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Category: Biology

Is conscious AI possible?

Is conscious AI possible?

Andrew Maynard writes: It seems that barely a week goes by these days where there isn’t some degree of speculation that the current crop of large language models, novel AI systems, or even the internet, are showing signs of consciousness. These are usually met with a good dose of skepticism. But under the surface there’s often a surprisingly strong conflation between advanced artificial intelligence and conscious machines — to the extent that much of the current wave of AI acceleration…

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How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it

How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a friendly competition some of them had attended in person for almost three decades where they could all get together and obsess over the same question. Known as the protein folding problem, it was simple to state: Could they accurately predict the three-dimensional…

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Why intelligence exists only in the eye of the beholder

Why intelligence exists only in the eye of the beholder

Abigail Desmond and Michael Haslam write: What has intelligence? Slime moulds, ants, fifth-graders, shrimp, neurons, ChatGPT, fish shoals, border collies, crowds, birds, you and me? All of the above? Some? Or, at the risk of sounding transgressive: maybe none? The question is a perennial one, often dusted off in the face of a previously unknown animal behaviour, or new computing devices that are trained to do human things and then do those things well. We might intuitively feel our way…

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What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

Nature reports: Antibodies isolated from people with long COVID increase pain sensitivity and reduce movement in mice when transferred to the animals, research shows. The findings suggest that antibodies might drive some symptoms of long COVID — although how that process works is unclear, and the results will need to be replicated in larger studies. “I think this will be a beacon of a paper that we can take forwards to further understand long COVID,” says Resia Pretorius, an immunologist…

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More playful young male dolphins father more offspring

More playful young male dolphins father more offspring

Science reports: Leaping over waves or body surfing side by side, dolphins are a fun-loving bunch. But their frolicking—and that of species from hyenas to humans—has long baffled evolutionary biologists. Why expend so much energy on play? A new study offers an intriguing explanation: Juvenile male dolphins use play to acquire the skills required for fathering calves, researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most significantly, the scientists found the most playful males go on…

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Do plants have minds?

Do plants have minds?

Rachael Petersen writes: Gustav Theodor Fechner championed the idea that plants have souls – something we might call ‘consciousness’ today. I first learned of him in an interdisciplinary reading group on plant consciousness that I co-lead at Harvard University. We convene biologists, theologians, artists and ethologists to explore the burgeoning literature on plant life. We found Fechner covered in the New York Times bestselling book by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins titled The Secret Life of Plants (1973). Michael Pollan…

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Elephants call each other by name across the savanna

Elephants call each other by name across the savanna

Marta Zaraska writes: Humans have a long history of inventing names for elephants. There is Disney’s Dumbo, of course, and Jumbo, a 19th-century circus attraction, and Ruby, a famed painting elephant from the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona. But new research suggests wild African elephants may pick their own names, too—and use them to call and greet one another on the savanna. Most animals are born with a fixed set of sounds for communication. A few, such as songbirds, can imitate…

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RNA, the long-overlooked molecule that will define a generation of science

RNA, the long-overlooked molecule that will define a generation of science

Thomas Cech writes: From E=mc² to splitting the atom to the invention of the transistor, the first half of the 20th century was dominated by breakthroughs in physics. Then, in the early 1950s, biology began to nudge physics out of the scientific spotlight — and when I say “biology,” what I really mean is DNA. The momentous discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 more or less ushered in a new era in science that culminated in the Human…

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Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an ‘emergency brake’

Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an ‘emergency brake’

Dan Samorodnitsky writes: Researchers recently reported the discovery of a natural protein, named Balon, that can bring a cell’s production of new proteins to a screeching halt. Balon was found in bacteria that hibernate in Arctic permafrost, but it also seems to be made by many other organisms and may be an overlooked mechanism for dormancy throughout the tree of life. For most life forms, the ability to shut oneself off is a vital part of staying alive. Harsh conditions…

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Crows can count out loud, startling study reveals

Crows can count out loud, startling study reveals

Live Science reports: Crows can count out loud, a startling new study has revealed, and they may even have the same numeracy skills as human toddlers. Researchers found that carrion crows (Corvus corone) can produce a specific number of caws in response to visual or auditory stimuli, enabling them to count out loud between one and four. The discovery is the first time that animals have been definitively shown to count by making a distinct number of vocalizations. The researchers…

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Animals self-medicate with plants − behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia

Animals self-medicate with plants − behavior people have observed and emulated for millennia

A goat with an arrow wound nibbles the medicinal herb dittany. O. Dapper, CC BY By Adrienne Mayor, Stanford University When a wild orangutan in Sumatra recently suffered a facial wound, apparently after fighting with another male, he did something that caught the attention of the scientists observing him. The animal chewed the leaves of a liana vine – a plant not normally eaten by apes. Over several days, the orangutan carefully applied the juice to its wound, then covered…

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Bizarre bacteria defy textbooks by writing new genes

Bizarre bacteria defy textbooks by writing new genes

Nature reports: Genetic information usually travels down a one-way street: genes written in DNA serve as the template for making RNA molecules, which are then translated into proteins. That tidy textbook story got a bit complicated in 1970 when scientists discovered that some viruses have enzymes called reverse transcriptases, which scribe RNA into DNA — the reverse of the usual traffic flow. Now, scientists have discovered an even weirder twist. A bacterial version of reverse transcriptase reads RNA as a…

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Sperm whale clicks could hide a surprisingly complex ‘alphabet’

Sperm whale clicks could hide a surprisingly complex ‘alphabet’

Science Alert reports: A recent analysis of a sperm whale’s vocalizations suggests variations in ‘clicks’ represent a kind of alphabet that forms the basis of a complex communication system. Members of the conservation initiative Project CETI discovered series of clicks less than 2 seconds in length act as codas – basic units (phonemes) of cetacean speech. The highly social mammals have previously been heard identifying themselves with unique patterns of clicking, but this is the first time a combinatorial and…

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Insects and other animals have consciousness, experts assert in new declaration

Insects and other animals have consciousness, experts assert in new declaration

Dan Falk writes: In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun. The study on playful bees…

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Viruses finally reveal their complex social life

Viruses finally reveal their complex social life

Carl Zimmer writes: Ever since viruses came to light in the late 1800s, scientists have set them apart from the rest of life. Viruses were far smaller than cells, and inside their protein shells they carried little more than genes. They could not grow, copy their own genes or do much of anything. Researchers assumed that each virus was a solitary particle drifting alone through the world, able to replicate only if it happened to bump into the right cell…

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The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change

The French aristocrat who understood evolution 100 years before Darwin – and even worried about climate change

Donna Ferguson writes: Shortly after Charles Darwin published his magnum opus, The Origin of Species, in 1859 he started reading a little-known 100-year-old work by a wealthy French aristocrat. Its contents were quite a surprise. “Whole pages [of his book] are laughably like mine,” Darwin wrote to a friend. “It is surprising how candid it makes one to see one’s view in another man’s words.” In later editions of The Origin of Species, Darwin acknowledged Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon,…

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