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Category: Biology

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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A ‘universal’ flu vaccine could bring one of the world’s longest pandemics to an end

A ‘universal’ flu vaccine could bring one of the world’s longest pandemics to an end

Matthew Hutson writes: In 2009, global health officials started tracking a new kind of flu. It appeared first in Mexico, in March, and quickly infected thousands. Influenza tends to kill the very young and the very old, but this flu was different. It seemed to be severely affecting otherwise healthy young adults. American epidemiologists soon learned of cases in California, Texas, and Kansas. By the end of April, the virus had reached a high school in Queens, where a few…

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Widespread coronavirus infection found in Iowa deer, new study says

Widespread coronavirus infection found in Iowa deer, new study says

The New York Times reports: A new study of hundreds of white-tailed deer infected with the coronavirus in Iowa has found that the animals probably are contracting the virus from humans, and then rapidly spreading it among one another, according to researchers. Up to 80 percent of deer sampled from April 2020 through January 2021 in the state were infected, the study indicated. Scientists said the findings pose worrisome implications for the spread of the coronavirus, although they were not…

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Everyday noises are making our brains noisier

Everyday noises are making our brains noisier

Nina Kraus writes: Take a walk on a busy avenue and you hear either traffic whizzing by or creeping in a honk-laden crawl. Add the hissing of pneumatic bus brakes, distant sirens, the boom-boom of overloud car stereos, the occasional car alarm, music coming from shops you pass, the beeping of a reversing delivery truck. All are part of the fabric of city life. These sounds do not meet or exceed the generally accepted threshold of “unsafe.” They are not…

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Spiders are much smarter than you think

Spiders are much smarter than you think

By Betsy Mason People tend to associate intelligence with brain size. And as a general guideline, this makes sense: more brain cells, more mental capabilities. Humans, and many of the other animals we’ve come to think of as unusually bright, such as chimpanzees and dolphins, all have large brains. And it’s long been assumed that the smallest brains simply don’t have the capacity to support complex mental processes. But what if they do? The vast majority of Earth’s animal species are…

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The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

The secret lives of cells — as never seen before

Nature reports: For a few weeks in 2017, Wanda Kukulski found herself binge-watching an unusual kind of film: videos of the insides of cells. They were made using a technique called cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) that allows researchers to view the proteins in cells at high resolution. In these videos, she could see all kinds of striking things, such as the inner workings of cells and the compartments inside them, in unprecedented detail. “I was so overwhelmed by the beauty and…

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The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

Pamela Lyon writes: In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin draws a picture of the long sweep of evolution, from the beginning of life, playing out along two fundamental axes: physical and mental. Body and mind. All living beings, not just some, evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’, he writes. When psychology has accepted this view of nature, Darwin predicts, the science of mind ‘will be based on a new foundation’, the necessarily gradual…

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Primate memory

Primate memory

Tetsuro Matsuzawa writes: The most recent common ancestor of chimpanzees and humans lived between five and seven million years ago. This shared heritage became evident when sequencing revealed a 1.2% DNA difference between species. Chimpanzees have a living sister species, bonobos, that is equally closely related to humans. Both chimpanzees and bonobos are found only in Africa; this is also true of gorillas. Chimpanzees and humans shared a common ancestor with gorillas between eight and nine million years ago. Another…

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Flatworms can reproduce ripping themselves in half

Flatworms can reproduce ripping themselves in half

Ed Yong writes: When planarian flatworms want to reproduce, some have sex. Others, more straightforwardly, tear themselves in two. The latter option is fast and violent. The planarian begins as a small, flattened, sluglike creature with a spade-shaped head and two googly eyes. After a few minutes of stretching and ripping, it separates into two halves—a head and a tail. Within days, the head piece grows a tail. And even more miraculously, the tail regrows its head. “It’s just mind-blowing,”…

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The act of smelling

The act of smelling

Jude Stewart writes: If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Our auditory and visual receptors offer little mystery—they were mapped and explained by scientists many decades ago—but human olfactory receptors were…

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How memories persist where bodies and even brains do not

How memories persist where bodies and even brains do not

Thomas R Verny writes: I began exploring the concept of cellular memory – the idea that memory can be stored outside the brain, in all the body’s cells – after reading an article on Reuters headlined ‘Tiny Brain No Obstacle to French Civil Servant’ in 2007. It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient ‘had a shunt inserted into his head to drain…

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