Bird Brain?

Dodos Were Not So Dumb After

All
The dodo is an extinct flightless bird whose name has become synonymous with
stupidity.
But it turns out that the dodo was no bird brain, but instead a reasonably brainy bird.
Scientists said on Wednesday they figured out the dodo's brain size and structure
based on an analysis of a well-preserved skull from a museum collection. They
determined its brain was not unusually small but rather completely in proportion to its
body size.
They also found the dodo may have had a better sense of smell than most birds, with
an enlarged olfactory region of the brain. This trait, unusual for birds, probably let it sniff
out ripe fruit to eat.
The research suggests the dodo, rather than being stupid, boasted at least the same
intelligence as its fellow members of the pigeon and dove family.
"If we take brain size - or rather, volume, as we measured here - as a proxy for
intelligence, then the dodo was as smart as a common pigeon," paleontologist Eugenia
Gold of Stony Brook University in New York state said. "Common pigeons are actually
smarter than they get credit for, as they were trained as message carriers during the
world wars."

FILE - A skeleton of a Mauritius Dodo bird which was found in a cave at the
foot of Le Pouce Mountain at Pailles, in 1900, stands at an exhibition in the Mauritius Institute Museum in Port Louis, Dec. 27, 2005.

The dodo lived on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius. The weird-looking, groundnesting bird had a pointed beak and rounded head, stood about three feet (one meter)
tall and weighed up to about 50 pounds (23 kg).
Driven into extinction largely by human hunting, the last dodo was seen in 1662.
Gold said dodos exhibited no fear of humans when people reached Mauritius in the
1500s.
"Why would they fear something they've never seen? They had no natural predators on
the islands before humans arrived. Because of this, sailors herded the birds onto their
boats for fresh meat later in their voyages. Their willingness to be driven onto the boats
is, I think, what led to people thinking they were dumb. It is rather unfair," Gold said.

New Study Suggests We Are Alone in Universe

Since the universe is so huge, most astronomers think that there must be a planet,
somewhere out there, similar to Earth. But a computer model created at Swedens
Uppsala University says that our planet may in fact be the only one supporting life.
Astrophysicist Erik Zackrisson combined all human knowledge about how the universe
was created, from the Big Bang to the present, and fed it to a powerful computer. The
machine came up with a concrete number of what we already knew. There are about
700 quintillion planets, or 7 followed by 20 zeros.
The unexpected by-product of the calculation was that Earth may be unique, actually an
aberration among myriads of dead, uninhabitable worlds.
Taking into account all known laws of physics and our knowledge about how planets are
formed, it looks like that process is capable of producing only planets that cannot
sustain life in any form.
Probability suggests that just in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, there must be about 50
billion planets similar to ours. But according to Zackrissons model, Earth is a statistical
anomaly.
Scientists say that even if further research proves this theory wrong, it is true that the
planets like ours are rare and very far between.
The new study was published online and submitted to The Astrophysical Journal.