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POPSAboriginal Rock Art at Risk But the peninsula is also seeing increasing industrial activity, including a gas processing plant, a fertiliser factory and iron ore port facilities, making it the only place in Australia to feature on the World Monuments Fund's list of the most endangered sites. Smalldon believes the rock art has suffered since mining took off in the Pilbara, which holds some of the richest mineral deposits on earth, in the 1960s. "We had nearly one million panels of rock art," Smalldon said.
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POPSPrevailing theory of aging challenged in Stanford worm study To see whether these signal molecules were part of a wear-and-tear aging mechanism, the researchers exposed worms to stresses thought to cause aging, such as heat (a known stressor for nematode worms), free-radical oxidation, radiation and disease. But none of the stressors affected the genes that make the worms get old. So it looked as though worm aging wasn’t a storm of chemical damage. Instead, Kim said, key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake. Kim’s team refers to this slide as “developmental drift.”
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POPSAgriculture, from a different angle Several tribes of bark beetles are also major forest pests, and they farm their fungus gardens as their only source of food by growing the crop inside the sapwood of dead or dying trees. But the leaf-cutter ants are the modern pioneers, and their farming techniques are the most sophisticated of all, according to Schultz and Brady. They involve three separate but mutually dependent organisms that must all work together: The ants that eat leaves, grasses and flowers; the fungus that grows in the ant gardens; and a unique bacterium that lives and grows on the skin of the ants for mutual support. interesting.
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POPS "Time" - Wheel of Life The Wheel of Life illustrates in a popular way the essence of the Buddhist teachings\ see also :"How Your Brain Can Control Time?? " http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/DBF30537-E365-4B2D-9C2F-ACA704F333CF/ Time as an abstract idea –beautiful illustration \http://clipmarks.com/clipmark/DE078798-AA3B-4029-B82C-AF882516398D/
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POPSHow one day we may all be eternally young "We found a normal developmental programme that works in young animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older. It accounts for the lion's share of molecular differences between young and old worms." If ageing is not a cost of unavoidable chemistry, but is instead driven by changes in regulatory genes, the ageing process may not be inevitable, he added.
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POPSBreakthrough in animal part transplants for humans Surgeons have been able to transplant heart valves from pigs into patients for more than a decade, but these have a limited life span as they do not become populated by the patients own cells and are unable to repair any damage, meaning they must be replaced every 10 years. For young patients this poses a particular problem as the valves do not grow with the child and so must be replaced frequently. With the new technique the heart valves grow with the patient as if they were part of the original heart. The scientists use a combination of freezing, chemical baths and ultrasound to strip the animal tissue of its cells and prime the remaining biological scaffold so the patient's cells are encouraged to grow into it.
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POPSAging may be a mistake, and not a given "I don't think there are any theories that account for the vast differences in life spans between animals. Nobody knows why we age in 80 years and chimpanzees age in 40," he said. Kim said he thinks the worm results may one day answer questions such as why the human kidney ages faster than the liver or why some clams live for 400 years and whales can live for 200 years. "Why can't I live as long as a whale? How hard would it be?" he asked. it is a very good question...
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POPSDinosaur evolutionary tree unveiled It remained at that low level throughout the following Cretaceous period, a time of plenty in Earth's terrestrial history in which flowering plants, lizards, snakes, birds and mammals all became much more numerous. Dinosaurs apparently did not take advantage of the abundant food supply that emerged during the Cretaceous Terrestrial Revolution. "Our supertree allows us to look for unusual patterns across the whole of dinosaurs for the first time," says Lloyd. "It is the most comprehensive picture ever produced of how dinosaurs evolved."
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POPSAnimals Get Freaky at Museum of Sex! HA HA HA DOLPHINS MASTURBATING - Hermaphroditic banana slugs sometimes chew off their own penises. PANDA BEARS DOING THE NASTY AND life-size sculptures of copulating animals. SICK!!!!!!!
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POPSCat parasite in humans makes them like cat urine
Parasite "Brainwashes" Rats Into Craving Cat Urine, Study FindsBen Harder for National Geographic News April 3, 2007 The parasite Toxoplasma gondii uses a remarkable trick to spread from rodents to cats: It alters the brains of infected rats and mice so that they become attracted to—rather than repelled by—the scent of their predators. A new study reveals that rodents infected with the parasitic protozoa are drawn to the smell of cat urine, apparently having lost their otherwise natural aversion to the scent. The parasite can only sexually reproduce in the feline gut, so it's advantageous for it to get from a rodent into a cat—if necessary, by helping the latter eat the former. In rodents, "brain circuits for many behaviors overlap with the brain circuits responsible for fear," said Ajai Vyas of Stanford University, who led the new study. "One would thus assume that if something messes up fear of cat pee, it will also mess up a variety of related behaviors." Bu
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POPSWill Our Future Brains Be Smaller? Why does the brain need these two decision-making areas? What benefit does the new cortex bring? After all, extra brain means extra weight and energy required to carry it around. Furthermore, is the older sub-cortical system now largely redundant? If so, could we expect it to atrophy in future humans so our brains become smaller? The results of their modelling showed that when the threat level is high, such as the risk of being attacked by a dangerous animal, it is very useful to have the fast-acting, if inaccurate, system. But when dealing with situations which don't occur very often, or complex scenarios with many conflicting cues such as social situations, the cortical system is of more use than the sub-cortical system.
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POPSBio-Earth: Are Planets Living Super-Organisms? He believes that expanding the study of life sciences to the core of our world and the depths of outer space will help us find distant relatives of our own Earth -- planets that could also sustain life. To explain why contintental plates drift on the surface of the Earth's molten mantle, Maruyama argues that continents actually have life cycles. Old, cold plates on continental fringes sink to “plate graveyards” deep in the Earth’s mantle, and then rise again, creating volcanoes fueled by three-dimensional convection movements deep below the surface.
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POPSOctopus vs Rubik’s cube No one has suggested that any of the octopuses will actually solve the puzzle, but there’s a very slim chance they might. At the risk of re-igniting the now dormant ‘Echinoderms or Molluscs’ blog war, show us a starfish that can do that…
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POPS3 Next-Gen Animal Prosthetics Build Perfect Beasts Humans aren't the only ones who benefit from artificial (and often robotic) advances in high-tech medicine. Kangaroos, dolphins, birds and even elephants have all received artificial parts. Scientists involved in these efforts believe outfitting disabled animals with prosthetics can maintain biodiversity and help save endangered species. Here are the tales of three lucky patients from the other kingdom.
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