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Category: Biology

How migrating birds use quantum effects to navigate across vast distances

How migrating birds use quantum effects to navigate across vast distances

Peter J. Hore writes: Imagine you are a young Bar-tailed Godwit, a large, leggy shorebird with a long, probing bill hatched on the tundra of Alaska. As the days become shorter and the icy winter looms, you feel the urge to embark on one of the most impressive migrations on Earth: a nonstop transequatorial flight lasting at least seven days and nights across the Pacific Ocean to New Zealand 12,000 kilometers away. It’s do or die. Every year tens of…

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Nick Lane is asking — and answering — vital questions about life

Nick Lane is asking — and answering — vital questions about life

Philip Ball writes: “There is a black hole at the heart of biology,” Nick Lane writes at the start of his 2015 book The Vital Question. “Bluntly put, we do not know why life is the way it is.” It takes some chutzpah to lay down the gauntlet to the life sciences so starkly—to suggest they are engaged more in documenting life than in explaining it. Lane, a professor of evolutionary biochemistry at University College London, doesn’t seem the kind…

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How xenobots reshape our understanding of genetics

How xenobots reshape our understanding of genetics

Philip Ball writes: Where in the embryo does the person reside? Morphogenesis – the formation of the body from an embryo – once seemed so mystifying that scholars presumed the body must somehow already exist in tiny form at conception. In the 17th century, the Dutch microscopist Nicolaas Hartsoeker illustrated this ‘preformationist’ theory by drawing a foetal homunculus tucked into the head of a sperm. This idea finds modern expression in the notion that the body plan is encoded in…

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Bacteria’s immune sensors reveal a novel way to detect viruses

Bacteria’s immune sensors reveal a novel way to detect viruses

Annie Melchor writes: “All of the life forms on Earth have the same problem,” said Jonathan Kagan, an immunology researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. “And that is dealing with infection.” Just as we worry about bacterial infections, bacteria are on the watch for the viruses called phages that infect them, and — like every organism across every kingdom of life — they have evolved an arsenal of molecular tools to fight infections. Large, complex creatures like humans can splurge on…

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What animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity

What animal intelligence reveals about human stupidity

By Rachel Nuwer, August 26, 2022 The German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was, by all accounts, a miserable human being. He famously sought meaning through suffering, which he experienced in ample amounts throughout his life. Nietzsche struggled with depression, suicidal ideation, and hallucinations, and when he was 44 — around the height of his philosophical output — he suffered a nervous breakdown. He was committed to a mental hospital and never recovered. Although Nietzsche himself hated fascism and anti-Semitism, his…

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Natural: Same-sex couples are everywhere in the animal kingdom

Natural: Same-sex couples are everywhere in the animal kingdom

Justin Gregg writes: I’m surprised at the number of people I talk to about animal behavior that are shocked at how common homosexual behavior is in the animal kingdom. I often point gay animal skeptics to Biological Exuberance by Bruce Bagemihl—a 1999 book detailing more than 300 different animal species that engage in a diverse array of behaviors that fall under the umbrella of homosexuality. Everything from same-sex sex, affection, pair bonds, and parenting. It might seem odd that homosexuality…

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Octopus brains are nothing like ours — yet we have much in common

Octopus brains are nothing like ours — yet we have much in common

James Bridle writes: It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to…

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‘Life hates surprises’: Can an ambitious theory unify biology, neuroscience and psychology?

‘Life hates surprises’: Can an ambitious theory unify biology, neuroscience and psychology?

Shutterstock By Ross Pain, Australian National University; Michael David Kirchhoff, University of Wollongong, and Stephen Francis Mann, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology In the early 1990s, British neuroscientist Karl Friston was poring over brain scans. The scans produced terabytes of digital output, and Friston had to find new techniques to sort and classify the massive flows of data. Along the way he had a revelation. The techniques he was using might be similar to what the brain itself was…

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This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

This animal’s behavior is mechanically programmed

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: The biophysicist Manu Prakash vividly remembers the moment, late one night in a colleague’s laboratory a dozen years ago, when he peered into a microscope and met his new obsession. The animal beneath the lenses wasn’t much to look at, resembling an amoeba more than anything else: a flattened multicellular blob, only 20 microns thick and a few millimeters across, with neither head nor tail. It moved on thousands of cilia that blanketed its underside to form…

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Cultural transmission makes animals flexible, but vulnerable

Cultural transmission makes animals flexible, but vulnerable

Tim Vernimmen writes: Just a few decades ago, even most biologists would have readily agreed that culture is a quintessentially human feature. Sure, they already knew there were dialects in birdsong, and good evidence that many birds largely learned these regional songs by copying other birds. They knew that some enterprising European songbirds called tits had learned how to open milk bottles by watching one another. Scientists had even reported that the practice of washing sweet potatoes in seawater had…

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The deep mystery at the heart of life on Earth

The deep mystery at the heart of life on Earth

  Viviane Callier writes: All living cells power themselves by coaxing energetic electrons from one side of a membrane to the other. Membrane-based mechanisms for accomplishing this are, in a sense, as universal a feature of life as the genetic code. But unlike the genetic code, these mechanisms are not the same everywhere: The two simplest categories of cells, bacteria and archaea, have membranes and protein complexes for producing energy that are chemically and structurally dissimilar. Those differences make it…

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The geometry of life

The geometry of life

The New York Times reports: In June, 100 fruit fly scientists gathered on the Greek island of Crete for their biennial meeting. Among them was Cassandra Extavour, a Canadian geneticist at Harvard University. Her lab works with fruit flies to study evolution and development — “evo devo.” Most often, such scientists choose as their “model organism” the species Drosophila melanogaster — a winged workhorse that has served as an insect collaborator on at least a few Nobel Prizes in physiology…

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Dolphins make peace and love — not war — when they encounter strangers

Dolphins make peace and love — not war — when they encounter strangers

Science reports: In the summer of 2013, dolphin researcher Nicole Danaher-Garcia spotted something rare and remarkable in the animal world. As she stood on top of the bridge of a sport fishing yacht near Bimini in the Bahamas, she spied 10 adult Atlantic spotted dolphins she had never seen before—speeding into the waters of another group of dolphins. Most mammals attack intruders, but war wasn’t on the menu that day. Instead, the newcomers—eventually 46 in all—joined up with the resident…

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The mysterious inner life of the octopus

The mysterious inner life of the octopus

Martha Henriques writes: It was a big night for Inky the octopus. The day’s visitors had been and gone, and now his room in the aquarium was deserted. In a rare oversight, the lid of his tank had been left ajar. The common New Zealand octopus had been without female company for some time, sharing a tank with only a fellow male, Blotchy. The loose lid provided Inky with an opportunity. With eight strong suckered limbs and, quite possibly, intimate…

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Ant colonies resemble neural networks when making decisions

Ant colonies resemble neural networks when making decisions

ZME Science reports: New research from the Rockefeller University suggests that colonies of ants make decisions collectively, with outcomes dependent both on the magnitude of the stressor requiring a decision as well as the size of the ant group. The findings suggest that ants combine sensory information about their environment with parameters of their colony to arrive at a group response. Most interestingly of all, this process is similar to the way neural networks make decisions. “We pioneered an approach…

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The octopus dreams of crabs

The octopus dreams of crabs

Laura Miller writes: John James Audubon was wrong. The great naturalist may have illustrated and compiled 1827’s Birds of America, a pioneering work of ornithology, but thanks to a series of sloppy experiments on turkey vultures, he insisted that birds can’t smell. This was taken for granted until the 1960s when two women scientists in New Zealand proved otherwise, but we are still discovering just how discerning bird’s noses can be. In the 1990s, biologist Gabrielle Nevitt was puzzling, as…

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