Thread: Strange News

Gosh, that was really strange news.

I'm still coming to terms with this utterly bizarre occurrence.

Originally Posted by DrWilly

Gosh, that was really strange news.

¡Hola! climate denier

Seems your BBQed butt is still stinging after I handed it to you months ago.

I heard there's gonna be some people dressed up as ghosts and monsters on Tuesday night.

Pretty weird - you'd better be ready with the c&p machine.

Originally Posted by S Landreth

¡Hola! climate denier

Seems your BBQed butt is still stinging after I handed it to you months ago.

Yes, that’s exactly it.

the climate denier is still hurting

get over it looser

Originally Posted by S Landreth

the climate denier is still hurting

get over it looser

Try spelling it with one o




But tool has two

Originally Posted by S Landreth

¡Hola! climate denier

Seems your BBQed butt is still stinging after I handed it to you months ago.

you made a couple nasty posts about me on a cut and paste mega thread I don’t read.

you think that equals an ass whopping?

your butt hurt must be bad

• Rats may have power of imagination, research reveals

Whether dreaming of a white Christmas or simply pondering how best to rearrange the furniture, humans are able to conjure up myriad situations that are not in front of us. Now it seems rats may be able to do something similar.

Researchers have found that rats can navigate their way through a space they have previously explored using their thoughts alone, suggesting the rodents have some sort of imagination.

Chongxi Lai, the first author of the study from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Janelia Research Campus, said the study was the first to show animals can, at will, flexibly activate the brain’s representations of places that are distant from where they currently are.

“This is a fundamental building block of a specific type of imagination, one that enables us to project ourselves into the past or future, within a certain scenario,” he said.

Writing in the journal Science, the researchers note that a region of the brain called the hippocampus contains a sort of mental model, or map, depicting previously explored environments. When an individual moves through specific locations within such an environment, particular neurons fire in the brain.

However, humans can, at will, imagine navigating their way through places they have previously visited – for example the corridors of a workplace.

To explore whether rats can do the same, and unpick a possible mechanism, researchers employed a brain-machine interface in which electrodes were surgically implanted into the rats’ brains. The rats were then placed on a treadmill ball within a 360-degree immersive virtual reality (VR) arena, and presented with an on-screen goal to run towards.

As the rats moved, and the treadmill ball turned, the animal’s apparent location within the VR environment updated on screen – as if the rat was running through a real environment. When the rats reached the goal, they received a treat and the goal was moved within the VR environment. The process was then repeated.

During this initial phase, the team recorded the activity within the animals’ hippocampus. They then used a computer system to translate this neural activity to specific locations within the VR environment.

In the next step, the researchers decoupled the treadmill from the VR system. This meant the rats could not reach the goal by running on the treadmill. Instead, they could only use their brain activity to navigate through the VR environment.

By analysing the activity in rats’ hippocampus in real time during the task, the team were able to update the screen every 100 milliseconds with the animals’ current location in the VR environment, based on what was happening in their brain.

The results reveal the rats could indeed navigate to the goal using just their brain activity.

In a subsequent experiment, the team gave the rats a “Jedi task” in which the animals themselves were stationary but had to direct an object on the screen to a particular goal within the VR environment using only their brain activity. Once again, the rats were able to do so.

Prof Tim Harris, another author of the work at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, said it was thought that in humans, imagination and recall is linked to activity in the hippocampus similar to that which occurs in the real-life scenario.

“To this end, it is fair to say the rats do imagine,” he said.

Very strange news.

^It is, butt hurtin’ climate denier.



‘Polar Preet’ Sets Out to Become the First Woman to Cross Antarctica Solo and Unsupported

keep telling yourself that. does it make you feel better?

It does, climate denier. Making sure everyone knows who will open the thread that your butt was handed to you and it's still stinging.

Wrong on two counts in one sentence. How sad.

you are still so bothered, climate denier

You're a complete nutbag, carry on.

climate denier can't let it go

• ‘There is power in a name’: why dozens of American birds are being renamed

A new rule from the American Ornithological Society (AOS) will cause reverberations around the birding world, and create new names for hundreds of species. The society says it has engaged in conversations with the community of birders, and will focus on first renaming the 70 to 80 species in the US and Canada that are named after people – or have names deemed offensive or exclusionary. Their efforts will start in 2024.

This means Anna’s hummingbird, named after an Italian duchess, and Lewis’s woodpecker, named after explorer Meriwether Lewis, will change. The society drew particular attention to undoing birds whose names are tied to historical wrongs – as in the case of Townsend’s warbler, named after John Kirk Townsend, who robbed Indigenous graves of skulls in the 1800s. This isn’t the first effort in renaming; in 2020, the society changed the name of a bird that once referred to a Confederate army general, John P McCown, to the thick-billed longspur.

The society says that in addition to decoupling birds from racist or inflammatory names, it also makes sense to help people understand the species: names that describe the bird, its habitat, its range, or something else about the species convey more information about the bird than a person’s name.

“There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today. We need a much more inclusive and engaging scientific process that focuses attention on the unique features and beauty of the birds themselves,” the AOS president, Colleen Handel, said in a statement. “Everyone who loves and cares about birds should be able to enjoy and study them freely – and birds need our help now more than ever.”

Since 1886, the AOS and its predecessor, the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU), have maintained a list of official English-language names for birds in North America (and more recently, South America). These names are widely used – but also often updated when new science comes to light, says the organization. Scientific names will not be changed.

Nicholas Lund, a birder who works as outreach and network manager for Maine Audubon and writes a blog called the Birdist blog, says he’s thrilled.

The impacts will be both minor and major, but only positive, he says: birders are used to bird names changing. That’s because it happens fairly often, either because the old name was inappropriate (oldsquaw became long-tailed duck) or, more often, because science improves our understanding of certain species, and split one species into several, which is what happened when the sooty grouse became dusky grouse and blue grouse; or the western scrub-jay split into the California scrub-jay and Woodhouse’s scrub-jay. “Birders have to and do absorb these changes.”

But while birders are used to some names changing, this announcement brings a reconsideration on a scale unknown until now. “Bird names are meaningless – they’re just codes that we all agree on to describe something – but until now the power to decide those names was held by only a few white men hundreds of years ago,” said Lund.

This means there’s a huge opportunity to figure out what names actually make sense for birds living today. “We can, for the first time, take a fresh look at what these birds should be called – what makes them unique or most easily separates them from other species. Never before have modern people been given the opportunity to debate this,” he said. “It’ll be a blast. We’ll get to look at these birds with fresh eyes, and it’ll certainly inspire us to think of these birds in new, fresh ways, and may ultimately work to raise interest and awareness.”

climate denier can't let it go

• Woman with a Watch: Picasso masterpiece of 'golden muse' sells for £113m

A 1932 Pablo Picasso masterpiece has sold for $139m (£113m), the second highest price ever achieved for the artist, according to Sotheby's.

Femme a la Montre (Woman with a Watch) also becomes the most valuable work sold at auction this year.

It depicts Marie-Therese Walter, the French model who was also a lover of the Spanish artist, and the subject of many of his paintings.

The work had been valued at $120m before it went to auction.

It was previously owned by the late art collector Emily Fisher Landau, who bought it in 1968, and has been purchased by an anonymous buyer.

Femme a la Montre is a portrait of Walter seated in a throne-like chair against a blue background.

Known as Picasso's "golden muse", Walter was 17 when she met the 45-year-old Picasso in Paris, and the pair later entered into a secret relationship while he was still married to Olga Khokhlova, a Ukrainian ballerina.

Walter became the subject for many of Picasso's paintings, including the 1932 work Femme Nue Couchee (Nude Reclining Woman), which sold for $67.5m at auction in 2022.

Picasso's most expensive painting to sell at auction was Les Femmes d'Alger (Women of Algiers), which fetched $179.3m at Christie's in 2015.

Born in Malaga in 1881 and growing up in Barcelona, Picasso moved to Paris in 1904 and became one of the most important artists of the 20th century.

He experimented with a wide range of styles and themes in his career, most notably inspiring "Cubism", which shows objects or people from many angles at the same time.

In a career spanning eight decades he created about 150,000 pieces.

He had four children and died in southern France in 1973, aged 92.

Although his creative legacy was never in doubt, recent years have seen questions over his behaviour. He has been accused of cruelty, womanising and coercive behaviour.

The post above must have passed the climate denier’s test

Originally Posted by DrWilly

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