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Justin Raps, Stem Cell-o-Rama!, Fish Using Tools, TWIWRD Disturbs Us All, Lizard VS. Bird, The Internet Is Your Mind, And Much More…
Justin’s Disclaimer Rap:
Disclaimer to the many minions and fans of twis
If you gotta hungry brain it’ll bounce to this
And as I labor to find the inspired line of reason to rhyme
So I can spit science-y alliterations when it comes show time
Dr kiki gets the show rolling
with a phd of kick ass knowing and kicks will be going
to my shins if my speech is slowing
or my tangent starts flowing
But seriously how do you contain within a brain frame of just one hour
That the world as we know it is but one drop in an informational shower
That everything we know now is only ten percent
of what we will learn in fifty years hence
Its mind boggling to say the least
That each week we could have such feast
Of new ideas and new discovery
From exoplanets to ancient dna recovery
From the big bang to the latest advances
We got more science news than Chinese zoos got pandas
And all the great finds of late minds over the history of time
on the shoulders of giants we put it in context
This week in science is coming up next…
Stem Cell Round up!!!
California Eyes Stem Cells – http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-07/first-trial-embryonic-stem-cell-treatment-blindness-begins-california
Stem Cell Breakthrough… in Mice
First Synthetic Organ Transplant
Teeth From Stem Cells
Fish Using Tools
A (surprisingly) great compilation of the press on this story
Get a free audiobook at Audible.com!
TWIWRD!
Robots For Climate Science
Really Disturbing Robot (video from popsci, and Kagome song)
But, neverfear, NYT article reassures us that robots aren’t us yet…
Lizard vs. Bird
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I'm the host of this little science show. 
Tool Use
I define a “tool” as an object, modified from it’s natural form to perform a useful action.
Tool: A rock used by monkeys to smash food, so long as it has been shaped against other, harder rocks.
Tool: A branch used by chimps to catch termites, so long as it has been trimmed of leaves by the chimp.
Not a tool: Birds dropping things on the ground, since the ground hasn’t been modified.
Not a tool: Coconut shell since it has not been modified by the crab.
Not a tool: Fish bashing clam against a rock, because the rock was not modified.
Tool: Bow and arrow, stone axe, the wheel, Hubble space telescope, etc.
I agree with Gendou, with one slight distinction: An object used in unmodified form that has however been chosen with a certain goal in mind for its specific properties (ie stone with pointed end, using the pointed end): The chimps using branches also choose these branches for a specific form and lenght, thicness, flexibility etc, and th’en modify it it as needed: if it doesn’t have leafs and obtrusive sidebranches there’s no need, but it’s still a tool, proven also by the fact that if it does, (and probably if there is no better candidate that doesn’t) it gets modified. In other words, the subject has a clear image of the needed object, will search for it and eventually manipulate it if needed. These could be considered two stages in tool-use, and I wonder how big and hard the step is from choosing a tool from nature, and perfecting one. In the case of the fish this makes it hard to judge, given the fact there is just this one observation. We do not know if the fish has conciously chosen his ‘tool'(?) for shape, size, pointedness etc, nor if it always uses the same or a different approach each time.
There is a BBC video on the net that shows crows in Japan. The crows eat walnuts but can’t open them. The crow will sit on a traffic light and drop the nut onto a pedestrian cross walk. When the light turns green, the oncoming cars break the nut. The crow waits at the edge of the street for the light to turn red then walks out onto the crosswalk and eats the nut. I don’t know how to make a car, but the car is a tool for me and not the crow?
When I go camping, I use a hammer to drive in the tent stakes. But, if I forget my hammer, I use a big rock. I didn’t make the hammer or the rock but the hammer is a tool and the rock isn’t?
Mark Hinman, good objections.
The word tool isn’t very helpful for understanding how crows crush nuts. It’s meaningful that they are able to anticipate the result of dropping the nut in the right place. It seems likely that more is going on than trial-and-error. The crows seem, to me at least, to have some understanding of the danger of being squished on the paved road. This has double survival advantage: keep from getting squashed yourself, and easily squash tough foods. Being smart doesn’t always require using tools, which I think is true for these crows.
When you use a rock in stead of a hammer, you are totally using a tool! This is a clear exception to the rules I was able to come up with. Maybe intention plays a bigger part in “tool use” than modification?