Jane Goodall: What Separates Us From the Apes « The TEDxClassroomProject In TED Talks on May 20, 2010 at 9:38 pm Reflection by KEITH C. Original TED page w/ speaker bio, links, comments, etc: Jane Goodall: What Separates Us From the Apes Jane starts off her talk with explaining how she actually had come to the ted conference directly from deep inside the rainforest of Ecuador. Later on in the video, Jane also talks about how this new technology is being used to educate nonhuman animals such as chimpanzees. Like this: Like Loading... Runaway Universe | How Big is the Universe? By Brent Tully Posted 11.11.00 NOVA How big is the universe? Could it be infinitely large? If the universe has an edge, what is beyond the edge? And if the universe had a beginning, what was going on before that? Our experience of the everyday world does not prepare us to grasp the concept of an infinite universe. There are billions of galaxies in the visible universe. The Visible Universe There is an edge to what we are able to see and could ever possibly see in the universe. This horizon describes the visible universe—a region some 28 billion light years in diameter. While we can never directly "see" the whole of the universe or glimpse its farthest horizons, we can discover how it is behaving This view of the universe fits with the currently popular idea that the universe began with a vast expansion of size. If this grand idea is correct, then the universe is larger than we ever could have imagined. Cosmic Acceleration A Puzzling Expansion Whatever could produce that acceleration?
The language of dolphins: Denise Herzing at TED2013 Photos: James Duncan Davidson A dolphin’s brain-to-body-weight ratio is second only to a human’s. They live complex social lives, can understand abstract concepts and even use tools. For 28 years, Herzing has been researching dolphins in the wild, spending five months each summer living, sleeping and working at sea off the coast of the Bahamas with a pod of Atlantic spotted dolphins. Dolphins, of course, are incredible mammals. Dolphins use sound to resolve conflicts, creating burst pulses to show agression. Still, does the way dolphins communication count as a language? “The dolphins were showing a lot of mutual curiosity about us. To test human-dolphin communication, Herzing and a team created a keyboard with four symbols, which corresponded with acoustic sounds and with a toy. On the TED stage, Herzing shows amazing footage of a dolphin swimming a scarf to a researcher, on her request. Herzing is excited to see how this new tool changes communication with the dolphins.
Speaking Bonobo To better understand bonobo intelligence, I traveled to Des Moines, Iowa, to meet Kanzi, a 26-year-old male bonobo reputedly able to converse with humans. When Kanzi was an infant, American psychologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh tried to teach his mother, Matata, to communicate using a keyboard labeled with geometric symbols. Matata never really got the hang of it, but Kanzi—who usually played in the background, seemingly oblivious, during his mother’s teaching sessions—picked up the language. Savage-Rumbaugh and her colleagues kept adding symbols to Kanzi’s keyboard and laminated sheets of paper. Kanzi learned to combine these symbols in regular ways, or in what linguists call"proto-grammar." Savage-Rumbaugh claims that in addition to the symbols Kanzi uses, he knows the meaning of up to 3,000 spoken English words. Through a glass panel, Savage-Rumbaugh asks Kanzi if it’s OK for me to enter his enclosure."
Is the Universe a Holographic Reality? - Global One TV The Universe as a Hologram by Michael Talbot Does Objective Reality Exist, or is the Universe a Phantasm? In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science. Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.
Preening the History of Primates | Wired Science A close-up of Smilodectes, a lemur-like primate closely related to Notharctus. Photo by the author. When viewed within the broader context of our evolutionary history, we are anthropoid primates. That’s the group which contains monkeys and apes (with our species being a specialized variety of ape, and apes being a particular subset of monkeys, and monkeys representing the major group of anthropoids). But how anthropoid primates originated has been a subject of frequent contention. The current consensus – on the basis of anatomy, genetics, and other lines of evidence – is that anthropoids are most closely related to tarsiers and extinct, tarsier-like primates called omomyiforms. A simplified diagram of primate evolutionary relationships. Then Ida crashed the party. But the mess had at least one positive outcome. Notharctus tenebrosus is a classic fossil primate. One of primary facets of the Darwinius debate has been whether or not the lemur-like primate had a grooming claw. References:
Howstuffworks "How Holograms Work" If you want to see a hologram, you don't have to look much farther than your wallet. There are holograms on most driver's licenses, ID cards and credit cards. If you're not old enough to drive or use credit, you can still find holograms around your home. Unfortunately, these holograms -- which exist to make forgery more difficult -- aren't very impressive. On the other hand, large-scale holograms, illuminated with lasers or displayed in a darkened room with carefully directed lighting, are incredible. If you look at these holograms from different angles, you see objects from different perspectives, just like you would if you were looking at a real object. Holograms have other surprising traits as well. Once you know the principles behind holograms, understanding how they can do all this is easy.
'Junk DNA' Defines Differences Between Humans and Primates Scientists believed for years that the vast phenotypic differences between humans and chimpanzees would display significantly different genetic makeups. However, when their genomes were later sequenced, researchers were surprised to learn that the DNA sequences of human and chimpanzee genes are nearly identical. In molecular biology, "junk" DNA is a collective label for the portions of the DNA sequence of a chromosome or a genome for which no function has yet been identified. About 98.5% of the human genome has been designated as "junk", including most sequences within introns and most intergenic DNA. While much of this sequence is probably an evolutionary artifact that serves no present-day purpose, some may function in ways that are not currently understood. What then is responsible for the many morphological and behavioral differences between the two species? The Daily Galaxy via Georgia Institute of Technology
Access Any Website Or Forum Without Registering Visit any forum or website to find something useful and they will ask you to register. Every time a forum asks me to register, I simply close the site. You would probably do the same. But this time, lets face it. Before I begin, you should know how things work. First grab the add-on for Firefox called ‘user agent’ here and install it. Select User Agent from the left sidebar and click Add. crawl-66-249-66-1.googlebot.com and in user agent field type: Googlebot/2.1 (+ as shown in the screenshot below. Select Google Bot as your User Script by going to Tools > User Agent Switcher. Now browse any website or forum without registering. Advertisement
eol Biology Bonobos are highly intelligent, social animals. They live in stable communities that may have up to 150 members, although these will usually split into smaller groups in order to forage or travel (2). Swellings on the rump advertise a female's receptivity to mating; there is no specific breeding season (5). A single offspring is born after around 8 months of gestation and will be cared for by its mother for almost 5 years (6). Trusted Todd's Intro to Quantum Mechanics