tagged w/ Breeding
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It’s official: Ellen Ripley is the most badass female movie character of all time. So now the only question that remains is a simple one: Will we ever see her again? “You know, Fox was going to do another one,” Sigourney Weaver said to us recently while accepting Ripley’s honor. “They had it written. Joss Whedon wrote it.”
As Weaver remembered it, however, the script from the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” mastermind just didn’t rock her world. “It took place on earth,” she explained. “Which, I have to say, just really didn’t interest me. And I just felt that every time we went out there, we needed to have a really original piece.”
Which is a shame, because Weaver said that at the time she was perfectly willing to take on the Aliens once again. “I was all for going back to the original planet; I thought that would be interesting,” she explained. “But I was alone in that; we couldn’t really agree on what would be interesting.”
Soon afterwards, Fox turned their attention to casting a different leading character opposite the Alien, and Weaver’s days as Ripley may have been shut down for good. “Once they were committed to ‘Alien vs. Predator’…” she trailed off. “If you don’t respect the creature - I haven’t seen them - but it just becomes too hum-drum.”
Still, Weaver told us that although she isn’t sitting by the phone these days, she does feel like Ripley still needs a proper send-off. And if somebody could ever write a great Alien script (that presumably wasn’t set on planet Earth), she’d be willing to read it.
“Even in twenty years, if someone came to me and said, ‘This is the story, and it’s a really interesting story using that world’ [I’d do it]. I think it’s an amazing saga,” the 59-year-old actress reasoned. “I don’t sit around thinking, ‘Oh I want to do another Alien,’ but it does feel slightly unfinished to me. But that has a lot to do with Fox, so it wouldn’t surprise me if another generation at Fox, looking at what they have, would [make it work].”
“There have been lots of ‘Alien’ impersonators, but there is something about [that first] one,” she said of Ripley’s original film, as well as the franchise it spawned. “I just don’t feel that it’s quite finished.”It’s official: Ellen Ripley is the most badass female movie character of all... more
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gooma2
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3 years ago
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Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds out a dog biscuit.
"Henry!" he says. Henry is a big black schnauzer-poodle mix--a schnoodle, in the words of his owner, Tracy Kivell, another Duke anthropologist. Kivell holds on to Henry's collar so that he can only gaze at the biscuit.
"You got it?" Hare asks Henry. Hare then steps back until he's standing between a pair of inverted plastic cups on the floor. He quickly puts the hand holding the biscuit under one cup, then the other, and holds up both empty hands. Hare could run a very profitable shell game. No one in the room--neither dog nor human--can tell which cup hides the biscuit.
Henry could find the biscuit by sniffing the cups or knocking them over. But Hare does not plan to let him have it so easy. Instead, he simply points at the cup on the right. Henry looks at Hare's hand and follows the pointed finger. Kivell then releases the leash, and Henry walks over to the cup that Hare is pointing to. Hare lifts it to reveal the biscuit reward.
Henry the schnoodle just did a remarkable thing. Understanding a pointed finger may seem easy, but consider this: while humans and canines can do it naturally, no other known species in the animal kingdom can. Consider too all the mental work that goes into figuring out what a pointed finger means: paying close attention to a person, recognizing that a gesture reflects a thought, that another animal can even have a thought. Henry, as Kivell affectionately admits, may not be "the sharpest knife in the drawer," but compared to other animals, he's a true scholar.
It's no coincidence that the two species that pass Hare's pointing test also share a profound cross-species bond. Many animals have some level of social intelligence, allowing them to coexist and cooperate with other members of their species. Wolves, for example--the probable ancestors of dogs--live in packs that hunt together and have a complex hierarchy. But dogs have evolved an extraordinarily rich social intelligence as they've adapted to life with us. All the things we love about our dogs--the joy they seem to take in our presence, the many ways they integrate themselves into our lives--spring from those social skills. Hare and others are trying to figure out how the intimate coexistence of humans and dogs has shaped the animal's remarkable abilities.
Trying to plumb the canine mind is a favorite pastime of dog owners. "Everyone feels like an expert on their dog," says Alexandra Horowitz, a cognitive scientist at Barnard College and author of the new book Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell, and Know. But scientists had carried out few studies to test those beliefs--until now.
This fall, Hare is opening the Duke Canine Cognition Center, where he is going to test hundreds of dogs brought in by willing owners. Marc Hauser, a cognitive psychologist at Harvard University, recently opened his own such research lab and has 1,000 dogs lined up as subjects. Other facilities are operating in the U.S. and Europe.
The work of these researchers won't just satisfy the curiosity of the millions of people who love their dogs; it may also lead to more effective ways to train ordinary dogs or--more important--working dogs that can sniff out bombs and guide the blind. At a deeper level, it may even tell us something about ourselves.Brian Hare, assistant professor of evolutionary anthropology at Duke University, holds... more
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Favourable breeding conditions over the autumn mean that spiders and daddy longlegs have thrived this year.
In the first public survey, hundreds of members of the public overcame arachnophobia to record 13,265 sightings. Buglife, the insect conservation charity that organised the count, said this equated to 750 million spiders around the country - or at least 30 spiders in every house or garden.
Read more : http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6460539/More-than-750-million-spiders-in-UK.htmlFavourable breeding conditions over the autumn mean that spiders and daddy longlegs... more
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eva2
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2 years ago
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The ability of endangered blue whales to gather and breed may be being put at risk by equipment used to search for oil and gas lauded for its low environmental impact.The ability of endangered blue whales to gather and breed may be being put at risk by... more
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Did you know that it's legal to own a big cat such as a lion or tiger in over half of the United States? Watch this video and find out if it's legal in your state, to help us end this abuse visit: http://www.bigcatrescue.org/laws/statelawsexoticcats.htmDid you know that it's legal to own a big cat such as a lion or tiger in over... more
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BigCat
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2 years ago
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This is a short documentry of what it takes to get ready for and put on a livestock breeders sale. It features Forster Farms Simentals.This is a short documentry of what it takes to get ready for and put on a livestock... more
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An extinct Galapagos tortoise species could walk again, scientists believe.
Researchers report finding relatives of Geochelone elephantopus alive and well. By cross-breeding these living tortoise, scientists might be able to re-create the extinct species - though it could take a century. "We might need three or four generations to do this," Gisella Caccone from Yale University in New Haven, US, stated. "But in theory it could be done, and I think it's pretty exciting to bring back from the dead a genome that we thought was gone."
The distribution of related tortoises between the islands was one of the pieces of evidence Charles Darwin used in formulating his theory of evolution. But of 15 known Galapagos species, four have since gone extinct - elephantopus less than two decades after Darwin visited the island.
An extinct Galapagos tortoise species could walk again, scientists believe.... more
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The first ever dog to be successfully cloned has reportedly shown everything 'down below' is working fine, after he has become a father to nine pups. He managed to produce 10 puppies altogether but unfortunately one didn't make it.
Snuppy, an Afghan hound 'impregnated two cloned bitches of the same breed through artificial insemination' according to a Seoul National University research team' statement.
The team's leader said "This is the first time in the world that puppies have been born from cloned parents."
"This shows the reproductive ability of a cloned dog.'The first ever dog to be successfully cloned has reportedly shown everything... more
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Drug addicts are breeding dogs to raise cash to fund their habits, according to Scottish animal welfare charities.
Now rescue shelters across the country are being swamped with Staffordshire Bull Terriers that have been sold to or bred by irresponsible owners.
The Scottish SPCA is housing 57 of the dogs now and one group in Angus said more than half of the 70 dogs it had taken in this year were of that breed.
Ian Robb, from Help for Abandoned Animals near Arbroath, said: "The wrong type of people in society are breeding them for their own gains and then dogs are just being abandoned. People who are abusing drugs are breeding the dogs to raise funds to buy the substances they're abusing and this just seems to be happening all over Britain at the moment."
Drug addicts are breeding dogs to raise cash to fund their habits, according to... more
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