Our vision and hearing aren’t as reliable as we might think, according to a study by life scientists at UCLA. “Our basic sensory representation of the world — how information from our eyes and ears is processed by neurons in the brain — is inaccurate,” said Ladan Shams, an associate professor of psychology in the UCLA College and senior author…
To keep old trains running, operators had to keep a firm grip on a dead man’s switch. If the operator became incapacitated or, well, dead, his hand would loosen, the brakes would engage, and the train wouldn’t turn into a runaway—no active intervention required. That was 20th century engineering. In the 21st century, where scientists are as likely to engineer…
Hibernation is a state of energy conservation during which body temperature and metabolism are drastically reduced. If this state lasts longer than 24 hours, it is called hibernation. Shorter periods are called daily torpor. There are many mammals that hibernate. However, among primates hibernation is a rare capability, as it had been previously found in three species of lemurs only.…
Male zebra finches, small songbirds native to central Australia, learn their songs by copying what they hear from their fathers. These songs, often used as mating calls, develop early in life as juvenile birds experiment with mimicking the sounds they hear. MIT neuroscientists have now uncovered the brain activity that supports this learning process. Sequences of neural activity that encode…
Biologists at Tufts University have succeeded in inducing one species of flatworm to grow heads and brains characteristic of another species of flatworm without altering genomic sequence. The work reveals physiological circuits as a new kind of epigenetics – information existing outside of genomic sequence – that determines large-scale anatomy. The finding that head shape is not hard-wired by the…
When most wild animals first encounter humans, they respond as they would to any predator — by running, swimming or flying away. Over time, some species become more tolerant of humans’ presence, but the extent to which they do is largely driven by the type of environment in which the animals live and by the animal’s body size, according to…