Smart Mrs Dragonfly

In order to avoid males of the species bothering them for sex, female dragonflies fake their own deaths, falling from the sky and lying motionless on the ground until the suitor goes away.

 

A study by Rassim Khelifa, a zoologist from the University of Zurich is the first time scientists have seen odonates feign death as a tactic to avoid mating, and a rare instance of animals faking their own deaths for this purpose. Odonates is the order of carnivorous insects that includes dragonflies and damselflies.

But you can read the article here – http://www.newsweek.com/female-dragon-flies-fake-death-avoid-sex-evolution-591494

Reminds me of :-

Thought from the Greatest Living Scottish Thinker–Billy Connolly.  “If women are so bloody perfect at multitasking, How come they can’t have a headache and sex at the same time?”

A Gem

The trout is a beautiful creature. His colouring is the most delicate brushwork on a
glistening sheen, exquisitely streamlined: now gold and olive, now blue and silver,
now mottled with spots red and black.
Peter Cunningham.

The gem is the new author that I came across. Beautiful writing. The story does not really matter if someones writes as eloquently as this man. Obviously a lover of fly fishing of which I know nothing. But so far I love the story too….

Alex and Kay began their relationship many years ago in Ireland where Alex was destined to become a priest. His father, a well-respected doctor, is immensely proud of him until the day Alex meets Kay, a meeting which changes Alex’s life and his relationship with his father forever. Rejected by his father and his friends, Alex and Kay eventually settle in Canada to lead a normal family life. Normal life, however, is only a thin veneer covering a world of childhood secrets and lies and a letter arriving out of the blue triggers a long-buried guilt in Alex, leading him to risk all to track down its secrets. In a spellbinding story of one man’s search for the crucial secret locked in his memory since childhood, The Trout bursts up through the conventions and falsehoods of the past and hangs, beautiful and shimmering, in the clear and vital light of truth.

 

Alzheimer’s in a Petri dish

This is fiction but very good fiction from a very talented author

Neuroscientist and debut novelist Genova mines years of experience in her field to craft a realistic portrait of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Alice Howland has a career not unlike Genova’s—she’s an esteemed psychology professor at Harvard, living a comfortable life in Cambridge with her husband, John, arguing about the usual (making quality time together, their daughter’s move to L.A.) when the first symptoms of Alzheimer’s begin to emerge. First, Alice can’t find her Blackberry, then she becomes hopelessly disoriented in her own town. Alice is shocked to be diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s (she had suspected a brain tumor or menopause), after which her life begins steadily to unravel. She loses track of rooms in her home, resigns from Harvard and eventually cannot recognize her own children.

 

But this is fact!

Breakthrough Replicates Human Brain Cells for Use in Alzheimer’s Research

 

For the first time, and to the astonishment of many of their colleagues, researchers created what they call Alzheimer’s in a Dish — a petri dish with human brain cells that develop the telltale structures of Alzheimer’s disease. In doing so, they resolved a longstanding problem of how to study Alzheimer’s and search for drugs to treat it; the best they had until now were mice that developed an imperfect form of the disease.

The key to their success, said the lead researcher, Rudolph E. Tanzi ofMassachusetts General Hospital in Boston, was a suggestion by his colleague Doo Yeon Kim to grow human brain cells in a gel, where they formed networks as in an actual brain. They gave the neurons genes for Alzheimer’s disease. Within weeks they saw the hard Brillo-like clumps known as plaques and then the twisted spaghetti-like coils known as tangles — the defining features of Alzheimer’s disease.

The work, which also offers strong support for an old idea about how the disease progresses, was published in Nature on Sunday. Leading researchers said it should have a big effect.

You can also read more here:-

 

 

 

Compassion, in our DNA?

Is Human compassion part of (some of) the human race’s DNA? And of course the animal DNA, let’s not leave animals out please!

Read an interesting article in Live Science about a 100 000 year old human skull of a child that was so badly brain damaged that he /she could not possibly have looked after itself. Yet it lived with care for another decade.  Which means there must have been compassion to care for the helpless?

 

Read more about it here 

If you find this one on hoax slayer go shout at the BBC

 

Fossilised bones of dinosaur believed to be the largest creature ever to walk the Earth has been unearthed in Argentina, palaeontologists say.

Based on its huge thigh bones, it was 40m (130ft) long and 20m (65ft) tall. Weighing in at 77 tonnes, it was as heavy as 14 African elephants, and seven tonnes heavier than the previous record holder, Argentinosaurus. Scientists believe it is a new species of titanosaur – an enormous herbivore dating from the Late Cretaceous period. Read more: http://ow.ly/wXCu1

Image credit: BBC Natural History Unit

What do You do with an empty glass bottle?

In the early 1900s, Fort Bragg residents threw their household garbage over the cliffs above what is now Glass Beach. It is hard to imagine this happening today, but back then people dumped all kinds of refuse straight into the ocean, including old cars, and their household garbage, which of course included lots of glass.

Beginning in 1949, the area around Glass Beach became a public dump, and locals referred to it as “The Dumps.” Sometimes fires were lit to reduce the size of the trash pile (up to 30 feet high), however in 1967, the city leaders closed the area. Various cleanup programs were undertaken through the years to try to correct the damage, but without success.

Over the next 30 years the pounding waves cleaned the beach, by breaking down everything but glass and pottery. The pounding waves washed the trash up and down, back and forth. Tons of polished, broken glass were created by the pounding surf. These smoothened, coloured glass particles then settled along the sea shore in millions, and so a magnificent beach was formed. The name was changed from, “The Dump” to what we currently know as, “The Glass Beach”.

The sea glass that was created is the product of a very long and interesting process.  It can take anywhere from 10 to 30 years to make sea glass, the name for any piece of glass that finds its way to the ocean and tumbles around in the water long enough to frost and smooth its surface. Once it makes its way into the ocean, the glass is broken up into shards and is tumbled around in the water, where sand and other rocks act like sandpaper to smooth out its rough edges. Sometimes as the sea glass is passed through fire, it becomes “fire glass”, the rarest of sea glass with certain “inclusions”, just like precious gems.

In 1998, the private owner of the property determined that Glass Beach should belong to the public and in 2002 it became part of MacKerricher State Park, open to the public.

Within a period of few years the Glass Beach won fame, attracting a large number of tourists every year. Way back in time, people wanted to dump their glass products on this shore; now they would try to get one of these pieces to take home as a souvenir. It is ironic but true that where once it was illegal to dispose the glass on the shore, it now is a crime to remove it.

Visiting the Glass Beach today is a unique experience. What makes it even more remarkable, are the sounds produced by the glass pebbles as they are being washed away by the gentle waves.

Happy Belated albeit Birthday Jane Goodall

My favorite image is the one where Jane is with Gregoire and she’s out of focus. She doesn’t have to be in focus to be recognized because she’s so symbolic,” says photographer Michael “Nick” Nichols. In honor of Jane Goodall’s 80th birthday, Nichols shared his experiences capturing Goodall and the work she does.

National Geographic

 

 

The wonder of genetics!

Twinzy is a “half sider” budgerigar, also known as a parakeet. Probably one the of the best ever photographed. Twinzy has the characteristics of a blue bird on one side and a green bird on the other, even his tail feathers are split down the middle

A chimera (also spelled chimaera) is a single organism composed of genetically distinct cells. This can result in male and female organs, two different blood types, or subtle variations in form.^[1] Animal chimeras are produced by the merger of multiple fertilized eggs. In plant chimeras, however, the distinct types of tissue may originate from the same zygote, and the difference is often due to mutation during ordinary cell division. Normally, chimerism is not visible on casual inspection; however, it has been detected in the course of proving parentage.

Another way that chimerism can occur in animals is by organ transplantation, giving one individual tissues that developed from two different genomes. For example, a bone marrow transplant can change someone’s blood type.

 

So you are…?

Which Grandparent Are You Most Related to?

 

Your family tree says you inherited 25 percent of your ancestry from each. Genetics says you didn’t.

 

What makes you who you are genetically? The easy answer is your family. The longer answer begins with the fact that all humans have two parents (at least for now), and usually four distinct grandparents (there are unfortunate exceptions). Genetically you are a recombination of four separate individuals. But that does not mean you have an equal contribution from four separate individuals.

But that does not mean you have an equal contribution from four separate individuals. Humans normally carry 23 pairs of chromosomes: 22 autosomal pairs and one pair of sex chromosomes, either two copies of the X for a female or an X and a Y in the case of males. By Mendel’s law of segregation you receive one copy of each pair from your mother (via the egg), and one copy from your father (via the sperm). This means exactly half of your genome derives from each parent.

Things begin to get more complicated going back two generations. One might think that of the 44 autosomal chromosomes you would receive 11 from each of the four grandparents. (For simplicity we’ll leave the sex chromosomes out for now. If you are a female, you receive one X from each parent, while if you are a male you receive an X from your mother and a Y from your father, who got it from his father.) But while the proportion of one’s inheritance from parents is fixed by exact necessity, the fraction from grandparents is governed by chance. For each of the chromosomes you inherit from a given parent, you have a 50 percent chance of gaining a copy from your grandfather and a 50 percent chance of gaining a copy from your grandmother. The laws of independent probability imply that there is a 1 in 4 million chance that all of your maternal or paternal chromosomes could come from just one grandparent!* What’s more, genetic recombination means that chromosomes aren’t purely from one grandparent or the other; during the cell divisions that produce sperm and eggs, chromosomes exchange segments and become hybrids. You almost certainly have different genetic contributions from your four grandparents.

But this is not just abstract theorizing. Imagine that you could know that 22 percent of the genome of your child derives from your mother, and 28 percent from your father. Also imagine that you know that 23 percent of the genome of your child derives from your partner’s mother, and 27 percent derives from your partner’s father. And you could know exactly how closely your child is related to each of its uncles and aunts. This isn’t imaginary science fiction, it is science fact.

read the article

Weekly Photo Challenge – The Hue of You

Is this my hue? Lilac and green. For gardens yes.