Slider

Science

SCITECH

AMAZING FACTS

NATURE SPACE

Psychology

You can sell your poop

Posted date: 6:38 AM / comment : 0

You can donate blood, plasma, eggs, and sperm. Why not poop? Yes, your feces are perhaps your greatest untapped monetary resource.Everybody poops. That’s not just the name of a popular potty training book, but it’s an essential fact of life. However, most people merely flush it away without a second thought. In the spirit of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure, the non-profit company OpenBiome is actually paying for stool samples in order to create lifesaving fecal transplant treatments for those infected with Clostridium difficile, a bacteria which is highly resistant to antibiotics.
Source

 Infections of C. difficile result in severe diarrhea, hospitalizing 250,000 Americans each year and causing about 14,000 deaths. It can actually come about after using antibiotics for too long, which ties into what makes it exceptionally difficult to treat. The patient’s gut microbiota is nearly wiped out, and conventional probiotics are not sufficient to replace them.
-->

Requirements for Donors

Caveat: 

You have to live within commuting distance from Boston and be in excellent health, especially as far as your fecal matter is concerned. Some other guidelines are
Types one or two, defined by the Bristol Stool Chart as “like nuts” or “lumpy,” are too dry to process into a treatment.

If a donor’s stool is “mushy” or “watery” — that’s a type six or seven — then it can’t be used because it could be a sign the donor has a gastrointestinal infection.
-->

The perfect poop is type three, which is “like a sausage but with cracks on its surface;” type four, which is “like a sausage or snake, smooth and soft;” or type five, “soft blobs with clear-cut edges (passed easily).” [Link 1, Link 2]

Over the last four years, only 4 percent of interested donors have passed the screening process, co-founder Mark Smith told WaPo. (Link) -->

Rate

The going rate is $40 per donation, with a $50 kicker for those who come five days a week. This translates into $250 per week, or $13,000 per year. OpenBiome tries to make the experience as fun as they can by offering prizes to donors who make the most donations, provide the biggest sample, etc. However, there’s no word on if OpenBiome offers a fun sticker to show off your donation to friends and family, such as the “Be nice to me, I gave blood today” badge handed out by the Red Cross.
 [Link 1, Link 2, Link 3]

Dolphins

Posted date: 8:25 AM / comment : 0

Dolphins are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic marine mammals. They are an informal grouping within the order Cetacea, excluding whales and porpoises, so to zoologists the grouping is paraphyletic. The dolphins comprise the extant families Delphinidae (the oceanic dolphins), Platanistidae (the Indian river dolphins), Iniidae (the new world river dolphins), and Pontoporiidae (the brackish dolphins). There are 40 extant species of dolphins. Dolphins, alongside other cetaceans, belong to the clade Cetartiodactyla with even-toed ungulates, and their closest living relatives are the hippopotamuses, having diverged about 40 million years ago.
-->

Size

Dolphins range in size from the 1.7 metres (5.6 ft) long and 50 kilograms (110 lb) Maui's dolphin to the 9.5 metres (31 ft) and 10 metric tons (11 short tons) killer whale. Several species exhibit sexual dimorphism, in that the males are larger than females. They have streamlined bodies and two limbs that are modified into flippers.

Sleeping

Dolphins have to be conscious to breath. This means that they cannot go into a full deep sleep, because then they would suffocate. Dolphins have "solved" that by letting one-half of their brain sleep at a time. This has been determined by doing EEG studies on dolphins. Dolphins sleep about 8 hours day in this fashion. 
-->

A dolphin's behavior when sleeping/resting depends on the circumstances and possibly on individual preferences. They can either:
1. Swim slowly and surface every now and then for a breath
2. Rest at the surface with their blowhole exposed 
3. Rest on the bottom (in shallow water) and rise to the surface every now and then to breath. 
Sources
1. S.H Ridgway (1990) The Central Nervous System of the Bottlenose Dolphin, in S. Leatherwood and R.R. Reeves: The Bottlenose Dolphin, pp. 69-97, Academic Press
2. Mukhametov, L. M.; Supin, A. Ya. (1978). "Sleep and vigil in dolphins". Marine mammals. Moscow: Nauka.
3. Mukhametov, Lev (1984). "Sleep in marine mammals". Experimental Brain Research. Experimental Brain Research Supplementum. 8 (suppl.): 227–238. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-69554-4_17. ISBN 978-3-642-69556-8.
4. Dallas Grasby (1994). "Excerpts from "Sleep in marine mammals", L.M. Mukhametov". Experimental Brain Research. 8 (suppl.). Retrieved February 11, 2008. [Link]

Source

Intelligence

Brain size was previously considered a major indicator of the intelligence of an animal. Since most of the brain is used for maintaining bodily functions, greater ratios of brain to body mass may increase the amount of brain mass available for more complex cognitive tasks. Allometric analysis indicates that mammalian brain size scales at approximately the ⅔ or ¾ exponent of the body mass. Comparison of a particular animal's brain size with the expected brain size based on such allometric analysis provides an encephalization quotient that can be used as another indication of animal intelligence. Killer whales have the second largest brain mass of any animal on earth, next to the sperm whale. The brain to body mass ratio in some is second only to humans.
In 1995, Marten and Psarakos used television to test dolphin self-awareness. They showed dolphins real-time footage of themselves, recorded footage, and another dolphin. They concluded that their evidence suggested self-awareness rather than social behavior. While this particular study has not been repeated since then, dolphins have since passed the mirror test. [Source 1, Source 2, Source 3]
-->
Research Example
At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. The next time a trainer passes, she goes down to the rock and tears off a piece of paper to give to the trainer. After a fish reward, she goes back down, tears off another piece of paper, gets another fish, and so on. This behaviour is interesting because it shows that Kelly has a sense of the future and delays gratification. She has realised that a big piece of paper gets the same reward as a small piece and so delivers only small pieces to keep the extra food coming. She has, in effect, trained the humans.
Then one day, Kelly managed to grab a gull that flew into the tank. When she delivered it to her keepers, she got an especially large fish reward. The next time Kelly was fed she hid the fish at the bottom of the pool, and later brought it to the surface to lure more gulls into the pool. The strategy proved so successful that she taught her offspring, who went on to teach others. (Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4)

Chimpanzees and monkeys have entered the Stone Age

Posted date: 3:11 PM / comment : 2 ,

“Some Chimpanzees Have Entered Stone Age.” Scientists On 3 Continents Make Surprising Discovery.

In the rainforests of west Africa, the woodlands of Brazil and the beaches of Thailand, archaeologists have stumbled upon some fascinating stone tools.
What sets them apart is not the workmanship or their antiquity: they belong to the same age as the Egyptian pyramids.
-->
Source

What is exceptional about this discovery is that the tools were held by non-human hands.

The tools are crude. A chimpanzee or monkey stone hammer is hardly a work of art to rival the beauty of an ancient human hand axe. But that’s not the point. These primates have developed a culture that makes routine use of a stone-based technology. That means they have entered the Stone Age.
The chimpanzees of west Africa had used these tools in a cruder way, to crack open nuts for example.
A few years ago, biologists believed only humans could make extensive use of tools. However, recent discovery falsifies this claim.
Our closest living relatives might be similar to us, more than we could have ever imagined. An article published in Oxford journals suggests monkeys and chimpanzees have a flair for reading each other’s facial expressions.
This certainly calls for a re-assessment of primates.
-->
Countries like New Zealand and the United Kingdom consider experiments on apes, illegal. Spain for example, allots them some human rights. In the U.S. too, there are reforms taking place in this area. A trial pending in New York courts wants chimpanzees to be granted full human rights.
If nothing else, we should certainly be compassionate and sympathetic to our primate cousins.


For Further Reading

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)
Copyright © 2014 Science and Nature
⬆
Top