Monthly Archives: October 2016

Pigeons Can Read 4-Letter Words

Bird Behavior, Doves & Chickens
Pigeons (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Pigeons (photo from Wikimedia Commons)

A new study of rock pigeons indicates they can read four-letter words … sort of(*).

Researchers at the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ruhr University in Germany quizzed four pigeons on their orthographic abilities.

According to Science Daily, “In the experiment, pigeons were trained to peck four-letter English words as they came up on a screen, or to instead peck a symbol when a four-letter non-word, such as ‘URSP’ was displayed. … The pigeons correctly identified the new words as words at a rate significantly above chance.”

Eventually the four birds in the experiment recognized 26 to 58 real words and correctly labelled over 8,000 as non-words.  They’re the first non-primate species found to have this ability.

So yes, pigeons know when they’re looking at a real 4-letter word but like naïve children they don’t know what it means.

Learn more about the study here in Science Daily.

 

(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the image to see the original)

(*) The study shows that pigeons can figure out letter-combinations. Pigeons have no reading comprehension so, literally speaking, they cannot read.

Discovery

Plants & Fungi
Wild mignonette, Reseda lutea, found in Lawrence County (photo by Mike Fialkovich)
Wild mignonette, Reseda lutea, found in Lawrence County (photo by Mike Fialkovich)

Last weekend Bob Machesney and Mike Fialkovich were hiking near Slippery Rock Creek in Lawrence County when Bob found some unusual flowers growing on a gravel heap.

Mike knows a lot about plants but these flowers were new to him so he took some pictures — the first two photos shown here — while Bob collected an identification sample for his wife, Dianne.

Dianne identified the plant as wild mignonette (Reseda lutea) and Bonnie Isaac, Botany Collection Manager at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, confirmed that this is indeed a rare find in western Pennsylvania.  It’s a County Record for Lawrence County.

Wild mignonette, Lawrence County (photo by Mike Fialkovich)
Wild mignonette, Lawrence County (photo by Mike Fialkovich, color enhanced to show contrast)

Resada lutea is a biennial or short-lived perennial native to Eurasia that grows in well-drained chalk or limestone soils.  It can spread by root cuttings or seed but it won’t start to grow until the soil is disturbed.  At full height the plant is one to two feet tall.

Blooming from June through September, the flowers have unusual shapes as you can see in this Wikimedia close-up.

Closeup of Reseda lutea flowers in the Netherlands (photo by TeunSpaans via Wikimedia Commons)
Closeup of Reseda lutea flowers in the Netherlands (photo by TeunSpaans via Wikimedia Commons)

Wild mignonette is rare in western Pennsylvania because we don’t have well-drained limestone soil.

It found a home on a gravel heap in Lawrence County, the only well-drained limestone for miles.

 

(photos by Mike Fialkovich. Closeup from Wikimedia Commons; click on the image to see the original)

A Shiny Thing in the Sky

Weather & Sky
International Space Station as seen from Space Shuttle Atlantis, 19 Jul 2011 (photo from NASA via Wikimedia Commons)
International Space Station as seen from Space Shuttle Atlantis, 19 July 2011 (photo from NASA via Wikimedia Commons)

1 October 2016

If it’s clear tonight in Pittsburgh you’ll be able to see the International Space Station (ISS) traverse the sky for six minutes.

At 7:41pm the ISS will appear in the southwest and pass directly overhead on its way northeast at 17,150 miles per hour.  At five miles per second it doesn’t take long to disappear.  Read more here in the Post-Gazette on what and where to look for it.

You don’t have to be in southwestern Pennsylvania to see it.  NASA’s Spot The Station website predicts ISS’s appearances around the world.

Armed with this information you can impress your friends.  Casually looking at the night sky you can say, “Look over there.  In half a minute the International Space Station will appear on the horizon and pass directly overhead.”

A fast-moving shiny thing in the sky.

(photo of the International Space Station as seen from the Space Shuttle Atlantis, 19 July 2011.  Click on the image to see the original)

p.s. Unless they’ve already fixed it, I believe there’s a typo in the Post-Gazette’s 2nd paragraph which says “Monday” but probably means Saturday.