mate

A female mouse that is. You may recall a post from several years ago when we talked about how rats seem to "laugh" when tickled. Back in April 2015 researchers at Duke University presented a video that showed male mice "singing" a tune after either smelling the urine of a female mouse or being in her presence. The sounds were recorded using a microphone designed to capture 35 to 125 kilohertz (kz), which is a much higher frequency than we can hear: Recent research published in eLife shows that female mice will sing back if interested in the male pursuing her. You can listen to a clip of a…
See here to see why you might want to install the Mate flavor of Ubuntu 14.10. Then, install it and consider doing these things. Get your system up to date. Yes, yes, you just installed it but that install image was old(ish). Update and upgrade now: First, you probably want to open the Software Center, to to Software and Updates, and enable all the Ubuntu Software Sourcews (other than source and the CDRom option). Then: sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade Go to Preferences/Additional Drivers and then allow additional drivers, and pick a proprietary driver for your graphics card…
With Ubuntu's release a few weeks ago of Ubuntu 14.10, Mate has now become an official flavor of Ubuntu. There are two pieces of bad news that relate to this that we'll get out of the way. First Ubuntu's default distribution, which uses the Unity Desktop by default, broke a key Linux feature. If you install Ubuntu with Unity, you can't easily change your desktop. Or, if you try, you'll break your system. Ubuntu seems to want you to use Unity no matter what. Second, while at one time all flavors of Ubuntu were treated more or less alike (though the "Default" was gnome) now, the non-Unity…
Scientists in the jungles of southern India have discovered 14 new species of "dancing frogs" many of which are unfortunately already endangered. DNA analyses have shown that these new species are members of an ancient genus that has been around since the time of the dinosaurs, Micrixalus. There are now 24 known species of dancing frogs. Considering that males outnumber females 100 to 1, these acrobatics are important to attract mates. The tiny frogs are only about the size of a walnut.
Out on the grassy plains of Kenya's Masai Mara National Reserve, a group of six female topi antelope (Damaliscus lunatus) walk across the savanna. It is the time of the annual rut - a one and a half month period in which most males control small patches of land and try to attract adult females which, for one day, are in estrus. The small group walks by one of the lone males, but just as they reach the edge of his territory he snorts an alarm. It means that somewhere, out ahead of them, a predator waits to pounce on any topi foolish enough to blunder towards it, and so the females stay close…
Walk through the rainforests of Ecuador and you might encounter a beautiful butterfly called Heliconius cydno. It's extremely varied in its colours. Even among one subspecies, H.cydno alithea, you can find individuals with white wingbands and those with yellow. Despite their different hues, they are still the same species... but probably not for much longer. Even though the two forms are genetically similar and live in the same area, Nicola Chamberlain from Harvard University has found that one of them - the yellow version - has developed a preference for mating with butterflies of its own…