Evening open thread…Extinct Frogs, Roosters, and A-Holes

Good Evening

I’ve got two sick munchkins, both of them have the flu. And it is not the…oh you’re sick…looks like you have a flu. It is, swab the nose, positive result, you definitely have the flu…so the links will be short and quick. (Hopefully they will not be repeats.)

They have cloned a certain type of extinct frog, Scientists Resurrect Bonkers Extinct Frog That Gives Birth Through Its Mouth | Popular Science

Gastric-Brooding Frog Australian Government Department of the Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts

In 1983, the world lost one of its weirdest frogs. The gastric-brooding frog, native to tiny portions of Queensland, Australia, gave birth through its mouth, the only frog to do so (in fact, very few other animals in the entire animal kingdom do this–it’s mostly this frog and a few fish). It succumbed to extinction due to mostly non-human-related causes–parasites, loss of habitat, invasive weeds, a particular kind of fungus. There were two subspecies, the northern and souther gastric-brooding frog, and they both became extinct in the mid-80s sometime.

Except–what if they didn’t?

Taking place at the University of Newcastle, the quest to revive the gastric-brooding frog became known as the Lazarus Project. Using somatic-cell nuclear transfer (SCNT), a method for cloning, the project has achieved the major step forward of creating an early embryo of the extinct frog. Essentially, they found a related frog–the great barred frog, which also lives in Queensland and has cool eye markings, like it’s wearing sunglasses–deactivated its eggs, and replaced them with eggs taken from the extinct frog.

Even though the gastric-brooding frog has been extinct for decades, it’s possible to do this because individual specimens were kept preserved in, believe it or not, everyday deep freezers. When going through somatic-cell nuclear transfer, the eggs began to divide and form into the early embryo stage.

They did not last long…but it is a start. The scientist think it is a technical issue and hope to get it right soon. If you want to know about how these frogs give birth, check out the rest of the article at the link.

In other animal news, Cock-A-Doodle-Doo! Roosters Really Do Know What Time It Is | Circadian Rhythms | LiveScience

The rooster’s morning cock-a-doodle-doo is driven by an internal clock, finds new research, suggesting the male chickens really know the time of day.

The study, detailed today (March 18) in the journal Current Biology, found that roosters put under constant light conditions will still crow at the crack of dawn.

Past studies have found that a myriad of animal behaviors are driven by an internal clock: at night, a dip in insulin causes humans to process food more slowly, and even blind cave fish use a circadian clock to tell time.

“‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’ symbolizes the break of dawn in many countries,” said study author Takashi Yoshimura of Nagoya University, in a statement. “But it wasn’t clear whether crowing is under the control of a biological clock or is simply a response to external stimuli.”

[...]

To find out Yoshimura and his colleagues put 40 roosters in a setting with constant light, then recorded when they crowed.

Sure enough, the chickens crowed at daybreak regardless of the light conditions. The roosters also crowed at other times of day and in response light and the crows of their fellow chickens, but those behaviors were much stronger at daybreak. The findings suggest that an internal circadian clock, rather than external conditions, drive the behavior.

See, I was going to call this post Extinct Frogs, Cocks and Assholes…but I did not want to bring a lot of fetish trolls to the blog.

Anyway, here is the asshole link:  Daily Caller’s Menendez Smear Campaign Implodes As More Dominican Women Recant Their Stories | Blog | Media Matters for America

In another devastating blow to the credibility of The Daily Caller, the Associated Press is reporting that Dominican police have determined that three women who said they had sex with Sen. Robert Menendez for money were actually paid to make the false accusations.

In November, the Caller reported that two Dominican prostitutes had told the outlet in interviews that Menendez had paid them for sex and that the senator’s office had denied the charges. The Caller has since published dozens of pieces furthering the accusations, even as the story started to crumble under scrutiny.

[...]

On March 4, the Washington Post reported that a woman who had alleged that she had sex with Menendez had recanted her story and claimed in an affidavit that she was paid to lie about the senator. The Caller responded by claiming that the woman in the Post story was not one of the women they had spoken to for their own story.

Since then, several outlets including ABC News, the Star Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), and The New York Post, have stated that they had been approached with the story by Republican operatives who provided them access to three women offering the allegations in the months leading up to Menendez’s 2012 re-election, but had decided not to run it because they did not find the women’s stories credible.

Yup, bullshit…what else would you expect from the assholes at the Daily Caller?

This is an open thread.