Zebra Stripes Could Be Pest Control

It can be tricky to pin down just why an animal’s coat looks a certain way, and scientists have a few ideas about why zebras evolved to have their trademark black and white stripes — they might act as thermoregulation, or as a unique, confusion-based kind of camouflage, to name just a couple of examples. But one of the more promising, consistent theories — although scientists are still ultimately divided — is that the striped pattern keeps dangerous flies away.

After finding that zebra stripes are more pronounced in areas of Africa with more horseflies and tsetse flies (which can transmit deadly diseases among equines), an evolutionary biologist assembled a team for a new experiment. They observed horses, some dressed up in zebra-striped coats, next to some especially tame zebras, and found that while flies hovered around all of them, they rarely landed on zebras or the striped horses compared to the horses without coats. When flies would approach zebra-striped surfaces, they would behave as if they couldn’t find a good spot to land.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

Do we have a value system? What is of value to us? Can we describe or identify that which has value?
Great questions, what are the answers? Last weekend a good percentage of the nation watched the Super Bowl. What were your thoughts when you drove past the homeless encampment on the way to the store for chips and beer?
We send millions of dollars worth of munitions to our allies to use against their enemies and find justification for withholding $40.00 per month per child during the summer for school lunches. There are families of 3 or 4 that are living in mansions that cost millions and just down the street we have other families living in tents.
It is normal to enjoy the fruit of your labor, the point is that sometimes we need to be aware of our surroundings and share our good fortune. The disparity between labor and management in many businesses today is beyond belief. It is like we have gone back to the days when we had royals and serfs and nothing in between.
This country was not founded on that theory. We had an upper class that owned property and had the vote. We had a separation of church and state, as the founders knew that tying religion to any civic entity is a recipe for disaster as religion of any flavor is toxic to individual freedom.
There have been struggles with privilege based on status for centuries and we still put up with the problem. Laws are enacted and yet some constantly claim that they are somehow immune from this or that because of the color of their skin or their shit doesn’t stink. Will we ever get beyond that issue? It may come to pass when we have AI enforcing and administering the law.
Other nations have overcome the majority of things that seem to plague us, homelessness, hunger, housing the elderly and education and health care. Why we can not do this is simply a case of everything has to be for profit not good will.
Double standards are the norm, businesses that close on Sunday and claim their faith exempts them from paying for birth control insurance have no problem using other businesses that are open on Sunday to advertise their business. Just a way to get out of paying for insurance.
Most rules are made for the benefit of those that made the rule. Take the one that says there can be no autopsy performed in the Vatican. Won’t explain it as it seems obvious without explanation.
Today most of the dysfunction is in the lack of cooperation between the political parties. Working together to overcome the disparities is how we achieve advancement and gain unity. Today’s world view is not to let that happen but rather to burn the bridge before anyone can get on it rather than cooperatively resolve the issue in advance.

Lyle Northey (Silent/Boomer)

There are concerns being voiced that violence will be the consequence of any legal action against Trump that produces a guilty verdict and a jail sentence. If that is the case then we are living with domestic terrorism and we need to put a stop to it.
If the results of the Jan 6 effort are any indication of where this will get you, nearly 1000 people so far have been found guilty of felony charges and are serving time in jail. One man’s ego is surely not worth that many people’s freedom. It is hard to believe that a person of such limited public notoriety has made this big of an impression on so many.
We know from history that some of the most well known characters were in fact some of the least noteworthy people. These individuals were the ones that dragged their countries into unnecessary wars and caused pain and suffering among the citizens of the nations they represented. We all know the names like Hitler and Mussolini just to name two of them. They ranted and raved about conditions that existed after WWI and ultimately caused WWII.
Hopefully we are not headed into either Civil War or WWIII because Mr. Trump is being prosecuted for the crimes he has been getting away with for most of his life. Committing fraud, assaulting women, trying to steal classified documents and overturning and election are not the most common of crimes and the perpetrators of such crimes should not have public approval. Yet it seems, this is the case where the Robin Hood syndrome seems to have taken over, take from the rich to give to the poor even though this case is rob from the poor to give the rich more.
There have been suggestions that he be pardoned and that seems like a slap in the face to every person in the country that obeys the laws and tries to be a decent citizen. On the other hand a pardon with conditions might just put the idiot brigade out of business. If the pardon required that he removes himself from politics, ceases his hourly incitement to insurrection and retires to some faraway place where he can live as he pleases, say Saudi Arabia. His attitudes and moral codes fit very well with the royalty of that nation. His value system would indicate that even if he were pardoned and allowed to stay in this country he would not honor any deal he made, because he is above the law. Isn’t that what he is trying to claim to get out of responsibility on current charges.P

Toward the end of World War 2, mission updates from the 415th Night Fighter Squadron took a mysterious turn. Along with details of dogfights over the German-occupied Rhine Valley, pilots began reporting inexplicable lights following their aircraft.

One night in November 1944, a Bristol Beaufighter crew—pilot Edward Schlueter, radar observer Donald J. Meiers, and intelligence officer Fred Ringwald—was flying along the Rhine north of Strasbourg. They described seeing “eight to 10 bright orange lights off the left wing…flying through the air at high speed.” Neither the airborne radar nor ground control registered anything nearby. “Schlueter turned toward the lights and they disappeared,” the report continued. “Later they appeared farther away. The display continued for several minutes and then disappeared.” Meiers gave these objects a name, taking a nonsense word used by characters in the popular “Smokey Stover” firefighter cartoon: “foo fighters.”

Reports kept coming in. The objects flew alongside aircraft at 200 mph; they were red, or orange, or green; they appeared singly or with as many as 10 others in formation; and they often out-maneuvered the airplanes they were chasing. They never showed up on radar.

Richard Ziebart, historian for the nearby 417th Night Fighter Squadron, heard many of the stories directly from the 415th crew members: “The pilots were very professional. They gave the report, talked about the lights, but didn’t speculate about them.” Still, the pilots found the sightings unnerving. “Scared shitless” was how a 415th pilot described feeling to Keith Chester, author of Strange Company: Military Encounters With UFO’s in World War II.

At the end of the year, an Associated Press war correspondent, Robert C. Wilson, celebrated New Year’s Eve with the 415th. The next day, his story on the foo fighters was featured on the front page of newspapers across the country. Other squadrons had seen them, but it was the number, consistency, and impact on the 415th crews—and the fact that a reporter listened to the airmen—that finally prompted investigations into the sightings.

Amateur psychologists, military aviation buffs, and conspiracy theorists offered explanations, but none that the airmen found credible. They didn’t believe they were hallucinating because of battle fatigue. And because the lights caused no damage, the pilots doubted they came from remote-controlled German secret weapons. St. Elmo’s fire, a discharge of light from sharp objects in electrical fields, seemed unlikely, since the foo fighters exhibited such extreme maneuverability.

Eventually the Army Air Command sent officers to investigate, but their research was lost after the war, Chester reported. In 1953, the CIA convened a panel of six top scientists familiar with experimental aviation technology to determine if the lights constituted a national security threat. The Robertson Panel, named for its chair, Caltech physicist Howard P. Robertson, offered no official conclusion.

Ziebart, the historian, offered no explanation either, only an insight. “I think the foo fighters didn’t show up on radar because they were plain light,” he said. “Radar had to have a solid object. If there was any bogey out there, the pilots would absolutely be able to tell.”

Some dogs can understand 250 words.

Dogs are man’s best friend, and the canine ability to understand human words has gone a long way to solidify that world-changing relationship. According to the American Psychological Association, the average dog can understand 165 words, and “super dogs” — those in the top 20% of canine intellect — can understand around 250 words. Dog intelligence can be divided into three main types: instinctive (what the dog is bred to do), adaptive (what a dog learns from its environment), and working/obedience (what a dog is trained to do). Research into the levels of working/obedience intelligence in various dog breeds shows that border collies displayed the highest levels, followed by poodles, German shepherds, and golden retrievers. With the ability to also understand simple math (1+1 = 2, for example), these “super dogs” have an estimated cognitive ability of 2- to 2.5-year-old humans.

Although an understanding of 250 words is already impressive, it’s by no means the absolute limit. The Einstein of the dog world is a border collie named Chaser. According to the journal Behavioural Processes, Chaser had the ability to recall and correctly identify 1,022 words. This far exceeds the vocabulary of any known dog, and pushes Chaser into the cognitive ability range of a 3-year-old. Now, that’s an extremely good girl