The ocean is a cool fucking place
Two really cool science stories, both found via Pharyngula:
1. A nautilus can learn! Experiments performed on a nautilus strapped to a pipe show that it can learn to associate a light (conditioned stimulus) with a squirt of fish juice (unconditioned stimulus). Teeny-tiny brains, but they can still make associations like that. Sweet!
2. Vivipary is at least 380 million years old! Dr. Myers already said it better, and it's pretty short anyway, so I'm just gonna quote him:It's not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here's a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical cord and yolk sac.
How fucking cool is this?! Too cool for school.
1. A nautilus can learn! Experiments performed on a nautilus strapped to a pipe show that it can learn to associate a light (conditioned stimulus) with a squirt of fish juice (unconditioned stimulus). Teeny-tiny brains, but they can still make associations like that. Sweet!
2. Vivipary is at least 380 million years old! Dr. Myers already said it better, and it's pretty short anyway, so I'm just gonna quote him:It's not often that something as delicate as details of the reproductive tract get preserved, but here's a phenomenal fossil of a Devonian placoderm containing the fragile bones of an embryo inside, along with the tracery of an umbilical cord and yolk sac.
How fucking cool is this?! Too cool for school.