The hooded Pitohui was one of the first poisonous birds discovered. It has a toxin on its skin and feathers that can induce tingling or numbness when touched. It is a common bird in New Guinea.

The researchers gave pregnant women a recording of several spoken variations of the made-up word "tatata" to play daily during their last trimester. When tested using EEG sensors after birth, their infants' brains recognised the words and its variations, while the control group did not.

New research has shown that liver genes play a key role in regulating our body clock, and could be the target for treatments that help shift workers and international travellers 'reset' their internal rhythm and reduce their risk of obesity and diabetes.

Two days ago, I streamed history being made for the first time ever online, and witnessed the Philae lander's touchdown on Rosetta's comet. The journey took 10 years, 6.4 billion kms away from here, and a 7 hour long landing.

Unfortunately, it was an awkward landing where Philae landed approximately 1km away from its intended landing site that currently, one of its 3 legs is not on the surface of the comet and it itself is oriented in a way that no sufficient sunlight is being recieved enough to charge its batteries ever 12 hour rotation.


At the moment, plans to try to "hop" the robot back into a position for enough sunlight are being studied, hopefully in time to execute them before Philae dies out sometime between next Friday and Saturday. ...

Remember Philae? That little lander that was targeting comet Rosetta?

https://biology-forums.com/index.php?article=1050

It was very big news around two months ago... Sadly, Philae landed incorrectly in a rather awkward position due to technical failings. After all, it was trying to land on the harsh, unstable, deteriorating/burning up surface of a comet. It bounced three times to a site away from the targeted position and ended up in a shady place with insufficient sunlight to recharge its energy reserves. And so it died out after 60 hours of touchdown.

Recent tabloids have now reported that Philae is missing! Scientists from the European Space Agency have tried to analyze the images that Philae returned but things just keep on getting more ...

Our perception has heavily depended on how well we can accurately describe our surroundings. And this description relies on our language. Our ancestors apparently were not capable of perceiving the color blue. If they did, they were not capable of noticing it, simply because there was no term in language for blue. The first civilization to document and affirm the color blue was the Ancient Egyptian Civilization. In fact, the Ancient Egyptians were the only ancestors that were able to produce blue dyes! Moreover, philologists have compared Hindu, Chinese, Arabic, Hebrew and many more languages only to find no mention of the color blue. However, just because the term for blue did not exist, does not mean our ancestors did not perceive blue.

T ...

Some of us may be guilty of procrastination, but we all are pre-crastinators at some level.

Procrastination is a serious problem to many of us that like to put off work and cram the night before. Not only is procrastination a behavioral problem, but also one with a psychological implication. Procrastination is the "thief of time". On the other hand, precrastination, discovered to be the complete opposite, is the tendency to do things ahead of time - and really ahead of time- just for the sake of completion.



Precrastination was found to be exhibited in pigeons as well. And the fact that we and pigeons have separated in phylogeny 300 million years ago suggests that precrastination is a behavior also found earlier in phylogeny. How has this be ...