Category: Biology Philosophy
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Die. It is for my own good.
Some worms are genetically predisposed to die before reaching old age, which appears to benefit the colony by reducing food demand, finds a new study. (1) Dying. For the sake of others. Why don’t you die? Do you wish to live? Unknown darkness. Dictating light. Unknown terror. Dictating pleasure. Petty humans. Living. For the sake…
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What is an individual?
It’s almost impossible to imagine biology without individuals — individual organisms, individual cells, and individual genes, for example. But what about a worker ant that never reproduces, and could never survive apart from the colony? Are the trillions of microorganisms in our microbiomes, which vastly outnumber our human cells, part of our individuality? The authors…
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Copying sounds. Speaking?
Bats can learn to mimic specific sounds, which puts them into an elite group of animals capable of this. Studying how bats can copy noises could help us learn more about humans’ unique capacity for speech and language. (1) Listen. Speak. Oh child. How did you learn to speak? If not by listening to people…
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Ancient pottery. Cooking. Dead men.
A team has developed a new method to date archaeological pottery using fat residues remaining in the pot wall from cooking. The method means prehistoric pottery can be dated with remarkable accuracy, sometimes to the window of a human life span. Pottery found in Shoreditch, London proven to be 5,500 years old and shows the…
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Going home…
New research indicates mantis shrimp use path integration to find their way back to their burrows after leaving to seek food or mates. That means they can track their distance and direction from their starting point. A series of creative experiments revealed that to do that, they rely on a hierarchy of cues from the…
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