Here's another Lizts by Liz! She puts it all in order so you don't
have to. This week in honor of Thanksgiving...Top 10 Turkey Facts!
Turkeys have lived in North America for roughly 10 million years.
Native Americans have hunted wild turkey for consumption as early as
1000 A.D., and turkeys were likely domesticated by the Aztecs hundreds
of years before Europeans arrived on the continent. The name "turkey"
may be a deriviation from the Native American name for turkey,
"Firkee."
Here's another Lizts by Liz! She puts it all in order so you don't have to. This week...Top 10 Animal Videos! A mix of old and new animal video classics that will make you laugh, giggle or gasp.
Here are Nerdabout we are quite fond of Top 10 lists of pictures and memes. I myself like to spend my time perusing flickr for disgusting and disturbing photos preferably with a scientific or medical theme. Today's post: Top 10 Grossest Pictures.
It's Friday. It's August. This can only mean you have ample time to look through images of funny cats with X-ray eyes eating people. And so we give you today's Top 10 Kitty Memes which we gathered from Ffffound.
This past Saturday I went to a panel discussion called Avian Einsteins, on bird intelligence, at NYU Skirball Center, part of the World Science Festival. Faith Salie was the moderator and she was both funny and engaged, which helped a lot through the 2 hour discussion. And Johnathan Rosen bracketed the discussion with two moving readings from his book **The Life of the Skies.**
Irene Pepperberg has been studying the behavioral science of birds for over 20 years. She related some really interesting stories about having her early work questioned and at times rejected, simply because at the time there was no hard scientific evidence for bird intelligence. However she continued to observe and report on remarkable interactions with laboratory-raised birds, and recently the biological evidence appears to have finally caught up with her research: many of the slides shown, by various members of the panel, described in detail the kinds of activity that goes on in the brain of a bird while it is vocalizing.
Nicola Clayton of Cambridge University who has done groundbreaking work with crows, including observing birds fashioning a piece of wire into a hook in order to use it as a tool.
David Rothenberg of New Jersey Institute of Technology, does all kinds of interesting work on musical interactions in animals. He played a couple of new clarinet pieces, duets with slowed-down recordings the songs of nightingales, thrushes and other songbirds. These pieces are developed in cooperation with Ofer Tchernichovski of the City College of New York.
Ofer described work his team had done with raising male Zebra Finches in isolation (the Zebra Finch is the lab rat of the avian world) and observing how the songs of these "isolates" differed from the usual Zebra Finch song.
About half way through the discussion, Molecular Biologist Irena Schulz brought out Snowball, the Dancing Cockatoo from Youtube. Just in case you have not seen the dancing cockatoo, here he is.
Having seen the video many times already myself, I was interested to see how much more fluid the bird's dancing appears in person than on video. And apparently he only dances to that one Back Street Boys Song. Currently Irena is conducting experiments where they slow the track down incrementally (or speed it up) and try to ascertain whether Snowball adjusts his dance to the new tempo (so far it looks like he does).
Erich Jarvis studies the brains of birds at Duke University. Over the last decade he and his team have elucidated science's understanding of the part of the avian brain responsible for songs. Turns out it is the same part of the brain used for mimicry by parrots, cockatoos and many songbirds like the starling. I thought one of the most interesting things Erich said was that only animals with speech centers, have been shown to be able to move in time to a rhythm. Apparently dancing is a skill that requires a part of the brain that evolves with or after speech.
Of course, this came up in the context of the Dancing Cockatoo, but it also might equally apply to Hatebeak, a death metal band whose singer is a parrot (tip o' the pentagram to Tommy Z for pointing them out).
Check out Hatebeak's Myspace page to listen to tracks like Birdseeds of Vengeance and Beak of Putrefaction.
Everyone loves cats right? You just might not love the little dead critters they drag in or friends they invite in to feast upon your cat food. If you have a cat that regularly shows up with guests, you might find the Tweeting Cat Door just the thing to guarantee that only the cat which you want in your house...gets in your house. Invention and step by step directions available here.
Does it bother you if your cat jumps on the counter? Then check out Brain Gaut'sBlender Defender. It looks startling.
The web is overflowing with irresistibly adorable images of animals in containers. As promised, here is another installment in Nerdabout's ongoing series of posts featuring animals in buckets (and other containers).
A friend recently alerted me to a growing trend in Australian wildlife: Koalas in buckets. Here’s a series of images in honor of the little guys’ plight to stay cool, including a thirsty koala illustration by Seattle/New York artist Todd Lown, drawn especially for Nerdabout. Please stay tuned for future posts involving animals in buckets.
![[l_69ecc7aedb84ba27ec34e294b64c0a3c.jpg]](http://img.ffffound.com/static-data/assets/6/b4cf5f207ce7ff373cec3b28ad697f047a75c98e_m.jpg)
Recent Comments