Monday Science Links

This week's science

• Greg at Laelaps blogs on baboon frienships: For years primatologists have been puzzling over "friendship" in baboons. Across baboon species lactating females keep up close social relationships with unrelated adult males. The females are not reproductively available, and by devoting much of their attention to these females the males significantly reduce their opportunities to mate with other females, so why are these males so concerned with mothers and infants? What is the function of this behavior?


• Ethan at Starts With A Bang explains how tides work:The reason we have any tides at all are twofold: the Earth is pretty big and gravity cares how far away you are. The farther away you are from something, the weaker gravity's pull is on you. If you were to take a look at our Solar System, and you were to move the Earth out to where Pluto is, you'd find that the force of gravity from the Sun on the Earth would be an astounding 1,600 times weaker than it is today, as Pluto is 40 times as far away as Earth is from the Sun!


• Carl at The Loom explains why humans are living with dinosaurs: It would not be true to say that humans walk with other species of dinosaurs, such as Tyrannosaurus rex or Velociraptor. But birds are dinosaurs, too. That is, they belong to the group of species defined as dinosaurs by paleontologists, based on their shared common ancestry. The statement “humans walk with dinosaurs” is not analogous to “humans descended from chimpanzees.” That would be like saying “birds descended from Tyrannosaurus rex.” Birds are dinosaurs in the same way humans are mammals.
  


• Judith at Zenobia Empress of the East talks about the excavation of Palmyra: Until this very year, there was a great unexplored chunk of ancient Palmyra right outside the central city (marked reddish-brown on the aerial photograph, below). Despite the monuments on all sides of the area -- the Agora to the east, Diocletian's walls on the south, the Transverse Colonnaded Street on the west and, for the whole of its northern length, the Great Colonnade -- this quarter of Palmyra has been an archaeological blank. Not any more.


• Jason at The Thoughtful Animal blogs on how dogs got so smart: Domesticated dogs seem to have an uncanny ability to understand human communicative gestures. If you point to something the dog zeroes in on the object or location you’re pointing to (whether it’s a toy, or food, or to get his in-need-of-a-bath butt off your damn bed and back onto his damn bed). Put another way, if your attention is on something, or if your attention is directed to somewhere, dogs seem to be able to turn their attention onto that thing or location as well. Amazingly, dogs seem to be better at this than primates (including our nearest cousins, the chimpanzees) and better than their nearest cousins, wild wolves. And so it was that biological anthropologist Brian Hare, director of the of Duke University Canine Cognition Center wondered: did dogs get so smart because of direct selection for this ability during the domestication of dogs, or did this apparent intelligence evolve, in a sense, by accident, because of selection against fear and aggression?
  

Enjoy!