The Yeti: Has a Geneticist Solved the Mystery?

A geneticist believes he may have begun to solve the riddle of one of most enduring myths in all of cryptozoology: the yeti, or Abominable Snowman, of the Himalayas.

The mystery has swirled through the snows of the mountainous region for centuries, since Alexander the Great searched for a yeti on his eastward march across the Indus Valley. In the 1950s, even respected mountaineers such as Sir Edmund Hillary claimed to have seen footprints of the legendary beast, which reportedly walks upright and is covered with hair.

Now, using DNA analysis from two different hair samples — one from a strange animal shot by a hunter about 40 years ago in northern India's Ladakh region, and a second sample found in a Bhutan bamboo forest 10 years ago — geneticist Bryan Sykes of the University of Oxford claims to have linked those samples to the jawbone of an ancient polar bear found in Norway.

A rare bear?
In the early 1970s, a French mountaineer trekking through the rugged Ladakh region (at the western edge of the Himalayas) encountered a hunter who had saved the remains of a bizarre, bear-like animal — about the size of a human being — that he had recently shot. The mountaineer saved a sample of the hair, which he later passed to Sykes.

Sykes found the Ladakh hair sample especially intriguing. "The fact that the hunter … thought this one was in some way unusual and was frightened of it, makes me wonder if this species of bear might behave differently," he told The Telegraph. "Maybe it is more aggressive, more dangerous or is more bipedal than other bears."

Sykes began by comparing that hair sample, and the 10-year-old sample from Bhutan, against a database of collected animal DNA. "In the Himalayas, I found the usual sorts of bears and other creatures amongst the collection," said Sykes, as quoted in Phys.org.
"But the particularly interesting ones are the ones whose genetic fingerprints are linked not to the brown bears or any other modern bears, [but] to an ancient polar bear."

That polar bear lived in Norway between 40,000 and 120,000 years ago, and its DNA is a 100-percent match with the recent hair samples from Ladakh and Bhutan. "This is a species that hasn't been recorded for 40,000 years," Sykes said. "Now, we know one of these was walking around 10 years ago."

More research needed
Sykes — whose research has not yet been published in any peer-reviewed journal — stops short of saying that the Himalayas are home to an ancient breed of polar bear. "There's more work to be done on interpreting the results. I don't think it means there are ancient polar bears wandering around the Himalayas," he told the Telegraph.

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Source: Yahoo news

Elephants Understand Human Gesture, No Training Needed

Elephants understand the human gesture of pointing, new research suggests.

The ability is even more impressive given that the animals received no training to understand the gesture and have never been domesticated.

"By showing that African elephants spontaneously understand human pointing, without any training to do so, we have shown that the ability to understand pointing is not uniquely human but has also evolved in a lineage of animal very remote from the primates," study co-author Richard Byrne of the University of St Andrews said in a statement.

The new finding gives elephants membership in a select club that includes dogs, cats and bottlenose dolphins. Chimpanzees that have lived with humans can be trained to follow a point, but wild chimps typically fare worse than dogs at understanding human gestures.

Byrne and his colleague Anna Smet, also of St. Andrews, studied a group of 11 African elephants that took tourists on rides near Victoria Falls, on the border of Zambia and Zimbabwe. The animals had been trained to follow vocal commands, but had never learned pointing.

The team hid tasty morsels of food in several containers, then pointed to the correct bin to direct elephants to the food. The elephants went to the correct food container two-thirds of the time, significantly above chance. All told, five out of 11 of the elephants consistently went to the right container. In contrast, 1-year-old children typically get it right about 70 percent of the time. Even more impressive, many of the pachyderms chose the correct bin from the first try.

"What really surprised us is that they did not apparently need to learn anything. Their understanding was as good on the first trial as the last, and we could find no sign of learning over the experiment," Byrne said.

Those elephants born in captivity or bred for more human contact performed no better at the task.
Though elephants make other gestures with their trunks, no one knows whether those gestures are parallel to pointing.

The findings suggest that elephants' ability to follow a point may arise from their social natures. Elephants live in large groups and display many emotional behaviors, including marking the gravesites of lost pack members and weeping for their dead. Elephants also recognize themselves in a mirror, a hallmark of animals with sociality and empathy.

"What elephants share with humans is that they live in an elaborate and complex network in which support, empathy, and help for others are critical for survival. It may be only in such a society that the ability to follow pointing has adaptive value, or, more generally, elephant society may have selected for an ability to understand when others are trying to communicate with them, and they are thus able to work out what pointing is about when they see it," Byrne said.

The research was published yesterday (Oct. 10) in the journal Current Biology.


Source: livescience.com

Do fish drink water?

                                     

“Water everywhere and not a drop to drink.” Talking about the sea, of course. Each 100 pounds of seawater contains almost 4 pounds of salt. You can’t drink that. What do marine mammals such as dolphins, manatees, orcas, seals and whales drink?

Marine mammals do not actually drink. They get all the water they need from the fish that they eat. The fish they eat do drink the sea water – lots of it – which is processed through diffusion and osmosis.

Marine mammals in captivity that for some reason are not eating are fed freshwater from a pipe or bottle.


Source: didyouknow.org

Did you Knows?

                                             

• the average person falls asleep in 7 minutes
• the average speed of a skydiver is 200kph (124mph)
• the average human brain contains around 78% water
• an average person will spend 25 years asleep
• the average golf ball has 336 dimples
• the average bed contains over 6 billion dust mites
• the average hen lays 228 eggs a year
• the average person laughs 10 times a day
• the average soccer ball is made up of 32 leather panels and held together by 642 stitches
• the average porcupine has 30,000 spikes
• there is enough petrol in a full tank of a Jumbo Jet to drive the average car 4 times around the world
• the average person will consume 100 tons of food and 45,424 liters (12,000 gallons) of water in their lifetime
• the average person goes to the toilet 6 times a day
• the average American eats 263 eggs a year
• the average bank teller loses $250 every year
• the average person has 10,000 taste buds
• the average elephant produces 22kg (50 pounds) of dunn each day
• the average lifespan of a squirrel is 9 years
• the average person swallows 295 times during a meal
• the average 22% of all restaurant meals include potato chips