James Gorman writes: Sometimes spiders ride the wind. They spin out lines of silk that are caught by the breeze and carry them aloft. They have been reported to rise a mile or two above the earth, and perhaps even to cross oceans. It’s called ballooning. Moonsung Cho, an aeronautical engineer, was in Denmark the first time he saw the flight of a spider. It was autumn, when baby spiders often balloon en masse and spread to new areas. He…
Taylor Lorenz writes: Pop neuroscience has long been fascinated with uncovering secret biological differences between male and female brains. Just last year, the Google engineer James Damore caused an uproar after publishing a manifesto detailing the various ways women were biologically different from men. But according to Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, anyone who goes searching for innate differences between the sexes won’t find them. “People…
AFP reports: Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees — a few dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks — have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, researchers said Monday. The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and some as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. “We report that nine of the 13 oldest… individuals have died, or at least their oldest…
Kate Keller writes: As a mathematical concept, the idea of zero is relatively new in human society—and indisputably revolutionary. It’s allowed humans to develop algebra, calculus and Cartesian coordinates; questions about its properties continue to incite mathematical debate today. So it may sound unlikely that bees—complex and community-based insects to be sure, but insects nonetheless—seem to have mastered their own numerical concept of nothingness. Despite their sesame-seed-sized brains, honey bees have proven themselves the prodigies of the insect world. Researcher…
Jordana Cepelewicz writes: When Emma Hammarlund of Lund University in Sweden first reached out to her colleague Sven Påhlman for help with her research, he was skeptical he’d have much insight to offer. He was a tumor biologist, after all, and she was a geobiologist, someone who studied the interplay between living organisms and their environment. Påhlman didn’t see how his work could possibly inform her search for answers about the rapid proliferation and diversification of animal life that, half…
Our brains make sense of the world by predicting what we will see and then updating these predictions as the situation demands, according to Lars Muckli, professor of neuroscience at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Glasgow, Scotland. He says that this predictive processing framework theory is as important to brain science as evolution is to biology. Horizon magazine: You have used advanced brain imaging techniques to come up with a model of how the brain processes vision – and…
By Bill Laurance, James Cook University The plan to build a massive hydropower dam in Sumatra as part of China’s immense Belt and Road Initiative threatens the habitat of the rarest ape in the world, which has only 800 remaining members. This is merely the beginning of an avalanche of environmental crises and broader social and economic risks that will be provoked by the BRI scheme. Read more: How we discovered a new species of orangutan in northern Sumatra The…
Shutterstock By Jordi Paps, University of Essex The first animals emerged on Earth at least 541m years ago, according to the fossil record. What they looked like is the subject of an ongoing debate, but they’re traditionally thought to have been similar to sponges. Like today’s animals, they were made up of many, many different cells doing different jobs, programmed by thousands of different genes. But where did all these genes come from? Was the emergence of animals a small…
Person of the Forest from Melissa Lesh on Vimeo.
Liqun Luo writes: An important difference between the computer and the brain is the mode by which information is processed within each system. Computer tasks are performed largely in serial steps. This can be seen by the way engineers program computers by creating a sequential flow of instructions. For this sequential cascade of operations, high precision is necessary at each step, as errors accumulate and amplify in successive steps. The brain also uses serial steps for information processing. In the…
James Gallagher writes: Prof Rob Knight, from University of California San Diego, told the BBC: “You’re more microbe than you are human.” Originally it was thought our cells were outnumbered 10 to one. “That’s been refined much closer to one-to-one, so the current estimate is you’re about 43% human if you’re counting up all the cells,” he says. But genetically we’re even more outgunned. The human genome – the full set of genetic instructions for a human being – is…
Dana Nuccitelli writes: Recently, geologist Dr Benjamin Burger identified a rock layer in Utah that he believed might have formed during the Permian and subsequent Triassic period that could shed light on the cause of the Great Dying [the Earth’s deadliest mass extinction 252 million years ago]. During the Permian, Earth’s continents were still combined as one Pangea, and modern day Utah was on the supercontinent’s west coast. Samples from the end-Permian have been collected from rock layers in Asia,…
Mary Beth Pfeiffer writes: In the tally of species that will evolve or perish as temperatures rise, now consider the moose. The lumbering king of the deer family, known for antlers that can span six feet like giant outstretched fingers, the moose faces a litany of survival threats, from wolves and bears to brain worms and liver fluke parasites. But in the late 1990s in many northern states and Canada, something else began to claim adult cows and bull moose…
Tanya Basu writes: What is an organ? Anatomy textbooks are rather fuzzy about what defines an “organ,” requiring one to have primary tissue—parenchyma—and “sporadic” tissue, called stroma, which can be nerves, vessels, and other connective tissue. Organs are the necessary building blocks of organisms (hence, the name), and can be gigantic or microscopic. So long as cells clump together to form tissues, and these tissues organize themselves into organs that perform specific functions in the survival of an organism, that…
Adithya Rajagopalan writes: The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London, John O’Keefe and his student Jonathan Dostrovsky recorded the electrical activity of neurons in the hippocampus of freely moving rats. They found a group of neurons that increased their activity only when a rat found itself in a particular location. They called them “place cells.” Building on these early findings, O’Keefe and his colleague Lynn Nadel…
Rebecca Boyle writes: In the arid, sun-soaked northwest corner of Australia, along the Tropic of Capricorn, the oldest face of Earth is exposed to the sky. Drive through the northern outback for a while, south of Port Hedlund on the coast, and you will come upon hills softened by time. They are part of a region called the Pilbara Craton, which formed about 3.5 billion years ago, when Earth was in its youth. Look closer. From a seam in one…