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Category: Biology

Before neurons evolved, mechanics may have governed animal behavior

Before neurons evolved, mechanics may have governed animal behavior

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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Even worms feel pain

Even worms feel pain

David P. Barash writes: Who feels more pain, a person or a cat? A cat or a cockroach? It’s widely assumed animal intelligence and the capacity to feel pain are positively correlated, with brainier animals more likely to feel pain, and vice versa. But what if our intuition is wrong and the opposite is true? Perhaps animals that are less intelligent feel not only as much pain but even more. Thinking about pain is psychologically challenging. It can be, well,…

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Animals that sense impending catastrophes

Animals that sense impending catastrophes

Norman Miller writes: In 2004, a tsunami triggered by a 9.1 magnitude undersea quake off Indonesia decimated coastal communities around the Indian Ocean, killing at least 225,000 people across a dozen countries. The huge death toll was in part caused by the fact that many communities received no warning. Local manmade early warning systems, such as tidal and earthquake sensors, failed to raise any clear alert. Many sensors were out of action due to maintenance issues, while many coastal areas…

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Altruism in birds? Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices

Altruism in birds? Magpies have outwitted scientists by helping each other remove tracking devices

Shutterstock By Dominique Potvin, University of the Sunshine Coast When we attached tiny, backpack-like tracking devices to five Australian magpies for a pilot study, we didn’t expect to discover an entirely new social behaviour rarely seen in birds. Our goal was to learn more about the movement and social dynamics of these highly intelligent birds, and to test these new, durable and reusable devices. Instead, the birds outsmarted us. As our new research paper explains, the magpies began showing evidence…

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A billion years before sex, ancient cells were equipped for it

A billion years before sex, ancient cells were equipped for it

Jake Buehler writes: Most complex organisms engage in a strange bit of genomic math at some point in their lives: To multiply, they subtract and then add. That is, to reproduce through the process of meiosis they create specialized sex cells, or gametes, with half the usual number of chromosomes; they then merge pairs of those gametes to create new individuals with a full, unique genome. Sexual reproduction is nearly ubiquitous among eukaryotes — organisms from kelp to koalas that…

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Some parallels between birdsong and human speech

Some parallels between birdsong and human speech

Betsy Mason writes: In our quest to find what makes humans unique, we often compare ourselves with our closest relatives: the great apes. But when it comes to understanding the quintessentially human capacity for language, scientists are finding that the most tantalizing clues lay farther afield. Human language is made possible by an impressive aptitude for vocal learning. Infants hear sounds and words, form memories of them, and later try to produce those sounds, improving as they grow up. Most…

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Secrets of early animal evolution revealed by chromosome ‘tectonics’

Secrets of early animal evolution revealed by chromosome ‘tectonics’

Viviane Callier writes: Chromosomes, the bundles of DNA that star in the mitotic ballet of cell division, play a leading role in complex life. But the question of how chromosomes came to exist and evolve has long been discouragingly hard to answer. This is due partly to the lack of chromosome-level genomic information and partly to the suspicion that eons of evolutionary change have washed away any clues about that ancient history. Now, in a paper appearing today in Science…

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The inner lives of farmed animals

The inner lives of farmed animals

Lori Marino writes: We’ve all heard them and used them – the common references to farmed animals that appeal to the worst part of human nature: ‘pearls before swine’, ‘what a pig’, ‘like lambs to the slaughter’, ‘bird brain’. These phrases represent our species’ view of farmed animals as not particularly bright, uncaring about their treatment or fate, and generally bland and monolithic in their identities. My team of researchers asked: ‘What is there to really know about them?’ Our…

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Scientists find hints of a hidden mass extinction 30 million years ago

Scientists find hints of a hidden mass extinction 30 million years ago

Inside Science reports: Nearly two-thirds of mammal species in Africa and the Arabian Peninsula may have died off about 30 million years ago, a mass extinction that escaped detection for decades until now, a new study finds. During a time span known as the Eocene-Oligocene transition between 40 million and 34 million years ago, Earth’s climate shifted dramatically, with the planet growing cooler, ice sheets expanding and sea levels dropping worldwide. During the Eocene, Antarctica was covered by lush forests,…

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How the speed of climate change is unbalancing the insect world

How the speed of climate change is unbalancing the insect world

Oliver Milman writes: The climate crisis is set to profoundly alter the world around us. Humans will not be the only species to suffer from the calamity. Huge waves of die-offs will be triggered across the animal kingdom as coral reefs turn ghostly white and tropical rainforests collapse. For a period, some researchers suspected that insects may be less affected, or at least more adaptable, than mammals, birds and other groups of creatures. With their large, elastic populations and their…

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E.O. Wilson’s lifelong passion for ants helped him teach humans about how to live sustainably with nature

E.O. Wilson’s lifelong passion for ants helped him teach humans about how to live sustainably with nature

Edward O. Wilson in his office in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, in 2014. Suzanne Kreiter/The Boston Globe via Getty Images By Doug Tallamy, University of Delaware E. O. Wilson was an extraordinary scholar in every sense of the word. Back in the 1980s, Milton Stetson, the chair of the biology department at the University of Delaware, told me that a scientist who makes a single seminal contribution to his or her field has been a success. By…

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New clues about the origins of biological intelligence

New clues about the origins of biological intelligence

Rafael Yuste and Michael Levin write: In the middle of his landmark book On the Origin of Species, Darwin had a crisis of faith. In a bout of honesty, he wrote, “To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree.” While scientists…

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How animal uses of fire help illuminate human pyrocognition

How animal uses of fire help illuminate human pyrocognition

Ivo Jacobs writes: In the beginning, there was no fire. People were cold, lean and hungry. Like baboons, they gathered food and ate it raw. But one day, a group of children began playing with arrows by twirling them against a log, and were surprised to find that the tips became hot and smoke appeared. Sparks jumped and landed on the dry grass nearby, making it smoulder. The kids added more grass to the flames and, as the bonfire grew,…

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These ‘living robots’ self-replicate — and it’s not terrifying

These ‘living robots’ self-replicate — and it’s not terrifying

The Daily Beast reports: You might have missed the debut of the Xenobots last year when the world was falling apart, but they made quite a splash in the science and tech community. These Pac-Man-shaped synthetic organisms designed by supercomputers can organize into larger groups and be programmed to fulfill specific functions. They’re certainly not robots in the traditional sense, but they’re also too artificial to qualify as typical living organisms. They’re part cell, part machine, and completely one-of-a-kind. As…

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Why insects are more sensitive than they seem

Why insects are more sensitive than they seem

Zaria Gorvett writes: One balmy autumn day in 2014, David Reynolds stood up to speak at an important meeting. It was taking place in Chicago City Hall – a venue so grand, it’s embellished with marble stairways, 75ft (23m) classical columns, and vaulted ceilings. As the person in charge of pest management in the city’s public buildings, among other things, Reynolds was there to discuss his annual budget. But soon after he began, an imposter appeared on one of the…

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At the dawn of life, heat may have driven cell division

At the dawn of life, heat may have driven cell division

Carrie Arnold writes: An elegant ballet of proteins enables modern cells to replicate themselves. During cell division, structural proteins and enzymes coordinate the duplication of DNA, the division of a cell’s cytoplasmic contents, and the cinching of the membrane that cleaves the cell. Getting these processes right is crucial because errors can lead to daughter cells that are abnormal or unviable. Billions of years ago, the same challenge must have faced the first self-organizing membranous bundles of chemicals arising spontaneously…

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