Skye

I was able to control my dreams fairly often as a kid. I'd usually fly because it was fun. It's interesting when there is an interplay between the conscious and subconscious states. I would realise it was a dream, conscious think of floating up then my subconscious would create wings for me. I haven't been able control my dreams for a while though:-(

The main structure of one is a matrix of interwoven collagen fibres that contain crystals of calcium salts. This forms a sponge-like structure inside the bone. Blood vessels and nerves are able to enter the bones at various points and travel through channels in the spongy structure.

You need to settle down on a nice quiet maggot ranch out west (Wales perhaps?) Social insects nest, such as termite mounds, have one reproducing organism (the queen), millions of her non-reproductive offspring and some males. In this situation it's pretty easy to conceptualise it as a super organism, with individuals being analogous to organs. In some species it is less clear cut, all worker honeybees (who are the queens daughters) are capable producing male eggs. Other workers will usually eat eggs they don't recognise as the queens, because they are more closely related to the queens sons (their brothers) than their sisters sons (their nephews). The impetus for social insects forming colonies is thought to be haplodiploidy, in which females diploid while males are haploid, they result from unfertilised eggs (which are what worker bees produce). This means that fathers have no sons and sons get all their genes from their mothers. For the females it means that a she is more closely related to her sisters than her daughters, she shares 50% of their genes with her mother and 100% of her genes with her father. On average then, females share (50% + 100%)/2= 75% of their genes with their sisters. This only hold true if the queen mates with one male. If the queen mates with a unrelated male then the workers don't share 100% of their genes with him, so the percentage relatedness drop. Despite that, it seems that the first colonies formed because individual females spread their genes better by caring for their sisters rather than their daughters. The queen makes up for her disadvantage in only passing on 50% of her genes to her daughters by having sons who have 100% of her genes.

Colours are probably largely reliant on the content of the dream. So if you are in a good dream it will be light and airy, bad dream, all dark and foreboding. Our subconscious response to colour is more along the lines of red/orange/yellow means hot (or whatever), rather than dreaming of cerulean blue means trouble with your uncle. It's an vague relationship rather than a association between a colour and a specific concept. Actually I'm making this all up, I've never taken a psych class in my life. I'm arguing against it because my girlfriend had a dreamt last night I left her, so I'm doing what I can to dispell the myth. Who said there wasn't bias in science?

It's a system of relatively simple things that interact to form a complex pattern. Weather, traffic flow, the CNS and ecosystems are examples. One of the principle ideas is that organisation can emerge from chaos simply by random and unorganised interactions. Another is that the sum of a system is, in a way, greater than the whole. Group dynamics are definately included, I'm reading a book on social insects. They are surprisingly complicated little critters. I covered a hole with soil and watched for a while, the ants returning to the nest just ran around like idiots on speed. I emailed a researcher from my school who said: "if you kept watching you would have found that after awhile a number of ants would have started to dig into the soil. Some holes would be more attractive than others, through chance alone, so the ants would begin to concentrate their work efforts on only a subset of the original number of wholes. These successful holes would continue to attract more ants via a process of positive feedback and amplification. Once the hole was completed it would not longer attract new ants and the number of digging ants would decrease over time. So order arrises from disorder via positive feedback and decay." Sell eh? Let's keep this hush-hush, we might be sitting on a gold mine. That's very true. Hospitals are such large, sterile, unfeeling places too. Perhaps it would be easier if we had more on smaller hospitals, though would certainly be bucking the trend. I agree, teachers too. They are both so important yet they get treated badly by pretty much everyone. Unless they get better working conditions and pay we are just going to get a lower standard of people entering these positions, I personally want the person giving me injections to be of the highest standard possible.

It's kind of a shame we don't have any vet science students on this forum, they'd love this. They are probably all studying feverishly in the hope of becoming a zoo vet. Biochemistry. I've taken a very wide variety of subjects though so far (I can use surveying equipment for example) and I change my mind about every second week as to an area of specialisation. I was thinking biochemistry/neuroscience double major a little while ago. Then I emailed a researcher about group behaviour and he mentioned complex systems, which really are interesting. So I think I'll just have to see what happens, get some work in the labs and find out where the serious money is That's very true. In the case where I cut my foot I didn't realise untill I had walked back to the campsite (it was in a large cave under a waterfall, very nice) and saw a little trail of blood behind me. I didn't so much mean other people as other animals. Though I can't see it as a treatment that would take off, perhaps because dogs aren't as clean as maggots or leeches. Not a great thought. How much of this is purely psychological? Are we simply wimps or are there physiological reasons for it? There are definately psychological reasons for it though, how can we better help people feel well (given that nurses skirts can only be so short)?

As the universe expands would black holes have shorter and shorter lifespans because they are further away from surrounding matter?

Well like that site said, at 20 km/h they would be going faster than a rhino can run. It would be easily outrunning (outwalking?) many of the large herbivorous dinosaurs. And at that speed it would get hurt by falling but not fatally. I wouldn't be surprised if it attacked it's prey in the water, at least sometimes. Many of the larger dinosaurs spent alot of in the water, hadrosaurs were abundant and seem fairly defenseless. Current bipeds are quite efficient at both wading and swimming. I've never actually heard of this theory though, maybe it doesn't hold water;)

Based on muscle mass T rex probably couldn't run (it would need something like 86% of it's muscle mass in it's legs to do so) and would have walked up to about 20 km/h from here Interestingly, an Allosaurus fossil skeleton was found to have 14 fractured ribs that had healed, perhaps meaning they often did fall and injure themselves. Allosaurs weighed around half as much a the T rex, and had more substantial arms, so certainly didn't have as much force exerted on their body if they fell.

The vet thought he was underrated too when he performed a facelift on a Cocker Spaniel (their eyelids often fold over their eyes as they age and cause eye infections) for a tenth of the price a plastic surgeon would charge. Vets have to have a broad range of skills, even in a small clinic they perform all manner of procedures, on a variety of different animals. That being said from the little I've seen it's mainly desexing and terminating. I wanted to be a vet at that stage, though that wasn't a great introduction, and probably turned me off it. Not that it was too gross; just mind numbingly repetitive...desex/put down/desex/put down... I have been out of school though a few years now, having loved and lost a few career paths. Being a little over a year through a BSc, I am thinking of a research career in some area of biology. I don't like being stitched up, it always seems to hurt more than the actual injury. I had a cut once on the underside of my heel, perhaps 8mm deep by 30mm long, that healed fine without stitches, actually without any medical attention at all. For fairly minor cuts to epithelial or muscle tissue are stitches all that usefull? Thinking about wounds, leech and maggot treatments, and vet science, made me remember how little treatment the cattle dogs would get (which involved being sprayed with whatever poisons the cows were). They would often get some decent cuts from the barbed wire, I saw them up to 6 inches long. Despite the rest of the dog being covered in mud their wounds were always perfectly clean and a nice healthy pink. Maybe we should just go home and lick our wounds, or at least have them licked for us.

I think there's only one way to disprove such an anthropomorphic theory...:flame:

Dolphins have a larger brain to body volume, and a greater level of cortical folding, than us. They have a much thinner cortex though, and far fewer connections between their neurons.

I did a weeks work experience for school when I was 16 at a local vet clinic. A dog that had been fixed up after being hit by a car (it had had a leg lacerated and broken) was getting a check up when the vet said "Oooh look he has some friends", and out dropped about a dozen maggots. Can stitching up a wound cause similar problems to gluing it, especially without internal stitches to prevent a fluid filled space forming?

They probably occupied their brains more with processing sensations and controlling their body than with advanced cognition or behaviour, like creating a 3D model of a fish, or highly variable social interactions.

Well how fast do dinosaurs run anyway? Alot of the big ones would have been slow, they have the same problems that T rex had (supporting a massive body). Maybe T rex attacked them in the water, kangaroos have a similar body form and are good swimmers...it's dangerous for a dog to follow them into the water. Just trying to give Blike some hope;)

It probably did a bit of both, there're few predators that won't eat carrion and there're few scavengers that won't hunt vulnerable prey.

Interesting, it seems strange that it would make it harder to recover if you have a low resting heart rate. I was training for a kickboxing fight about a year ago (didn't happen, accursed promotors:mad: ) and I had great recovery, I could get my heart rate well over 200, then be able to talk fine after half a minute. Usually to say I am not *%#$ing doing that again.

Just as an aside, since the imflammatory response is important in both controlling infection and aiding repair, why are anti-imflammatory drugs so frequently prescribed?

I'm not even remotely close to a doctor, so I may be wrong here. Cardiac cycle for a 0.8 second heart beat: Atria contract for 0.1 s then ventricals contract for 0.3 s (this makes up the systole, where the heart expells blood) then the heart relaxes for 0.4 s (this makes up the diastole, where the heart takes in blood). If you just consider the systole and diastole the heart is relaxed for half the cardiac cycle. But the atria are only really contracting for an 1/8th of the cycle and the ventricals for 3/8ths. If you are healthier then you should have a lower resting heart rate, your heart needs to pump less often to keep you going. Regular exercise keeps you healthier overall, and I've read that anaerobic exercise can make you heart muscles more flexible which should give it a higher capacity thus lower resting heart rate. Unless you are working really hard, like running all day, then your lower resting heart from regular exercise should oversome the period of higher heart rate during the exercise.

Dark matter does seem a little dodgy. If my bank told me that no, 96% of my money wasn't all missing, it was simply dark money now I think I might be a little pissed at them. Wait...a little more pissed at them. If the universe started from several points, wouldn't the several points already have space(-time) between them? Maybe it had the same kind of space-time as is outside our universe. If so, I hope whoever owns that space-time doesn't have a concept of property rights.

I'm just confused as to how they missed the Spice Girls. Though, back on topic, I was talking to my mother today and she said my dad used to read his biochem textbook to me when I was a baby as a combination of studying/shutting me up. So damn I started early:-p

People do to get animals mixed up. Ever done Chinese lion dancing? The 'lion' has a small horn coming out of it's forehead and eats lettuce. Not to mention it's multicoloured, covered in mirrors and scares demons away. Still when stuffed platypuses were first brought back to England they were thought to be fakes.

Best to look at the actual researchers than the schools I think. If it's anything like here, post grad work is basically supervised research under a researcher at the school. Most post grads do very similar work to their supervisor, so try and find one that has done work in an area you are interested in. Course I'm just an undergraduate and I seem to be getting nowhere slowly.

"Great money comes from taxes; taxes come from alot of folks who don't have much money. Spend that money wisely." I think part of the problem is the seemingly random nature of pure research in finding solutions to problems people have. It's hard to wisely play the lottery. That being said applied research is just that, there'd be nothing to apply without pure research. Perhaps it would be better to look at is as a production line of useful information. The applied/pure research demarkation seems to be about where people are able to claim intellectual property rights at. That guy researching ants probably won't see a cent (or penny) of the money made out of it, nor his grantors. If we allowed pure researchers to claim rights over what they find then I would expect a flood of money coming out of pure research, and taxpayers wouldn't feel ripped off.

Man I was wrong:D though I did give you fair warning. Babies also extend their toes out when you rub the bottom of their feet. Supposedly this reflex can return when people are drunk, which sounds fun to me. Oh and putting their hand in a glass of water. That's just evil.