What do you know today that you didn't know yesterday?

[Silver]

Nitrous oxide, also known as laughing gas, bulbs, whippets and nangs, is a gas sometimes inhaled for a fleeting high but comes with some heavy side effects.

The word 'nangs' is Australian slang that refers to small canisters of nitrous oxide (N2O).

https://yourroom.health.nsw.gov.au/whats...ralia.aspx

[Anomalocaris]

octopus in aquariums are able to comprehend that certain actions will be stopped if humans see them being carried out. They are able to look through the glass to track the direction that humans outside of the aquarium are looking at, and wait for the the humans to look away before carrying out these actions.

octopuses can recognize individual humans by sight, even when the humans wear identical lab uniforms, and react different to different humans.

octopus in aquarium also appear to have learned that water level in the tanks can be adjusted by plugging up the drain, and would do so with their tentacles when the water level in their tanks are too low for their liking. They don’t plug the drain when the water levels are high.

Somehow some octopus learned that lights in laboratories can be shut off by the simple expedient of shorting them out with salt water. Octopuses tend to disliked bright lights. if laborary lights are left on, octopus will wait until humans have left and will squirt seawater at the lights to short them out.

octopus also appeared to be able to comprehend that they can signal to humans and humans could understand their meaning. In one experiment, octopuses are fed either kettle fish or sardines. individual octopus clearly has preference for one or the other. laboratory technicians would go down a row of tanks feeding the octopus in each tanks in turn. Some octopus, when given the less preferred food, would hold the food ostentatiously in their tentacles and wait for the technicians to finish the row of tanks and come back. when the technician is back at their tank they will ostentatiously walk along the bottom to the drain and stuff the disliked food down the drain.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

octopus in aquariums are able to comprehend that certain actions will be stopped if humans see them being carried out. They are able to look through the glass to track the direction that humans outside of the aquarium are looking at, and wait for the the humans to look away before carrying out these actions.

octopuses can recognize individual humans by sight, even when the humans wear identical lab uniforms, and react different to different humans.

octopus in aquarium also appear to have learned that water level in the tanks can be adjusted by plugging up the drain, and would do so with their tentacles when the water level in their tanks are too low for their liking.  They don’t plug the drain when the water levels are high.

Somehow some octopus learned that lights in laboratories can be shut off by the simple expedient of shorting them out with salt water.   Octopuses tend to disliked bright lights.   if laborary lights are left on, octopus will wait until humans have left and will squirt seawater at the lights to short them out.

octopus also appeared to be able to comprehend that they can signal to humans and humans could understand their meaning.   In one experiment, octopuses are fed either kettle fish or sardines.    individual octopus clearly has preference for one or the other.     laboratory technicians would go down a row of tanks feeding the octopus in each tanks in turn.      Some octopus, when given the less preferred food,  would hold the food ostentatiously in their tentacles and wait for the technicians to finish the row of tanks and come back.   when the technician is back at their tank they will ostentatiously walk along the bottom to the drain and stuff the disliked food down the drain.

They also go amazingly well with tomatoes, garlic, and pan-seared courgettes.

Boru

[Anomalocaris]

Crows may be smart, but it apparently has weak sensory fusion.    if you cover one of crow’s two eyes, and then train it until it learned to do a task that requires visual identification of its surroundings using its uncovered eye.  The crow will not be able to do this task if you covered up this eye and uncovered the other eye.    it will take just as long to learn to do it with the other eye as it did with the first eye.  apparently the crow’s brain does not recognize what it sees out of the other eye is the same thing.

humans on the other hand are adept at sensory fusion and reflexively recognize what it learned to see with one eye when it sees it with the other.

octopus are somewhere in the middle.   Octopus will not be able to instant do what it learned to do with one eye covered when the other eye is covered.   but the octopus will learn to do it with the other eye much more quickly than it did with the first eye.

[SirLuck]

I’m in worse shape than I realised.

[Anomalocaris]

most humans exhibit ocular dominance, that is preference for using the visual input from one eye over the other.

It appears most land tetrapods exhibit similar ocular dominance. furthermore, for many animals in social situations where the animal needs to interact with others of its own kind, they tend to place other members of their own species, in the field of view of their left eye. when they are looking for food, they tends to place the area of search in the field of view of its right eye.

[Anomalocaris]

in an interesting experiment, blind human subjects are wired up to a video camera. The output of the camera then actuate a dot matrix of small actuators, which press on the skin of the subject.   So the camera image are translated into a low resolution field of different pressures on the subject’s skin.    if an object in the camera’s field of view moves, the pattern of pressure on the subject’s skin will also move.  

this produced some interesting results.    after a while, the subject no longer report feeling the output from the camera as pressure on their skin,  but instead they perceive the object seem by the camera as an object in 3D space.     even more interestingly, this perception of video image conveyed through pressure on the skin as an actual object in space only occurs if the subject can control the placement of the camera, for example by moving the camera to the left or right and closer and further from the object.   if the subject can not control the camera, then he subject never report perceiving the object seen by camera as an object on space rather than pressure on his skin.

this suggest the circuitry in human brain that converts visual input into a mental map of the spatial relationship of the environment around the person doesn’t actually require visual input to work. The brain is sufficiently flexible to convert tactile input into a faux visual input and activate this mechanism.

[Anomalocaris]

A typical octopus has roughly as many neurons as a dog.     However, unlike a dog, more than half of an octopus’s neurons are not in its brain but in its tentacles.   The amount of neurons in an octopus’s tentacles allow each tentacle to execute its own neuromuscular coordination and complex autonomous behavior even if severed from the body of the octopus.     For example, a severed Octopus tentacle can still sense scent molecules in the water and feel it’s way through a maze to get to the food emitting the scent molecules on the other side.

Yet even though the octopus tentacle seems to have life of its own,   It obey commands issued by the brain.    If the maze is transparent so the octopus can see blind turns and dead ends in the maze,  tentacles attached to the octopus can avoid them while severed octopus tentacles can not.

[Anomalocaris]

The octopus’ eyeballs are the largest relatively firm and deformation resistant organ in the animal’s body. So an octopus can squeeze its entire body through any opening large enough for its eyeballs to pass through.

[Angrboda]