Missing Mary Road

i knew microsoft was getting pretty bad with all the different brands that they keep coming out with but this…!?

from dell.

We may not all have pointy ears and sharp teeth, but Spanish scientists are convinced that inside every human lurks the best bat-power: echolocation, or navigating by sound. And they’re determined to show us all how to unlock it!

Juan Antonio Martínez and a team of researchers at the University of Alcalá de Henares taught a group of volunteers (and themselves) to make palate clicks similar to those used by dolphins — although at a much slower rate. The series of protocols they developed then called for subjects to learn to aim their own sounds, and then to recognize their echos to identify objects around them.

The scientists promise, though, that you don’t need to be blind (like famous echolocaters Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood) to awaken your latent echolocation skills. Martínez tells SINC:

Two hours per day for a couple of weeks are enough to distinguish whether you have an object in front of you, and ithin another two weeks you can tell the difference between trees and a pavement.

In fact, the scientists who taught themselves echolocation can now detect far more than just the terrain ahead of them: they can identify bones and even objects hidden in a bag.
They hope that their techniques can be put to use in the future by firefighters, rescue workers, people lost in fog or those lost in bat-filled caves in West Virginia.

Ant colonies are often part of bigger “mega colonies” that share genetic traits and will not make war on each other. One colony got so big it now rivals the human population in its reach, covering most of the planet.

According to BBC News:

In Europe, one vast colony of Argentine ants is thought to stretch for 6,000km (3,700 miles) along the Mediterranean coast, while another in the US, known as the “Californian large”, extends over 900km (560 miles) along the coast of California. A third huge colony exists on the west coast of Japan.

While ants are usually highly territorial, those living within each super-colony are tolerant of one another, even if they live tens or hundreds of kilometres apart. Each super-colony, however, was thought to be quite distinct.

But it now appears that billions of Argentine ants around the world all actually belong to one single global mega-colony. Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles . . . “The enormous extent of this population is paralleled only by human society,” the researchers write in the journal Insect Sociaux, in which they report their findings.

The real question is, do the ants have a plan?