posts and reblogs in english
“The Life of Oceans”.
It pays to be nice. One of the most absolutely, emphatically wrong hypotheses about the oceans was coined by one of the most carefree and amiable people in nineteenth century science.
It should have sunk his reputation without trace. Yet, it did not. He thought the deep oceans were stone cold dead and lifeless. They’re certainly not that. Even more amazingly, it was clear that the deep oceans were full of life even before he proposed his hypothesis — and yet the idea persisted for decades.
He is still regarded as the father of marine biology. There’s a moral in that somewhere.
Edward Forbes was born a Manxman who early developed a love of natural history. He collected flowers, seashells, butterflies with a passion that saw him neglect, then fail dismally in, his studies: first as an artist (he had a fine talent for drawing) then as a doctor. He…
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Surprise! Pluto May have Clouds
Alleged clouds in Pluto’s atmosphere imaged by New Horizons, highlighted by a Southwest Research Institute scientist (NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI)
We could be calling it Cloudgate—”leaked” information from internal emails identifying structures in Pluto’s already hazy atmosphere that could very well be clouds, based on a March 4 article in New Scientist.
The image above shows sections of an image attached to an email sent by SwRI scientist John Spencer, in which he noted particularly bright areas in Pluto’s atmosphere. “In the first image an extremely bright low altitude limb haze above south-east Sputnik on the left, and a discrete fuzzy cloud seen against the sunlit surface above Krun Macula (I think) on the right,” he wrote.
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An iceberg universe
Forms in Nature
This video is made posible with a grant from the foundation for science & nature
By: Chromosphere, Production Company, Kevin Dart, Stephane coedel, nelson boles and studiokamp
The Social Intelligence Hypothesis
Why do some animals have large brains? It’s a subject of considerable debate and also the central subject of my research. Humans have the largest brains, relative to body size, of any animal we know of. Some other animals with conspicuously big brains include dolphins, apes, monkeys, crows, octopuses, parrots and elephants. This presents a problem. Brain tissue is incredibly expensive to grow and maintain in metabolic terms and natural selection should act to maximise the efficiency of energy use. Therefore, large brains must confer some sort of selective advantage.
By far the most commonly discussed hypothesis for why some animals have large brains is known as the social intelligence hypothesis (or Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis). This idea proposes that the cognitive complexities of living in social groups, such as tracking social relationships and knowing who to cooperate with and who to be submissive to, require larger brains.
When we think…
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What is something? – O que é “algo”?
Placental mammals’ family tree, new research
This 2013 video from the USA says about itself:
A tiny, furry-tailed creature was the earliest ancestor of placental mammals — a widely diverse group of animals ranging from bats to humans — according to a new study by a team of international scientists, including a core group of Museum researchers. In findings published in the February 8 issue of the journal Science, the researchers analyzed the world’s largest dataset of genetic and physical traits to find that placental mammals diversified into present-day lineages much later than is commonly thought: after the extinction event 65 million years ago that eliminated non-avian dinosaurs. This finding, and the visualization of the placental ancestor — an insect-eating animal that weighed less than a pound — was made with the help of a cloud-based and publicly accessible database called MorphoBank.
MorphoBank is an initiative funded primarily by NSF with additional support…
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‘Neanderthal-human mating earlier than thought’
This video says about itself:
Neanderthals mated with modern humans much earlier than previously thought
22 December 2015
Using several different methods of DNA analysis, an international research team has found what they consider to be strong evidence of an interbreeding event between Neanderthals and modern humans that occurred tens of thousands of years earlier than any other such event previously documented.
From Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York in the USA:
Neanderthals mated with modern humans much earlier than previously thought
February 17, 2016
Using several different methods of DNA analysis, an international research team has found what they consider to be strong evidence of an interbreeding event between Neanderthals and modern humans that occurred tens of thousands of years earlier than any other such event previously documented.
Today in Nature the team publishes evidence of interbreeding that occurred an estimated 100,000 years ago. More specifically the scientists…
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A Ciência em tudo 