Gender: Female
Status: In a Relationship
Age: 27
Sign: Cancer
City: chicagoforever
State: Illinois
Country: US
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10/08/03
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Sunday, December 02, 2007
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yes!!
Young chimp beats college students --> END HEADLINE -->
--> BEGIN STORY BODY -->
By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer1 hour, 45 minutes ago
Never mind that TV show that asks if you're smarter than a fifth-grader. Is your memory better than a young chimp's?
Maybe not.
Japanese researchers pitted young chimps against human adults in two tests of short-term memory, and overall, the chimps won.
That challenges the belief of many people, including many scientists, that "humans are superior to chimpanzees in all cognitive functions," said researcher Tetsuro Matsuzawa of Kyoto University.
"No one can imagine that chimpanzees — young chimpanzees at the age of 5 — have a better performance in a memory task than humans," he said in a statement.
Matsuzawa, a pioneer in studying the mental abilities of chimps, said even he was surprised. He and colleague Sana Inoue report the results in Tuesday's issue of the journal Current Biology.
One memory test included three 5-year-old chimps who'd been taught the order of Arabic numerals 1 through 9, and a dozen human volunteers.
They saw nine numbers displayed on a computer screen. When they touched the first number, the other eight turned into white squares. The test was to touch all these squares in the order of the numbers that used to be there.
Results showed that the chimps, while no more accurate than the people, could do this faster.
One chimp, Ayumu, did the best. Researchers included him and nine college students in a second test.
This time, five numbers flashed on the screen only briefly before they were replaced by white squares. The challenge, again, was to touch these squares in the proper sequence.
When the numbers were displayed for about seven-tenths of a second, Ayumu and the college students were both able to do this correctly about 80 percent of the time.
But when the numbers were displayed for just four-tenths or two-tenths of a second, the chimp was the champ. The briefer of those times is too short to allow a look around the screen, and in those tests Ayumu still scored about 80 percent, while humans plunged to 40 percent.
That indicates Ayumu was better at taking in the whole pattern of numbers at a glance, the researchers wrote.
"It's amazing what this chimpanzee is able to do," said Elizabeth Lonsdorf, director of the Lester E. Fisher Center for the Study and Conservation of Apes at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. The center studies the mental abilities of apes, but Lonsdorf didn't participate in the new study.
She admired Ayumu's performance when the numbers flashed only briefly on the screen.
"I just watched the video of that and I can tell you right now, there's no way I can do it," she said. "It's unbelievable. I can't even get the first two (squares)."
What's going on here? Even with six months of training, three students failed to catch up to the three young chimps, Matsuzawa said in an e-mail.
He thinks two factors gave his chimps the edge. For one thing, he believes human ancestors gave up much of this skill over evolutionary time to make room in the brain for gaining language abilities.
The other factor is the youth of Ayumu and his peers. The memory for images that's needed for the tests resembles a skill found in children, but which dissipates with age. In fact, the young chimps performed better than older chimps in the new study. (Ayumu's mom did even worse than the college students).
So the next logical step, Lonsdorf said, is to fix up Ayumu with some real competition on these tests: little kids.
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On the Net:
Current Biology: http://www.current-biology.com
Chimp research at Kyoto University: http://www.pri.kyoto-u.ac.jp/ai/index-E.htm
(This version Corrects name to Ayumu thruout.))
9:04 PM
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Wednesday, November 07, 2007
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more on hypnagogia
Category: Dreams and the Supernatural
Hags and nightmares
sleep paralysis and the midnight terrors
by Michele Ernsting
19-11-2004
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Henry Fuseli's The Nightmare, 1791: sleep paralysis sufferers often speak of an evil presence, sometimes sitting on their chest | ..> | ..>
In the middle of the night a few months ago I woke up with the terrifying sensation of being crushed in my bed - not by any living thing but by a distinctly evil presence. I know it sounds crazy, but the experience left me quaking and I spent the rest of the night sitting up in bed with the lights on.
In my search to find the source of my "night fright" I stumbled upon the website of Al Cheyne, the head of the department of psychology at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, Canada.
The first thing he did was to put a name to the experience; sleep paralysis. And I was relieved to find out that it's a relatively common sleep disorder. Professor Cheyne:
"Sleep paralysis is in the first instance a brief period of complete paralysis when you are either waking or falling asleep. I suspect it comes down to a fairly minor anomaly in the brain stem that regulates waking and sleeping and that for some of us there's a loose switch of an electrochemical sort which is out of balance."
Evil presence
The result is that your brain is awake, but you can't move. "A fairly large proportion of people will have a number of other experiences," Professor Cheyne says. "They may feel 'a presence' in the room watching them. They may see and hear things approaching them or attacking them. It can be terrifying, in fact many people describe it as the most terrifying event in their lives."
That's true for sleep paralysis-sufferer Andrea Parkes: "I could see this thing high up in the corner of the room. I tried to remain very calm and this thing got annoyed that I was staying so calm, so without touching me it slammed me against the walls, up through the ceiling and down through the floors and then the terror overtook me."
"The terror comes from losing control," says Hal Crawford, who experiences sleep paralysis several times a year.
"It comes from being in a situation where you don't know what's going to happen next, you don't know if your breathing is going to stop or whether something otherworldly is there. In a way you're battling against yourself and you don't have the power to control your body."
Folk tales
The phenomenon of sleep paralysis is so widespread it has become part of folklore around the world. "Many traditional societies include references to sleep paralysis as part of their everyday sets of working knowledge," Professor Cheyne says. It has survived in Newfoundland, an island off the east coast of Canada.
"Particularly in the small outpost communities everyone knows what the 'old hag' experience is. So someone might get up in the morning and say 'oh I was hagged last night' and everyone knows exactly what happened to them. People in these traditional societies have a great range of explanations for the experience - everything from a condition of the blood, to vampires, to being haunted by an old woman . . . this knowledge seems to have disappeared from urban societies."
In fact in urban societies you're more likely to have people describe their experience as one of 'alien abduction', according to Professor Cheyne. "The little grey men have become a modern icon, so it's not surprising that they are stored somewhere in our memory." And our brain grasps these images to explain the 'fear' it senses.
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Sharon Shag had The Hag
Almost every night
She'd lie awake for hours
Paralyzed with fright
"There's no such thing as an Old Hag!"
Sharon's mother said.
"That's just some silly notion
You've got inside your head."
From that time on, she slept quite well
Each night passed like the other.
She slept in peace, because The Hag
Was haunting Sharon's mother.
Al Pittman | ..>
| ..> "The emotion of fear accompanies threats and dangers. When you activate fear you activate a whole set of strategies to deal with danger. If you consider the fact that the part of your brain responsible for fear [the limbic system] is active at the same time that you're awake and paralysed and helpless, this would tend to aggravate this condition."
Essentially your brain strains to find clues to understand what it perceives as a threat. The sound of the fan becomes a whispering voice, a creak becomes a demon climbing on the bed, and when the brain doesn't have a stimulus, it makes one up.
Despite this rational explanation, I still shudder at the thought of the evil presence I sensed in my room. It was so real I find it hard to believe that my brain could fabricate such a terrifying hoax. I'm enormously relieved that in the cold light of day I can refer to Professor Cheyne's scientific understanding of this 'otherworldly' phenomenon, even if this leads in turn to the disturbing realization that our own minds are potentially the source of midnight's worst horrors.
10:23 AM
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Monday, August 06, 2007
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Wednesday, July 25, 2007
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Warm Water Creatures May Soon Rule the Oceans
Warm-water sea creatures may one day rule the oceans as their cold-water competitors fail to adapt to climate change.
This scenario is suggested by a new study which concludes that a species of Antarctic limpets, a type of animals can't grow efficiently or increase their growth rates, they are unlikely to be able to cope in warmer water or compete with species that will inevitably move into the region as temperatures rise." Scientists once assumed that polar species grew slower than temperate and tropical species because food was scarce in the winter. But the new study, first published in the July 20 online issue of The Journal of Experimental Biology, shows that proteins—the building blocks of growth—are the problem. Cold-blooded animals, such as the Antarctic Antarctic species retain only about 20 percent. While warmer waters would seem to be good news for the Antarctic limpets by allowing them to produce more proteins, it turns out that their protein production peaks at a specific temperature—the Antarctic summer maximum. At anything above that temperature the limpets actually produce less protein, Fraser said. "The animal certainly doesn't seem to have the ability to produce proteins outside of this narrow temperature range," he told LiveScience. Because limpets sit near the base of the Antarctic food chain, their disappearance could threaten species that dine on them, such as seabirds, fish and starfish.
9:26 AM
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giant squid!
MONTEREY, Calif. - Jumbo squid that can grow up to 7 feet long and weigh more than 110 pounds are invading central California waters and preying on local anchovy, hake and other commercial fish populations, according to a study published Tuesday.
An aggressive predator, the Humboldt squid — or Dosidicus gigas — can change its eating habits to consume the food supply favored by tuna and sharks, its closest competitors, according to an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal. "Having a new, voracious predator set up shop here in California may be yet another thing for fishermen to compete with," said the study's co-author, Stanford University researcher Louis Zeidberg. "That said, if a squid saw a human they would jet the other way." The jumbo squid used to be found only in the Pacific Ocean's warmest stretches near the equator. In the last 16 years, it has expanded its territory throughout California waters, and squid have even been found in the icy waters off Alaska, Zeidberg said. Zeidberg's co-author, Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute senior scientist Bruce Robison, first spotted the jumbo squid here in 1997, when one swam past the lens of a camera mounted on a submersible thousands of feet below the ocean's surface. More were observed through 1999, but the squid weren't seen again locally until the fall of 2002. Since their return, scientists have noted a corresponding drop in the population of Pacific hake, a whitefish the squid feeds on that is often used in fish sticks, Zeidberg said. "As they've come and gone, the hake have dropped off," Zeidberg said. "We're just beginning to figure out how the pieces fit together, but this is most likely going to shake things up." Before the 1970s, the giant squid were typically found in the Eastern Pacific, and in coastal waters spanning from Peru to Costa Rica. But as the populations of its natural predators — like large tuna, sharks and swordfish — declined because of fishing, the squids moved northward and started eating different species that thrive in colder waters. Local marine mammals needn't worry about the squid's arrival since they're higher up on the food chain, but lanternfish, krill, anchovies and rockfish are all fair game, Zeidberg said. A fishermen's organization said Tuesday they were monitoring the squid's impact on commercial fisheries. "In years of high upwellings, when the ocean is just bountiful, it probably wouldn't do anything," Zeke Grader, the executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen's Associations. "But in bad years it could be a problem to have a new predator competing at the top of the food chain."
9:23 AM
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Monday, July 16, 2007
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bastards
How to spot a b*stard by his star sign  Always falling for the bad guy? Keep missing those telltale signs? According to Adele Lang & Susi Rajah's book How To Spot A B*Stard By His Star Sign some men are simply destined to be complete gits Some men might seem like natural-born b*stards. Other will appear to have grown into the role over a period of time and a life of hard knocks. Don't be fooled. As far as men and their less-appealing characteristics go, genetic make-up and social conditioning have got absolutely nothing to do with it. Put simply, all men are b*stards by dint of their star signs. - Aries Boy does he yearn for the times when men were men and women were grateful.
- Leo A complete bloody nightmare
- Sagitarrius Past philosphers used a comforting tool: 'I think, therefore I am not Sagittarius'.
- Taurus A typically stubborn Taurean male always knows better than a female. Even when he doesn't.
- Virgo If you're looking for a man that no other woman will ever want to steal, you've finally found him.
- Capricorn The heart of a loan shark, the humour of an undertaker and the sensitivity of a tax auditor.
- Gemini Gemini b*astards are completely and utterly mad.
- Libra Life is getting more complex. The half-flush or the full-flush? The stress is unbelievable.
- Aquarius He seems like any normal bloke. Don't be fooled, the Aquarius is about as 'normal' as a pig with wings.
- Cancer Used to sneak his mother's Barbara Cartland novels when normal boys were shoplifting Hustler.
- Scorpio A sneaky, nasty, controlling b*stard, a master manipulator and a world-class pervert.
- Pisces Quite simply Pisces is a pathological liar.
9:34 AM
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Tuesday, May 15, 2007
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great!
By SARAH LARIMER, Associated Press Writer2 hours, 37 minutes ago For the second straight year, rude Miami drivers have earned the city the title of worst road rage in a survey released Tuesday. Miami motorists said they saw other drivers slam on their brakes, run red lights and talk on cell phones, according to AutoVantage, a Connecticut-based automobile membership club offering travel services and roadside assistance. Other cities near the top of the rude drivers list were New York, Boston, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. South Miami resident Erik Pinto told The Associated Press he's probably seen every bad driving habit on Miami's roads. "You don't want to know what I've seen," Pinto said. "I've seen everything. I'm from L.A., and we don't see the crazy drivers that you see here." Portland, Ore., drivers were the least likely of the cities to see other motorists tailgating on the roadways, and St. Louis motorists were the least likely to swear at another driver, the survey found. Minneapolis-St. Paul was rated the most courteous city in 2006 but slipped to the middle of the list this year. The most frequent cause of road rage cited in the survey was impatient motorists. Drivers also cited poor driving in fast lanes and driving while stressed, frustrated or angry. "The best piece of advice is to take a deep breath. Slow down, be aware and be careful," AutoVantage spokesman Todd Smith said, adding the aim of the survey is to increase driver safety across the nation. More than 2,500 drivers who regularly commute in 25 major metropolitan areas were asked to rate road rage and rude driving in telephone surveys between January and March. The survey was conducted by Prince Market Research has a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points. The list, ranked from those reporting the most incidents of road rage to the fewest: 1. Miami 2. New York 3. Boston 4. Los Angeles 5. Washington, D.C. 6. Phoenix 7. Chicago 8. Sacramento, Calif. 9. Philadelphia 10. San Francisco 11. Houston 12. Atlanta 13. Detroit 14. Minneapolis-St. Paul 15. Baltimore 16. Tampa, Fla. 17. San Diego 18. Cincinnati 19. Cleveland 20. Denver 21. Dallas-Ft. Worth 22. St. Louis 23. Seattle-Tacoma 24. Pittsburgh 25. Portland, Ore.
8:44 AM
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Sunday, February 11, 2007
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underwater adventures..
at one of my favorite places, shedd aquarium. i go at least 4 times a year to see the same exhibits over and over again.
share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=0AbsXLZo5YsmLCQg
6:59 PM
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