Starship Asterisk*

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/complex-thinking-goes-beyond-primates-dolphins-understand-zero-elephants-rescue-each-other/2012/06/24/gJQAEPDZzV_story.html wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Complex thinking goes beyond primates:
Dolphins understand zero, elephants rescue each other
By Associated Press,

WASHINGTON — <<It’s not just man’s closer primate relatives that exhibit brain power. Dolphins, dogs and elephants are teaching us a few lessons, too.

Dolphin brains involve completely different wiring from primates, especially in the neocortex, which is central to higher functions such as reasoning and conscious thought.

Dolphins are so distantly related to humans that it’s been 95 million years since we had even a remotely common ancestor. Yet when it comes to intelligence, social behavior and communications, some researchers say dolphins come as close to humans as our ape and monkey cousins.

Maybe closer.

“They understand concepts like zero, abstract concepts. They do everything that chimpanzees do and bonobos can do,” said Lori Marino, a neuroscientist at Emory University who specializes in dolphin research. “The fact is that they are so different from us and so much like us at the same time.”

In recent years, animal researchers have found that thought processes in critters aren’t a matter of how closely related they are to humans. You don’t have to be a primate to be smart.

Dolphin brains look nothing like human brains, Marino said. Yet, she says, “the more you learn about them, the more you realize that they do have the capacity and characteristics that we think of when we think of a person.”

These mammals recognize themselves in the mirror and have a sense of social identity. They not only know who they are, but they also have a sense of who, where and what their groups are. They interact and comprehend the health and feelings of other dolphins so fast it as if they are online with each other, Marino said.

Animal intelligence “is not a linear thing,” said Duke University researcher Brian Hare, who studies bonobos, which are one of man’s closest relatives, and dogs, which are not.

“Think of it like a toolbox,” he said. “Some species have an amazing hammer. Some species have an amazing screwdriver.”

For dogs, a primary tool is their obsessive observation of humans and ability to understand human communication, Hare said. For example, dogs follow human pointing so well that they understand it whether it’s done with a hand or a foot; chimps don’t, said Hare, whose upcoming book is called “The Genius of Dogs.”

Then there are elephants.

They empathize, they help each other, they work together. In a classic cooperation game, in which animals only get food if two animals pull opposite ends of a rope at the same time, elephants learned to do that much quicker than chimps, said researcher Josh Plotnik, head of elephant research at the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation in Thailand.

They do even better than monkeys at empathy and rescue, said Plotnik. In the wild, he has seen elephants stop and work together to rescue another elephant that fell in a pit.

“There is something in the environment, in the evolution of this species that is unique,” he says.>>

Ann wrote:
It's fascinating to wonder about why it was Homo Sapiens and not dolphins that "took over the world", so to speak.
There must have been a time when early humans were not that much more able than dolphins.

Ann wrote:It's fascinating to wonder about why it was Homo Sapiens and not dolphins that "took over the world", so to speak. There must have been a time when early humans were not that much more able than dolphins.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salacia_%28mythology%29 wrote:

[b][color=#DF7030]Gilt bronze head from the cult statue of Sulis Minerva/Salacia from the Temple at Bath, found in Stall Street in 1727 and now displayed at the Roman Baths (Bath).[/color][/b]

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<<In ancient Roman mythology, Salacia was the female divinity of the sea, worshipped as the goddess of salt water who presided over the depths of the ocean. She was the wife and queen of Neptune, god of the sea and water. That Salacia was the wife of Neptune is implied by Varro, and is positively affirmed by Seneca, Augustine and Servius.

The god Neptune wanted to marry Salacia, but she was in great awe of her distinguished suitor, and to preserve her virginity, with grace and celerity she managed to glide out of his sight, and hid from him in the Atlantic Ocean. The grieving Neptune sent a dolphin to look for her and persuade the fair nymph to come back and share his throne. Salacia agreed to marry Neptune and the King of the Deep was so overjoyed at these good tidings that the dolphin was awarded a place in the heavens, where he now forms a well known constellation Delphinus.

Salacia is represented as a beautiful nymph, crowned with seaweed, either enthroned beside Neptune or driving with him in a pearl shell chariot drawn by dolphins, sea-horses (hippocamps) or other fabulous creatures of the deep, and attended by Tritons and Nereids. She is dressed in queenly robes and has nets in her hair.

Salacia was the personification of the calm and sunlit aspect of the sea. Derived from Latin sal meaning "salt" , the name Salacia denotes the wide, open sea, and is sometimes literally translated to mean sensational.

• SALACIOUS, a. [L. salax, from the root of sal, salt; the primary sense of which is shooting, penetrating, pungent, coinciding probably with L. salio, to leap. Salacious then is highly excited, or prompt to leap.] Lustful; lecherous.

Sometimes, as Salachia, she is also known as the goddess of springs, ruling over the springs of highly mineralized waters. She is identified with the Greek goddess, Amphitrite, wife of Poseidon. In northern Europe, the Norse god Aegir and his consort, Rán are equivalent to Neptune and Salacia. The goddess Sulis, an aspect of Salacia is worshiped at the sacred hot springs at Bath.

http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/06261021-salacia.html wrote:

[b][color=#0000FF][size=150]Coat of Arms of Upper[/size][/color][/b] [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silesia][b][size=150]Silesia[/size][/b][/url]

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Salacia: As big as Ceres, but much farther away
Posted By Emily Lakdawalla, 2012/06/26

<<I received the June 2012 issue of Icarus in the mail yesterday. This is the peer-reviewed scientific journal most closely associated with the main planetary science professional organization: the Division of Planetary Sciences of the American Astronomical Society. Reading the Table of Contents on the back, I came across "Physical properties of trans-neptunian binaries (120347) Salacia-Actaea and (42355) Typhon-Echidna," by John Stansberry and several coauthors. Stansberry's is one of very few groups of researchers doing the extremely difficult work of following up on the discoveries of distant trans-Neptunian objects by trying to characterize them as more than just moving dots of light.

So I expected an interesting paper about some odd little objects; there's so much variety beyond Neptune that there are pleasing surprises everywhere you look. I didn't expect to discover one of the biggest objects in the Kuiper belt! Salacia, it turns out, is one of the largest known objects out there. How was Salacia's large size not appreciated in the past? It turns out to have a very low albedo, 3 to 4 percent. Stansberry and his coauthors used Hubble optical data and Spitzer infrared data to constrain the size of Salacia. I've described this process before, in a discussion of Orcus and Vanth.

Getting diameters of two members of a binary pair requires a lot of assumptions. Given some reasonable assumptions, Salacia's diameter is 905 ± 103 kilometers. For context, this very similar to the largest asteroid Ceres' diameter of 975 × 909 kilometers. Salacia has a companion, Actaea, that is also good-sized: 303 ± 35 kilometers. That's bigger than Hyperion but smaller than Mimas. The two are separated by about 5600 kilometers, with a period of 5.5 days. The orbit gives you a measurement of the mass of the whole system, about 4.6 · 1020 kilograms, and that gives you a density, about 1.2 grams per cubic centimeter, only slightly denser than water ice.

It's interesting to compare this system to Orcus and Vanth. In terms of size, they're quite similar; the total system mass of Salacia-Actaea is three-quarters that of Orcus and Vanth. Vanth is likely more than a third Orcus' diameter; the Salacia-Actaea pair is similar. But Salacia and Actaea orbit each other much more closely than Orcus and Vanth, which are separated by 9000 kilometers.

How does Salacia fit in the size ranking of trans-Neptunian objects? Based on what we know now, it's somewhere between seventh and twelfth. The objects that are definitely larger than Salacia are (in order of absolute magnitude) Eris, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, Sedna, and 2007OR10. Stansberry lists objects whose size is similar (within uncertainty) to Salacia: these include Orcus, Quaoar, 2002MS4, 2003 AZ84, and 2002TC302. There may be more of these that I'm not aware of. (Aside: are there any professionals out there keeping up with TNO size estimates being published in the literature? The only online list I'm aware of is Mike Brown's, but he doesn't seem to have kept up with the zillions of papers published in 2012 already. Someone should start a TNO size wiki.)

Salacia's dark surface is unusual among large trans-Neptunian objects, but not unheard of. Stansberry mentions that 2002MS4 and 2003 AZ84 are similarly sized and also dark, with albedo of 5.1 and 6.5 percent, respectively. (This is dark, but not as dark as Salacia.) Still, most larger objects are also brighter; Orcus has an albedo of 27%, and the biggest ones like Makemake, Haumea, Pluto, Eris, and Triton (which is often lumped among the Kuiper belt objects because it likely originated there and looks like them) are icy white. The bright icy surfaces of the objects bigger than 1000 kilometers in diameter suggest past surface geologic activity. The wide variety of surface properties among intermediate-sized objects 700 to 1000 kilometers in diameter suggests to Stansberry that "evolutionary processes can lead to either high or low albedo, with the outcome depending on the details of the history of individual objects."

In the conclusion, Stansberry and coworkers list a number of ways in which Salacia is exceptional. It's one of the largest trans-Neptunian objects. It's the darkest one in this (intermediate to large) size range. It is also the least dense of the intermediate to large-sized objects whose densities are known (although it should be pointed out that the range of possible densities significantly overlaps the range for Orcus). After that, they allow themselves to speculate a bit. They suggest that the low density and dark color might mean that Salacia looks more like a primordial trans-Neptunian object, one of the planetesimals from which the solar system's planets were constructed.

The "history of individual objects" can have a profound effect on their appearance. Just look at similarly sized Io, Europa, Ganymede, and Callisto, all of which formed at the same distance from the Sun from similar materials to see how individual history can make objects unique. How I wish we could visit all these distant moon-sized things beyond Neptune to see their unique faces and learn their individual histories!>>

Beyond wrote:
And just what, if i may inquire, is the porpoise of this thread

• I serve no porpoise.

Beyond wrote:And just what, if i may inquire, is the porpoise of this thread

Source: http://carnivoraforum.com/topic/9333144/1/

neufer wrote:

Beyond wrote:
And just what, if i may inquire, is the porpoise of this thread

• I serve no porpoise.