Inter species sex

The five heroic sex geckos sent into space on July 19 to study sexual reproduction in zero gravity died before returning to Earth on Monday, Russian officials said. It is unclear what they died of, or whether the intrepid geckos ever mated in space. Their tiny, partially mummified bodies were found within their enclosure aboard the small Foton-M4 spacecraft at the conclusion of their mission. "All geckos, unfortunately, died," the Russian Space Agency said in a statement. "The date and conditions of their deaths will be determined by specialists." See also: 12 facts about space that will rock your world The geckos gained international recognition in late July when Russia said it had lost contact with the satellite , raising the possibility that the experiments would be a failure and the geckos would orbit the earth for months before their food supply ran out. Communication was restored within a few days. But the satellite did change its orbital trajectory during that … [Read more...] about Space Sex Geckos Dead on Reentry, Russia Reveals

UPDATE, July 28, 11:16 a.m. ET: Salvation! The Russian space agency Roscosmos has released a statement that they have reconnected with the troubled satellite containing the gecko experiment. The connection was restored on Saturday evening and a spokesperson for Roscomos told RT that the agency is sure they will be able to conduct "90 percent" of the experiments originally planned to be conducted on the vessel. Talk about space oddity. Russian scientists have lost contact with a biosatellite containing five geckos as part of a sex study on living organisms. The flight was intended to be a 60-day mission which launched last week on July 19 from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan, Russian news agency RIA Novosti reports. Communication with the spacecraft was lost the same day it launched. See also: 12 facts about space that will rock your world The geckos, four females and one very lucky male, were packed into the Foton-M4 spacecraft so that scientist could study the … [Read more...] about Russia’s Experimental Sex Geckos Are Lost in Space

Baby bats babble just like newborn human babes, a new study finds. Babbling is thought to be a kind of vocal play that provides human infants a chance to train their vocal tract muscles in preparation for speech and to practice combining the syllables they will use as adults. Humans begin babbling at about 7 months of age. Apart from a few other primates, like the pygmy marmoset, babbling has never been observed in any other mammals until now. However, certain species of songbirds are known to engage in a similar behavior, called "subsong." Barking pups Researchers at the University of Erlangen-Nuernberg in Germany recorded vocalizations from male and female sac-winged bat ( Saccopteryx bilineata ) pups aged 4 to 8 weeks and found that pups of both sexes uttered barks, chatters and screeches similar to those made by adult bats. [ Audio ] The study also found that both male and female pups made additional sounds—including whistles, trills and snippets of … [Read more...] about Baby Bats Babble Like Human Infants

For birds, size matters in one key organ.  Those with bigger noggins outsmart and outlive their small-brained relatives. This could help them adapt to global warming and shrinking habitats, researchers say. After a study that compared brain and body sizes with mortality rates for 220 bird species in polar, temperate and tropical regions, the researchers say they are the first to show that larger brains, relative to body size, help birds dodge  death. Compared with other organs, the brain requires extra energy to develop and maintain. Therefore, researchers have theorized that a bigger brain makes up for its high metabolic price tag by giving animals the mental agility to survive environmental challenges. This idea is known as the “cognitive buffer” hypothesis. "We have shown that species with larger brains relative to their body size experience lower mortality than species with smaller brains, supporting the general importance of the cognitive buffer hypothesis in the … [Read more...] about Bigger Brains Help Birds Dodge Death

By Sofia Moutinho Feb. 26, 2021 , 11:30 AM One hundred years ago, a play by the Czech author Karel Čapek introduced the word “robot,” telling the story of artificial factory workers designed to serve humans. Now, in a metanarrative twist, a robot itself has written a play. And it premieres online today. “It’s a kind of futuristic Little Prince ,” says dramatist David Košťák, who oversaw the script. Like the classical French children’s book, the 60-minute production— AI: When a robot writes a play —tells the journey of a character (this time a robot), who goes out into the world to learn about society, human emotions, and even death. The script was created by a widely available artificial intelligence (AI) system called GPT-2. Created by Elon Musk’s company OpenAI, this “robot” is a computer model designed to generate text by drawing from the enormous repository of information available on the internet. ( You can test it here .) So far, the technology has been used to … [Read more...] about Kinky and absurd: The first AI-written play isn’t Shakespeare—but it has its moments