Link of the day- Loch Morlich

Image/link of the day today is this lovely photo of Lake Morlich in the Cairngorn Mountains, Scotland in the snow-
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2BJSkM/www.flickr.com/photos/freeskiing/4230226411/sizes/o/

thanks to Stumbleupon.com for bringing it to my attention.
The photographer is "freeskiing"- you can see the rest of his flickr photostream here-
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2BJSkM/www.flickr.com/photos/freeskiing/4230226411/sizes/o/

Science update- 7th Jan 2010

Good morning and welcome to Weirdbeautiful.

The big wildlife story this week is the statement by zoologist Lori Morino that dolphins are "too clever to be treated as animals" and should have status as "non-human" people. Prof Morino is biologist at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and has been using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans to map the brains of dolphin species and compare them with those of primates.

A lot of scientists tend to roll their eyes at the mention of studies of animal intelligence. This is partly because it is such an emotive/subjective issue-so the media tends to get very excited and make exagerated claims based on pretty much any study in the subject. The other reason is that intelligence is a very difficult thing to measure- what do you mean by intelligence? Is a chimpanzee, who can communicate using pictures with his human keepers "brighter" than a dog, who cannot but who can read a human's emotions and follow his master's gaze to find food? Different types of intelligence have evolved in different animals, depending upon their needs and their lifestyles/ecological niches.

You can find more detail on Lori Morino's dolphin studies here-
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/article6973994.ece

A little while back (last March, in fact) The Daily Telegraph ran another interesting story on the science of intelligence- specifically the brain-power of the humble bumblebee, which is also an interesting read-
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/5039387/Might-of-the-bumblebee.html

Image of the day- Cassia flowers

This beautiful image is of Cassia fistula, the "Golden shower tree" (also known as "the Indian Laburnum"). It grows in Southern Asia, including Southern Pakistan, India, Burma (Myanmar) and, notably, Thailand, where it is the National Tree. It is in the same family (Fabaceae) as the Laburnum tree, Wysteria and the common broom, but, then, it is a large family, having over 19,000 species in it.
The photographer is Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin and the picture was taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cassia_fistula1.jpg , where it has a creative commons 2.0 licence.

You can find more of Challiyil Eswaramangalath Vipin's photographs on his impressive flickr photostream at-
http://www.flickr.com/photos/challiyan/

Link of the day- the scale of things

This clever webpage graphic thing shows the relative sizes of coffee beans, salt grains, human eggs cells, sperm, certain viruses and some bacteria. A lot more interesting than it sounds-

http://learn.genetics.utah.edu/content/begin/cells/scale/

Cheering-up bird 17- Helmeted Guineafowl

Today's cheering-up bird is another guineafowl- this time, the Helmeted Guineafowl, Numida meleagris. This image is by "User Sb616" and the original file and licence (creative commons attribution share alike 3.0) can be found here - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Guineafowl_-_sb616.JPG

Angels and (Tasmanian) Devils

Hello. Welcome to Weirdbeautiful.

Today I want to share with you two links-
the first is to some angelic-looking baby pandas- courtesy of the tabloid newspapers. (In this case, an article in The Sun about how the stress of looking after panda cubs leaves their mothers too exhausted to breed).

One of the big problems with panda conservation programmes is that pandas are reluctant to breed. Koala bears are similarly difficult to persuade to reproduce, which is likewise hampering programmes to halt their decline.

The article and cute panda pictures can be found here- http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/2788816/Exhausted-panda-mums-too-tired-to-have-cubs.html

The other link is to an article in the International Herald and Tribune on Tasmanian devils- one of Australia's odder creatures (although, admittedly, a lot of Australian wildlife is very weird...). The Tasmanian devil suffers from an unusual affliction- an infectious facial cancer.

Infectious cancers are rare- probably the best known other example is Kaposi's sarcoma in humans- a cancer of the cells lining blood vessels that occurs in a lot of AIDS patients. Kaposi's sarcoma is caused by Human Herpes Virus 8. This herpes virus is found in large numbers of people but usually only becomes problematic when AIDS suppresses someone's immune system to the extent that it can no longer keep on top of the virus.

(There are pictures of Kaposi's sarcoma here- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaposi - WARNING!- they are fairly GORY)

The situation in the Tasmanian devil is more complicated - the infectious cancer is apparently caused not by a virus but by a mutant form of some of the animal's normal cells that have evolved to behave like a parasitic organism. You can find more information in the IHT article here-
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/01/science/01devil.html?ref=science

Bee in Flight

This lovely image of a bee in flight was one of Flikr's images of the year for 2009-

http://www.flickr.com/photos/pdecell/3482496182/in/pool-yourbestshot2009