Boy or girl? For those who want to influence their baby's sex, superstition and folk wisdom offer no shortage of advice whose effectiveness is questionable at best -- from what to eat to when to make love. But some animals have a technique backed by scientific proof: In turtles and other reptiles, whether an egg...
Food-carrying ants use collective problem solving to get through or around obstacles
Ants working together to carry a large piece of food get around obstacles by switching between two types of motion: one that favors squeezing the morsel through a hole and another to seek a path around the barrier. Jonathan Ron of the Weizmann Institute, Israel, and colleagues present these findings in PLOS Computational Biology.
When carrying...
Ancient skull shows early 'baleen whale' had teeth
Today's baleen whales (Mysticetes) support their massive bodies by filtering huge volumes of small prey from seawater using comb-like baleen in their mouths much like a sieve. But new evidence reported in the journal Current Biology on May 10 based on careful analysis of a 34-million-year-old whale skull from Antarctica -- the second-oldest "baleen" whale...
Neuroscientists find first evidence animals can mentally replay past events
Neuroscientists at Indiana University have reported the first evidence that non-human animals can mentally replay past events from memory. The discovery could help advance the development of new drugs to treat Alzheimer's disease.
The study, led by IU professor Jonathon Crystal, appears today in the journal Current Biology.
"The reason we're interested in animal memory isn't only...
Big fish produce disproportionately more and bigger eggs
What difference does it make whether an angler catches one big fish or two smaller fish, each half its weight? Experts assumed that big and small fish invest the same proportion of their energy to make eggs. But a new report in Science by a Smithsonian biologist and colleagues shows that plus-sized females invest disproportionately...
What gives bees their sweet tooth?
Scientists have discovered bees linger on a flower, emptying it of nectar, because they have sugar-sensing taste neurons which work together to prolong the pleasure of the sweetness.
Newcastle University researchers report that the bees' taste neurons found on their proboscis -- their mouthparts -- fire intense signals for up to 10 seconds -- much longer...