Category: Animals
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Why doesn’t any animal have three legs?
If ‘Why?’ is the first question in science, ‘Why not?’ must be a close second. Sometimes it’s worth thinking about why something does not exist. Such as a truly three-legged animal. At least one researcher has been pondering the non-existence of tripeds. “Almost all animals are bilateral,” he said. The code for having two sides…
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Listening to music. Humans. Apes.
In the eternal search for understanding what makes us human, scientists found that our brains are more sensitive to pitch, the harmonic sounds we hear when listening to music, than our evolutionary relative the macaque monkey. The study, funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, highlights the promise of Sound Health, a joint…
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Octopuses’ arms. Universe’s brain.
How octopuses’ arms make decisions: Researchers studying the behavior and neuroscience of octopuses have long suspected that the animals’ arms may have minds of their own. A new model is the first attempt at a comprehensive representation of information flow between the octopus’s suckers, arms and brain, based on previous research in octopus neuroscience and…
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Counting. Playing music.
Bees can solve seemingly clever counting tasks with very small numbers of nerve cells in their brains, according to researchers. (1) Scientists have developed a 3D-printed robotic hand which can play simple musical phrases on the piano by just moving its wrist. (2) Everyone feeling so important when counting. But every animal can do it.…
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Learning…
In order to learn about the world, an animal needs to do more than just pay attention to its surroundings. It also needs to learn which sights, sounds and sensations in its environment are the most important and monitor how the importance of those details change over time. Yet how humans and other animals track…
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