By Cody Cottier The twittering of songbirds may bear little resemblance to human speech, but new research on Bengalese finches shows that their vocalizations do follow a fundamental structural principle found in all languages. Zipf’s law states that a handful of words—or, in this case, chirps, whistles and trills—occur frequently, while most are rare. Specifically, the most common word (“the,” in English) appears roughly twice as often as the second-most common (“of”), three times as often as the third most common (“and”), and so on. This peculiar frequency distribution was also documented last year in humpback whale song, meaning it has emerged in at least three evolutionary lineages that are separated by millions of years. Though these wordlike units in songbirds and whales probably don’t convey specific meaning in the way that human words do, these discoveries challenge the notion that human language is wholly unique, says Simon Kirby, a cognitive scientist at the University of Edinburgh and a co-author of both the whale and songbird studies. “We suddenly have these unrelated species that do something similar to what humans do,” he says. “This gives us a new dividing line, a new way of carving up communication systems in the world.” The dividing line, as Kirby sees it, lies between species that learn their vocal signals culturally and those whose calls are genetically built-in. Much like language, the songs of humpbacks and many songbirds get transmitted from one generation to the next. Because so-called Zipfian word distribution is known to help human infants pick up language from the adults around them, it stands to reason that similar patterns may aid learning in young birds and whales, too. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30363 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Jake Buehler A craving for sweets may have helped set the stage for the evolution of the human brain. Over 4 million years, our lineage’s brains grew from about 300 grams to 1,500 grams. Much of the brain growth occurred before early humans had mastered both fire and cooking, which would have unlocked access to the energy of starches. A new analysis of existing data from human ancestors, as well as chimps, suggests that a large proportion of that energy probably came from sugary foods like fruits and honey. These simple carbohydrates may have played an important, overlooked role in humankind’s evolutionary story, researchers argue August 6 in Science. A major part of the story of diet and human evolution revolves around meat-eating: Around 2.5 million years ago, our hominid ancestors began increasing their intake of animal food. This influx of protein and fat is seen as instrumental in fueling our ancestors’ ever-expanding brains. But Jennie Brand-Miller, a human nutrition scientist at the University of Sydney, was interested in how dietary sugars factored into the lives and overall evolution of our early ancestors. A 2017 study suggested that fruit-eating primates had bigger brains than leaf-eating species. Other researchers had hypothesized in the 1990s that the cognitive demands of fruit eating may have kick-started the evolution of big brains in humans. “You need to remember when various species of ripe fruit begin to ripen, then you need to remember where it is in the forest,” Brand-Miller says. “Your memory is associated with a bigger brain.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Obesity; Evolution
Link ID: 30361 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Clarissa Brincat To avoid ending up with a less committed mate, some female birds listen for red flags in their suitor’s song. Male pied flycatchers change their song after mating, and females use these song features to tell if a male is already paired, researchers report July 1 in Ethology. The results are consistent with earlier research showing that most female pied flycatchers prefer to settle with an unmated male. “The female doesn’t really care about the song,” says behavioral ecologist Stephen Nowicki of Duke University, who was not involved in the work. “She cares because the song is a reliable indicator of some quality of the male,” including whether it already has a mate. Once its first mate lays eggs, a male pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) will often set up another nest several hundred meters away and court passing females. The stakes are high for the females, as a male splitting its time between two nests provides less help raising chicks. Ethologist Helene Lampe and her colleagues recorded 17 wild males twice — once while a male was a bachelor, and again after it had mated and moved to a second territory to woo another female. Using bioacoustics software, the team found that two things changed. The songs got shorter — from about two seconds to about 1.7 — and the male repeated itself less. “Usually, a male will cycle through his song syllables in an orderly manner — one or two syllables are usually repeated from one song to the next,” says Lampe, of the University of Oslo. “But when they become polyterritorial, they do it much less often.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30356 - Posted: 08.05.2026

By Ailie McWhinnie On a research trip to Indonesia in 2007, Yosuke Kaifu saw for himself the skull of “Flo”—the skeletal remains first discovered 4 years earlier that heralded the existence of a diminutive human relative called Homo floresiensis. These so-called “Hobbits,” which stood about 1 meter tall, lived on the Indonesian island of Flores until about 50,000 years ago. The University of Tokyo anthropologist was drawn to one anatomical peculiarity: The skull’s right side is slightly smooshed. Some researchers had previously attributed this abnormality to disease, others to distortion after burial. But when Kaifu showed it to a clinician back in Japan, he received a surprising response: It looked like a harmless condition known as deformational plagiocephaly, or flattening of the skull, that occurs today in about one in six babies. Usually, the skull rounds out over time, but in some cases, it can persist into adulthood. The condition arises because the human skull remains soft for the first months of life to allow for the enormous amount of brain growth that occurs after birth. Repeated pressure on one side can cause flattening, and because babies cannot hold up their own heads, they are prone to resting it on one side when put down. Such helplessness is thought to be a concession to babies’ brains being relatively underdeveloped at birth to allow them to fit through the birth canal. Kaifu reasoned that deformational plagiocephaly in the skulls of ancient hominins could be a good indicator that they, too, were helpless as infants. After examining hundreds of skulls, they conclude today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B that at least two other lineages of humans shared this trait with us, suggesting it has deep evolutionary origins. “I thought it was a very ingenious study,” says Lia Betti, an anthropologist at University College London. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Evolution; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 30352 - Posted: 08.01.2026

By Emily Anthes One day last summer, a curious white-faced capuchin encountered a strange contraption in the forest. There, in the middle of the Taboga Forest Reserve in Costa Rica, sat a 15-inch touch screen, mounted in a wooden frame. As the monkey, an alpha male named Papi, began investigating — poking the device here, prodding it there — his fingers landed on the screen. Suddenly, a piece of dried banana dropped into a tray below the frame. Before long, Papi learned the basic rules of the device: touch the screen, get a dried banana slice. He also provided proof of concept for CapuchinAI, a new device designed to assess the cognitive abilities of monkeys in the wild. The testing apparatus, which the researchers described in a new paper, used A.I.-powered facial recognition software to detect capuchins in real time and record their responses to a simple learning task. The scientists hope that more sophisticated versions of the device, which they will begin testing in the coming weeks, will shed new light on primate evolution and intelligence, and answer questions that would be impossible to study in a lab, such as how a monkey’s smarts affect its success and survival. “If we really want to understand how primates make decisions, if we want to understand how they’re using these large brains that they evolved, we have to really put it in the context of the world in which they’re navigating,” said Marcela Benítez, a primatologist at Emory University and an author of the new paper, which was published in the American Journal of Primatology on Tuesday. “But that is a lot easier said than done.” Dr. Benítez has been studying the white-faced capuchins at Taboga for years, logging their behavior, recording their vocalizations and measuring their hormone levels. For the new study, she and her colleagues used images of some of these monkeys to train an artificial intelligence model to identify capuchins and distinguish them from the other animals roaming the forest. Then they built a portable testing station equipped with a touch screen, webcam and 3-D-printed food dispenser. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30349 - Posted: 07.29.2026

By Kristen French Psychedelics get humans high. On this point, there is no question. For centuries, Indigenous shamans, the mystically inclined, and the neuro-curious have been ingesting the trippy stuff to incur strange visions and otherworldly flights. But why psychedelics evolved is less clear and remains the subject of strenuous debate. Tiny amounts of DMT are naturally produced in the brains of humans and other mammals, which has led some neuroscientists and ethnobotanists to argue that hallucination may have some direct evolutionary or therapeutic benefit to humans, that the DMT is there to serve a special visionary or consciousness-related function, and that psychedelic plants may have co-evolved for human spiritual use. But the authors of a new study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argue that human hallucination is more likely just a side effect, and that psychedelics probably evolved as ecological tools, allowing various animals and plants to defend against predators and herbivores or to help manage symbiotic relationships. After all, hallucinogens like psilocybin, mescaline, and DMT are extremely common in the animal kingdom, appearing independently in numerous unrelated organisms such as mushrooms, cacti, toads, and sponges. “Understanding why evolution produced these molecules doesn’t diminish their therapeutic value,” wrote study author Yibo Wang, a chemist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, in an email. “Instead, it provides a deeper biological framework for discovering better medicines while promoting conservation and sustainable production.” Wang and his team propose that humans hallucinate when we ingest psychedelics because we share ancient brain chemistry with the creatures who were the original targets of the compounds, such as slugs, insects, and sea urchins. The receptors these compounds mess with—serotonin, opioid, and GABA receptors—are also found all over the animal kingdom. So the chemicals that scramble human perception may also deter snails from eating certain plants, the researchers suggest. © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30343 - Posted: 07.25.2026

By Julia Vaz Kelly Jaakkola spends her time getting dolphins to tell her things. In her observations as a cognitive psychologist at the Dolphin Research Center in Grassy Key, Florida, she’s discovered that the marine mammals cooperate to solve problems, and that they respond to complex human gestures such as pointing. Her colleague Jason Bruck, a biologist at Stephen F. Austin State University, has even shown that dolphins seem to have names for one another, just like humans do. Studies have started to pile up showing that other animals might be able to do the same. But Jaakkola is skeptical. In an opinion piece published today in Cell Press, she, Bruck, and biologist Stephanie King at the University of Bristol argue there is little evidence that other cognitively complex animals such as marmosets and elephants use names. Names, Jaakkola and her co-authors propose, must be learned, they must be shared among members of the community, and they must act as a symbolic representation of a specific individual. Showing that animal calls fulfill all those requirements is more challenging than it seems. Science chatted with Jaakkola about how researchers can test whether animals really use names—and why that matters. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. Q: Names seem simple to us, but they’re actually quite hard to define. Is that right? A: When we talk about names, what we’re talking about is a shared symbolic label that [picks] out a particular individual. So, if you say something is a name, you’re talking about a symbol for something in the world. The way that I typically talk about it is the difference between “Hey, you” and “Hey, Julia.” In both cases, I’m picking out somebody, but only in one case does it actually mean that person. Also, by this definition, names have to be learned, because you can’t be born knowing the names of everybody you’re ever going to meet. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30342 - Posted: 07.25.2026

Emma Bryce Sperm whales produce a specific pattern of clicking noises when they hear the noise of boats, researchers have found. The pattern is so distinct that the scientists who identified it said they can now use it to predict when ships are nearby. Researchers from Project Ceti (the Cetacean Translation Initiative), a non-profit research organisation working to decode sperm whale communication, spent four years tuning in on the calls of 15 sperm whales off the coast of Dominica. They discovered specific differences in sperm whale “codas”, the discrete and distinctive patterns of clicks that this species utters to communicate when those whales encountered shipping. Individual click sequences became shorter, and one type became more prominent than another. Their findings are published in the journal Ecological Informatics. “This research begs the question: are whales talking about the ships, or is it an impact on their voices because the ships are around?,” said David Gruber, the founder and chief executive of Project Ceti. “And then if we’re able to discern what they’re saying about the ships, how might that impact policy and laws?” Under normal conditions, recordings from one of the whales, named “Atwood”, picked up one type of coda comprising five clicks in a 1-1-3 pattern (two clicks preceding three quicker ones), which, Gruber explained, is unique to this specific clan of sperm whales off the Caribbean coast of Dominica. With the background hum of a ship, Atwood issued the same 1-1-3 click rhythm but noticeably faster, with the whale reducing the intervals between each click. The association was so strong that “in general, from their vocalisations alone, we can predict whether ships are around,” said Gašper Beguš, linguistics lead at Project Ceti. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Evolution
Link ID: 30338 - Posted: 07.22.2026

By Rachel Nuwer It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point, if he was awake, he also provided a saliva sample and filled out a survey about his mood. The room looked like a cell, or perhaps a very cramped hotel room, but in fact it was a metabolic research chamber, one of only 50 of its kind in the world. Its conspicuously small size prevented Picard from burning extra energy beyond the bare minimum needed to keep him alive. Napping during the day was prohibited, as was eating anything but the strictly scheduled meals tailored to his caloric needs. Bedtime was at 11 p.m. sharp. Before lights-out, Picard put on a device to monitor his vitals and brain activity while he slept. Though there wasn’t much to do — mostly he sat in bed reading or working on his laptop — excitement was the primary emotion Picard felt that day in July 2021. That’s because he was the first volunteer in an experiment run by the Mitochondrial Psychobiology Lab (opens a new tab), which he directs at Columbia University Irving Medical Center in New York. By studying how much energy is required to sustain baseline existence, his lab aims to explore what he considers an overlooked factor in health and disease, from the level of molecules all the way up to the mind: mitochondria. Most middle school students learn that mitochondria are the powerhouses of the cell. These organelles make adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of life, through a cascade of chemical reactions that breaks down glucose and fat from food. But mitochondria are much more than energy factories. Studies over the past decade have shown that they process all sorts of molecules, including neurotransmitters, hormones, and metabolites, which means they directly impact what we experience as mood, stress, sexual arousal, and the need to sleep. This makes them “the consilience point for many known processes demonstrated to underlie consciousness,” Picard said. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Consciousness; Evolution
Link ID: 30330 - Posted: 07.18.2026

By Natalie Wolchover When I was first learning to write, my letters and words ran from right to left, reversed as if in a mirror. Being left-handed, I was imitating the hand strokes of my right-handed teachers instead of reversing their strokes to replicate the letters. I gradually got the hang of writing in the correct direction, but it still feels natural for me to mirror-write. I have a mirror-written childhood diary. Leonardo da Vinci, another lefty, did that too. Being left-handed is mostly no big deal. It is annoying how ink smudges under my hand. And I did once have to jump out of the way of a circular saw that I was holding backward; indeed, left-handers have more accidents while operating machinery. That aside, overall, I enjoy being left-handed. It grants entry into a smug little club, whose members — 10% of the human population — carry the secret knowledge that we are overrepresented among U.S. presidents, famous artists and musicians, and top athletes. But our difference hasn’t always been welcome. My 91-year-old Texan grandmother remembers starting out left-handed (she, too, has examples of mirror-writing from early childhood) before being forced to switch, a common practice in much of the world until about the 1970s. The deep-seated disdain for left hands runs through our very language. “Left” comes from Old English lyft, meaning weak, foolish, worthless, or useless, while “right” means correct or proper. In other languages, the word for “left” can also mean awkward, unlucky, clumsy, suspicious, or sinister. In philosophy, “qualia” refers to the subjective qualities of our experience: what it’s like for Alice to see blue or for Bob to feel delighted. Qualia are “the ways things seem to us,” as the late philosopher Daniel Dennett put it. In these essays, our columnists follow their curiosity, and explore important but not necessarily answerable scientific questions. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Laterality; Language
Link ID: 30326 - Posted: 07.15.2026

By Jake Currie One theory, the social brain hypothesis, says we owe our massive noggins in part to the evolutionary pressure exerted by the demands of large social groups. Because we needed to keep a running tally of friends and foes to navigate thorny hierarchies and shifting alliances, we had to have brains that were up to the task (which is why this theory is also known as the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis). In many animals, especially mammals, there does seem to be a correlation between social group size and brain size. But there’s at least one big exception to this rule: cephalopods. Cephalopods like octopuses have huge brains but aren’t really known for their gregarious behavior. They tend to live solitary lives, mating without forming pair bonds and reproducing without parenting their young. In fact, their behavior can stray into the downright anti-social—many species are territorial, aggressive, and cannibalistic. Still, they’re incredibly intelligent. Octopuses use tools, solve problems, and even like to play. So if sociality can’t explain big cephalopod brains, what can? In a new paper published in iScience, an international team of researchers proposed a new version of the cultural brain hypothesis. This hypothesis—first advanced by one of the authors of the current study—states that big brains evolved to handle mountains of information that are learned both socially and asocially. In this latest research, the team focuses solely on the asocial pathway to brain evolution. To test their asocial brain hypothesis, the team compiled data on cephalopod brain size as well as ecological, behavioral, and social factors from 79 cephalopod species. They found that several ecological factors seemed to correlate with big cephalopod brains, especially the complexity of their habitats. Cephalopods that lived on the ocean floor and in shallow pools—where cleverness can be rewarded with calorie-rich prey—tended to have larger brains. Sociality, on the other hand, showed no such correlation.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 30317 - Posted: 07.11.2026

By Jim Robbins Imagine a chicken that could speak or a pigeon with a voice rivaling that of the most musical songbirds. Granted, the world probably doesn’t need any gossiping chickens or pigeons breaking out in song. But why some birds learn to create a deep repertoire and others are unable to has long been a research focus of the neurobiologist Erich D. Jarvis. “Vocal learning, just like spoken language itself, is a rare trait,” said Dr. Jarvis, who directs the Neurogenetics of Language laboratory at Rockefeller University in New York. He studies the small group of species capable of speech, focusing on birds and mice, and he has long hoped to genetically engineer an animal that can vocalize in new ways. Introducing manipulated genes into the brain of a bird or a mouse that doesn’t vocalize could create that ability and provide new clues into the origins of speech. It may also one day help in finding treatments for people with speech problems or brain disorders. Dr. Jarvis, 60, didn’t start his career in neuroengineering. He once hoped to become a professional dancer, performing ballet at Manhattan’s renowned High School for the Performing Arts and then studying at the Alvin Ailey dance school. He was a member of the Westchester Ballet Company when he began wondering how the brain was able to create dance movements. His mentor at Rockefeller was Fernando Nottebohm, the researcher who discovered in the early 1980s that songbird brains generate new neurons each spring to enable them to sing. That revolutionary understanding of neurogenesis led to further findings that all brains, including human ones, grow new neurons throughout life. Until then, it had been scientific gospel that people came into the world with a fixed number. From 2002 to 2005, Dr. Jarvis helped lead the Avian Brain Nomenclature Consortium, a project that renamed the regions of the avian brain to show that it was remarkably sophisticated. The research undermined the use of the term “bird brain” as a pejorative. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30316 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Sandy Ong On a Sunday afternoon in April, the main minibus terminal in Sukabumi, Indonesia, looked sleepy from the outside. But in an open space round the back, hundreds of men were gathered. Amid chatter and cigarette smoke, the air buzzed with excitement, for one of the region’s biggest bird-singing competitions was set to begin, and a motorbike was among the prizes. As the day progressed, dozens of songbirds were brought out for their 10-minute rounds, from tiny garden sunbirds and grey-cheeked bulbuls to larger oriental magpie-robins and orange-headed thrushes. Then the emcee announced the main event — the singing contest among the highly popular, strikingly handsome white-rumped shamas — and a hush fell over the crowd. The shamas’ owners murmured final words of encouragement and stepped away from their cages. Judges swept in with clipboards, assessing each bird for its song, ability to hold a steady tune, volume and showmanship. Soon it was down to a final two birds . . . and then “Baby White” was crowned the winner amid cheers from the crowd. Many men gathered on a patio beneath hanging cages holding songbirds Since the 1970s, songbird competitions have grown in popularity across Indonesia. With goats, motorcycles, watches and money (sometimes worth up to 10 years’ salary) up for grabs, the events are driving hordes of people to keep songbirds as pets. Indonesians have a long-standing culture of keeping birds as pets, and songbirds are especially popular, prized by collectors for their melodious singing and colorful plumage. “I keep songbirds as a hobby, to relieve stress and also gain a bit of money,” explained Harry Gunawan, a 78-year-old businessman and owner of 39 shamas, including the multiple prizewinning Baby White, while waiting for his new motorbike. Gunawan’s shamas are among an estimated 66 million to 84 million caged birds that are kept across Java, the island where 56 percent of Indonesia’s population lives and one in three households owns birds. These include more than 3 million white-rumped shamas and 2 million oriental magpie-robins. Wild birds are believed to be better songsters; hence, many are trapped in forests then crammed into tiny crates, drainpipes and even plastic bottles, destined for pet markets in Jakarta, Surabaya and other big cities. Birds that survive the journey — estimates of mortality rates range from 30 to 80 percent — will spend the rest of their lives confined to cages.

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30315 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Natalia Mesa To accurately navigate the world, an animal must learn, remember and continually update how its body position relates to what it sees in the world around it. New findings reveal the circuit mechanisms responsible for this process in fruit flies—and upend a widely held assumption that this kind of learning relies on dopamine. The research “solves this long-standing problem of how you learn about landmarks in the world,” says Lisa Giocomo, professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, who was not involved in the study. “Over the last decade, some of the biggest insights into how the brain generates algorithms for navigational systems have come from Drosophila,” she says. “It’s been astonishing to see what’s been possible with that system.” When a neuron in a fly’s internal compass activates at the same time as a cell responding to a visual landmark, a third type of cell called an EL neuron releases the neuromodulator octopamine onto the visual inputs, according to the work, posted as a preprint in December 2025 and presented at the Jane Coffin Childs Symposium in May 2026. Octopamine acts as a signal that modifies the connection between the compass and visual cells, anchoring the fly’s sense of direction to visual cues. To their knowledge, the synaptic and circuit mechanisms the fly uses to update its internal compass work unlike any yet described, the study investigators say. “It’s a completely new learning mechanism, basically,” says Stanley Heinze, senior lecturer of sensory biology at Lund University, who was not involved in the study. Fruit flies, like other animals, have an internal compass made up of head direction cells that selectively activate based on the direction the fly faces. The fly’s internal representation of the world drifts without visual input but quickly reorients when familiar landmarks reappear. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30313 - Posted: 07.08.2026

By Libby Riddle A bear might seem like the scariest thing you could run into in a national park. But a new study suggests maybe you should be more worried about elk. Out of nearly 3,000 wildlife incidents in Canadian national parks, more than half involved an elk, researchers report July 2 in Frontiers in Conservation Science. But the risk of tangling with a given species also depended on what people were doing, say Holly Landles and conservation biologist Shashank Balakrishna of the University of York in England. Camping out? Be wary of elk grazing near your campsite. Quietly hiking or wildlife watching? Watch out for bears using the same trails. “By identifying situations where a potential conflict scenario is more likely, we can help visitors make informed decisions that improve safety whilst also reducing unnecessary disturbance to wildlife,” says Landles, who conducted this research as an undergraduate at York. Landles and Balakrishna analyzed 2,878 aggressive wildlife incidents from 2010 to 2023 involving five animals: black bears, grizzly bears, elk, coyotes and mule deer. Aggressive behaviors included chasing, attacking or bluffing a charge. The analysis identified which animal–human activity combinations were especially risky. Elk topped the list, involved in 62 percent of all the incidents. One of the riskiest combos was elk and camping — the animals turned up in 84 percent of campground incidents. This may be because Canada’s peak camping season aligns with when the animals mate and give birth — times of heightened aggression for the species. “Elk are herbivorous herd animals that don’t immediately inspire fear like a carnivore does,” Balakrishna says. Visitors may underestimate how aggressive they can be. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Aggression
Link ID: 30308 - Posted: 07.04.2026

By Nora Bradford Mirrors are tricky. Even humans aren’t born with an intuitive understanding of them; we have to learn how they work. Now, scientists have discovered that the California two-spot octopus (Octopus bimaculoides) can also learn to use mirrors, researchers report June 3 in Current Biology. When brainstorming octopus experiments, Mary Kieseler, a neuroscientist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, had wondered whether the famously smart creatures could pass the mirror test, which evaluates if an animal can identify itself in a mirror. Because of the challenging logistics the mirror self-recognition test would entail underwater, Kieseler and her team decided to first study whether octopuses could use mirrors as a tool to do something they’re already great at. And octopuses are great at hunting prey. The team began by habituating three wild-caught octopuses to a mirror covering half their tank. They let the octopuses hide from the mirror and even explore the other half of the tank behind it. After the octopuses became comfortable with seeing their reflection and eating in front of the mirror, the team gave them a task: Find a hidden jar with a tasty crab inside, placed where the snack could be found using only its reflection in the mirror. Initially, the octopuses approached the mirror, then turned around to find their prey. But after about 10 to 12 trials, each animal learned to crawl directly to the crab without the mirror pit stop. When using real crabs, there was no way to know whether the octopuses might have been relying on smell or another nonvisual sense to hunt, so Kieseler and her team came up with one final test. Rather than using real crabs, the team used virtual ones. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 30305 - Posted: 07.01.2026

By K. R. Callaway Strutting and fluttering around cities, pigeons have adapted to an ever-shifting environment. But their environment isn’t the only thing that’s constantly changing. New research suggests the birds themselves avoid stability in their decision-making, instead choosing to live “at the edge of chaos.” As model species for learning and behavior, these birds are helping researchers test a century-old law about how humans and other creatures learn. When learning something new, people and animals alike tend to repeat behaviors that are rewarded. First proposed by Edward Thorndike in 1898, this principle is so well established in psychology that it's become known as the law of effect. But the law implies that beyond making a behavior more frequent, rewards also make it more consistent: reducing variability in the specific way behaviors are performed over time. Although scientists have repeatedly tested whether rewards increase the frequency of behaviors, their effect on consistency is less well studied. University of Iowa experimental psychologist Edward A. Wasserman and his colleagues decided to put it to the test in pigeons—a species that has been integral to the study of learning at the university’s Comparative Cognition Laboratory for more than 50 years. And the study’s results, published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Learning and Cognition, suggest these birds experience variability as the spice of life. To see how rewarded behaviors vary, the researchers gave pigeons a series of five colorful buttons to peck. They could peck any buttons in any order, but as long as they pecked five times, a treat would appear. Based on previous theories of learning, the scientists expected the pigeons might eventually slip into a routine—perhaps choosing to repeat patterns they know work or simply pecking the button nearest to them five times. Instead they continued pecking in a variety of patterns. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30304 - Posted: 07.01.2026

Ian Sample Science editor A scientist who decoded the vocalisations that a bird uses to communicate has won a $100,000 prize for making progress towards a world in which humans can talk to the animals – without being met with a blank response. Dr Julie Elie at the University of California, Berkeley, was awarded the 2026 Coller-Dolittle prize for two-way interspecies communication after working out the 11 core calls in the zebra finch vocabulary and their meanings. Her work revealed how the birds announce who they are and what they are doing, and recognise one another regardless of what they are saying by using individual signatures. She also found that at times, the birds confused calls with similar meanings more than those that sounded the same. “I’m really super-honoured,” Elie said on winning the prize, adding that she hoped the work was a step forwards in the “great endeavour” to communicate with animals. Prof Yossi Yovel, a zoologist at Tel Aviv University and chair of the panel of judges, said the work marked “a key moment in the field”. The prize was launched in 2024 by the Jeremy Coller Foundation, which promotes awareness of animal welfare and animal sentience, in partnership with Tel Aviv University. Beyond the annual prizes for progress, the foundation has established a $10m grand prize for cracking the problem of two-way human-animal communication. Elie decided to study zebra finches because they are so vocal – meaning they produce plenty of data. “The question I asked myself when hearing these chatty songbirds was what are they saying?” she said. For more than a decade, Elie observed and recorded the sounds the birds made and classified the calls according to the situation and the bird that made them. She then used machine learning to analyse what and how information was encoded in the calls. Finally, she ran tests that showed the birds agreed with her classification. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30301 - Posted: 06.27.2026

By Emily Anthes Humor is deeply personal. A punchline or a pratfall that leaves one person doubled over in delight might elicit blank stares from another. But laughter is universal, an innate instinct shared by humans everywhere. And not just humans. Chimps chuckle, gorillas guffaw, bonobos bust a gut. All the planet’s great apes laugh, and they often do so in the same kind of regular, repeating rhythm that humans do, scientists found in a small new study. The research sheds light on how laughter evolved with and among great apes, becoming faster and more variable in humans than in these other primate species. While nonhuman apes appeared to laugh in ways that were largely fixed, humans were more flexible in their expressions of mirth, changing up the tempo of their chuckles depending on the circumstance, the scientists found. “I think we can say we are the masters of laughter,” said Chiara De Gregorio, a research fellow at the University of Warwick in Britain and an author of the study. “We can have a small, polite laugh in front of the Queen of England, and then we are in the pub with our friends, and we laugh so much in a different way. We can even laugh in a way that communicates to the other person that we actually didn’t find the joke they said funny.” This wide-ranging repertoire requires significant vocal flexibility and control — the same skills that humans would have needed for spoken language. The study demonstrates the “uniqueness of human laughter,” said Greg Bryant, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who was not involved in the new research. “It provides a window into human vocal evolution.” In the new study, which was published on Thursday in the journal Communications Biology, the researchers analyzed the recorded laughter of four children and 13 young, captive apes: four orangutans, two gorillas, three bonobos and four chimpanzees. Some of the recordings featured laughter produced during play, while others captured laughter elicited by tickling. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30298 - Posted: 06.27.2026

Zoe Beketova When Adam Douglass began to study the tiny, transparent fish in the Danionella genus about 10 years ago, he had to get his animals from an out-of-state fish shop, where they were sold as an exotic pet breed. “The only information at all about trying to grow them in captivity came from online,” says Douglass, a neurobiologist at the University of Utah. Compared with zebrafish, which by that point had been a model species for biology research for decades, Danionella was little known to scientists. How things have changed. Last week, the Janelia Research Campus, the in-house research arm of the behemoth Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), announced a 10-year, roughly $1 billion research effort focused on using Danionella as a model for how brain cells and circuits drive complex behaviors in vertebrates. The effort will also draw on cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) tools to make sense of all the new data on the fish. “I think this is one of the most exciting opportunities that we’ve faced in the entire history of Janelia,” says neuroscientist Nelson Spruston, Janelia’s vice president and executive director. “There are a lot of structures in the brain and the rest of the body of fish that are identifiably similar to those of humans,” he adds, and there’s a long history of simple model organisms “leading to important insights that eventually result in cures and treatments for devastating diseases.” Danionella’s growing popularity comes from one (literally) clear advantage: Unlike zebrafish, which are transparent only for the first few weeks of their 3- to 4-year lives, Danionella remain so, meaning their brain is still visible—and easier to image—when they reach adulthood and engage in behaviors such as schooling, navigation, and courtship. The fish, only about the size of a grain of rice, never grow scales, develop pigmentation, or form a complete, bony skull. “All of these features that stand in the way of being able to get photons into and out of your skull [for imaging] are not there,” says Douglass, who has watched Danionella become a focus of dozens of labs worldwide

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30294 - Posted: 06.24.2026