Category: Animals
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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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Starving to death…
Octopuses are fascinating creatures with incredible problem-solving skills and breathtaking camouflage. But overall, they are short-lived, typically around for just one to two years. That's because they're semelparous, which means they reproduce just once before they die. Once an octopuse mother lays her eggs, she stops feeding - she'll stay and watch over her eggs…
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The last white rhino…
Rhino embryos made in lab to save nearly extinct subspecies. The development is an early step toward the much more distant goal of resurrecting the northern white rhinoceros, whose last male died this year. (1) Being the last of your kind. A sad moment. A lonely moment. Those eyes. Full of lust for life. In…
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Instability… Randomness… Out of design…
A study by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Applied Physics Laboratory, Johns Hopkins University has brought science one step closer to a molecular-level understanding of how patterns form in living tissue. The researchers engineered bacteria that, when incubated and grown, exhibited stochastic Turing patterns: a…
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Plants “deciding”. Death and Life.
Animals facing competition have been shown to optimally choose between different behaviors, including confrontation, avoidance and tolerance, depending on the competitive ability of their opponents relative to their own. For example, if their competitors are bigger or stronger, animals are expected to "give up the fight" and choose avoidance or tolerance over confrontation. Similar responses…
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