Thursday, 30 January 2025
Pooh Philosophy
"It certainly is," said Piglet.
"What are you hoping for, this year?" asked Pooh. "Are you going to try and achieve some goals or ambitions? Make lots of money? Better yourself?"
"Well," said Piglet. "The thing is, Pooh, is that I am a very simple soul at heart. And I may not be right, when I say this...but I have always felt that the most important thing in life - for me at least - is love. To love, and to be loved. So while Achieving Goals, and Making Money, and Bettering Yourself, might all be great things to dream of...I can't help feeling that, without love, they would be very empty dreams indeed."
"So your hopes for the next year is ..."
"For love," said Piglet, simply. "For love, and for a regular walk through the Hundred Acre Wood with my very best friend, kicking up the leaves and talking as though we haven't a care in the world."
"That sounds just perfect to me," said Pooh. "Shall we go?"
And so the two friends put on their boots and their waterproofs, and walked out into the Hundred Acre Wood, kicking up leaves and talking as though they hadn't a care in the world. 
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
The Wolf
The wolf never eats corpses, neither of animals nor of people; it spends its entire life with one partner, it does not mate with its mother or sister; it is a monogamous animal, it does not cheat. If a partner dies, the wolf remains alone; it knows its young well: it is the only animal that helps its parents after a deep old age and brings them food.
When you kill a wolf, it looks you in the eyes until its soul leaves it; it is 25% smarter than the dog and it is the only animal that does not obey training, they say. Wolves think, dream, make plans, communicate with each other intelligently and are more like us than any other living being.Credit Goes to Respective Owner
Saturday, 25 January 2025
From a medieval village in Italy to an ancient underwater city in China: Beautiful places that have been deserted and forgotten
Imagine up and leaving your hometown never to return again - that's what happened in these ghost towns and lost cities.
They were once thriving and home to many inhabitants but are now left deserted and forgotten.
From sprawling cities that were home to thousands of people to a coal mine that is now occupied by just one inhabitant, these unique places are revealed as some of the most beautiful empty towns from around the world.
The desolate medieval village of Craco, in southern Italy, has been used as the setting for many films, including Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, while Bodie, in California, has been preserved in exactly the same way it was when residents left there in the 1960s.
The only way to get to China's Lion City is by scuba diving 130ft underwater and if you wish to visit the Pyramiden village in Norway you'll have to travel on a snowmobile from a town 31 miles away.
Mandu in India was abandoned by its people and last inhabited over 400 years ago while there are still some people living in the Unesco World Heritage Site of Chinguetti in Mauritania in Africa.
Craco, Italy
The ghost town of Craco, Italy is situated in the south of the country and has been left completely uninhabited
The medieval village of Craco, often described as the most beautiful abandoned city, was built so that its inhabitants could watch over the surrounding land
The beautiful and unique landscape means Craco has been the setting for many films, including The Passion of the Christ and Quantum of Solace
The last of Craco’s residents left the city between 1892 and 1922 for America due to poor agricultural conditions, landslides, earthquakes and floods
Dogs are humans' oldest companions, DNA shows
A study of dog DNA has shown that our "best friend" in the animal world may also be our oldest one.
The analysis reveals that dog domestication can be traced back 11,000 years, to the end of the last Ice Age.
This confirms that dogs were domesticated before any other known species.
Our canine companions were widespread across the northern hemisphere at this time, and had already split into five different types.
Despite the expansion of European dogs during the colonial era, traces of these ancient indigenous breeds survive today in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Oceania.
The research fills in some of the gaps in the natural history of our close animal companions.
Dr Pontus Skoglund, co-author of the study and group leader of the Ancient Genomics laboratory at London's Crick Institute, told BBC News: "Dogs are really unique in being this quite strange thing if you think about it, when all people were still hunter gatherers, they domesticate what is really a wild carnivore - wolves are pretty frightening in many parts of the world.
"The question of why did people do that? How did that come about? That's what we're ultimately interested in."
To some extent, dog genetic patterns mirror human ones, because people took their animal companions with them when they moved. But there were also important differences.
The Rhodesian Ridgeback retains ancestry from an ancient African dog lineage
For example, early European dogs were initially diverse, appearing to originate from two very distinct populations, one related to Near Eastern dogs and another to Siberian dogs.
But at some point, perhaps after the onset of the Bronze Age, a single dog lineage spread widely and replaced all other dog populations on the continent. This pattern has no counterpart in the genetic patterns of people from Europe.
Anders Bergström, lead author and post-doctoral researcher at the Crick, said: "If we look back more than four or five thousand years ago, we can see that Europe was a very diverse place when it came to dogs. Although the European dogs we see today come in such an extraordinary array of shapes and forms, genetically they derive from only a very narrow subset of the diversity that used to exist."
An international team analysed the whole genomes (the full complement of DNA in the nuclei of biological cells) of 27 ancient dog remains associated with a variety of archaeological cultures. They compared these to each other and to modern dogs.
The results reveal that breeds like the Rhodesian Ridgeback in southern Africa and the Chihuahua and Xoloitzcuintli in Mexico retain genetic traces of ancient indigenous dogs from the region.
The New Guinea singing dog is one representative of a lineage found in dogs across Asia and Oceania
The ancestry of dogs in East Asia is complex. Chinese breeds seem to derive some of their ancestry from animals like the Australian dingo and New Guinea singing dog, with the rest coming from Europe and dogs from the Russian steppe.
The New Guinea singing dog is so named because of its melodious howl, characterised by a sharp increase in pitch at the start.
Greger Larson, a co-author from the University of Oxford, said: "Dogs are our oldest and closest animal partner. Using DNA from ancient dogs is showing us just how far back our shared history goes and will ultimately help us understand when and where this deep relationship began."
Dogs are thought to have evolved from wolves that ventured into human camps, perhaps sniffing around for food. As they were tamed, they could then have served humans as hunting companions or guards.
The results suggest all dogs derive from a single extinct wolf population - or perhaps a few very closely related ones. If there were multiple domestication events around the world, these other lineages did not contribute much DNA to later dogs.
Dr Skoglund said it was unclear when or where the initial domestication occurred. "Dog history has been so dynamic that you can't really count on it still being there to readily read in their DNA. We really don't know - that's the fascinating thing about it."
Many animals, such as cats, probably became our pets when humans settled down to farm a little over 6,000 years ago. Cats were probably useful for controlling pests such as mice, that were attracted by the waste generated by dense settlements. This places their domestication in cradles of agriculture such as the Near East.
"For dogs, it could almost have been anywhere: cold Siberia, the warm Near East, South-East Asia. All of these are possibilities in my mind," Pontus Skoglund explained.
The findings have been published in the journal Science.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54690458?at_medium=custom7&at_campaign=64&at_custom1=%5Bpost+type%5D&at_custom2=facebook_page&at_custom4=172C7118-1A22-11EB-9360-36AD96E8478F&at_custom3=BBC+News&fbclid=IwAR1EK9k9ZS7BUAhHyH8sKC6NLHe6bP_SgcNNwxMi5cANufTSUMURZHIde0I
Friday, 24 January 2025
Dogs Have an Internal Compass
Your dog’s sense of direction changes with the Earth’s magnetic fields, influencing their orientation when pooping and acting as an internal compass.
Do dogs sense direction with their vision, smell, or something else entirely? Multiple studies provide evidence that a different mechanism may allow dogs to return to their starting point: magnetoreception, or the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field and use it as a compass. This incredible ability is almost as unbelievable as the powers of Haley Joel Osment’s character in The Sixth Sense. But it’s true. Dogs actually sync up with the Earth’s magnetic field to orient their sense of direction. Here’s how:
Dogs Are Tuning Into Magnetic Fields
In one study, researchers reviewed how sensitive dogs are to minor variations of the Earth’s magnetic field and demonstrated that dogs can sense and respond to magnetic fields. Researchers found a measurable change in the dogs’ behavior based on the conditions of the magnetic field.
Specifically, they found that dogs choose to pee and poop under certain conditions with their bodies aligned along the north-south axis and avoided orientation along the east-west axis. They studied 70 dogs from 37 different breeds over a two-year period, observing 1893 defecations and 5582 urinations. Observations were all made while the dogs were off-leash and in open fields so that they were not influenced by walls, fences, fire hydrants, or other objects.
The researchers collected data on dog directionality and found that the way dogs face is not just a matter of chance. They ruled out such factors as time of day, angle of the sun, and wind conditions. Their analysis found that the Earth’s magnetic field explained dogs’ orientation when doing their business.
Interestingly, the pattern only emerged when the magnetic field was stable, which was only about 30 percent of the time. The Earth’s magnetic field can become unstable due to such factors as the variation in solar winds and the sun’s magnetic field. During such periods of instability, dogs did not show a preference for aligning themselves along the north-south axis and were oriented randomly.
Dogs Do Have an Internal Compass
Previous studies have found that cattle, deer, and foxes sometimes align their bodies with respect to the magnetic field. Sensitivity to the Earth’s magnetic field has previously been demonstrated in species that migrate, such as birds and whales, and also in honey bees, whose navigational abilities are legendary.
Of course, people have long asserted that dogs can find their way exceptionally well. It was, in part, dogs’ remarkable homing abilities that made the researchers suspect that dogs might be sensitive to the Earth’s magnetic field in the first place.
So, the revelation that dogs are able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field and that their behavior is influenced by it is outstanding. It has been known for a long time that dog senses, particularly the sense of smell, mean that they are responsive to stimuli that we humans aren’t aware of, but the fact that dogs can act, in some manner, as though they have an internal compass is just as fascinating.
Another published study may explain how dogs are able to sense the magnetic field. Researchers found that dog eyes contain cryptochrome 1, a light-sensitive molecule that reacts to the magnetic field when simultaneously stimulated by light.
This molecule plays a role in the navigational abilities of birds, allowing them to sense the magnetic field through the activation of the visual system. (Birds also detect the magnetic field through cellular-level ferrous particles, called magnetite, as do mole rats, who live underground.) In mammals, cryptochrome 1 has been found in only two of the 18 orders of mammals — carnivores (including canines but excluding felines) and primates (including orangutans).
Dogs’ Sense of Direction
Another piece of research reveals a way that being able to sense the Earth’s magnetic field influences dogs’ behavior. In this study, the researchers chose to focus on hunting dogs because they are generally considered to have amazing homing abilities. They outfitted 27 hunting dogs of 10 breeds with GPS trackers and collected data from a total of 622 daylight excursions in 62 locations. The dogs’ trips lasted 30 to 90 minutes and were undertaken in forested areas away from buildings, power lines, and roads. The paths they took out and back were the subject of the study.
Many dogs followed their own scent back to the starting point using a method called “tracking,” which was observed in 399 returns. But in 233 excursions, dogs returned to the starting point via a novel route called “scouting.” In 50 cases, dogs combined both strategies in a single return route.
A majority of the dogs who returned by scouting began with a short run (about 20 meters/65 feet) along the Earth’s north-south axis; they did this no matter what direction they needed to go in order to return to the starting point. The researchers hypothesized that the dogs perform this initial “compass run” to get their bearings.
Though scouting dogs’ routes were far more likely to begin along a north-south axis, for tracking dogs, the direction of the start of the return route was random. Another difference was that the scouting dogs returned to their pet parents faster than the tracking dogs. Gender and breed did not influence the likelihood of employing scouting versus a tracking strategy, nor did wind or sun.
Activity along the north-south alignment of the compass axis is observed in many animals. Such behavior allows animals to access a universal reference frame that is so useful for navigation. Despite dogs showing some of the same abilities and mechanisms as migrating birds, marine mammals, and sea turtles, there is still so much more to explore about a dog’s sense of direction. What we do know so far is that they have their own internal compasses, just as people have been saying for ages.
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