If you are looking for a new game to play with your pet rat, may I suggest hide-and-seek? Neuroscientist Juan Ignacio Sanguinetti of the Humboldt University of Berlin does just that. Drawing inspiration from YouTube animal videos (really!) he has taught rats to play hide-and-seek. His work was recently published in the journal Science. The
No, this is not a joke. It’s just a great “what if?” — if dinosaurs were alive today, how would veterinarians treat them? Like all wild animals, dinosaurs had difficult and violent lives. Scientists who study fossils can identify all kinds of wounds and injuries. For instance, a tyrannosaur skeleton has been found with a
There has been a lot of talk recently about how some think the next target for our manned space exploration should be Mars. But if you examine the details about time and distance, and consider the limitations of our rocket technology, there’s a compelling case for sending women. And maybe it should be only women.
In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a media blitz on climate change. I’ve found a little tidbit in this blizzard of information that shows the unusual connections among life on this planet. This involves the impact of whales on the climate. Or more specifically, whale poop. According to a study by International Monetary
Egypt has a problem. Both the cost of living and the rate of divorce are increasing. Egyptian divorces rose by almost seven percent in 2018 compared to 2017; it’s now 2.2 divorces for every thousand citizens, up from 1.9 in 2010. At the same time, the marriage rate has fallen from a little over 10
I have been reading in Astronomy magazine about the wonders of our solar system, like the landscape of the dwarf planet Ceres (in the October 2019 issue) and the possibilities of life on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Every time we send out an interplanetary probe, we are surprised at what we find. And
I hope we never find intelligent alien life in the cosmos. Granted, it would be exciting, especially to science fiction buffs to see how accurate our imaginations were. But even within our own galaxy, the distances are vast and we don’t have the technology to make travel practical. So if there was contact, they would
As a (substitute) school teacher, this topic is of special interest to me. What is intelligence? How is IQ calculated? The National Public Radio program Radiolab recently aired a series of six programs entitled “G” that addresses general intelligence. The first program, broadcast on June 7, 2019, is “G: The Miseducation of Larry P” and
How many languages are there? According to the website Infoplease, there are about 6500 spoken languages in the world (https://www.infoplease.com/askeds/how-many-spoken-languages); other estimates are even higher. The most common is Mandarin Chinese. English comes in third, behind Chinese and Spanish, although it is far and away the most popular second language. The flip side to this
It’s been a long time since I’ve been in wilderness on my own. In the Amazing Maasai Marathon in Kenya, I did find myself alone — no one in sight in the middle of Africa — but that was simply a matter of following the painted rocks. But I’ve recently learned of a phone app