Tag: animals

  • Counting. Playing music.

    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. […]

  • Learning…

    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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]