Category: Biology
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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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Asteroids. Death. Opportunities.
When the asteroid hit, dinosaurs weren't the only ones that suffered. Clouds of ash blocked the sun and cooled the planet's temperature, devastating plant life. But fungi, which decompose dead stuff, did well. So what happened to the lichens, which are made of a plant and fungus living together as one organism? "We thought that…
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Self-navigation…
Human eyes are insensitive to polarized light and ultraviolet radiation, but that is not the case for ants, who use it to locate themselves in space. AntBot, a robot designed by CNRS and Aix-Marseille University (AMU) researchers at ISM, copies the desert ants' exceptional navigation capacities to navigate without the use of GPS. (1) Navigating…
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Imperfect evolution… Life without life…
The pinnacle of beauty to most people is a symmetrical face, one without any major left-right differences. But for blind Mexican cavefish (Astyanax mexicanus), asymmetry may be a lifesaver. That’s because their lopsided skulls may help them feel their way along dark cave walls – similar to a person navigating by touch in the dark.…
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Genes. Not important.
One of the great puzzles of evolutional biology is what induced certain living creatures to abandon solitary existence in favor of living in collaborative societies, as seen in the case of ants and other social, colony-forming insects. A major characteristic of so-called eusocial species is the division of labor between queens that lay eggs and…
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