Predators Prefer Small-Brained Prey

Predators such as leopards and chimpanzees consistently target smaller-brained prey less capable of escape. They avoid more intelligent prey such as monkeys which have exceptionally large brains and are more capable of escaping attacks.

The report shows a strong correlation between the brain size of the prey and the predatory bias towards it. The study, carried out by Dr Susanne Shultz, focused on predators from Africa and South America such as the jaguar, chimpanzee, leopard and puma. Dr Shultz found that prey with a small brain such as small antelope, mongooses and the red river hog were more susceptible to attacks by predators compared with larger-brained prey.

Animals with small brains lack behavioural flexibility and are probably less capable of developing new strategies to escape predators, compared with larger-brained species.

"Some animals' ability to avoid being eaten by predators may be a contributing factor to the evolution of large brains across some species, adding to conventional theories which argue this is important for developing social relationships and using tools."

Link

The Biter of Thorpe

Hmmm... just back into this time line long enough to talk about....

Danielle Dax was a goth/punk/experimental musician and producer from the late 1970s to the early 1990s. After a brief stint in a band called The Lemon Kittens, Dax broke off and embarked on a solo career, recording and producing "Pop-Eyes"(1982), "Jesus Egg That Wept" (1984), and "Inky Bloaters" (1987) on her own label, Awesome Records. In 1988, she signed with Sire Records, which released her double album "Dark Adapted Eye. “

She made her sole film appearance as "the naked wolfgirl who comes out of the well and slinks around" in Neil Jordan's The Company of Wolves. Her last two releases, in 1995, were a compilation appropriately titled Comatose Non Reaction: The Thwarted Pop Career of Danielle Dax, and an EP of new material called Timber Tongue EP. Although officially retired from music she did make a live appearance earlier this year reading poetry over the soundscapes of her longtime partner David Knight.

I first became aware of her through the cover doddle she did for Robert Fripp's "League of Gentlemen" LP (as such things were called back in the 1970's).

A explanation for the name of her record label, "Biter of Thorpe", comes from this interview:

'Ah, Biter of Thorpe' she laughs, 'that was my nick-name at infant school. I went to Thorpe junior school, or Greenways as it was also known as, and I used to fight all the time - I used to feel bad about it; every Monday I would think 'Right, I'm not going to get into any trouble,' and I always got into trouble, I was always going to the Headmistress. `Once a boy called Steven Gandey gave me a Valentine's sticker, which a girl then stole from me, so I bit her on the arm.' she laughs, 'I was only about six or seven at the time, and there was a great big hoo-haa about it, and her mum came to the school and there was a big argument. And after that I was called the Biter of Thorpe!'

A clip of 'Pariah':

Danielle Dax Home Page

She recently released the live DVD, “Bad Miss M”

Science Says You're Wrong!

Click to enlarge

Back To The Cretaceous

From Pete Von Sholly's Extremely Weird Tales. CLICK TO ENLARGE

Your Atomic Surgeon has now departed for the Late Cretaceous of Alberta where he will be investigating weird phenomena until the end of the summer.

Stay tuned for periodic posting from the Past!

The Secret Origin of Spider Webs

Art © Frank Cho. Spider Woman © Marvel Comics.

From over at the Palaeoblog.

And where exactly does the web come from?

42n-1

How did the Universe begin? Many scientists would regard this as one of the most profound questions of all. But to Stephen Hawking, who has perhaps come closer than anyone to answering it, the question doesn't in fact even exist.

Virgil Finlay

Hawking and Thomas Hertog are about to publish a paper claiming that the Universe had no unique beginning. Instead, they argue, it began in just about every way imaginable (and maybe some that aren't).

That, they insist, is the only possible conclusion if we are to take quantum physics seriously. "Quantum mechanics forbids a single history," says Hertog.

Thomas Hertog and Hawking call their theory 'top-down' cosmology, because instead of looking for some fundamental set of initial physical laws under which our Universe unfolded, it starts 'at the top', with what we see today, and works backwards to see what the initial set of possibilities might have been. In effect, says Hertog, the present 'selects' the past.

Within just a few seconds after the Big Bang, a single history had already come to dominate the Universe, he explains. So from the 'classical' viewpoint of big objects such as stars and galaxies, things happened only one way after that point. Other 'histories', say, one in which the Earth formed only 4,000 years ago, have made no significant contribution to this cosmic evolution.

But in the first instants of the Big Bang, there existed a superposition of ever more different versions of the Universe, instead of a unique history. And most crucially, Hertog says that "our current Universe has features frozen in from this early quantum mixture". http://www.nature.com/news/2006/060619/full/060619-6.html

Eric Explains It All:

Thanks to Val Armorr(U of C) for this story.

The Laws Have Changed

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EQUALS:

"What you have already lost consider as totally lost"

Plucking our hero, the 5th century saint Simon Stylites, who preached from atop a pillar for 37 years, from the 1965 film, “Simon of the Desert” by Luis Buñuel, he ends up in an ersatz version of the Night Club scene in The Beatles “A Hard Day’s Night”, thanks to the seductive charms of the devil herself.



The video for The New Pornographers "The Laws Have Changed” (click for realplayer version) is subtitled with dialogue from the film. The band only shows up (I think) in the photo that the saint passes to the bartender. Dig the Hep Cat in the sunglasses straight outta "AHDN."

Images link and link