Sister blog of Physicists of the Caribbean in which I babble about non-astronomy stuff, because everyone needs a hobby

Friday, 18 September 2015

The chicken that walks like a dinosaur

"Dr Rodrigo Vasquez, from the University of Chile, received the biology Ig Nobel for the crucial observation that if you raise a chicken with a weighted, artificial tail stuck to its backside, it will walk like a dinosaur."
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-34278595

2 comments:

  1. "Science" has lost it's way. So many things wrong. Since when does anyone know how a dinosaur walked? Trying to prove evolution is the same as trying to push a square peg through a round whole. There is no mechanism for evolution so you cannot get written directives that are not there.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Firstly, this is the *Ig*Nobels. They're not meant to be taken entirely seriously.

    Secondly, if you read the article it says :
    "As comical as they sound, these experiments offer a rare chance to explore how extinct species like Tyrannosaurus rex might have moved. It is impossible to know for sure, of course, but palaeontologists had made some educated guesses - which are now closely matched by the gait of these stick-tailed chickens."
    So of course no-one knows for certain exactly how dinosaurs really walked, but a chicken with a tail stuck on it apparently walks in a similar way to models predicting how they might have walked.

    Thirdly, I'm not going to debate evolution with you.

    ReplyDelete

Due to a small but consistent influx of spam, comments will now be checked before publishing. Only egregious spam/illegal/racist crap will be disapproved, everything else will be published.

Navigating the AI Hype And Hysterics

Back in the days when AI development meant working towards something like an artificial human, I had three rules to bear in mind when readi...