Tag: science

Reptile Science Digest: Leopard Gecko Enrichment!

kaijutegu:

At least two behavioral measures of good welfare increased in captive leopard geckos with every type of enrichment used.

  • (With the exception of the visual enrichment, which was a mirror that let the geckos see their reflections.)

The Citation: Meredith J. Bashaw, Mallory D. Gibson, Devan M. Schowe, Abigail S. Kucher. Does enrichment improve reptile welfare? Leopard geckos (Eublepharis macularius) respond to five types of environmental enrichment. Applied Animal Behaviour Science: In press, available online 25 August 2016.

The Article: link here! It’s a docdroid link, which is the site I like to use for uploading PDFs. Clicking that link will not start an automatic download, but will open the PDF in your browser instead. It may load funny at first. If it does, give it a moment and then refresh if it doesn’t fix itself!

The Take-Away: 

  • Enrichment is really important for your reptile’s overall wellness!
  • You can provide enrichment in even a simple tub and plastic hide basic enclosure and your gecko will benefit.
  • Much of the value of enrichment is based on novelty and variety. Enrichment doesn’t mean just cluttering up the cage or adding more hides! It means adding stuff to do and adding new stuff to do!
  • Enrichment introduces small changes, not major environmental shake-ups.
  • Enrichment doesn’t have to be complicated! You can make or buy many simple items that will improve your gecko’s quality of life!

Want to know why? There’s loads of science after the jump!

Keep reading

tl:dr: if you give your geckos stuff to do, they’ll do the stuff and seem to enjoy it.

This applies to all reptiles, though the type of enrichment that’s best will vary between them. Smelly things and things containing food are usually good bets.

currentsinbiology:

Baby bird found in 99-million-year-old amber

A nugget of amber from Myanmar has been found with a nearly complete baby bird inside. The specimen is one of the several recently discovered amber nuggets with entombed body parts of feathered dinosaurs.

Paleontologists Lida Xing and colleagues announced the discovery of one of the most amazing fossil specimens yet known: a baby bird preserved in a nugget of amber. The amber specimen, about the size of half of an avocado, allows details of the bird’s anatomy to be seen in extraordinary detail and in three dimensions, something no other fossil specimen have shown.

Rocks deposited in the middle portion of the Cretaceous Period from Myanmar (formerly called Burma) are famous for their numerous large amber specimens. This amber is important for the gem and jewelry industry, and many scientifically important amber specimens have been discovered in amber markets. Amber is formed when tree sap is buried in sediment. Over millions of years, the sap hardens and can frequently contain parts of plants and insects. On rare occasions, amber can preserve portions of larger animals, as in this case.

Read the original research in Gondwana Research.

Source: eartharchives.org

kiwianaroha:

kiwianaroha:

kiwianaroha:

kiwianaroha:

Oh fucking hell why is my activity feed full of terfs 

They just keep coming?!

Yes, the transplants work – there have been 8 successful pregnancies so far.

No, they aren’t excessively dangerous – no one has been harmed or killed.

No, it doesn’t mean the fetus will be half yours. 

Yes, they do take uteri from living donors – the living donor transplants have been much more successful than those using deceased donors.

No, you are not in any danger of having your uterus harvested after your death against your will, even if you are registered a an organ donor.

No, it isn’t “impossible” to transplant organs and tissues between sexes. The sex of the donor is not a barrier to transplant for other organs and tissues and trans men have been able to carry healthy pregnancies to term despite years of HRT.

Read a book and grow up. 

No, “male” pelvic girdles aren’t “too small” or “the wrong shape” for a uterus to fit in. It’s an internal organ about the size of a lemon; as it expands it will grow upwards and outwards, just like in cis women; and no one is expecting a vaginal delivery.

No, they don’t transplant the ovaries or vaginal canal along with the uterus. The embryo is created via IVF and it will not have the donor’s DNA unless they are also the egg donor.

No, a uterus on it’s own isn’t “useless” without a “female” body to magically imbue it with baby-making power.

Suggested Reading:

The Salhgrenska Academy website

Uterus Transplantation: current progress and future prospects

Trangender pregnancy (wikipedia)

botanyshitposts:

plantanarchy:

proteusolm:

I feel like there has to be some kind of botany joke in the similarity between the words “areoles” and “areolas”

I mean this is literally a cactus that exists so (that’s Montrose Myrtilocactus geometrizans)

Also there’s an entire genus of popular cacti, Mammillaria whose name legit means “nipple”

Also after brief googling, it seems the words are related, areole coming from areola. The areole is actually the little bud that cacti spines sprout from. Botanists have been looking at cacti for centuries and going “ah… a titty”

me, a 1800s botanist: *is first to name a beautiful result of evolution that has been evolving for longer than my brain can feasibly imagine*

me: look like titty..name titty bush

Humans have always been humans, even the smart ones. 

What would you name that thing?

cyanhyena:

pika-brew:

mrv3000:

sonneillonv:

underhuntressmoon:

voidbat:

explainervideo:

What happens to cats in zero gravity ?   more educational gifs«

OH GOD THOSE POOR BABIES i am sobbing i am laughing so hard

In the last pic the cat is all “oh thank god I found ground NO WAIT COME BACK GROUND”

THOSE POOR BABIES OMG WHY AM I LAUGHING AT THIS

Astronaut: We need to fund 1.4 billion dollars.
NASA: FOR WHAT?!
Astronaut: We want to put kitties in space and have them float around in zero gravity.
NASA: Here is all the money. God bless.

Those cats are just ?????????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!????!?!?!?!?!?!?!!!

Source: videosanimation.com

crwatters:

jumpingjacktrash:

coolmanfromthepast:

jumpingjacktrash:

blueelectricangels:

blueelectricangels:

if you read in a frog paper “specimen was released in the field immediately after capture” chances are very good that what it actually means is

“i dropped the damn frog and despite the fact that we fell all over each other no one could recapture it”

sometimes when i am sad i go read through the tags on this post, because they are 70% other biologists saying things like “AND ALSO FUCK FIELD MICE” and “THAT CRAB ALMOST BROKE MY FINGER” and I am reassured that I am not the only one who has bobbled a wood frog right into their cleavage.

plus six or seven people who just….can’t figure out what a frog paper could possibly be. (guys it’s…a scientific paper. about frogs.)

and this one

which made me laugh despairingly because i mean

bro you don’t even know.

what is the code entomologists use for “i stepped on it, i’m so sorry, it was dark out and the specimen was very small”

“Impromptu dissection was performed under less-than-optimal lighting conditions.”

‘impromptu dissection’ is an alarming phrase in any context and i thank you for it

Reblogging for the new phrase. I’m now using it every time I accidentally step on a bug, etc

Raccoons Have Passed an Ancient Intelligence Test by Knocking It Over

typhlonectes:

Many scientists have used a test paradigm in which the creature under
investigation has to figure out how water displacement works in order
to reach a treat. As it turns out, some raccoons just don’t buy into the
premise.

The paradigm of water displacement actually comes from an ancient
Greek fable written by Aesop called “The Crow and The Pitcher”, and it’s
been used to investigate whether birds and small children understand how cause and effect work.

The fable is about a thirsty crow that can’t drink from a pitcher
with a low water level. To raise the water level higher, the bird drops
stones in the pitcher until the water level rises and it can drink.
(This paradigm has actually been tested on New Caledonian crows with amazing results.)

Now, a group of researchers from the University of Wyoming and the
USDA National Wildlife Research Center has found that raccoons have a
different way of being innovative when it comes to getting their sweet
prize.

Raccoons Have Passed an Ancient Intelligence Test by Knocking It Over

sheepey-and-flufflepuff-bffs-fan:

iamramonadestroyerofworlds:

postirony:

pisshets:

shy-magpie:

nb-positive:

ten-and-donna:

broliloquy:

protect-lgbtqia-kids:

eggcup:

run-up-the-sail:

pisshets:

If you add two pounds of sugar to literally one ton of concrete it will ruin the concrete and make it unable to set properly which is good to know if you wanna resist something being built, French anarchists used this to resist prison construction in the 80s

I’m just gonna go ahead and reblog this for purely educational purposes.

added bonus is that concrete now taste good

Sugar does not really do that.

What you need is citric acid (you get that to get the hard water residues out of your pots/water boiler/washing machine), looks like sugar granules.

Or concentrated vinegar.

Cement needs a high ph to bind properly.
So if you add acid, it won’t properly set and/or needs 3-4 times longer.

Speaking as someone who works in the concrete forming industry: the easiest way to severely fuck up any large concrete pour is to delay it at the wrong moment.

If someone is trying to build a huge fuckoff concrete thing – say, for instance, a giant wall – they’re going to need an obscene quantity of concrete, and that’s all going to have to be transported there from the nearest mixing plant. This means they’ll have multiple trucks coming by to decant concrete in consecutive pours while the workers place it and vibrate it to ensure it all intermixes and sets properly, forming a monolithic mass. If one pour is allowed to set before the next one is added, you get a big, ugly, possibly structurally unsound gap between the two called a “cold joint.” A bad enough cold joint can completely fuck your whole project because the next engineer or inspector who sets foot on that site is going to take one look at that motherfucker and immediately embark on a quest for blood vengeance. You will literally have to cut that whole section of wall out, slap some dowels in the nearest structurally sound bits, and re-form and pour the offending segment from scratch, which represents a fortune in cost overruns and will make everyone involved very upset. This is an especially bad problem in hot climates, because the concrete curing process is exothermic – that stuff sets much faster when it’s really hot out, and its 28-day compressive strength tends to be poorer as well.

So if, hypothetically speaking, you wanted to completely shit up a wannabe dictator’s enormous unfeasible poured concrete vanity project, you could literally just randomly hassle and delay every concrete truck on its way there. Dude’s gonna end up with a giant worthless pile of shitty crumbling concrete and exposed reinforcing steel, and an army of pissed-off contractors to boot.

reblogging for purely educational purposes nothing more

Reblogging this here, since we previously reblogged the inaccurate version.

according to Concrete Construction.net a small amount of sugar is used delibarately to slow setting by 4 hours (but actually increases strength.) Higher amounts of sugar delay setting longer, but we in delibarate use cases we are talking mixtures of 0.1%-0.3% if I understood correctly. So going off of the comment on cold joints, one assumes that if some of the trucks were sugared and some weren’t then they wouldn’t set at the same time causing the crumbling concrete they described.

essentially the point is to make it set at uneven rates so that it crumbles or is at risk of crumbling

Don’t forget to save some sugar for the gas tank of the cars and construction vehicles. It isn’t as damaging as the legends say, but it’ll sure prevent the vehicle from being operable for a while.

good to know

Reblogging for … science I swear.