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SonicG » Thu Apr 14, 2016 7:41 pm wrote:MacCruiskeen » Tue Feb 23, 2016 10:51 pm wrote:Marx: "The exact moment when the working class achieves self-awareness":
https://pbs.twimg.com/tweet_video/Cb0hvBYW0AAYn0g.mp4
"Orangutans of the world - Relax!!" - Not-Marx
Hagaman Musson says: "So I was waiting for my son to come home from school and I see this woman trying to get a close up of the squirrel trying to get a selfie with it. Next thing I know he's chasing her down the street and she's rejecting the close up. Now she's in front of our house and the squirrel comes into view still chasing her. So now she's filming him screaming for him to get away. "
Canuck the crow, Vancouver's most notorious bird, is being accused of flying away with a knife from a crime scene.
The crow has quite a reputation in Vancouver and its antics are regularly chronicled on social media, including a dedicated Facebook page that has a profile photo of the bird holding a knife in its beak.
Earlier on Tuesday, police had shot a man near Hastings and Cassiar streets. They were called to the scene of a car engulfed in flames. When they arrived, police said, they were confronted by a man with a knife.
Shots were fired and the man was arrested.
Vancouver Courier reporter Mike Howell said he saw the bird — which had a red tag on its leg as does Canuck — swoop in and pick up an object from inside an area cordoned off by police tape.
"A cop chased it for about 15 to 20 feet, and then the crow dropped it and took off," Howell told CBC.
"It was really strange. In my 20-plus years reporting from crime scenes, I've never seen anything like that crow trying to take a knife."
Car Chased by 20,000 Bees for Two Days After Hive Queen Gets Stuck in Trunk
By Sumitra on May 26th, 2016
[...]
Roger said that this was the strangest incident he’d encountered in his 30 years of beekeeping. “It is natural for them to follow the queen but it is a strange thing to see and quite surprising to have a car followed for two days. It was quite amusing.”
http://www.odditycentral.com/pics/car-c ... ign=buffer
Fish can recognize human faces (and we know because they keep spitting at us)
By Rachel Feltman June 7 at 12:14 PM
(University of Oxford)
Archerfish are already stars of the animal kingdom for their stunning spit-takes. They shoot high-powered water jets from their mouths to stun prey, making them one of just a few fish species known to use tools.
But by training Toxotes chatareus to direct those jets of spit at certain individuals, scientists have shown that the little guys have another impressive skill: They seem to be able to distinguish one human face from another, something never before witnessed in fish and spotted just a few times in non-human animals.
The results, published Tuesday in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, could help us understand how humans got so good at telling each other apart. Or how most people got to be good at that, anyway. I'm terrible at it.
Study reveals archerfish can recognize human faces
Play Video0:22
A species of tropical fish called Archerfish seem to be able to distinguish one human face from another, something never before witnessed in fish and spotted just a few times in non-human animals. (University of Oxford)
It's generally accepted that the fusiform gyrus, a brain structure located in the neocortex, allows humans to tell one another apart with a speed and accuracy that other species can't manage. But there's some debate over whether human faces are so innately complex — and that distinguishing them is more difficult than other tricks of memory or pattern recognition — that this region of the brain is a necessary facilitator of the skill that evolved especially for it. Birds, which have been shown to distinguish humans from one another, have the same structure. But some researchers still think that facial recognition might be something that humans learn — it's not an innate skill — and that the fusiform gyrus is just the spot where we happen to process all the necessary information.
That's where fish come in: They don't have anything like this structure within their (relatively) simple brains. But they've been trained to spit at particular shapes or colors before, so Cait Newport, Marie Curie research fellow in the department of zoology at Oxford University, wanted to see whether faces posed a particular challenge for fish brains.
And based on the spits she monitored, they don't.
[The stunning accuracy of archerfish spit]
"It's very similar to training a pet dog," said Newport, who conducted the research along with scientists from the University of Queensland. First she taught archerfish that spitting at a cursor she moved around on a screen would result in food pellets. Then she taught them to spit at pictures of human faces — and then she taught them to spit at a particular face, even when given options. In two experiments — each using four fish — the subjects were presented with a random sequence of 44 faces in addition to the one they'd been trained to pick. In both cases (including an experiment where the researchers made the faces gray-scale) the fish made better than random guesses, obtaining average accuracies of 81 percent and 86 percent.
"Obviously the first takeaway is that they could do it. They were distinguishing something really complicated," Newport said. This also shows that the fish have surprisingly good memories. "It certainly challenges the whole idea of a fish with a 30-second memory," she joked.
There's no doubt that whatever mechanism humans use for recognizing one another is much more sophisticated — and more accurate — than the recognition Newport saw in archerfish. "We may even find that fish aren't able to do it in other conditions," she said, while humans are able to recognize faces at different angles and under different light, at least up to a point. She plans on testing the limits of archerfish abilities in future studies.
"But this does start to suggest that there's nothing special about human faces, and that they can be treated as any other object and still be recognized," she said, which further suggests that facial recognition is learned and not innate. Again, this doesn't mean the fusiform gyrus isn't important — irregularities there have been linked to a condition called face blindness, which prevents humans from recognizing individuals — but it could mean that the human ability boils down to more than just some unique brain matter we've evolved to carry.
Cordelia » Fri Mar 04, 2016 9:40 am wrote: Things are getting wild in Northern Virginia: Raccoon and fox attacks reported
"A man fought off a raccoon that bit him and eventually killed it by putting his foot on its throat in Fairfax County. And two women were bitten by foxes in separate incidents in the county.
The incident with the raccoon happened Thursday about 11 a.m. in the Clifton area.
Police said the man was awakened by a raccoon in his home. It’s not immediately clear how the animal got inside."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/th ... story.html
Edited to add that I had a 'pet' raccoon as a child; they're very intelligent and dexterous creatures.
82_28 wrote:Hagaman Musson says: "So I was waiting for my son to come home from school and I see this woman trying to get a close up of the squirrel trying to get a selfie with it. Next thing I know he's chasing her down the street and she's rejecting the close up. Now she's in front of our house and the squirrel comes into view still chasing her. So now she's filming him screaming for him to get away. "
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