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POPSSongs From The Sea: Deciphering Dolphin Language With Picture Words Dr. Horace Dobbs, a leading authority on dolphin-assisted therapy, has joined the team as consultant. "I have long held the belief that the dolphin brain, comparable in size with our own, has specialized in processing auditory data in much the same way that the human brain has specialized in processing visual data. Nature tends not to evolve brain mass without a need, so we must ask ourselves what dolphins do with all that brain capacity. The answer appears to lie in the development of brain systems that require huge auditory processing power. There is growing evidence that dolphins can take a sonic 'snap shot' of an object and send it to other dolphins, using sound as the transmission medium. We an therefore hypothesize that the dolphin's primary method of communication is picture based. Thus, the picture-based imaging method, employed by Reid and Kassewitz, seems entirely plausible."
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POPSWhales & Dolphins Inspire a Novel Design for Wind Turbines "Engineers have previously tried to ensure steady flow patterns on rigid and simple lifting surfaces, such as wings. The lesson from biomimicry is that unsteady flow and complex shapes can increase lift, reduce drag and delay 'stall', a dramatic and abrupt loss of lift, beyond what existing engineered systems can accomplish," Fish said. "There are even possibilities that this technology could be applied to aeronautical designs such as helicopter blades in the future."
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POPSBan The Plastic Bag Bangladesh slapped an outright ban on all polythene bags in 2002 after they were found to have been the main culprit during the 1988 and 1998 floods that submerged two-thirds of the country. Discarded bags had choked the country's drainage systems. Nylon fishing nets, fishing line, bags, 6-pack rings etc, kill hundreds of thousands of animals every year and will continue to do so for hundreds, if not thousands of years to come. Horrible, panicked and painful deaths by drowning, suffocation or internal damage. If Bangladesh can ban the plastic bag and get by, surely so could we!
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POPSCan Dolphins Imagine the Future? Partly because their brains are roughly the same size as humans, and are similarly or superiorly complex (although differently evolved in structure), some marine biologists have speculated that dolphins, and other Cetaceans, are at least as intelligent as humans, and could have several unknown communicative abilities, that surpass human understanding.
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POPSDo Dolphins Have a Sense of the Future? It is their ability to understand sentences of sign language that astound though, with a sentence like “touch the frisbee with your tail and then jump over it” returning just that from the dolphin. This proves more than just rigorous training is the answer, but an understanding of what we are asking of them.
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POPSDo Dolphins Have a Sense of the Future? I had a wonderful experience with a mated pair of Hawaiian Bottlenose dolphins...When I was on a longliner Tuna boat we would stop for lunch at the end of the flagline and one day a male dolphin stuck his nose on the gunwale edge and squawked loudly and then swam a sort distance back down the line...then back and repeated the message...we ran down the line until we found his mate, who had tried to steal our bait (Look, honey, free breakfast!) and got hooked on her lip! rather than tear her lip she sent Hubby to us for the rescue! I swear she sat her cute little nose on the gunwale and patiently waited while I removed the hook...thanked us with a flip and some clicxkin, squeeling and swam off! Amazing! This was my first falling in love with Dolphins and Whales came later.
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POPSJust how smart are dolphins anyway? more signs... "Playing around Most mammals seem to enjoy play - but dolphins seem to like making their games as challenging as possible. A killer whale calf learned the trick of luring gulls to the surface of the water with fish. When the gulls landed on the water, the killer whale would then attempt to capture them in her mouth, without killing them. Once she mastered this skill, she made the task more challenging for herself: instead of waiting for the gulls to land on the water, she tried to capture the gulls on their descent when they were more than a metre above the water surface. "
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POPSThe Gay Animal Kingdom Didn't god make these animals too? So much for the "abomination" theory. But then, which is true, real life facts, or a bible written by 1st century goat herders?
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