Judy+Lee

** WEEK 2 **
== i remembered from a video we watched from TED talk, the speaker was talking about science being capable of bringing back extinct species. starting from more recently extinct species, such as the tasmanian tigers, scientists are developing ways to use the available DNA codes from the animals to try to bring back these animals. one way that scientists are figuring out is to use frozen sperm from animals such as mammoths from over 10,000 years ago. they have already tested this on mice, and the sperm was able to produce healthy offsprings when joined with a mouse egg. == a wooly mammoth

=== however, there are some downsides to this proposal. brining back mammoths may not be a good idea, because their DNA is from so long ago that they might be broken up. additionally, they do not have a habitat to live in and they might mess up the food chain. i believe that although it would be amazing to bring back some extinct species, the animals might have health problems and not be able to survive for a long period of time. so far experiments to bring back the mammoths have been unsuccessful. ===

[|article about bringing back extinct species]

=== Researchers are planning to join the frozen mammoth sperm with an egg from a closely related species, like an elephant. This, however, would create only an elephant-mammoth hybrid. After repeating the test many times, scientists hope to make a near-original mammoth. ===

lets be compassionate to animals:)



** WEEK 1 **
== Animal cognition is the title given to the study of the mental capacities of non-human animals. I wanted to talk about this because when the students from the Temple School of Pharmacy came to talk to us, I noticed that they used many animals,usually rodents and primates, in order to test the safety and the effectiveness of different drugs. This led me to wonder if those kind of animals could feel pain, and if so, then to what degree. So, when I was researching about pain in animals, i stumbled aross an experiment that caught my attention. This experiment was done by an animal cognition scientist named Irene Pepperberg who studied the intelligence of a parrot, named Alex, and taught the bird to communicate in human language. == Here is a video about the experiment: media type="youtube" key="SzPiTwDE0bE" width="425" height="350"
 * its kinda lengthy, but its interesting to watch how smart Alex is:)

[|also here is an article from National Geographic that is about animal intelligence]

==** as other pet owners may agree, animals have feelings and emotions. Moreover, humans and animals cognition have much in common. following are some of the major areas of research in animal cognition: **==
 * ===Perception--like humans, non-human animals process data from eyes, ears, and other sensory organs to acheive a usful image of the environment. More interesting are those perceptual processes that differ from, or go beyond those found in humans.===
 * ===Attention-- attention refers to metal processes that select relevant information, inhibit irrelevant information, and switch among these as situation demands.===
 * ===concepts and categories--concepts allow humans and animals to organize the world into functional groups; the groups may be composed of perceptually similar objects or events, diverse things that have the same function, relationships between same and different, or relations among such thing as analogies.===
 * ===Memory--The categories that have been developed to analyze human memory have been applied to the study of animal memory, and some of the phenomena characteristic of human short term memory have been detected in animals, particularly monkeys===
 * ===Spatial Cognition--The ability to properly navigate and search through the environment is a critical task for many animals.===
 * ===Tools and Weapon Use--Some species, such as the Woodpecker Finch of the Galapagos Islands, use particular tools as an essential part of their foraging behavior. Research in 2007 shows that chimpanzees in the Fongoli savannah sharpen sticks to use as spears when hunting, considered the first evidence of systematic use of weapons in a species other than humans===
 * ===Reasoning and Problem Solving--It is clear that animals of quite a range of species are capable of solving a range of problems that are argued to involve abstract reasoning===
 * ===Language--The modeling of human language in animals is known as animal language research. In addition to the ape-language experiments mentioned above, there have also been more or less successful attempts to teach language or language-like behavior to some non-primate species, including parrots and Great Spotted Woodpeckers.===
 * ===Consciousness--The sense in which animals can be said to have consciousness or a self-concept has been hotly debated; it is often referred to as the debate over animal minds.===
 * ===Mathematics--Some animals are capable of distinguishing between different amounts and rudimentary counting. Elephants have been known to perform simple arithmetic, and rhesus monkeys can count. Young chimpanzees have outperformed human college students in tasks requiring remembering numbers.===