Category: Animals
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Monkeys, music, ecology...
Research published today by the American Psychological Association has shown that chimpanzees prefer listening to West African akan and North Indian raga over listening to silence. What does this say about the evolutionary purpose of music? Previous work by McDermott and Hauser showed that when tamarins and marmosets were given a choice between a lullaby…
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Asexual reproduction - The menace to ToE...
Plants can transfer their entire genetic material to a partner in an asexual manner, researchers report. Occasionally, two different plant species interbreed with each other in nature. This usually causes problems since the genetic information of both parents does not match. But sometimes, instead of passing on only half of each parent's genetic material, both…
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Primates, brain stimulation, free will, dogmatism...
When electrical pulses are applied to the ventral tegmental area of their brain, macaques presented with two images change their preference from one image to the other. The study is the first to confirm a causal link between activity in the ventral tegmental area and choice behavior in primates. (1) My dogmatic atheist friend, Free…
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Fungus eating the DNA-determined dream... No peniciline available!
Fungus. Shapeshifters. Difficult to categorize. A problem to taxonomy. Neither animals nor plants. Even member of the same species can have different properties and appearance. Good thing we have the DNA analysis to determine they belong to the same species. (1) But wait a minute. The DNA says they are the same species even though...…
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