About
If you've got a story, picture, or link that's beyond belief, send it to tipline@haveigotoneforyou.com with your name and where you heard about it and we'll add it!
Accounts
Click here to check if anything new just came in.
April 14 2011
Can Your Dog Cut a Rug? The DISCOVER Dancing Pet Challenge
Snowball the dancing, Backstreet Boys-loving cockatoo is more than a web meme: he is a scientific conundrum. Bobbing in time to music is a shockingly rare behavior, and even monkeys, capable of learning very complex tasks, find it impossible to get down to the beat even after more than a year of training. It’s marvelous evolutionary serendipity that humans dance, thinks neurobiologist Aniruddh Patel, who has found that our hearing system and motor control are intimately linked. In DISCOVER’s 2011 special issue on the brain, Patel discusses his idea that that animals needed a vocal-learning brain in order to get their groove on:
The implication is that dogs and cats can never do it, horses and chimps can never do it, but maybe other vocal-learning species can do it. I proposed that idea, but it was purely hypothetical until a few years after, when along came Snowball [in 2007].
But more importantly (drumroll), he issues a challenge:
If your pet really does have rhythm, he wants to know about it. “If someone has a dog that can dance to the beat, it will totally refute my hypothesis,” he says, “and that’s progress in ...
October 28 2010
For Bees, Solving Tricky Math Problems Is All in a Day’s Work
Having a bee brain might not be so bad after all, since new research shows that bees are faster than supercomputers when it came to solving one of those dreadful “word problems” from (probably very advanced) high school math class.
Co-author Mathieu Lihoreau explained the significance of this discovery in a press release:
“There is a common perception that smaller brains constrain animals to be simple reflex machines. But our work with bees shows advanced cognitive capacities with very limited neuron numbers.”
The problem is called the traveling salesman problem, and the bees’ lives actually depend on solving it every day. The traveling salesman needs to visit a number of cities in the shortest amount of time, without repeating a visit. The traveling bumblebee needs to visit a number of flowers everyday, while expending as little energy as possible. Queen Mary University of London researcher Lars Chittka explained in the press release why studying bees’ habits is important:
“Such traveling salesmen problems keep supercomputers busy for days. Studying how bee brains solve such challenging tasks might allow us to identify the minimal neural circuitry required for complex problem solving.”
The supercomputer is able to solve a traveling salesman problem by comparing the length of all of the possible routes and choosing the shortest. Mathematicians (and their computer lackeys) haven’t been able to figure out how to accurately compute the best answer (instead of just comparing each option). But somehow, the bees are also able to find the right answer as quickly and correctly as humans do when the problem is presented visually. From the press release:
The team used computer controlled artificial flowers to test whether bees would follow a route defined by the order in which they discovered the flowers or if they would find the shortest route. After exploring the location of the flowers, bees quickly learned to fly the shortest route.
Finding a way to quickly and easily compute the shortest distance between a variety of points could also be useful to researchers studying the flow of traffic along streets, the communication of information over the Internet, business supply chains, and even DNA microchips.
Related content:
Discoblog: German Bees Report for Duty as Pollution Inspectors
80beats: Brainless Slime Mold Builds a Replica Tokyo Subway
DISCOVER: Quantum Honeybees
DISCOVER: Birds and Bees Do the Locomotion
DISCOVER: 20 Things You Didn’t Know About… Bees
DISCOVER: Million Dollar Math
Image: Flickr/olaeinang
June 18 2010
Damselfish, Damselfish, How Does Your Garden Grow?
Some damselfish have sensitive stomachs, but they certainly aren’t in distress. They can hold their own, researchers have recently determined, by diligently farming their preferred algae crops.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Stegastes nigricans–otherwise known as the “dusky farmer fish”–has a bit of a green fin, but researchers rarely see such dedication to farming chores in a marine animal. They watched as this fish yanked out less digestible types of algae from their crops and threw them aside to make room for their preferred varieties, like the delicious red Polysiphonia.
As reported by Discovery News, researchers at Ehime University looked at 320 territories of 18 damselfish species from coral reefs from Thailand to the Great Barrier Reef. Though the fish in different locales preferred different regional algae flavors, they all exhibited a drive to cultivate. Hata and colleagues also raised similar crops themselves without the fish. They were no match for the fish farmers, and their crops soon overflowed with unwanted algae weeds.
They published their findings online today in BMC Evolutionary Biology. Researchers believe that the relationship is beneficial to the algae too and call it “cultivation mutualism.” Besides raising their own plots of land, the fish also fought for their turf, raising their pitchforks, so to speak, against sea urchins and other fish.
Related content:
Discoblog: This Fish Has Seen the Enemy, and It Is Him
Discoblog: The Curious Case of the Immortal Jellyfish
Discoblog: Can a Dead Fish Prove that Modern Brain Studies Are Bunk?
Discoblog: Fish that Climb? New Catfish Scales Rocks with Pelvic Fins
June 08 2010
World Science Festival: Surprising Smarts in the Animal Kingdom
We’re not that special.
At least, not for the reasons we thought we were. Our knack for acting altruistically, for communicating, for putting a complicated brain to good use: We’ve claimed all these as our own, as the things that set humans apart from every other species.
But recently, science has shown that we have a lot more in common with other animals, from bonobos to bees, than you might expect. On Saturday, five researchers helped set the public record straight by busting up a few humanocentric myths during “All Creatures Great and Smart,” a panel event at the World Science Festival in New York.
Myth #1: Humans are the only altruistic animals.
From proffering a shovel in the sandbox to writing a check to our favorite charity, humans commit altruistic acts whenever they do something for someone else without any concrete benefit for themselves. But you can cross sharing off the “uniquely human” list; in a simple experiment, anthropologist Brian Hare demonstrated that bonobos do it, too.
Alone in a room with some delectable snacks, each bonobo in the study had two choices: Enjoy the snacks on his own, or open a door to let another bonobo in an adjoining room come share the feast. Hare found that, time and again, bonobos in this situation chose to voluntarily share.
“It could be that they feel bad for the other guy, or maybe they’re just being politicians,” sharing now with the expectation they’ll be shared with later, Hare said. “Or maybe they just want to go on a blind date.” The fact that altruism might come with an agenda doesn’t make the bonobos’ actions any less remarkable, Hare added. These same motivations prompt a lot of the sharing we do, too.
Myth #2: Humans are the only true communicators.
When scouting for potential dangers, monkeys in the rainforest go by the same rule people do: If you see something, say something. What’s more, what monkeys say depends on what exactly they see, said primatologist Klaus Zuberbühler. One alarm call signals “Oh no, a leopard!”, while another signals “Look out, an eagle!” It’s clear the calls mean different things because they don’t just sound different, they elicit different responses. Play a leopard alarm call, and a monkey will start peering down at the forest floor; play an eagle alarm call, and he’ll start scanning the skies. “Calling it a conversation might be too much,” Zuberbühler said, but monkeys can convey detailed information using their voices.
Some animals can even dabble in the languages of other species. Hornbills, birds that live a safe distance off the ground, ignore monkeys’ leopard alarm calls, but they’ll flap their wings in panic when the monkeys say an eagle’s nearby.
Myth #3: We can learn because of our big brains.
Even insects, far from us on the evolutionary tree as they are, are capable of some surprising mental feats. Understanding how their neural circuits work and what they do can give us insight into the building blocks of our own brains and behavior. “Insects are incredibly sophisticated,” said insect neuroscientist Jeremy Niven. “When you see what they can do with their tiny brains, you wonder why we need an extra billion neurons or so.”
– by Valerie Ross
Related Content:
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Will Scientists Ever Know Everything?
Discoblog: World Science Festival:Waiting for Einstein’s Gravity Waves
Discoblog: World Science Festival: The Science of Star Trek
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Telling Scary Stories of Strangelets
Discoblog: World Science Festival: Listening to Illusions of Sound
May 24 2010
Should Dolphins and Whales Have “Human Rights”?
Maybe Soup is currently being updated? I'll try again automatically in a few seconds...
