they have found a new food source. They may be aggregating to reproduce but they do tend to be territorial and solitary," he told the Telegraph.
However, this is not the first time octopuses have been seen coming onto land. In 2011, an octopus was filmed crawling over dry land at the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve in San Mateo County, California. In 2016, Inky the octopus which resided in the National Aquarium of New Zealand, crawled across the room and disappeared down a drainpipe into the sea.
http://www.ibtimes.com/dozens-octopuses ... ch-2607906
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzR89kea9jg
by Cordelia » Thu May 17, 2018 11:11 am
Luther Blissett » Mon May 14, 2018 10:52 pm wrote:Science news: Octopuses came to Earth from space as frozen eggs millions of years ago
OCTOPUSES are “aliens” which evolved on another planet before arriving on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago as “cryopreserved” eggs via a process known as panspermia, radical new research has suggested.
The extraordinary claims were made in a report entitled Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? which was co-authored by a group of 33 scientists and published in the Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology journal.
The paper suggests that the explanation for the sudden flourishing of life during the Cambrian era – often referred to as the Cambrian Explosion – lies in the stars, as a result of the Earth being bombarded by clouds of organic molecules.
But the scientists go on to make an even more extraordinary claim concerning octopuses, which seem to have evolved on Earth quite rapidly something like 270 million years ago, 250 million years after the Cambrian explosion.
The paper states: “The genome of the Octopus shows a staggering level of complexity with 33,000 protein-coding genes more than is present in Homo sapiens.
“One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth”
Study authors
“Its large brain and sophisticated nervous system, camera-like eyes, flexible bodies, instantaneous camouflage via the ability to switch colour and shape are just a few of the striking features that appear suddenly on the evolutionary scene.
“The transformative genes leading from the consensus ancestral Nautilus to the common Cuttlefish to Squid to the common are not easily to be found in any pre-existing life form – it is plausible then to suggest they seem to be borrowed from a far distant “future” in terms of terrestrial evolution, or more realistically from the cosmos at large.
“One plausible explanation, in our view, is that the new genes are likely new extraterrestrial imports to Earth - most plausibly as an already coherent group of functioning genes within (say) cryopreserved and matrix protected fertilized Octopus eggs.
“Thus the possibility that cryopreserved Squid and/or Octopus eggs, arrived in icy bolides several hundred million years ago should not be discounted as that would be a parsimonious cosmic explanation for the Octopus' sudden emergence on Earth circa 270 million years ago.”
The suggestion is all the more interesting because octopuses have frequently been touted as a possible model for extraterrestrial beings.
In his 1898 sci-fi classic Martians in War of The Worlds, HG Wells conceived his Martians as octopus-like creatures with massive brains.
Meanwhile the 2016 film Arrival concerns first contact with an alien cephalopod race.
Cephalopods, especially octopuses are regarded as the most intelligent of all non-vertebrates, with the highest brain-to-body ratio.
One study has suggested they are capable of observational learning, ie by observing others.
They have even been spotted assembling discarded coconut shells and using them to construct a shelter.
In his book Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, author Peter Godfrey-Smith wrote: “If we can make contact with cephalopods as sentient beings, it is not because of a shared history, not because of kinship, but because evolution built minds twice over.
“This is probably the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien.”
The Scientific Community Criticizes The Entire Theory
The reason the theory has received so much attention in the media is because other scientists are blasting it as being false.
"So this article is useful, calling for attention, and it is worth thinking about," wrote Molecular geneticist Karin Moelling. "Yet the main statement about viruses, microbes and even animals which came to us from space, cannot be taken seriously."
There are several reasons why the scientific community rejects the entire theory. First, none of the meteorites collected on Earth contain genetic material. In fact, the Octopus' genes fit perfectly in the genetic makeup of life on Earth. As for the new life in the fossil record, most scientists agree that there are more plausible explanations than aliens.
The entire study that was published contains no original research. Instead, the authors of the study only referenced their own works.
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/22801 ... -space.htm
http://www.panspermia.org/causeofcambrianexplosion.pdfby Iamwhomiam » Thu May 17, 2018 3:59 pm
by Cordelia » Thu Jul 05, 2018 7:29 am
Some species of ants farm aphids, protecting them on the plants where they are feeding, and consuming the honeydew the aphids release from the terminations of their alimentary canals. This is a mutualistic relationship, with these dairying ants milking the aphids by stroking them with their antennae.[b][61] Although mutualistic, the feeding behaviour of aphids is altered by ant attendance. Aphids attended by ants tend to increase the production of honeydew in smaller drops with a greater concentration of amino acids.
Some farming ant species gather and store the aphid eggs in their nests over the winter. In the spring, the ants carry the newly hatched aphids back to the plants. Some species of dairying ants (such as the European yellow meadow ant, Lasius flavus)[63] manage large herds of aphids that feed on roots of plants in the ant colony. Queens leaving to start a new colony take an aphid egg to found a new herd of underground aphids in the new colony. These farming ants protect the aphids by fighting off aphid predators.
An interesting variation in ant–aphid relationships involves lycaenid butterflies and Myrmica ants. For example, Niphanda fusca butterflies lay eggs on plants where ants tend herds of aphids. The eggs hatch as caterpillars which feed on the aphids. The ants do not defend the aphids from the caterpillars, since the caterpillars produce a pheromone which deceives the ants into treating them like ants, and carrying the caterpillars into their nest. Once there, the ants feed the caterpillars, which in return produce honeydew for the ants. When the caterpillars reach full size, they crawl to the colony entrance and form cocoons. After two weeks, the adult butterflies emerge and take flight. At this point, the ants attack the butterflies, but the butterflies have a sticky wool-like substance on their wings that disables the ants' jaws, allowing the butterflies to fly away without being harmed.[64] Some bees in coniferous forests collect aphid honeydew to make forest honey.
Another ant-mimicking gall aphid, Paracletus cimiciformis (Eriosomatinae), has evolved a complex double strategy involving two morphs of the same clone and Tetramorium ants. Aphids of the round morph cause the ants to farm them, as with many other aphids. The flat morph aphids are aggressive mimics with a "wolf in sheep's clothing" strategy: they have hydrocarbons in their cuticle that mimic those of the ants, and the ants carry them into the brood chamber of the ants' nest and raise them like ant larvae. Once there, the flat morph aphids behave as predators, drinking the body fluids of ant larva
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphid
by Cordelia » Fri Jul 20, 2018 7:08 am
Fish do have feelings
Fish were long believed to be unfeeling, dead-eyed animals. But now scientists are discovering the intrinsic social life of fish. They grieve, engage in cooperative hunting and some have very weird sex lives. Take an underwater journey to learn more about the greatly misunderstood and underappreciated fish.
New fish fossil found in Germany
The previously unknown pufferfish species lived around 150 million years ago. A number of interesting finds have been unearthed at the same stone quarry in northern Bavaria.
Scientists in southern Germany have discovered the fossilized remains of a previously unknown pufferfish.
A team from the Bamberg Museum of Natural History made the find in a stone quarry in nearby Wattendorf.
Matthias Mäuser, the head of the museum, said the pufferfish lived around 150 million years ago.
Similar to pufferfish living today, the fossilized remains showed that the fish had teeth.
Scientists from the museum regularly excavate the Wattendorf stone quarry and have unearthed many interesting finds to date.
In 2011, they discovered the remains of a previously unknown flying dinosaur species known as pterosaurs.
More...https://www.dw.com/en/new-fish-fossil-f ... a-44397549
by Luther Blissett » Fri Jul 20, 2018 9:06 pm
by Cordelia » Mon Jul 23, 2018 11:30 am
It’s Official: Fish Feel Pain
The verdict is in. But will our oceanic friends ever get the same legal protections as land animals?At the anatomical level, fish have neurons known as nociceptors, which detect potential harm, such as high temperatures, intense pressure, and caustic chemicals. Fish produce the same opioids—the body’s innate painkillers—that mammals do. And their brain activity during injury is analogous to that in terrestrial vertebrates: sticking a pin into goldfish or rainbow trout, just behind their gills, stimulates nociceptors and a cascade of electrical activity that surges toward brain regions essential for conscious sensory perceptions (such as the cerebellum, tectum, and telencephalon), not just the hindbrain and brainstem, which are responsible for reflexes and impulses.
Fish also behave in ways that indicate they consciously experience pain. In one study, researchers dropped clusters of brightly colored Lego blocks into tanks containing rainbow trout. Trout typically avoid an unfamiliar object suddenly introduced to their environment in case it’s dangerous. But when scientists gave the rainbow trout a painful injection of acetic acid, they were much less likely to exhibit these defensive behaviors, presumably because they were distracted by their own suffering. In contrast, fish injected with both acid and morphine maintained their usual caution. Like all analgesics, morphine dulls the experience of pain, but does nothing to remove the source of pain itself, suggesting that the fish’s behavior reflected their mental state, not mere physiology. If the fish were reflexively responding to the presence of caustic acid, as opposed to consciously experiencing pain, then the morphine should not have made a difference.
More....https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science- ... 180967764/
As America confronts the opioid crisis, environmental scientists are warning about a related problem. Chemicals from pain-killers and other drugs often end up in lakes and rivers, creating what some scientists say could be a deadly cocktail for fish and other wildlife.
http://wksu.org/post/environmental-cris ... w#stream/0
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