Scents emitted by certain species of adult corals draw fish and coral larvae to healthy reefs, while the noxious odor of out-of-control seaweed drives them away from damaged ecosystems.
“These are fantastic results,” says Jelle Atema, a chemical and behavioral ecologist at Boston University. The findings demonstrate “dramatic differences” in coral or fish behavior, he says, and “how important chemical signals are in regulating the interactions between corals and seaweeds and fishes.”
The end result of World War I was the creation of the League of Nations and the argument that sovereignty leads to disunion and catastrophe. World War II led to the creation of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. I believe that a third world war is nearly upon us, one that may involve weapons of monetary destruction more so than weapons of mass destruction. Each supposed disintegration of global unity has eventually led to greater centralization, and this is something the skeptics seem to forget. The progression of crises suggests that the next war will lead to total globalization under the dominance of a minority of elitists posing as “wise men” who only wish to bring peace and harmony to the masses. In the meantime, the skeptics will continue to mindlessly debate in the face of all reason that the whole thing was a fluke, an act of random mathematical chance, leading coincidentally to the one thing the establishment rulers crave: total global totalitarian micromanagement.
I've been fighting a losing battle for 25 years to reassert the primacy of the human factor within the craft of intelligence (decision-support). Although I have no doubt this will happen eventually — industrial era technology is in performance free-fall — I am now becoming interested in plant and animal intelligence, and in how we might harness the distributed intelligence of plants and animals — including as sensors — at the same time that we radically enhance our ability to harness the distributed intelligence of humans.
Known for detecting land mines, the rodents could also help detect disease.
EXTRACT
“Rats are very fast,” said his trainer, Catia Souto, adding that one rat can evaluate more samples in ten minutes than a lab technician can evaluate in a day.
. . . . . . .
And so far, rats seem to be a promising solution: In the first 16 months of the Maputo program, the rats evaluated samples from roughly 12,500 patients. Of those, 1,700 had been found positive at the health clinics. The rats detected another 764 patients, an increase in detection rate of around 44 percent, according to APOPO.
I've known for decades that plants can see and hear and sense and communicate feelings — the 1970's experiment with plants witnessing an individual “murdering” on of their own, and then the plants reacting on a polygraph machine when the one individual out of a line of many individuals came back into the room, was for me a compelling indicator.
Similarly I have been both awed by Koko the gorilla knowing over 1,000 words in sign language and able to interpret between other gorillas and humans, and dismayed to not see a Manhattan Project seeking to extend inter-species communication.
Then we've had the recent advances in linking plants to cell phones such that changes in their chemistry and water content are as ably charted from the micro-level as SPOT Image pioneered at the macro level.
Now we learn beyond doubt that plants do have a form of language using RNA. This has huge implications for true cost economics and big data — implications that suggest that our earlier doubts about the capacity of existing big data concepts and capacities are severely under-stated. If humans with their 183 languages are a tower of babel, the idea of one day being able to integrate the languages of animals and plants into a larger world brain that integrates the 183 human languages (and ideally resurrects the other 5,000 largely lost human languages) with the languages of all animals and plants, is a breathtaking possibility to contemplate. For engineers, it will be a bio-mimicry and cause and effect revolution inspiring a modern renaissance in sensible sustainable science.
Here is more on agricultural toxins. It never fails to amaze me that what seems so obvious: plants mutate and so do the bugs that attack them is not, in fact obvious. The siren call of more profit seems to trump all other considerations. Only citizen pushback is going to stop this trend.
Despite its own admission that it will cause an up to seven-fold increase in chemical pesticide use, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is poised to approve a new type of genetically engineered seed built to resist one of the most toxic weedkillers on the market.
Here is some very good news. The Fish and Wildlife Service has announced “uses of neonicotinoid pesticides on wildlife refuges… will stop… along with GMO crops, at farming projects by 2016.”
After facing a series of legal challenges from environmental groups, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service will phase out the use of genetically modified (GMO) crops and controversial neonicotinoid pesticides at farming projects on national wildlife refuges.
National Wildlife Refuge System chief James Kurth has directed the agency to stop using GMO crops and neonicontinoids on refuge farms by January 2016, according to a July 17 memo obtained by activists last week. The Fish and Wildlife Service is the first federal agency to restrict the use of GMOs and neonicotinoids in farming practices.
In this beautifully done cinematography, IEET contributor Adam Ford records Hugo de Garis talking about Innovating Beyond the Nanoscale, Femtometer Scale Technology, published on Aug 4, 2014
