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Category: Biology

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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The cell is not a factory

The cell is not a factory

Charudatta Navare writes: When you think about it, it is amazing that something as tiny as a living cell is capable of behaviour so complex. Consider the single-cell creature, the amoeba. It can sense its environment, move around, obtain its food, maintain its structure, and multiply. How does a cell know how to do all of this? Biology textbooks will tell you that each eukaryotic cell, which constitutes a range of organisms from humans to amoeba, contains a control centre…

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Crows are too smart to be domesticated

Crows are too smart to be domesticated

Ben Crair writes: At around 9 a.m. every weekday, a crow caws in the Jardin des Plantes, the oldest botanical garden in Paris. The sound is a warning to every other crow: Frédéric Jiguet, a tall ornithologist whose dark hair is graying around the ears, has shown up for work. As Jiguet walks to his office at the French National Museum of Natural History, which is on the garden’s grounds, dozens of the black vandals take to the trees and…

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How microbes influence our brain health

How microbes influence our brain health

Anthony King writes: You feel tension in the pit of your stomach as you begin your big public talk. You get butterflies as you wait for exam results. A mentor tells you to trust your gut feelings on a career decision. It’s no wonder ancient thinkers viewed the gut as the seat of emotions, or that a medieval physician even proposed that perception and our soul resided in our digestive organs. ‘Back in history we used to think the gut…

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Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants

Urban humans have lost much of their ability to digest plants

John Timmer writes: Cellulose is the primary component of the cell walls of plants, making it the most common polymer on Earth. It’s responsible for the properties of materials like wood and cotton and is the primary component of dietary fiber, so it’s hard to overstate its importance to humanity. Given its ubiquity and the fact that it’s composed of a bunch of sugar molecules linked together, its toughness makes it very difficult to use as a food source. The…

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Salty foods are making people sick − in part by poisoning their microbiomes

Salty foods are making people sick − in part by poisoning their microbiomes

Salt has taken over many diets worldwide – some more than others. ATU Images/The Image Bank via Getty Images By Christopher Damman, University of Washington People have been using salt since the dawn of civilization to process, preserve and enhance foods. In ancient Rome, salt was so central to commerce that soldiers were paid their “salarium,” or salaries, in salt, for instance. Salt’s value was in part as a food preservative, keeping unwanted microbes at bay while allowing desired ones…

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We aren’t the only apes who can playfully tease each other, study finds

We aren’t the only apes who can playfully tease each other, study finds

Spontaneous playful teasing in four great ape species: https://t.co/MhRhkoFPOs @RossanoFederico @IsabelleLaumer @ScienceSquil #ProcB #ethology pic.twitter.com/pzuMbBdTGf — Royal Society Publishing (@RSocPublishing) March 11, 2024 Mongabay reports: Being silly and indulging in humor may sound easy, but our brains need to do a lot of heavy lifting to pull it off. Landing a joke requires recognizing what’s socially acceptable, being spontaneous, predicting how others may react, and playfully violating some social expectations. Until now, research on the complex cognitive abilities that underpin…

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