Janmashtami 2014: Hindus Celebrate The Birth Of Lord Krishna. Deep dives of devil rays solve 'mystery' of warm brain. 1 July 2014Last updated at 12:47 ET By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News Individual devil rays, which can be 4m across, were tracked for up to five months using satellite tags A new study shows that devil rays plunge nearly 2km below the ocean surface, making some of the deepest and fastest dives ever observed in the sea.
Scientists tracked 15 of the large, winged fish, previously thought to be surface dwellers, for several months. In between their icy dives, they appear to bask near the surface to warm up. The findings, published in Nature Communications, offer an explanation for a mysterious mass of blood vessels, thought to keep the ray's brain warm. The front part of the animal's skull is stuffed with a sponge-like mesh of large and small arteries. The Mobula ray family, which includes these "flying" bentfin rays, were all thought to live near the surface Continue reading the main story. Pandas and Top Gear – both endangered species. 'Just as only zoos can now save pandas – the pickiest eaters on the planet – should we really be conserving the most destructive bunch of arseholes on Earth – men?
' Photograph: Alamy Oh God, the internet. Micahgoulart: Hands down the best photo ever... This is why your brain wants to swear. 'I think it's part of them learning about their emotions and emotional expression,' says Dr Timothy Jay.
Photograph: Martin Godwin Most of the time, words behave themselves. They're just a useful arrangement of sounds in our mouths, or letters on a page. They have no intrinsic power to offend. If I told you that skloop was a vile swearword in some foreign language, with the power to empty rooms and force ministerial resignations, you might laugh. Which is why parents will not necessarily rejoice at the findings of a study by Timothy Jay, who looked at the range of "bad" words used by children as young as one.
Parents tend to want to protect children from swearwords. But this leaves us with some unanswered questions: why are certain words considered dangerous in the first place? But the magic really happens as those links become entrenched. North American Aboriginals Took 10,000-Year Break Before Heading Here: Paper. Aboriginal people may have become who they are today during a 10,000-year stopover in a land that no longer exists, says a provocative essay in a major scientific journal.
"It was a substantial population, if only because it clearly persisted for 10,000 years or so," said Dennis O'Rourke, a University of Utah geneticist and co-author of an article published Thursday in Science magazine. "The people would have been very adept at extracting resources. They were a very successful population or they would not have survived. " Scientists have long believed that the ancestors of North American aboriginals came from Siberia during the Ice Age, when massive glaciers covering most of the continent lowered sea levels enough to expose a vast stretch of land now called Beringia.
Conventional wisdom has it that sometime between 25,000 and 15,000 years ago, the ancestors crossed Beringia, trekked an ice-free corridor down the West Coast and settled in various spots on a fresh new continent. 16 Habits Of Highly Sensitive People. Do you feel like you reflect on things more than everyone else?
Do you find yourself worrying about how other people feel? Do you prefer quieter, less chaotic environments? If the above sound true to you, you may be highly sensitive. The personality trait — which was first researched by Elaine N. Aron, Ph.D., in the early 1990s — is relatively common, with as many as one in five people possessing it. While recent interest in introversion — driven largely by high-profile publications on the subject, including Susan Cain’s book “Quiet,” — has brought more awareness to personality traits that value less stimulation and higher sensitivity, Aron notes that highly sensitive people still tend to be considered the “minority.”
But “minority” doesn’t mean bad — in fact, being highly sensitive carries a multitude of positive characteristics. Alien Life May Have Evolved Just After Big Bang, New Research Suggests. Earthlings may be extreme latecomers to a universe full of life, with alien microbes possibly teeming on exoplanets beginning just 15 million years after the Big Bang, new research suggests.
Traditionally, astrobiologists keen on solving the mystery of the origin of life in the universe look for planets in habitable zones around stars. Also known as Goldilocks zones, these regions are considered to be just the right distance away from stars for liquid water, a pre-requisite for life as we know it, to exist. But even exoplanets that orbit far beyond the habitable zone may have been able to support life in the distant past, warmed by the relic radiation left over from the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8 billion years ago, says Harvard astrophysicist Abraham Loeb.
[The Big Bang to Now in 10 Easy Steps] For comparison, the earliest evidence of life on Earth dates from 3.8 billion years ago, about 700 million years after our planet formed.