When a rescue dog found herself lost in her new neighborhood, she somehow knew just where to go to find help.
Back in January, a husky-mix named Bailey adopted by a family in Upper El Paso went missing, and her owners went to social media to try and find help locating her.
They contacted the shelter where they rescued Bailey, El Paso Animal Rescue League, who posted pictures of her on Facebook with the news. “URGENT- This beautiful girl- Bailey- has gotten loose in the area of Mesa and Sunland Park,” the post read.
But Bailey had a trick up her fur that would make the rescue efforts much easier. She walked herself ten miles right back to the Rescue League’s doors in Canutillo and rang the bell with her nose.
At 1:40 AM, the surveillance camera on the doorbell caught an image of the clever dog.
“These dogs are smarter than people give them credit for,” Loretta Hyde, the Rescue League’s founder, told a local Fox News affiliate. “How did she know what direction to go? She was 10 miles away! What did she eat and drink during those days?”
The shelter team immediately got Bailey inside and shortly thereafter reunited her with her family.
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Quote of the Day: “An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.” – George Jean Nathan
Photo by: dy n, dynv
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Cold exposure is the only known way to increase brown fat tissues – credit Mika Ruusunen
Did you know your body actually contains three different kinds of fat? That’s right, humans have brown, beige, and white fat adipose tissues, and a newfound ability to turn one into the other could create a revolution in metabolic disease prevention.
By turning a select number of genes in white fat cells off, they reverted to pluripotent cells, which can then become the cells for many different tissues and organs. In the case of a new study from the universities of California Davis and Copenhagen, they turned white fat into brown fat.
Brown fat is very useful for human beings to have, though many of us have very little owing to the comfortable nature of modern life. Brown fat burns a lot of calories to create heat through a process called thermogenesis.
The idea of having ‘more’ fat—of any kind—might seem a strange benefit for anyone other than a marine mammal, but the more brown fat an individual has, the less risk they are for obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and all the other modern hallmarks of the standard American diet.
The researchers returned white fat cells to a state of embryonic pluripotency through the Yamanaka Factors, a set of four genes discovered by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka for which he won the Nobel Prize.
Then they changed other epigenetic switches, epigenetics being adaptations to genetic expression developed through environmental stressors, and successfully converted the white fat to brown fat.
Cultivating those brown fat cells in a lab, they then injected them into overweight sheep, who were able to use the brown fat to burn away white fat.
It actually cured the sheep’s diabetes and metabolic disorders—a huge moment in the research field.
At Copenhagen, they had already been experimenting with a potential drug that could stimulate the calorie-burning activity of brown fat by activating genetic switches in the same way that exposure to cold stimulates it which unfortunately also creates stress and high blood pressure as the body believes it’s fighting to keep warm that could be dangerous for some folks.
They identified a cell surface receptor called GPR3 that doesn’t need to receive messaging molecules to activate, and which are particularly numerous on the surface of brown fat cells. They found it increased their self-signaling and increased the rate at which the brown fat chewed through calories.
Human infants are born with a lot of brown fat, but it decreases as we age. White fat on the other hand increases as we age, and creates inflammation associated with many of the hallmarks of aging.
Its primary function is to store excess sugar and carbs as glycogen. People don’t pack on the white pounds by eating fat in the form of triglycerides, but through a variety of lifestyle choices, a lack of exercise, and most importantly a high intake of refined vegetable oils.
Cold exposure is the best way to increase brown fat adipose tissue. It not only creates brown fat which was found to generate heat at a rate of 252 calories per day compared to 78 calories from those who had no detectable brown fat, but it actually absorbed more glucose from the bloodstream than insulin-stimulated glucose uptake into regular muscle tissue.
Researchers believe that finding cheap and safe ways to increase the general population’s amount of brown fat could reverse the obesity crisis in a fairly natural way.
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Credit - Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts
Credit – Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts
A trove of precious jewelry from Cambodia’s past has been repatriated after surfacing in London.
Totaling 77 artifacts from the medieval kingdom of Angkor, they are believed to have been trafficked from the country during the tyranny of the Khmer Rouge and the civil wars that plagued the country during the 20th century.
Angkor was one of the greatest powers in the East between the 9th and 14th centuries. Their theocratic capital of Angkor Wat is considered one of the 7 Wonders of the Medieval World, and today is still the largest religious complex on Earth.
The treasures date squarely to this period of flourishing and some of the crowns are believed to have sat on royal brows. They include items “such as gold and other precious metal pieces from the Pre-Angkorian and Angkorian period including crowns, necklaces, bracelets, belts, earrings, and amulets,” the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts said in a statement.
Credit – Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts
The items came from the estate of recently-late serial art trafficker Douglas Latchford, who for many years was considered an expert antiquities appraiser, but was later discovered to have worked alongside the Communist Khmer Rouge to traffic hundreds of artifacts from the country.
Now, many of the nation’s historical treasures are returning, and this trove is just the most recent tranche.
The year before that, the estate of Latchford, who died in 2020 before he could be convicted of antiquities trafficking, sent back five bronze and sandstone sculptures to Cambodia.
“We consider such returns as a noble act, which not only demonstrates important contributions to a nation’s culture but also contributes to the reconciliation and healing of Cambodians who went through decades of civil war and suffered tremendously from the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge genocide,” said Cambodia’s culture minister, Phoeurng Sackona.
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Strangers around the country are rewarding a Michigan woman for her honesty after turning in nearly $15,000 cash to the police that she found at a gas station.
It turned out to be the contributions of guests to a pair of newlyweds, who were more than overwhelmed by her integrity.
65-year-old Dianne Gordon has been walking 2.7 miles to and from her job behidn a deli counter every day since her Jeep broke down and she didn’t have enough money to fix it. One day she decided to stop at a gas station for a snack and noticed a plastic bag. Inside there was a lot of money; turning it around there were some greeting cards, and a lot more money.
Just doing what she “was taught to do” the grandmother of two called the police, who sent an officer to take custody of the sum.
Gordon could have walked into any dealership in the state and driven something off the lot that day, but new because the money wasn’t hers, it wasn’t correct to take it.
“If it doesn’t belong to you, you don’t keep it,” she told the Washington Post. “I didn’t do anything special. All I did was return something that didn’t belong to me.”
Police Chief Dan Keller of the White Lake Township Police Department telephoned Gordon later that day to tell her they had used the information on the cards inside the bag to track down the owners. The happy couple was “overwhelmed” by Gordon’s honesty, as was Keller’s wife Stacy Connell.
“As a police officer’s wife, I typically hear the bad things, so this was obviously heartwarming,” said Connell. “I was hoping we could help her get a car, since she could have walked into any dealership and used that money.”
Connell set up a GoFundMe, and in just 6 days it raised four times as much money from people wanting to reward Gordon’s act of selflessness as she had found in the sealed bag that morning.
Grateful for the money and the words of encouragement from all the contributors, who celebrated with comments like “there are still good people in the world,” Gordon said she was stunned by the outpouring of generosity, which at the time of publishing, raised $82,000 and then closed.
On February 8th, Friends of Dianne wrote: “Dianne officially signed for her new Jeep Compass yesterday at Szott M-59 in White Lake Township. Along with the new car, she also got an extended warranty, maintenance, insurance, and plates/tabs.”
Femke Bol breaking the record - retrieved from Twitter
Femke Bol breaking the record – retrieved from Twitter
A 41-year-old world record in women’s track and field stands no longer after a young Dutch speed demon smashed it in front of her home crowd.
Femke Bol took off at the starting pistol at the Dutch Indoor Championships in Apeldoorn, and completed a 400-meter sprint in 49.26 seconds, beating Jarmila Kratochvílová’s world record of 49.59 seconds set in 1982.
“It was because of all the fans here that I ran this record,” said the 22-year-old Olympic bronze medalist.
“Never have I ever seen that many people here. When I crossed the line, I knew that the record was mine because of the noise that the crowd made.”
Kratochvílová’s record was the longest-standing record in track and the second oldest in track and field.
Bol also set a world record for the best indoor 500-meter of 1:05.63 in Boston in her first race of this season. During the last Summer Olympics, she collected a bronze medal in the 400-meter hurdles.
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Quote of the Day: “A gentleman is one who puts more into the world than he takes out.” – George Bernard Shaw
Photo by: Dollar Gill
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A picture of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in progress at MAPS’ a Charleston Treatment Center. credit MAPS.org.
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy in progress at a Charleston treatment center – credit MAPS.org
Australia’s version of the FDA surprised the nation in early February when they announced that psilocybin and MDMA would be considered medicines, and prescribable by psychiatrists for various mental health disorders by July.
Psilocybin, the psychoactive component in psychedelic mushrooms, and MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, are two of the most effective treatments for dangerous and persistent mental health disorders like treatment-resistant depression and PTSD.
The current illegality of these substances in most countries makes them difficult to study in large trials, but small ones have been universally successful.
For psilocybin, Johns Hopkins University found it reduced symptoms of depression by 71% when combined with assisted psychotherapy, and prevented any return in symptoms in 54% of trial participants.
In 2021, the Department of Neurology at UC San Francisco also concluded a phase III trial of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for victims of PTSD and found it improved symptoms by 88%, and smashed the FDA criteria for safe and effective.
The Australian Therapeutic Goods Administration (TGA) said it considered several thousands of written public submissions before making its decision.
“The number of such submissions is a reasonable indicator of the scope and gravity of the issues for individual and public health,” it said in a statement. “The submissions confirm the need for greater access to alternative treatments for patients with persistent mental health conditions where currently available treatments have not been effective.”
“Prescribing will be limited to psychiatrists, given their specialized qualifications and expertise to diagnose and treat patients with serious mental health conditions.”
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The Bourakébougou pilot hydrogen unit - credit Petroma, released
The Bourakébougou pilot hydrogen unit – credit Petroma, released
In the beautiful West African country of Mali, a huge discovery has a town drawing a flammable gas from the earth that produces loads of electricity without CO2 emissions.
The town called Bourakébougou was prospected by Malian energy entrepreneur Aliou Diallo, who believed the mysterious gas which in the daytime shone with a blue color like sparkling ocean water, and at night like golden dust, could represent a fortune.
In 2012, he recruited Chapman Petroleum to determine what the gas was. It was 98% hydrogen. Months later, Diallo’s firm Petroma had installed a pilot unit to turn the gas into electricity that produced water as an exhaust product, and transformed the village into one with reliable, plentiful electricity.
In the decade since, belief that a potential inexhaustible natural energy source that’s zero emissions saw scientists and energy companies fly into action, scouring academia and the world for more information on underground hydrogen reservoirs
In 2018, a science team published a paper on the Bourakébougou hydrogen well, which concluded from evidence obtained from a dozen exploratory wells in the vicinity that it was “possible to confirm the presence of an extensive hydrogen field featuring at least five stacked reservoir intervals containing significant hydrogen that cover an estimated area well superior to 8 km in diameter.”
Furthermore, the study found that the current estimate of its exploitation price is much cheaper than manufactured hydrogen, either from fossil fuels or from electrolysis.
Cratons and cash
It was long believed, a feature in Science Magazine details, that hydrogen gas reservoirs were extremely rare. It’s rare to find them in places where energy companies drill for oil and natural gas, true, but if one knows where to look, they’re more common.
One such place are Earth’s “cratons,” the oldest and stablest parts of the tectonic plates. Some continents have more than one craton, others like the North American craton, are much larger and so cover most of the continent.
Olivine, a mineral believed to create hydrogen gas underground CC 2.0. דקי
Unlike oil and gas which need thousands of years to form from decomposing organic matter, hydrogen gas is constantly being made underground as water interacts with iron minerals at high pressures and temperatures.
Among these iron minerals is olivine, which through a chemical reaction called serpentinization, steals an oxygen molecule from water percolating down from Earth’s surface to transform olivine into serpentinite, and the water into hydrogen gas.
Deposits of olivine are richest in an underground, cratonic feature called a “greenbelt.” It’s thought that these greenbelts, because of their high concentration of olivine, act as Earth’s hydrogen gas engine.
Hydrogen fuel has huge potential to transition off fossil fuels as it’s the best currently perceived alternative for diesel or kerosene-based transport such as semi-trucks, jet aircraft, and cargo ships.
Currently, the Malian wells could produce hydrogen gas at 50 cents per kilo, one-tenth of the cost of hydrogen created through electrolysis with solar, wind, geothermal, or other green energies.
Ian Munro, CEO of Helios Aragon, a startup pursuing hydrogen in the foothills of the Spanish Pyrenees, told Science his break-even costs might end up between 50 and 70 cents, adding that would revolutionize energy production.
As for Diallo, he started a new company called Hydroma, which now produces electricity for the area via the hydrogen reservoir, and is looking into using it as a means to create green hydrogen via electrolysis.
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Secret cameras have captured the amazing moment two incredibly rare tiger cubs were born at a UK zoo. The tiny twins arrived at Chester Zoo on January 7th to proud first-time parents, tiger mom Kasarna and her partner Dash.
The births have been heralded as a “major boost for the conservation of these incredible animals”, as the Sumatran tiger sub-species is currently Critically-Endangered.
Zookeepers installed covert cameras in the tiger enclosure to capture the births which also filmed Kasarna mothering the cubs. It’s not clear what sex the newborns are—zookeepers don’t feel like checking under Kasarna’s watchful gaze.
“We’ve been closely monitoring Kasarna on our CCTV cameras as she gets to grips with motherhood and her first litter of cubs,” said Dave Hall, Carnivore Team Manager at Chester Zoo. “It’s a real privilege and incredibly special to watch.”
“She’s a great mom and is being very attentive to her new infants, keeping them snuggled up in the den and feeding them every few hours.”
There are only 350 Sumatran tigers in the wild and the only surviving population lives in the Indonesian islands of Sunda.
“One day, the pair will hopefully go on to themselves make a vital contribution to the endangered species breeding program, which is now playing a critical role in preventing these majestic animals from becoming extinct,” said Hall.
“The arrival of the cubs is a real testament to the expertise and scientific work of our teams who, only last year, paired up a female tigress, Kasarna, with a male Sumatran tiger, named Dash,” said Mike Jordan, Director of Animals and Plants at the zoo.
“They were coupled together based on their genetic make-up, age, and character and this news is cause for real celebration among the global conservation community.”
WATCH momma tiger with her new cubs…
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Quote of the Day: “There’s poetry, wonder, and meaning, even in death.” – Steam Punk Protagonist, Castle (TV Series)
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Artists rendition of two neutron stars colliding - CC University of Warwick/ Mark Garlick
Artists rendition of two neutron stars colliding – CC University of Warwick/ Mark Garlick
Astronomers just finished putting into words the first observation of a “kilonova,” or the merger of two neutron stars.
The scientists described it as the “perfect explosion” as it was utterly spherical, and brighter than a billion suns. After the two heavy stars merged, for a few moments they formed a massive neutron star, after which they collapsed into a black hole.
A kilonova is a very unique event in the galaxy since few things are as materially dense as a neutron star. There are plenty of objects more massive—the two neutron stars were only a combined 2.7 times the mass of the sun, but no other heavenly bodies can pack so much matter into so small a space.
In the middle of the merger, there could be fundamental physics that astronomers don’t understand yet. For example, the magnetic field formed around it is the strongest recorded in the universe, and so strong it can distort the structure of atoms.
“It is a perfect explosion in several ways. It is beautiful, both aesthetically, in the simplicity of the shape, and in its physical significance,” said astrophysicist Albert Sneppen of the Cosmic Dawn Center in Copenhagen, lead author of the research published in the journal Nature.
“This is fundamentally astonishing, and an exciting challenge for any theoreticians and numerical simulations,” Sneppen told the Guardian. “The game is on.”
Located in a galaxy called NGC 4993 found in the constellation Hydra, about 150,000 light-years from Earth, the two neutron stars began their life as normal stars orbiting each other billions of years ago. Neutron stars are essentially a star “heart” leftover from a supernova explosion. White, dense, small, and spinning incredibly fast, they are fascinating phenomena.
“Given the extreme nature of the physical conditions, with densities greater than an atomic nucleus, temperatures of Billions of degrees, and magnetic fields strong enough to distort the shapes of atoms, there may well be fundamental physics here that we don’t understand yet,” Cosmic Dawn Center astrophysicist and study co-author Darach Watson told the Guardian.
Their merger was witnessed by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Big Telescope in the Atacama Desert, Chile, in 2017. The outer parts of the new stars were torn and stretched into long thin streamers which probably launched gold, uranium, arsenic, platinum, and other rare elements into the universe.
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After teetering on the edge of extinction almost 50 years ago, the wood stork is now widespread across the southeastern US, and is preparing a flight off the Endangered Species List (ESL).
It’s all in a day’s work for the ESL, the world’s most successful conservation program in history, and the only stork native to North America is just the most recent beneficiary.
The wood stork faced extinction when listed in 1984 under the Endangered Species Act. The population had decreased from 20,000 nesting pairs to less than 5,000 pairs, primarily nesting in south Florida’s Everglades and Big Cypress ecosystems.
The recovery program worked to restore and protect the ecosystems which the four-and-a-half-foot-tall bird calls home.
Today, the wood stork breeding population has doubled to 10,000 or more nesting pairs and increased its range, including the coastal plains of Mississippi, Alabama, Florida, Georgia, and the Carolinas. These long-legged wading birds more than tripled their number of nesting colonies from 29 to 99 in their expanded range.
US Fish and Wildlife explained they’ve adapted to new nesting areas, moving north into coastal salt marshes, old, flooded rice fields, floodplain forest wetlands, and human-created wetlands.
The Fish and Wildlife Service will take comments on the proposal through April 17th, and even if it is delisted, it would remain a protected species under other legislation such as the Migratory Bird treaty.
The scale-headed wader, not-so-affectionately-termed a “flinthead,” hunts fish, frogs, and crustaceans in marshes, swamps, and rivers, and is actually listed globally by the IUCN as a species of Least Concern, due to its range extending across almost the entire South American continent east of the Andes.
“The wood stork is recovering as a result of protecting its habitat at a large scale,” said Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz. “This iconic species has rebounded because dedicated partners in the Southeast have worked tirelessly to restore ecosystems, such as the Everglades, that support it.”
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Dusseldorf University Hospital - credit duesseldorf-health.de
Dusseldorf University Hospital – credit duesseldorf-health.de
The “Düsseldorf Patient”, a man now aged 53, is just the third person worldwide to have been completely cured of HIV via stem cell transplantation.
As in the case of the other two patients, the so-called “Berlin Patient” and “London Patient,” the transplantation was undertaken to treat an acute blood disease, which had developed in addition to the HIV infection.
The Düsseldorf Patient received a stem cell transplant used to treat leukemia in 2013 and has shown persistent suppression of HIV-1 ever since, including during the last 4 years after the patient stopped taking anti-retroviral medication.
“I still remember very well the sentence from my family doctor: ‘don’t take it so hard,'” the Düsseldorf Patient, who had leukemia as well as HIV-1, said in a statement. “‘We will experience together that HIV can be cured!’ At the time, I dismissed the statement.”
Allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is a procedure used to treat certain cancers, such as leukemia, by transferring immature blood cells from a donor to repopulate the bone marrow of the recipient.
Scientists now understand that individuals with two copies of the Δ32 mutation in the gene for the HIV-1 co-receptor CCR5; are resistant to HIV-1 infection. The two previous cases of both the London patient and the Berlin patient involved receiving a stem cell transplant from a donor with these unique mutations.
The patient was diagnosed as having acute myeloid leukemia and proceeded to undergo transplantation of stem cells from a female donor in 2013, followed by chemotherapy and infusions of donor lymphocytes.
After the transplantation, anti-retroviral therapy was continued, but HIV was undetectable in the patient’s blood cells. Anti-retroviral therapy was suspended in November 2018 with the patient’s informed consent, almost 6 years after the stem cell transplantation, to determine whether the virus persisted in the patient.
“I very much hope that these doctors will now get even more attention for their work,” said the patient. “I have now decided to give up some of my private life to support research fundraising. And of course, it will also stay very important for me to fight the stigmatization of HIV with my story.”
The authors conclude that although HSCT remains a high-risk procedure that is at present an option only for some people living with both HIV-1 and hematological cancers, these results may inform future strategies for achieving long-term remission of HIV-1.
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Remains of the whaling ship Industry, found by an offshore oil producer Credit NOAA
Remains of the whaling ship Industry, found by an offshore oil producer Credit NOAA
As part of existing requirements for offshore energy production, 600 shipwrecks have been found in the Gulf of Mexico alone by oil and gas producers, however scientists and historians reckon this number is just a fraction of how many are actually out there.
A new proposal to the Federal Register by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management would obligate offshore energy companies to conduct maritime archaeological surveys before undertaking any operations that would disturb the seafloor off the continental shelf.
In 2011, an unnamed energy company spotted a shipwreck near its operations which was excavated last year by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Admin. (NOAA). It turned out to be the 207-year-old whaling ship Industry
The Boston-built Brig was associated with freed-slave and maritime entrepreneur Paul Cuffe, and hunted whales across the Atlantic Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Gulf of Mexico for 20 years. It was lost when a strong storm snapped its masts and opened its hull to the sea on May 26, 1836.
Current methods used to preserve undiscovered shipwrecks involve predicting where they could be found based on historic reports in newspapers and state records, as well as weather patterns and historic shipping lanes, but scientists now believe it’s a method that notably undercounts how many ships are actually down there.
Furthermore, oil and gas companies are currently only required to conduct a survey when they have “reason to believe” that a shipwreck may be present in their area of operations.
“By improving our reporting requirements, we can increase the likelihood of identifying these important resources before they are inadvertently damaged by an [oil or gas] operator and help ensure compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act,” James Kendall, BOEM Gulf of Mexico regional director, told Science.
The new proposal, currently open for public comment, puts oil, gas, and offshore wind all on the same page for survey requirements. Typically working beyond 5.5 kilometers from the shore, these installations must be preceded by an archaeological survey of the area before they begin construction.
Public comment will carry on until mid-April.
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A drone photo of Trench 6 at Lagash - Lagash Archaeology Project
A drone photo of Trench 6 at Lagash – Lagash Archaeology Project
It doesn’t get much older than Sumeria, but even the modern concept of going out to eat was already established 1,000 years before the Great Pyramids were built.
In the ancient Near Eastern city-state of Lagash, the foundations of a tavern were recently found by archaeologists that included an open-air sitting area, and a kitchen complete with a clay oven, clay chiller, and ancient crockery.
One of the oldest areas in Ancient Mesopotamia, Lagash was already inhabited in the fifth millennium BCE. Today it’s located on a mound 4,000 yards in length and 2,000 yards in width.
A joint project of the Univ. of Pennsylvania Museum, Cambridge University and the State Board of Antiquities and Heritage in Baghdad has renewed work at this critically important settlement as recently as 2019.
Using new magnetometry techniques and sedimentary analysis, the renewed work is taking a different approach to archaeology compared to past excavations of the city.
“It’s not like old-time archaeology in Iraq,” says Zaid Alrawi, project manager for the Lagash project at the Penn Museum, in the statement. “We’re not going after big mounds expecting to find an old temple. We use our techniques and then, based on scientific priority, go after what we think will yield important information to close knowledge gaps in the field.”
The Lagash Mound – Lagash Archaeology Project
According to established records of the procession of Mesopotamian city-states, Lagash might be the fourth such large important settlement in the area, following Eridu the first city, Uruk, and Ur.
Among the tavern’s contents were conical eating dishes which contained the remains of fish, a staple among ancient Mesopotamian settlements, and other storage jars that contained food.
It goes to show, according to the archaeologists, that the city wasn’t simply divided into the priestly and royal strata, and the lower classes, but rather contained a middle class as well who could afford to eat out as it were.
“The fact that you have a public gathering place where people can sit down and have a pint and have their fish stew, they’re not laboring under the tyranny of kings,” says Reed Goodman, an archaeologist at the University of Pennsylvania, to CNN. “Right there, there is already something that is giving us a much more colorful history of the city.”
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Quote of the Day: “The consequence of pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the individual.” – Helen Keller (It’s Presidents’ Day)
Photo by: Harini Rath, Mount Rushmore, CC BY-SA 4.0
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Goffin’s cockatoos have been added to the short list of non-human animals that use and transport sets of tools. In a study publishing in the journal Current Biology on February 10, researchers show that the cockatoos carry multiple tools to their worksite when the job calls for it.
This type of behavior has only been previously reported in chimpanzees—our closest relatives.
The clever white parrots that hail from the Tanimbar Islands archipelago in Indonesia can use up to three different tools to extract seeds from a particular fruit, according to recent research. Up until now, though, it wasn’t clear whether the Goffin’s cockatoos considered these tools as a “set”; it’s possible that what may look like a toolset is instead nothing more than a chain of single tool uses, with the need for each new tool appearing to the animal as the task evolves.
Now, a team of researchers have used controlled experiments to clarify that the cockatoos do indeed recognize when a job requires more than one tool—and will come prepared.
“With this experiment we can say that, like chimpanzees, Goffin’s cockatoos not only appear to be to using toolsets, but they know that they are using toolsets,” says first author Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna.
“Their flexibility of behavior is stunning.”
Osuna-Mascaró was inspired by the termite-fishing Goualougo Triangle chimpanzees of northern Congo, the only other known non-human animal to use toolsets. These chimpanzees fish for termites via a two-step process: first, they use a blunt stick to break holes in the termite mound, and then they insert a long, flexible probe to “fish” the termites out of the holes. In this study, the cockatoos were tasked with fishing for cashews instead of termites.
To mimic the termite-fishing set-up, the researchers presented the cockatoos with a box containing a cashew behind a transparent paper membrane. To reach the cashew, the cockatoos had to punch through the membrane and then “fish” the cashew out. They were provided with a short, pointy stick for punching holes and a vertically halved plastic straw for fishing. (See the video below for footage…)
Seven of the ten cockatoos tested taught themselves to extract cashews successfully by punching through the membrane, and two of the cockatoos (Figaro and Fini) completed the task within 35 seconds on their first attempt. The cockatoos don’t have an equivalent foraging behavior in the wild, so there was no chance that their tool use was based on innate behaviors, and each cockatoo used a slightly different technique.
Next, the team tested the cockatoos’ ability to change their tool use in a flexible manner depending on the situation. To do this, they presented each cockatoo with two different types of box: one with a membrane and one without. The cockatoos were given the same two tools, but they only needed the pointy stick when a membrane was in the way.
“The cockatoos had to act according to the problem; sometimes the toolset was needed, and sometimes only one tool was enough,” says Osuna-Mascaró.
All of the cockatoos mastered the test in a very short period of time and were able to recognize when a single tool was sufficient. However, the birds engaged in an interesting behavior during this choosing phase. “When making the choice between which tool to use first, they were picking one up, releasing it, then picking up the other one, releasing it, returning to the first one, and so on,” says Osuna-Mascaró. The researchers found that when cockatoos did this switching, they performed better on the tests.
Next, the team tested the cockatoos’ ability to transport the tools as a set on an as-needed basis. They put the cockatoos through a series of increasingly challenging trials to reach the boxes: first they had to climb a short ladder while carrying their tools; then they had to fly horizontally with them; and in the final test, they had to carry the tools while flying vertically. As before, the birds were only sometimes presented with a box with a membrane barrier, so they had to decide whether the problem required one or both tools.
Some cockatoos learned to carry the two tools together — by inserting the short punching stick into the groove of the halved straw — when they were presented with a box that required both. This meant they only had to make one trip, albeit while carrying a heavier toolset. Most of the cockatoos transported the toolset on an as-needed basis, further indicating that they knew ahead of time when two tools were required, though some made two trips when necessary. One cockatoo, Figaro, decided not to waste time thinking and instead carried both tools in almost every trial.
“We really did not know whether the cockatoos would transport two objects together,” says Alice Auersperg, senior author on the study and a cognitive biologist at the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna. “It was a little bit of a gamble because I have seen birds combining objects playfully, but they very rarely transport more than one object together in their normal behavior.”
There’s a lot more to be learned about cockatoo tool use, the researchers say. “We feel that, in terms of technical cognition and tool use, parrots have been underestimated and understudied,” says Auersperg.
“We’ve learned how dexterous the cockatoos are when using a toolset, and we have a lot of things to follow-up on,” says Osuna-Mascaró. “The switching behavior is very interesting to us, and we are definitely going to use it to explore their decision making and their metacognition — their ability to recognize their own knowledge.”
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Conservationists at Chester Zoo became the first in Europe to successfully breed a rare Coquerel’s sifaka lemur – SWNS
Conservationists at Chester Zoo became the first in Europe to successfully breed a rare Coquerel’s sifaka lemur – SWNS
The first ever ‘dancing lemur’ to be bred in Europe was born at a UK zoo in a “landmark moment for the species”.
The precious baby Coquerel’s sifaka arrived at Chester Zoo on December 19, weighing just 4oz (119g) following a 130-day pregnancy.
Proud parents Beatrice and Elliot, both aged ten, successfully bred after being transferred from a US zoo as part of a program to protect this critically endangered species.
It is the first time a Coquerel’s sifaka—otherwise known as ‘dancing lemurs’ because of their swinging movements—has been born in Europe.
Adorable pictures and video show the cute baby clinging to its mom Beatrice while she shows it around their enclosure.
The sex of the baby is not yet known but staff say they will find this out when the tiny primate starts to explore on its own.
“It’s really exciting to be the first team of conservationists in Europe to successfully breed this unusual and extremely rare primate,” said Mark Brayshaw, Curator of Mammals at Chester Zoo. “While it’s still early days, both mum and baby are doing great.
Newborn Coquerel’s sifaka lemur born at Chester Zoo, in vital new conservation breeding program with U.S. partners – SWNS
“Beatrice is feeding her new arrival regularly and is keeping it nestled in her fur as she leaps from tree to tree. In a few weeks’ time, the baby will graduate to riding on her back, before branching out and learning to climb trees independently at around six months old.”
“It won’t be long until this bright-eyed baby will be bouncing 20-feet from tree to tree just like its parents.”
A Coquerel’s ‘dancing’ distinguishes it from other lemurs. They maintain an upright posture whilst springing side to side along the floor on their back legs and leap more than 20-ft through the treetops in a single bound.
Listed by the IUCN as critically endangered, the wild population has declined by 30 percent in Madagascar in the last 30 years due to deforestation.
“The birth of a Coquerel’s sifaka in Europe is a real landmark moment for conservation and, importantly, has kickstarted the endangered species breeding program in European zoos for the species,” says Mike Jordan, Director of Animals and Plants at Chester Zoo.
“This could be a real lifeboat.”
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The annual Western monarch count to measure the population of overwintering butterflies shared fantastic news for the second year in a row.
Motivated by the surprising rebound in 2021, volunteers’ excitement continued to grow when early reports hinted at a consecutive year of improved numbers.
Surveying a total of 272 overwintering sites across coastal California in November and December—along with a few sites inside California and Arizona—volunteers tallied 335,479 individual monarchs.
Over 130,000 butterflies were reported in Santa Barbara and San Luis Obispo Counties alone. The San Francisco Bay Area also witnessed a comeback from last year with more than 8,000 butterflies reported in surrounding counties.
This season’s results are a welcome reprieve from the dismal total of less than 2,000 individuals counted in 2020—and larger than the 250,000 counted last year.
335,479 is squarely back into what was considered “normal” in 2000-2017.
“We can all celebrate this tally,” says Emma Pelton, a conservation biologist at the Xerces Society which leads the western monarch count. “A second year in a row of relatively good numbers gives us hope.”
That said, the storms that hit California after the count will certainly effect the total. At some sites, butterflies were blown out of their clusters, making them more vulnerable to cold, but other sites, like Pacific Grove, fared relatively well with the majority of monarchs still holding on.
Managing groves to be more resilient to climate change and severe weather may help improve monarch survival and ensure there is habitat long into the future. This can include replacing dead and dying trees, mitigating future flooding, and planting more native nectar sources.
All the small but collectively powerful efforts to re-wild and protect our landscapes for monarchs are producing results. Consider joining the monarch-boosting mission of the Xerces Society.
Here are five actions you can take to support monarch butterflies:
Plant native milkweed.
Plant a diversity of nectar plants, ideally native to your area.
Stop using pesticides, or minimize risk associated with pesticide use.
Call on legislators to support greatly needed policies such as Recovering America’s Wildlife Act and the Monarch Action, Recovery, and Conservation of Habitat Act.
Contribute to community science projects that track monarchs, such as the Western Monarch Milkweed Mapper, Western Monarch Mystery Challenge, and nationwide Integrated Monarch Monitoring Program.
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