SciAntics
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The World’s Most Amazing Databases: The Encyclopedia of Life
The EOL, a collaboration by the foremost authorities in biology, is a massive database that tracks every organism on Earth
Four years ago, the Smithsonian Institution, the Field Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Marine Biological Laboratory and the Biodiversity Heritage Library joined together to create a comprehensive collection of data about every living thing on Earth.
So far, the consortium’s researchers have collected and vetted information on 40 percent of the planet’s 1.9 million known species. Want observations describing the nocturnal behavior of the flying lemur? How about a map showing the distribution of the dark honey fungus, whose underground filament network spans thousands of acres and might make it the largest organism in the world? They’re in there.
The researchers gather information from hundreds of sources (including such databases as the Barcode of Life and Morphbank), work it into a consistent format, and organize it into individual species pages. Combining disparate data into a single, searchable database should make it possible to see new connections between different forms of life. By looking for lifespan patterns or similarities in resistance (or susceptibility) to disease—and by doing so across a broad range of EOL species pages—biologists will aim to find new species and genes to target in longevity studies, vaccine development and other medical research. At the current pace, EOL will hold data on every known plant, animal, insect and microbe species by 2017.
Article (Via Popsci)
Amazing! Just simply amazing!
(via vicuriously)
Are Bird’s tweets grammatical?
Are the rules of grammar unique to human language? Perhaps not, according to a recent study, which showed that songbirds may also communicate using a sophisticated grammar—a feature absent in even our closest relatives, the nonhuman primates.
Kentaro Abe and Dai Watanabe of Kyoto University performed a series of experiments to determine whether Bengalese finches expect the notes of their tunes to follow a certain order. To test this possibility, Abe and Watanabe took advantage of a behavioral response called habituation, where animals zone-out when exposed to the same stimulus over and over again.
Birds isolated as babies from other birds were still able to learn artificial rules of grammar, but they failed to respond to songs with modified syntax—that is, normal Bengalese finch songs with the notes shuffled. However, after being reintroduced to other birds, it took them only two weeks to learn to respond to the shuffled songs, indicating that the birds needed to hear other birds’ songs to absorb the precise rules of Bengalese finch grammar.
This study revealed that Bengalese finches can learn grammar and, furthermore, that their grammatical abilities involve a specific part of the brain region distinct from other brain regions involved in singing. This is similar to what neuroscientists understand about human language processing.
(Via Scientific American)
(Bengalese Finch Image by: BS Thurner Hof)
