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.

 (...)


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

Why?

Why does water not calm the tongue after eating hot spicy food?
 The spices in most of the hot foods that we eat are oily, and, like your elementary school science teacher taught you, oil and water don’t mix. In this case, the water just rolls over the oily spices.
What can you do to calm your aching tongue? Eat bread. The bread will absorb the oily spices. A second solution is to drink milk. Milk contains a substance called “casein” which will bind to the spices and carry them away. Alcohol also dissolves oily spices.

Why does wet fabric appear darker?
When fabric gets wet, light coming towards it refracts within the water, dispersing the light. In addition, the surface of the water causes incoherent light scattering. The combination of these two effects causes less light to reflect to your eyes and makes the wet fabric appear darker.

Why is blue for boys and pink for girls?
In ancient times, it was believed that certain colors could combat the evil spirits that lingered over nurseries. Because blue was associated with the heavenly spirits, boys were clothed in that color, boys then being considered the most valuable resource to parents. Although baby girls did not have a color associated with them, they were mostly clothed in black. It was only in the Middle Ages when pink became associated with baby girls.

Why do people kiss under the mistletoe at Christmas?
In ancient myth, when the son of the Norse goddess Frigga, Baldr, was killed by an arrow made of mistletoe and then brought back to life, she blessed the mistletoe and bestowed a kiss on all who passed beneath it. In the 18th century, the legend was adopted as a promise to marry. At Christmas a lady standing under a mistletoe may not refuse a kiss. If she does, she cannot expect to marry the following year. So it is told.


Source: Didyouknow.org

Curiosities about Cats - 2

                                          

Cats can see 6 times better than humans at night because their eyes amplifies even the dimmest light.

Cats have more bones than humans. Cats have 290 compared to humans, that have 206.

Whiskers and eyelashes, and also the tail, help the cat to keep their balance. Their amazing agility is due to their 500 muscles.

It is easier for a cat to survive a big fall than a small one. Some estimations have said that a cat needs a height of 8 floors to reach a position that allows to fell on their paws.

A cat 's sense of smell is 15 times more powerful than humans'.

Each cat has a different and unique shape for the tip of the nose, that is like our fingerprints.

The diet of a cat must be rich in fats because their bodies don't produce it.

Cats can't detect sweet tastes.

They have 32 muscles in their ears so they can direct them to the source of the sound.

A cat from Texas named Dusty had more than 420 kittens and had her last litter when she was 18.

Chocolate, coffee, and aspirin are some of the substances that are poisonous for cats.

In Asia, black cats are symbol of good luck.

Source: EmmaAlvarezBlog

Curiosities about Cats

The oldest cat in the world lived for 36 years.

And the heaviest one weighted 23 Kg.

A cub of cat that is born with blue eyes may change of eye color some months later.

Cats can smell with their nose but also (like snakes) with the so called Jacobson's Organ, that is inside the mouth, just behind the front teeth, and connects to the nasal cavity.

Cats sleep between 16 and 19 hours of every 24.

They can vocalize up to 100 different sounds.

A cat can jump up to 7 times their height.

When a cat rubs their head against an object or person, it is showing that it is theirs.

When a cat is upside-down, this is a sign of security and affection.

Cats relax from stress scratching a vertical object. This movement activates their circulation and invigorates their body.

Cats hiss to protect themselves and show that they are dangerous, the same as some snakes.

Cats obey women more easily because they perceive better high-pitched sounds.

Cats love kneading with their paws everything that they like. This is something that they learn when they are cubs because with this movement they get more milk from their mother.

Cats appeared on Earth before dogs.

In the ancient Egypt, when a woman was very beautiful, she was called "cat". Women, to look more pretty, painted lines in their eyes imitating the look of cats. This custom has arrived till our days.

Killing a cat in the ancient Egypt was punished with the death. Cats were mummified in company of small rodents.

Some cats like throwing their pellet from their dish. This is to simulate hunting, and is done because of boredom or for playing.

There are also some cats that like to move the water in their dish with the paw. These cats like running water and try to simulate it, because they feel it's healthier. This is an old instinct of cats. Some shops sell fountains for cats for this.

Source: EmmaAlvarezBlog

Brain

Prosopagnosia (Greek: "prosopon" = "face", "agnosia" = "not knowing"), also called face blindness, is a disorder of face perception where the ability to recognize faces is impaired, while other aspects of visual processing (e.g., object discrimination) and intellectual functioning (e.g., decision making) remain intact. The term originally referred to a condition following acute brain damage (acquired prosopagnosia), but a congenital or developmental form of the disorder also exists, which may affect up to 2.5% of the population.

The specific brain area usually associated with prosopagnosia is the fusiform gyrus, which activates specifically in response to faces. Thanks to this specialization, most people recognize faces much more effectively than they do similarly complex inanimate objects. For those with prosopagnosia, the ability to recognize faces depends on the less-sensitive object recognition system.

Though there have been several attempts at remediation, no therapies have demonstrated lasting real-world improvements across a group of prosopagnosics. Prosopagnosics often learn to use 'piecemeal' or 'feature by feature' recognition strategies. This may involve secondary clues such as clothing, gait, hair color, body shape, and voice. Because the face seems to function as an important identifying feature in memory, it can also be difficult for people with this condition to keep track of information about people, and socialize normally with others.

Prosopagnosia has also been associated with other disorders that are associated with nearby brain areas: left hemianopsia (loss of vision from left side of space, associated with damage to the right occipital lobe), achromatopsia (a deficit in color perception often associated with unilateral or bilateral lesions in the temporo-occipital junction) and topographical disorientation (a loss of environmental familiarity and difficulties in using landmarks, associated with lesions in the posterior part of the parahippocampal gyrus and anterior part of the lingual gyrus of the right hemisphere).

There are two types of prosopagnosia: acquired and congenital (developmental). Acquired prosopagnosia results from occipito-temporal lobe damage (See Etiologies and Affected Brain Areas) and is most often found in adults. This is further subdivided into apperceptive and associative prosopagnosia (See Types). In congenital prosopagnosia, the individual never adequately develops the ability to recognize faces.



^{Source: Wikipedia}