<A multigene evaluation of the echidna–platypus divergence using both a relaxed molecular clock and direct fossil calibrations reveals a recent split of 19–48 million years ago. Platypus-like monotremes (Monotrematum) predate this divergence, indicating that echidnas had aquatically foraging ancestors that reinvaded terrestrial ecosystems.>

http://www.pnas.org/content/106/40/...

Interesting article on marsupials. It indicates that echidnas essentially are platypuses that evolved to became adapted to terrestrial insectivore life in the middle of our Cenozoic era. From the opposite direction, that's almost like deer evolving into whales.

How some stole helicopters so they could transport their friends family relatives to the ships ready to depart,

One flew multiple trips to rescue as many as possible, only to have to return to land and await capture and disappear from records,

some of the last helicopters to rescue people had their doors pried off so they could carry more people and still take off from the roofs,

Several of the stories have never been told before the 40th year of the Fall of Saigon,

Thanks for the comic, too. :)

<VBD> wow, a lot of fascinating news - I just had time to go over all your links. That myoglobin study is great, in particular.

I'm not sure about the whale culture one - my cats learn behavior from each other too. Not that whales are not intelligent enough to have culture, they are, and they almost certainly do have some kind of culture, but this specific observation is not particularly indicative.

Mammalian taxonomy has gone a long way since my college days. Traditionally, there used to be an order Insectivora (all shrew-like creatures that usually eat insects), but in the past 2 decades, it has been invalidated as a monophyletic clade.

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2...

At present in seems that most of the shrews and shrew-like mammals have been divided into

Order Eulipotyphla (shrews, hedgehogs, moles, etc), and

Order Afrosoricida (tenrecs, golden moles).

A few of the rest:

Order Macroscelidea: Elephant shrews

Order Scandentia: Tree shrews, which are closely related to stem Primates.

Tree shrews are interesting creatures. They look like shrews.

https://www.google.com/search?q=tre...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ky1...

It seems that this teenage girl wanted to videocam her testimony over a lover's quarrel, but somehow it went wrong, and she lost control of her emotions. The accent becomes more pronounced in such emotional outbursts.

<They were roughly similar to squirrels and tree shrews in size and appearance.>

Interesting article on the first primates.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...

Above is an image of what Purgatorius, the earliest known Primate, looked like. Its bones have been recovered from deposits estimated at 63 million years old, just after the dinosaurs died out.

Meanwhile this just in, an interesting miniature for the <How Not To Play The French> series... ;)

[Site "http://lichess.org/T2Qto7XK"]
[Date "2015.05.06"]
[White "AnnieK"]
[Black "NN"]
[Result "1-0"]
[WhiteElo "1789"]
[BlackElo "1623"]
[TimeControl "300+0"]
[ECO "C02"]
[Opening "French Defence, Advance Variation, Euwe Variation"]

[Event "rated blitz match"]
[Site "Free Internet Chess Server"]
[Date "2015.05.06"]
[Round "?"]
[White "NN"]
[Black "Quylthulg"]
[Result "0-1"]
[WhiteElo "1932"]
[BlackElo "2033"]
[ECO "A00"]
[TimeControl "180"]

http://journals.plos.org/plosone/ar...

It's hard to document from stomach samples what predators take in the largest number of jellyfish, for the reason that these soft bodied creatures are almost all water and tend to 'melt' into water and protein soup in the stomachs of predators very quickly.

Thus, the study tries to determine what are the actual predators that keep jellyfish from overrunning Mediterranean shores, using isotopes taken from the predators and from the jellyfish. It presumes that if isotopic ratios match in a predator and and jellyfish, there is a good chance that the predator eats it in large amounts. We are what we eat.

<In conclusion, the jellyvorous guild in the Mediterranean integrates two specialists (ocean sunfish and loggerhead sea turtles in the oceanic stage) and several opportunists (bluefin tuna, little tunny, spearfish, swordfish and, perhaps, blue butterfish), most of them with shrinking populations due to overfishing.>

One of the surprising conclusions. Most of the diet of bluefin tuna in the Mediterranean is actually jellyfish.

So how do you win (almost) every game in existence, do you ask? Here are 20 data visualizations that offer lots of insight into the most popular games in America, including chess, Connect Four, Monopoly, Pac-Man, "Wheel of Fortune" and much more.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs...

http://www.genetics.org/content/194...

Higher Levels of Neanderthal Ancestry in East Asians than in Europeans

<Neanderthals were a group of archaic hominins that occupied most of Europe and parts of Western Asia from ∼30,000 to 300,000 years ago (KYA). They coexisted with modern humans during part of this time. Previous genetic analyses that compared a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome with genomes of several modern humans concluded that Neanderthals made a small (1–4%) contribution to the gene pools of all non-African populations. This observation was consistent with a single episode of admixture from Neanderthals into the ancestors of all non-Africans when the two groups coexisted in the Middle East 50–80 KYA. We examined the relationship between Neanderthals and modern humans in greater detail by applying two complementary methods to the published draft Neanderthal genome and an expanded set of high-coverage modern human genome sequences. We find that, consistent with the recent finding of Meyer et al. (2012),

<Neanderthals contributed more DNA to modern East Asians than to modern Europeans.>>

Nice game! Heh, somebody playing 1.g3 against you, that's funny. :D

<Hanh> too cute, very purposeful kitty there! :D Very interesting stats in that data analysis too.

<VBD: <Stop taking too much tuna and swordfish.>>

OK doc, I'll try. ;s

According to the paper the hypothesized intake of jellyfish by Mediterranean blue fin tuna is:

<To meet these proportions, a small bluefin tuna (15 kg) should eat daily 0.13 kg of fishes and squids and 8.5 kg of gelatinous zooplankton with an energy content of 3,509 kJ, equivalent to 270 pink jellyfish (Table 3). Likewise, a large bluefin tuna (100 kg) should eat daily 0.60 kg of fishes and squids and 14.2 kg of gelatinous zooplankton with an energy content of 6,120 kJ, equivalent to 474 pink jellyfish (Table 3). However, SIAR results have wide credibility intervals, so is possible that the consumption of gelatinous zooplankton by bluefin tuna is lower. For instance, if gelatinous zooplankton represents 60% and 30% of the diet of small and large bluefin tuna respectively, they should eat daily 6.3 kg and 7.1 kg of gelatinous zooplankton respectively.

These quantities may seem large, but the biomass of gelatinous zooplankton in the epipelagic region of the Mediterranean Sea ranges usually 1–10 kg 100 m−3, with the biomass of the pink jellyfish reaching sometimes values as high as 24 kg 100 m−3. This means that a bluefin tuna picking effortless jellyfish as it encounter them can satisfy its daily energy requirements after swimming just a few hundred meters across a swarm of gelatinous plankton. However, this tuna will probably not be able to swallow the required biomass of jellyplankton in a single meal, so more or less continuous consumption of gelatinous plankton through light hours is a more likely scenario.>

At ELWA Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia, run by the missionary group SIM, Dr. John Fankhauser, the medical director, said chronic pain, headaches and eye trouble were the most common physical problems among the hundred or so people attending a special clinic for Ebola survivors.

Some have such severe pain that they find it hard to walk, he said. About 40 percent have eye pain, inflammation, blurred vision and blind spots in their visual fields. Some have uveitis.

With Nina Pham there were a possible 4 experiment treatment used,

plasma from a Ebola survivor

TKM-Ebola help block virus genes from making copies,

brincidofovir help stop virus from making copies of self by blocking enzymes used in replication,

ZMapp are trio of antibodies that neutralize Ebola,

There warning and a instance where one recover from Ebola have infected their partner

I am thinking of changing my picture:

http://www.takepart.com/article/201...