The elusive octopus genome has finally been untangled, which should allow scientists to discover answers to long-mysterious questions about the animal's alienlike physiology: How does it camouflage itself so expertly? How does it control—and regenerate—those eight flexible arms and thousands of suckers? And, most vexing: How did a relative of the snail get to be so incredibly smart—able to learn quickly, solve puzzles and even use tools?.....
Also see:
Octopus genome holds clues to uncanny intelligence by Alison Abbott at Nature
Evolution 101: No, an Octopus is not an Alien by Jolene Creighton at From Quarks to Quasars
East Africa’s Elephant Architects by Rob Pringle at Animal Ecology In Focus:
I can see elephants in my backyard—at least fifteen of them, youngsters and grownups. They are a few hundred meters off, but distinctive amongst the thorn trees, and my eyes drift to them every time I look up from the computer screen. In the 12 years that I’ve been working here at the Mpala Research Centre in central Kenya’s Laikipia Highlands, elephants have grown both more abundant and more tranquil, less prone to howl at passing cars. This shift has both deep and shallow historical roots: Laikipia’s colonial legacy of large landholdings, a decentralized local conservation movement, the diminishing profitability of livestock, the rise of ecotourism, urbanization, globalization. These factors, independently and synergistically, have helped Laikipians tolerate elephants, and tolerance is reciprocated. Sitting at this little desk in this tiny sliver of equatorial Africa, I find it easy not to stew about the future of elephants. I mean, look at them out there.........
Also see:
GPS Trackers In Fake Elephant Tusks Reveal Ivory Smuggling Route at Goats and Soda
Male elephants are not the loners we once thought by Lesley Evans Ogden at BBC - Earth
Forest Elephant Chronicles by Catherine Clabby at American Scientist
Dining Like Darwin: When Scientists Swallow Their Subjects by Jessie Rack at The Salt:
Scientists are a driven bunch, dedicated and passionate about understanding the inner workings of the world. You must be focused, willing to work strange hours in every kind of weather. Willing to go beyond the known and be constantly inspired by your curiosity. It takes guts to be a scientist. And a strong stomach doesn't hurt, either. I was in a graduate ecology class when I first heard about the scientific tradition of eating the organism you study. Other students were swapping stories of friends who had chomped down on grubs and beetles, or illicitly slurped a tadpole. It was hilarious, disgusting and revealing. I was finally learning what it meant to be a biologist......Scientists Can Now Film the Entire Nervous System of a Fruit Fly Larva in Real Time by Bahar Gholipour at BrainDecoder:
Imagine a magical video in which each pixel is switching on and off in mysterious synchrony with other pixels to give rise to the visual patterns that you're watching. Your job is to decode the programming behind the behavior of these pixels, to figure out which ones work together and how they contribute to different patterns. Oh, and by the way, your video is three-dimensional, it's so small that it fits on a cross-section of a hair, and it has thousands of pixels, each only a few microns wide. .....Do Dogs Understand Play Signals Given by Humans? by Stanley Coren at Canine Corner:
I was watching an advanced dog obedience class that was being taught by a well-organized and knowledgeable instructor. At one point, after the dogs had done a series of exercises which required them to stay in one place and not respond to a series of distractions, this instructor told class to release their dogs and to play with them for a minute or two. The idea was clear; the dogs had shown admirable restraint and they were to be rewarded by a short interval of play. The response of the class was interesting. One student clapped her hands, another patted the floor, another shoved her dog with her knee, and several used verbal encouragements. The responses of the dogs were equally variable, with only about half of them actually showing any interest in playing, and the others staring at their owners with that wide-eyed look that I always interpret as the dog trying to say "Huh? Just what is it you want me to do?".....15 Fascinating Facts About Daddy Longlegs by Erin McCarthy at Mental Floss:
Being a curious person can be a double-edged sword. On one hand, you learn so much! On the other, you sometimes find yourself looking up arachnids right before bedtime, as I did earlier this month. When my search turned up some really interesting information on daddy longlegs, I had to know more—so I called Ron Clouse, who has been studying the DNA and lineages of these often misunderstood arachnids for a decade. "I do everything from going into the field and collecting them to analyzing the data and doing the papers and all the lab tests in between," he says. Here are a few fascinating facts he told us about daddy longlegs—which I now find pretty cool......The Neuron’s Secret Partner by Ferris Jabr at Nautilus:
When we speak of brain cells we usually mean neurons: those gregarious, energetic darlings of cell biology that intertwine their many branches in complex webs and constantly crackle with their own electric chatter. But neurons make up only half the cells in the brain. The rest, known as neuroglia or simply glia, have long lived in the neuron’s shadow. French physiologist Henri Dutrochet first documented glia in 1824, though he had no idea what they were—he simply noted globules between the nerves of mollusks. In 1856, German biologist Rudolf Virchow gave those blobs the name “neuroglia,” describing them as “a sort of putty in which the nervous elements are embedded.” In the following decades, scientists learned that this putty was in fact made of individual cells—at least six major types, we now know—that formed intricate structural networks with both neurons and blood vessels. Yet they still regarded glia (which is Greek for “glue”) as mere fluff ‘n stuff, the brain’s packing peanuts, an inert plasma holding everything else in place......
And if that is not enough, more readings for later this weekend:
In 1975, this Kodak employee invented the digital camera. His bosses made him hide it. by James Estrin at BRW
How the vomit bag became part of every flight by Phil Edwards at Vox
The Mismatch Between Teen Sleep and School Timing by Joseph A. Buckhalt at Child Sleep, From ZZZ's to A's
Journalists Should Act More Like Scientists by Christie Aschwanden at The Last Word On Nothing
Beyond Access: What Does Open Science Mean to You? by OpenExplorer at OpenExplorer Journal
Cornell University has built a magnificent archive of 9,000 creatures’ sounds from the most remote places on Earth by Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz
Serpularia: A Rightly Forgotten Problematicum by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms
Amphinectidae by Christopher Taylor at Variety of Life
A Scientific Look at Bad Science by Bourree Lam at The Atlantic
It's Time for Presidential Candidates to Talk About Science by Nina Burleigh at Newsweek
What is “Publication”? by Grumpy Geophysicist at The Grumpy Geophysicist
Make Peer Review Public by Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky at Slate
What is wrong with this picture? by Emma Saxon at On Biology
Scientists discover what controls waking up and going to sleep by Northwestern University at ScienceDaily
Understand the science behind a wildly popular, iconic American pastime with The Science of Cheerleading, a new ebook by Darlene Cavalier at SciStarter blog
A Compelling Reason to Start School Later (Finally!) by Grace Elkus at Real Simple
Hoof Radiographs: More Than Meets the Eye by Stacey Oke, DVM, MSc at The Horse
As Ocean Waters Heat Up, A Quest to Create ‘Super Corals’ by Nicola Jones at Yale Environment 360
Smart People Live Longer — Here's Why by Stephanie Pappas at Live Science
Surgeons Smash Records with Pig-to-Primate Organ Transplants by Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review
Meet blebb: To treat addiction, would you agree to have your memory erased? by Meredith Knight at Genetic Literacy Project
Do I have to be vegan to combat climate change? by Lydia Chain at Scienceline
Do we harm others even if we don't need to? by M. Paula Cacault, Lorenz Goette, Rafael Lalive and Mathias Thoenig at Frontiers Evolutionary Psychology and Neuroscience
What You Need to Know About Glanders Disease by Riley Davis at Horse Collaborative
More on Spider-Hawks by Christopher Taylor at Catalogue of Organisms
Signal to Noise Special on GMOs by Kevin Bonham at Food Matters
The Next Great GMO Debate by Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review
Research Biologist Coins Term 'Kilo-Author' For Scientific Journal Articles by Robert Siegel at NPR
Tiny Critters: Photographing itty-bitty insects and their amazing miniature worlds by Ray Hennessy at Vantage
Loss of altruism (and a body plan) without a loss of genes by Earlham College at ScienceDaily
Previously in this series:
FieldNotes: a view to spotted horses in the morning
FieldNotes: The Word For World is Blue (or is it Gold?)
FieldNotes: Golden Mean, polite middle-ground, and optimal numbers of legs.
FieldNotes: speeding up and slowing down time
FieldNotes: from Captain Ahab to Jeff Goldblum, chasing the giants
FieldNotes: this is not your grandparents' neuroscience!
FieldNotes: Brontosaurus in, Food Babe out.
FieldNotes: Rogue Microwave Ovens Call Home
FieldNotes: Let the sleeping apes lie
FieldNotes: one thing leads to another leads to another
FieldNotes: Seductive Allure of Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations
FieldNotes: do African horses do flehmen at the sight of Derby hats?
FieldNotes: How The Bird Got Its Beak
FieldNotes: When Snakes Had Legs...
FieldNotes: Only before the bicameral mind evolved could people fall for Bohannon's cheap stunts
FieldNotes: Water, fire, origin of life, origin of cooking.
FieldNotes: Jurassic World, and other strange animals...
FieldNotes: Honey Badger Don’t Care!
FieldNotes: Hallucigenia is back on its head again.
FieldNotes: Poisonous and grieving quail, reclusive rail, and giants!
FieldNotes: When Snark was a Boojum
FieldNotes: In a grip of the legs of a snake
FieldNotes: Cecil and grief
FieldNotes: Science Notes and high school start times
Images:
Octopus, by Michael LaBarbera
An elephant feeds on Balanites at Mpala Research Centre, photo by Rob Pringle