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POPSHeartbreaking Nature Story We know that whales are intelligent. Whether they are self aware is another matter. Yet, there is something very poignant about this story.
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POPSTracking the Origin of the Cat Cats probably started living close to humans when people evolved from nomadic herding to raising livestock and crops and started storing food, which attracted mice and other rodents. Cats found good hunting there, and humans surely appreciated the sly little predators' help protecting their stocks."There was a mutual benefit," Lyons said. From there, domesticated cats started to radiate out to different parts of the world, often following humans on their migrations. Today cats can be divided genetically into four broad groups: those from Europe, the Mediterranean, East Africa and Asia. But Lyons and her colleagues also made surprising discoveries about individual breeds. The Japanese bobtail, for example, does not seem genetically similar to cats from Japan, indicating the breed may have originated elsewhere. Despite its name, the Persian, the oldest recognized breed, looks as though it actually arose in Western Europe and not Persia, which today is Iran.
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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 Private Life of a Cat This is a 22-minute 1947 film about a "family" of cats. It is a very cute and sweet film. The video should load by clicking on the picture (either in this clip or at the source material). By the way, I'm not clipping the video itself because videos are now segregated from clips and I think not many people are going over to the video side of things.
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POPSAlex the parrot, zeros, and death Dr. Pepperberg reported the result with appropriate understatement: “That zero was represented in some way by a parrot, with a walnut-sized brain whose ancestral evolutionary history with humans likely dates from the dinosaurs, is striking.” In a well-known essay, “What Is it Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Thomas Nagel speculated about the elusiveness of subjectivity. What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death.
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POPSStatistics and the Dancing Cockatoo "On each trial he actually dances at a range of tempos," says Patel. But in each case the slower end of Snowball's range seemed to correlate with the tempo of the music. "When the music tempo was slow, his tempo range included slow dancing. When the music was fast, his tempo range didn’t include these slower tempos," Patel explains. A statistical check on these variations showed that the correlation between the music’s rhythm and Snowball’s slower movements was very unlikely to have happened by chance. "To us, this shows that he really does have tempo sensitivity, and is not just ‘doing his own thing’ at some preferred tempo," says Patel. Via Andrew Sullivan
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POPSI Loved My Pet. I lost one of my wonderful cats, Charlie today. He died from liver cancer 13½-years old. Being totally devastated, a dear sweet friend of mine suggested I check out this site. The front page got me bawling my eyes out, so I'm not quite ready to go "inside" yet, I reckon. But it's a really good idea, I'll be checking out soon... Thanks friend. You know who you are. .;)
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POPSCat & puppy As soon as Cute Overload stops posting pictures like these, I'll stop ripping it off.
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