Nature involves Science, too! (Nobody Cares...)

[Dakota Tebaldi]

A bunch of the comments are like, "why didn't he run?", but there's no running from that. Safer to have even some smallish boulders to duck behind than get overtaken in the open.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

Also comments, he’d just climbed a cliff. Without a wingsuit it was a straight line down.

Hunkering behind that rock was about his only option.

 

[Lexxi]

I didn't dig to deep into timeline of person who posted that again on December 22 2022. Possible it was related to the end of the year "repost of interesting stories" type of thing.

Anyway - video taker lived: British tourists survive avalanche in Tian Shan mountains of Kyrgyzstan

Regarding some responses I saw in the Twitter thread, the "of course he lived, we have the video": We also have the photographs of Mt Saint Helen erupting - which killed the photographer who took the photos. So just because we have something doesn't mean the person taking the photos/making the video lived.


ETA: Knew this is the thread/forum/place I'd seen that video before.

https://www.virtualverse.one/forums/threads/nature-involves-science-too-nobody-cares.7782/page-9#post-204797

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

Also a number of hikers who died in the eruption of Mount Ontoke in Japan.

Pictures Recovered From Damaged Cameras Reveal Moments Before Volcano's Eruption

On September 27th, 2014, Mount Ontake in Japan erupted and began spewing ash. A popular destination for tourists and beginning hikers, several hundred

petapixel.com

 

[Free]

Bees like to roll little wooden balls as a form of play, study finds

It's “a strong indication that insect minds are far more sophisticated than we might imagine."

arstechnica.com

 

[Free]

A look into the REM dreams of the animal kingdom

Animals' "active" sleep phases look very much like REM.

arstechnica.com

Young jumping spiders dangle by a thread through the night, in a box, in a lab. Every so often, their legs curl and their spinnerets twitch—and the retinas of their eyes, visible through their translucent exoskeletons, shift back and forth.

“What these spiders are doing seems to be resembling—very closely—REM sleep,” says Daniela Rössler, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Konstanz in Germany. During REM (which stands for rapid eye movement), a sleeping animal’s eyes dart about unpredictably, among other features.

In people, REM is when most dreaming happens, particularly the most vivid dreams. Which leads to an intriguing question. If spiders have REM sleep, might dreams also unfold in their poppy-seed-size brains?

 

[Free]

More "them crows be smart" news.

For the first time, research reveals crows use statistical logic

The birds can associate images with distinct reward probabilities.

arstechnica.com

Whether playing tricks, mimicking speech, or holding “funerals,” crows and ravens (collectively known as corvids) have captured the public’s attention due to their unexpected intelligence. Thanks to results from a new Current Biology study, our understanding of their capabilities only continues to grow, as researchers from the University of Tübingen found for the first time that crows can perform statistical reasoning. These results can help scientists better understand the evolution of intelligence (and may give us a better appreciation of what’s going on in our backyard).

 

[Beebo Brink]

Surprising jellyfish finding challenges what’s known about learning and memory | CNN

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Erich Templar]

If you look closely you can see the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

If you look closely you can see the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I thought I spotted some of the Great Old Ones in the mix, too.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

I don't see the "pink" they're talking about, it's all bottle green to me.

 

[Kokoro Fasching]

I don't see the "pink" they're talking about, it's all bottle green to me.

The pink is like 4-8 pixels at the very edge on bulges.. very brief.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

What happens in a crow’s brain when it uses tools?

Researchers trace the areas of the brain that are active when birds are using tools.

arstechnica.com

"A thirsty crow wanted water from a pitcher, so he filled it with pebbles to raise the water level to drink," summarizes a famous Aesop Fable. While this tale is thousands of years old, animal behaviorists still use this challenge to study corvids (which include crows, ravens, jays, and magpies) and their use of tools. In a recent Nature Communications study, researchers from a collaboration of universities across Washington, Florida, and Utah used radioactive tracers within the brains of several American crows to see which parts of their brains were active when they used stones to obtain food from the bottom of a water-filled tube.

Their results indicate that the motor learning and tactile control centers were activated in the brains of the more proficient crows, while the sensory and higher-order processing centers lit up in the brains of less proficient crows. These results suggest that competence with tools is linked to certain memories and muscle control, which the researchers claimed is similar to a ski jumper visualizing the course before jumping.

The researchers also found that out of their avian test subjects, female crows were especially proficient at tool usage, succeeding in the challenge quickly. “[A] follow-up question is whether female crows actually have more need for creative thinking relative to male crows,” elaborates Loma Pendergraft, the study’s first author and a graduate student at the University of Washington, who wants to understand if the caregiving and less dominant role of female crows gives them a higher capacity for tool use.

 

[Free]

How watching beavers from space can help drought-ridden areas bounce back

An algorithm can spot beaver ponds from satellite imagery.

arstechnica.com

For the first time in four centuries, it’s good to be a beaver. Long persecuted for their pelts and reviled as pests, the dam-building rodents are today hailed by scientists as ecological saviors. Their ponds and wetlands store water in the face of drought, filter out pollutants, furnish habitat for endangered species, and fight wildfires. In California, Castor canadensis is so prized that the state recently committed millions to its restoration.

While beavers’ benefits are indisputable, however, our knowledge remains riddled with gaps. We don’t know how many are out there, or which direction their populations are trending, or which watersheds most desperately need a beaver infusion. Few states have systematically surveyed them; moreover, many beaver ponds are tucked into remote streams far from human settlements, where they’re near-impossible to count. “There’s so much we don’t understand about beavers, in part because we don’t have a baseline of where they are,” says Emily Fairfax, a beaver researcher at the University of Minnesota.

But that’s starting to change.

 

[Innula Zenovka]