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Category: Biology

‘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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Nature is in crisis. A UN report says short-sighted economics is to blame

Nature is in crisis. A UN report says short-sighted economics is to blame

Grist reports: When governments make decisions, economic considerations often trump everything else — human well-being, social connections, the health of the environment. According to a new report from the United Nations, this imbalance is driving the global biodiversity crisis and the human suffering associated with it. “Despite the diversity of nature’s values,” the report says, “most policymaking approaches have prioritized a narrow set of values at the expense of both nature and society, as well as future generations.” It calls…

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Pollen and heat — a looming challenge for global agriculture

Pollen and heat — a looming challenge for global agriculture

Carolyn Beans writes: Last June, Aaron Flansburg felt the temperature spike and knew what that meant for his canola crop. A fifth-generation grower in Washington state, Flansburg times his canola planting to bloom in the cool weeks of early summer. But last year, his fields were hit with 108-degree Fahrenheit heat just as flowers opened. “That is virtually unheard of for our area to have a temperature like that in June,” he says. Yellow blooms sweltered, reproduction stalled, and many…

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Viruses can change your scent to make you more attractive to mosquitoes, new research in mice finds

Viruses can change your scent to make you more attractive to mosquitoes, new research in mice finds

Mosquito-borne diseases are estimated to cause over 1 million deaths a year. mrs/Moment via Getty Images Penghua Wang, University of Connecticut Mosquitoes are the world’s deadliest animal. Over 1 million deaths per year are attributed to mosquito-borne diseases, including malaria, yellow fever, dengue fever, Zika and chikungunya fever. How mosquitoes seek out and feed on their hosts are important factors in how a virus circulates in nature. Mosquitoes spread diseases by acting as carriers of viruses and other pathogens: A…

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What the anthropology of smell reveals about humanity

What the anthropology of smell reveals about humanity

By Sarah Ives, SAPIENS Vivian,* a Washington, D.C.–based art curator, realized she had COVID-19 in December 2020. “I bought a tree, and I brought it home,” she recalls. “And I thought, This tree has no smell. What did they sell me? Is this a bad tree?” For Vivian, the moment involved more than frustration about a “bad tree.” Her loss of smell left her unable to conjure memories and even affected her sense of self. “That Christmas was really hard,”…

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The genetic power of ancient trees

The genetic power of ancient trees

Jim Robbins writes: In 2005, several of the centuries-old ponderosa pine trees on my 15 acres (0.06 sq km) of forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in Montana suddenly died. I soon discovered they were being brought down by mountain pine beetles, pernicious killers the size of the eraser on a pencil that burrow into the tree. The next year the number of dying trees grew exponentially. I felt powerless and grief-stricken as I saw these giant, sky-scraping trees fading…

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Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Joanna Thompson writes: The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that…

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Do we need a new theory of evolution?

Do we need a new theory of evolution?

Stephen Buranyi writes: Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection. You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to…

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