This week in science: Bird brains

post from Daily Kos on 15 September 2012 09:00:06 AM. © Daily Kos

The video above was created by stitching together pieces of NASA imagery using computer effects. Via TPM?which has been doing a bang up job on science lately?the creator explains:

?I was motivated to create this video from the first moment that I saw the original four frames-per-second footage,? Canning wrote to TPM in a Reddit message. ?I could visualize exactly what steps would need to be taken to make it as close as possible to smooth HD video.? Still, Canning admits that the video, while strikingly vivid and seemingly realistic, is not a precise view of what it would look and sound like to land on Mars.
?I believe that my video is more accurate in some regards and less in others,? Canning wrote, saying he sacrificed accuracy in color tone and through creating the intermediate frames.

R. I. P. Vile Rat, aka Sean Smith, technogamer extraordinaire.
Fantastic pic of our stormy sun in action!
Bloggers here and elsewhere have done a first-rate job at keeping us informed on Arctic sea ice loss. Now some scientists are worried it's just the tip of the iceberg:
In short, the melting effect makes it much harder to quantify the amount of ice there is and the satellite tends to see more ice than there actually is. That's why monitoring groups such as NSIDC or the university of Bremen try to compensate with weather filters or by calculating the ice extent over a number of days rather than on individual ones.
Wow! Jupiter takes one for the team!
How might a bird deal with human faces? Pretty good, it turns out (W/video):
In a more recent study, Dr. Marzluff and colleagues used brain scans to demonstrate that crows not only remember faces, but they can also remember how they were treated by various people.