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Fascinating scientific stuff

beer good said:
I thought the warm-blooded theory had been around since the 60s?
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Well, the warm-blooded dinosaur theory nowadays is being a valid controversy .
Not only in relation to theories about the different heat-regulation strategies between the reptile ancestors and mammal ancestors ...
Actually, the controversy follows toward other topics as if the warm-blooded dinosaurs were able to live in cold regions or polar regions like the Cryolophosaurus Ellioti ...
Or if they had to eat a lot to fuel their lifestyle in cold regions ...
- A digression, in Geologic history these regions ( Alaska or Antartic ) were warmer than it is today but far from tropical climate -​
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Antarctic expedition unearths rare fossils | The Gateway
 
Beer good, Have you read about the Paleontological thermometer ?? or Do you know the Isostope Geochemistry ??
( Oxygen isotopes in fossilised dinosaurs )
 
beer good said:
I'm not a biologist, so no. Why?
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Neither am I . Well, I just wanted to explain better those of Physiology of Dinosaurs ( different heat-regulation strategies) in my last post, but then I thought that it would be difficult to understand the role of oxygen isotopes ( 16 and 18 ) in fossilised dinosaurs .
 
beer good said:
NASA looks to send landers to Europa in-2020-wants-to- break the ice .....
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This mission sounds like a course 'stage' of Ice & mixed Climbing in the moon :whistling: Btw, Michel Vaucher ( swiss mountain climber and maths teacher ) imagined something similar ....
Yes, I want to break the ice too :lol: and then I want to dive in this lunar ocean ..... :)
 
Cosimah2o said:
This mission sounds like a course 'stage' of Ice & mixed Climbing in the moon :whistling: Btw, Michel Vaucher ( swiss mountain climber and maths teacher ) imagined something similar ....
Yes, I want to break the ice too :lol: and then I want to dive in this lunar ocean ..... :)
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This quote from the comments on the attached article cracked me up: "Things like this make me nervous. What if the radiation on the surface of Jupiter's moon contaminates the landers and they bring the radiation back home :X. " :lol:
 
Collective Scientific Project to Decipher the Beautiful Whalesong !

The Misterious whalesong has occupied in our time the place left by the mermaids and their mythical ( Sirens, perhaps :whistling: ) and confounding voices. In the case of these cetaceans, however, the fascination has been less lethal and maybe even benefitial, this has been due to the profound respect that these impressive animals inspire.....
Marine scientists have launched an appeal asking Wildlife enthusiasts ( It means, Beer Good, Sparkchaser and Will :whistling: ) for help in decoding the secrets of whale song in a global "crowdsourcing" experiment !
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MH4WpiMdgOc&feature=relmfu

Language Whales | Create and Share
Scientists ask public to help decode whale song | Environment | guardian.co.uk
 
One day we'll figure out what they are saying and hopefully that will happen in my lifetime.
 
It's an interesting question, yeah, though I think people are bound to be disappointed if they expect to find an actual language. I recently read something on attempts to communicate with apes, who have probably the largest "vocabulary" of any animal we've studied and can even learn to talk to humans using either ideograms or sign language, yet have no actual concept of language. Chimpanzees, for instance, have a "word" for "leopard", but that word only means "Look out, I just saw a leopard!" They can't (as far as we know) conceptualize, discuss abstract ideas like "How many leopards do you think might be in this jungle" or "What should we do next time we see a leopard" or "What kind of animal is a leopard". You wonder if whales, with their (I would assume) far less dynamic environment, would have need for a more complex language than that.
 
beer good said:
It's an interesting question, yeah, though I think people are bound to be disappointed if they expect to find an actual language. ( .... ) You wonder if whales, with their (I would assume) far less dynamic environment, would have need for a more complex language than that.
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Yes you are right, it will be a really basic language like happens also with the Birds song or the Crickets song. Basically, this kind of songs usually allude to 3 o 4 parameters : - Territorial animal ( area that an animal of a particular species consistently defends against conspecifics) Courtship/Reproduction , Danger or Attack , ' Happiness ' ....
But there is a part for me also interesting in this project, the Dialects .
Marine scientists now wanted to investigate the differences in each group's calls, like a dialect, and whether they could discover different kinds of messages from analysing these calls. 'We want to be able to compare them; both these species have such complex sorts of sounds, and some of these sounds are repeated again, again and again. So they are not random ... ' Every matched group of sounds would be compared with the whales' location and activities that the whales were involved in. "We want to try and take that back to the context where they're produced, such as hunting or social situations."
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City Birds change their tune to adapt to urban noise !

Some bird species have the ability to modify their dialects over the course of a single generation—if not less . Scientists have assumed that some of the very factors that influence the structural evolution of bird singing ( the frequency and timing ) also mold its cultural evolution—that is, its capacity for change from one generation to the next. One item in particular that has piqued the interest of researchers is the contribution of urban development, and, more specifically, urban noise, to the evolution of bird song . - Song dialects are a form of vocal geographical variation that develop in bird species that learn their songs, such as oscine passerines, and are one of the most extensively studied cultural systems in animals ... Considerable geographical variation exists in the structure of phrases, syllables and syntax in the songs of white-crowned sparrows, and, based on this variation, most songs of a region can be grouped into one or more dialects ...
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Urban noise and the cultural evolution of bird songs
 
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