interesting #1

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"I was already puzzled by the evolution of large brains in cephalopods, and this discovery made the questions more acute. What is the point of building a complex brain like that if your life is over in a year or two? Why invest in a process of learning about the world if there is no time to put that information to use? An octopus’s or cuttlefish’s life is rich in experience, but it is incredibly compressed.

The particular puzzle of octopus life span opens up a more general one. Why do animals age? And why do they age so differently? A scruffy-looking fish that inhabits the same patch of sea as my cephalopods has relatives who live to 200 years of age. This seems extraordinarily unfair: A dull-looking fish lives for centuries while the cuttlefish, in their chromatic splendor, and the octopuses, in their inquisitive intelligence, are dead before they are 2? There are monkeys the size of a mouse that can live for 15 years, and hummingbirds that can live for over 10. Nautiluses (who are also cephalopods) can live for 20 years. A recent Nature paper reported that despite continuing medical advances, humans appear to have reached a rough plateau at around 115 years, though a few people will edge beyond it. The life spans of animals seem to lack all rhyme or reason.

We tend to think about aging as a matter of bodies wearing out, as automobiles do. But the analogy is not a good one. An automobile’s original parts will indeed wear out, but an adult human is not operating with his or her original parts. Like all animals, we are made of cells that are continually taking in nutrients and dividing, replacing old parts with new ones. If you keep replacing the parts of an automobile with new ones, there is no reason it should ever stop running."


"In no other country that participated in the PISA survey is the difference in test results between immigrant students and non-immigrant students so flagrant as in Flanders, Belgium." 

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