Adventure Ausrama Blog

Biology - 100 million unnamed species exist on the planet. We know that many species on the planet are dying out. Apparently, we have nothing to fear. Though 2 million species have been named, a massive 100 million more are out there. This does not include currently unnamed bacteria. Each living creature is placed in a species category because it has independent evolutionary lineage. A horse and donkey for example are different species, but they both have a common ancestor. If they do breed their offspring are infertile. There is debate about this with claims that some mules have had young. This gets into the argument about Neanderthals breeding with humans when they have a different number of chromosomes. Interbreeding should not be possible. Brewer's Sparrow The problem with naming is that animals from two species can look virtually identical. The African elephant is a misnomer. There are actually two species: the bush elephant and the forest elephant. One...

Despite the fairytale stuff put forward about delivering things to houses in built up areas of large cities, drone can be useful. Patrolling of protected regions for environmental damage is efficient and less costly than other methods. Conservation Drones a US company is mass producing drones to meet projected demand. Accidents will occur even though the drones will not land away from the operator, but injuries should be rare. Drones zooming around above our head will become the norm. Will there be complaints? Yes there will. The first major project will be to protect elephants in Africa. The distance that drones can travel will have to be significantly improved to do the job properly. At the moment helicopters are used. These can be expensive as well. They do have better range, however. Maximum range for non-military drones is about 40kms. High resolution videos can be taken. Preprogramming is possible to carry out surveillance and data collection. A test to ...

Elephants aren't so different from woolly mammoths. DNA samples taken from mammoth hair shows they are much alike. Furthermore, there are indications that the mammoth population was so low toward the end that inbreeding took place. If the unique mammoth genome can be isolated it can be inserted into elephant DNA to produce a woolly mammoth. It has also been found that differentiation between mammoth was only minor, so that a disease could have easily wiped them out. Mammoth are more closely related to elephants than chimpanzees are to humans, which is about 99 percent. Evidence shows that there were two groups of mammoth. One group died out 45,000 years ago, the other 10,000 years ago. http://www.adventure--australia.blogspot.com/ http://www.tysaustralia.blogspot.com/ http://www.feeds.feedburner.com/AdventureAustralia http://www.technorati.com/blogs/ http://adventure--australia.blogspot.com . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Science

Only a few animals including humans experience the "aha" moment. That is when there is an attempt to solve a problem and a mental moment occurs when the solution is identified. Tests were set up for elephants to retrieve food through the bars of their enclosure. Unfortunately, they didn't use poles provided to them to pull the food towards them. When elephant use their trunk to pick things up they lose their ability to smell the food, so they don't bother. Another test was worked out which left the trunk free: food was hung up above the elephant's heads and objects to stand on were put inside their pen. A young elephant rolled a cube under the food, placed his front feet on the cube then grabbed the tasty treat. He later rolled the cube down a hill, put it under some flowering tree blossoms and promptly stood on the cube to reach the food. This shows application of a concept to different situations. When the cube was taken away he used a tire or ball...