Wait, are lightsabers flat, like a real saber? (1:31)
I never noticed that before. I thought they were round, like the toys.

You ever get the sense that NBC is targeting a particular demographic with the Fallon revamp of the Tonight Show?
..maybe it's just me.

Scary.
..and it looked like an episode of Star Trek: "Shields up!"

My head hurts too much to read the paper right now, but I suspect that most of this can be attributed to learning, and that a 'causal understanding' is not being demonstrated here.

The important figure to look at here is Fig 3, specifically the first trial in figure 3, before the crows had a change to learn each particular task. Performance is, slightly, better than chance for each task except tasks D and F. But these are NOT naive birds. There are only 6 crows used in this experiment, and before the experiment they were all trained to perform a water displacement task for food reward. The better than chance performance on the first trial for some of the tasks could, and probably is, a result of the similarity between the 'correct' choice in that task and the training condition.
A: A water filled tube is more like the water filled tube in the training condition, than is a sand filled tube.
B: Heavy blocks are more like the heavy stones used in the training condition than are the light blocks.
C: Solid black weights are more like the black stones used in the training condition than are the hollow cages.
E: A nearly full tube is more similar to the training condition (which took only two stones to reach the food) than a nearly empty tube.
Tasks D and F, where the crows did not perform better than chance, have choices much more difficult to distinguish from the training condition (with both choices in F being nearly identical to the training condition).
What's more, the sample size is tiny, with a max of 6 birds for any task, and only 4 of these same (very experienced) birds for tasks E and F. You cannot do meaningful statistics with a sample size of 4.
If someone who has actually read the whole paper wants to show me how I'm wrong please do. Until then, I think the editors at PLoS ONE need to be more careful with their choice of reviewers. The journal, although noble in it's stated mission, is still young, and its reputation is still fragile.
"Our results indicate that New Caledonian crows possess a sophisticated, but incomplete, understanding of the causal properties of displacement, rivalling that of 5–7 year old children." How on earth did they let that pass! They know the press will have a field-day with misleading statements like that.

Shiny, from the context in which Volump used the quote, it really seems that he did understand what Lumbsten was saying, and was accurately pointing out that it is incorrect, or at least misleading. The human eye has a pretty significant blind spot as the result of the nervous connections having to pass through the layer of photoreceptors. While there are some who argue that the layout of the vertebrate eye helps to cope with damage cause by UV radiation, it doesn't make sense to argue that it functions this way because it is 'designed' for use out of water. The eyes of fishes have the same design (...extremely good evidence for evolutionary relatedness), and fish, of course, usually use their eyes underwater.
A stronger argument suggesting an adaptive trade-off between the costs of having nervous connections in front of the photoreceptors and some other benefits of this anatomy would be that the arrangement of the vertebrate eye allows for the photoreceptors to be closer to their blood supply in the choriod.

...the question he should of asked is how on earth was he granted a PhD?
I mean, believe in creation if you like... but to no be able to answer the questions posed by that graduate student means that you do not have a graduate level understanding of evolutionary theory.

It'll be fun when his wife sees this:
"Bobby-Dale! You said you had to swerve to 'void a baby chipmunk!!"

...and here I was all this time thinking that she was still just 'developing'.

from his electricity bill, I'll bet the cops think this guy is cooking meth.

sooo..., ..the hinges on the doors of the Universe are on the wrong side?
(2:30)

..actually, it took the stairs.

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Singapore-attempts-to-raise-birthrate-with-rap-song

thank you... it's not really something that seems to get better with time.

12/31/93... the show I decided not to go to...
.."I'll see them next time they come to town."
regret

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P3xPlishXw