Mongooses are a species of small carnivorans from southern Eurasia and mainland Africa. Mongooses are commonly terrestrial and many are active during the day. Some species lead predominantly solitary lives, seeking out food only for themselves, while others travel in groups, sharing food among group members.

The Meerkat is a species of Mongoose, a small, diurnal mammal that forages for invertebrates in open country. Its behavior and small size make it enticing to larger carnivores and birds of prey. However, it can capture and consume small migrating birds.

Sugar states were established in the Caribbean during the 1600s and 1700s to exploit profits from the high demand for sugar in Europe. The Europeans brought unintended new species such as rats in ships. Initially, the rats were rife and destroyed up to a quarter of the annual crop of sugarcane.

In 1872, a Jamaican sugar planter, Mr. W. B. Espeut, imported small Indian mongoose (Herpestes auropunctatus) and released them on his plantation. The rat populations were reduced, so other farmers brought them to release into other areas, including Puerto Rico, Barbados and Cuba.

The Buddhist god of wealth Vaisravana, or Dzambala for Tibetans, is frequently depicted holding a mongoose that is spitting jewels from its mouth.

Tabebuia chrysantha is a native tree of intertropical broadleaf deciduous forests above the Tropic of Capricorn. It is know as Canaguate in Northern Colombia, as Tajibo in Bolivia, as Ipe Amarelo in Brazil, and as Araguaney in Venezuela.

It is widely used as ornamental tree in the tropics for landscaping gardens, public squares, and boulevards due to its impressive and colorful flowering. Many flowers appear on the leafless stems at the end of the dry season, making the floral display more conspicuous.

The deep yellow tubular flowers are up to three inches in length and are produced in dense clusters, covering the entire canopy of the tree. The sweetly fragrant flowers last for a month or more, and when they fall the ground beneath is decorated with a yellow carpet.

Since flowering and fruiting take place in dry season, from February to April, the seeds can take advantage of early rains. If rain season is delayed, the tree may flower and fruit a second time. They are useful as honey plants for bees, and are popular with certain hummingbirds.

Melaleuca quinquenervia, commonly known as Niaouli or Broad-leaved Paperbark or the Paper Bark Tea Tree, is a medium sized tree of the allspice family, Myrtaceae. The plant is native to coastal Eastern Australia, in New South Wales and Queensland. It has become naturalized in the Everglades in Florida, where it is considered a serious weed by the USDA.

Melaleuca is used traditionally by indigenous Australians. A brew is made from the bruised young aromatic leaves to treat colds, headaches and general sickness. The steam distilled leaf oil of the cineole chemotype is also used externally for coughs, colds, neuralgia, and rheumatism. A nerolidol and linalool chemotype is also cultivated and distilled on a small scale for use in perfumery.

The flowers serve as a rich source of nectar for other organisms, including fruit bats, a wide range of insect and bird species such as the Scaly-breasted Lorikeet (Trichoglossus chlorolepidotus), the Grey-headed Flying Fox (Pteropus poliocephalus) and the Little Red Flying-fox (P. scapulatus), which all consume the nectar and flowers.

Melaleuca is known for its capability to withstand floods and droughts. If there is a canopy gap created by a flood or some other disturbance Melaleuca will establish to make use of the extra light. In physically disturbed sites, flourishing invaders have high colonization abilities. Melaleuca is constantly thinning itself of small branches and twigs and this causes many seeds to fall all the time, along with the detrius.

In Jewish mysticism, the Chamber of Guf, also called the Otzar, is the Hall of Souls located in the Seventh Heaven. Every human soul is held to emanate from the Guf. The Talmud teaches that the Messiah will not come until the Guf is emptied of all its souls.

In keeping with other Jewish legends that envision souls as bird-like, the Guf is sometimes described as a columbarium, or birdhouse. Folklore says sparrows can see the soul’s descent and this explains their joyous chirping.

The mystic significance of the Guf is that each person is important and has a unique role which only each person, with their unique soul, can fulfill. Even a newborn baby brings the Messiah closer simply by being born.

The peculiar idiom of describing the treasury of souls may be connected to the mythic tradition of Adam Kadmon, the primordial man. Adam Kadmon was a supernal being, androgynous and equal in size with the universe. According to Kabbalah, every human soul is a fragment cycling out of the great world soul of Adam Kadmon. Hence, every human soul comes from the Chamber of Guf.

Hammocks are dense stands of hardwood trees that grow on natural rises just few inches higher than surrounding marshland that is otherwise too wet to support them. They are formed gradually over thousands of years rising in a wet area through the deposits of their own decomposing organic material.

Because of their slight elevation, hammocks rarely flood. Acids from decaying plants dissolve the limestone around each tree island, creating a natural moat that protects the hammock plants from fire. Shaded from the sun by the tall trees, ferns and airplants thrive in the moisture-laden air inside the hammock.

As a result they typically have a large and diverse density of various forms of plant and animal life. They appear as teardrop-shaped islands shaped by the flow of water in the middle of a slough. Many tropical species such as mahogany and cocoplum grow alongside the more familiar temperate species of live oak and red maple.

Hammocks are one of the habitats found in the Florida Everglades, as well as in more northerly marshy areas of Florida such as the Gulf Hammock Wildlife Management Area in Levy County and the Steinhatchee Wildlife Management Area southeast of Cooks Hammock in Lafayette County.

An asclepeion was a healing temple, sacred to the god Asclepius, in ancient Greece and Rome. Starting around 350 BC, the cult of Asclepius became increasingly popular. Pilgrims flocked to asclepieia to be healed, slept overnight, and reported their dreams to a priest the following day. He prescribed a cure, often a visit to the baths or a gymnasium.

Asclepeia provided carefully controlled spaces conducive to healing. In the Asclepieion of Epidaurus, three large marble boards preserved the names, case histories, complaints, and cures of about 70 patients. Some of the surgical cures listed, such as the opening of an abdominal abscess or the removal of traumatic foreign material, are realistic enough to have taken place with the patient in a dream-like state of induced sleep known as enkoimesis, similar to anesthesia, induced with the help of soporific substances such as opium.

Since snakes were sacred to Asclepius, they were often used in healing rituals. Non-venomous snakes were left to crawl on the floor in dormitories where the sick and injured slept. Statues of Hygieia, the goddess of cleanliness, were covered by women’s hair and pieces of Babylonian clothing. According to inscriptions, the same sacrifices were offered at Paros.

Hippocrates is said to have received his medical training at an asclepieion on the isle of Kos. Prior to becoming the personal physician to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius, Galen treated and studied at the famed asclepieion at Pergamon.

Neural plasticity is the key to changes in intelligence. It occurs during short-term memory when a stimulus with a high frequency of activation causes improvement of a brain cell’s sensitivity to signals received from an associated cell. This change in neural connectivity allows information to be more easily processed, as the neural connection associated with that information becomes stronger.

It has been shown to play a large role in the development of the senses. For instance, blind patients have learned to “see” through tactile stimulation of their backs and tongues. The brain rewires the visual cortex to further process and interpret tactile stimulation in replacement of eyesight.

There are numerous behavioral factors that affect intellectual development. The key is neural plasticity, which is caused by experience-driven electrical activation of neurons. This experience-driven activation causes axons to sprout new branches and develop new presynaptic terminals. These new branches often lead to greater mental processing in different areas.

Those with a belief in fixed intelligence show less improvement on cognitive testing than people with a belief in neural plasticity, and a focus on performance goals and proving intelligence causes negative feedback and failure. Those who focus on flexible and expansive learning goals rebound well from occasional failure or feedback. By focusing on challenging tasks to expand intelligence instead of working to prove intelligence, neural plasticity allows greater intellectual capacity.

A chronotype is an attribute of animals and human beings describing the time of the day their physical functions such as body temperature, cognitive faculties, eating and sleeping reach a certain level. This phenomenon refers to people as early birds or night owls, where morning people wake up early and are most alert in the first part of the day, and evening people are most alert in the late evening hours and prefer to go to bed late.

Humans are normally diurnal creatures that are active in the daytime. As with most other diurnal animals, human activity-rest patterns are endogenously controlled by circadian rhythms. Most people are neither evening nor morning types but lie somewhere in between. Estimates vary, but up to half are either morning or evening people. People who share a chronotype, morningness or eveningness, have similar activity pattern timing: sleep, appetite, exercise, study etc.

Normal variation in chronotypes encompasses sleep/wake cycles that are from about two hours earlier to about two hours later than average. Extremes outside of this range can cause a person difficulty in participating in normal work, school and social activities. If a person’s early bird or night owl tendencies are strong and intractable to the point of disallowing normal participation in society, the person is considered to have a circadian rhythm sleep disorder.

The Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire, or MEQ, is used to conduct research on this topic. A short version can be found online. Several other assessment tools have been developed such as the Composite Scale of Morningness, the Lark-Owl Chronotype Indicator, and the Munich Chronotype Questionnaire. Some of these are designed with particular situations in mind, such as shift work scheduling, travel fatigue and jet lag, athletic performance or best timing of medical procedures.