An Asian elephant named Mary living at the Berlin Zoo surprised researchers by figuring out how to use a hose to take her morning showers, according to a new paper published in the journal Current Biology. “Elephants are amazing with hoses,” said co-author Michael Brecht of the Humboldt University of Berlin. “As it is often the case with elephants, hose tool use behaviors come out very differently from animal to animal; elephant Mary is the queen of showering.”

Tool use was once thought to be one of the defining features of humans, but examples of it were eventually observed in primates and other mammals. Dolphins have been observed using sea sponges to protect their beaks while foraging for food, and sea otters will break open shellfish like abalone with rocks. Several species of fish also use tools to hunt and crack open shellfish, as well as to clear a spot for nesting. And the coconut octopus collects coconut shells, stacking them and transporting them before reassembling them as shelter.

Birds have also been observed using tools in the wild, although this behavior was limited to corvids (crows, ravens, and jays), although woodpecker finches have been known to insert twigs into trees to impale passing larvae for food. Parrots, by contrast, have mostly been noted for their linguistic skills, and there has only been limited evidence that they use anything resembling a tool in the wild. Primarily, they seem to use external objects to position nuts while feeding.

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Fungi can be enigmatic organisms. Mushrooms or other structures may be visible above the soil, but beneath lurks a complex network of filaments, or hyphae, known as the mycelium. It is even possible for fungi to communicate through the mycelium—despite having no brain.

Other brainless life-forms (such as slime molds) have surprising ways of navigating their surroundings and surviving through communication. Wanting to see whether fungi could recognize food in different arrangements, researchers from Tohoku University and Nagaoka College in Japan observed how the mycelial network of Phanerochaete velutina, a fungus that feeds off dead wood, grew on and around wood blocks arranged in different shapes.

The way the mycelial network spread out, along with its wood decay activity, differed based on the wood block arrangements. This suggests communication because the fungi appeared to find where the most nutrients were and grow in those areas.

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Many species of bats use echolocation to avoid obstacles like tree branches and hunt small insects as they fly through the dark. But it turns out echolocation for bats is much more than just a short-range obstacle-avoidance and prey-targeting system. A recent study shows that one species of bats can stitch together thousands upon thousands of sound signatures into acoustic maps they use to successfully navigate several kilometers over their hunting grounds. The maps work even if the bats are completely blindfolded.

Blindfolded bats

“What echolocating bats do is they emit sounds, ultrasonic or not, and use the characteristics of the reflected echo to sense objects they have in front of them. We wanted to know if they use it for large-scale navigation. Most people think, 'Of course they do,' but the reality is we didn’t know that,” says Aya Goldshtein, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior in Konstanz, Germany. Goldshtein collaborated with scientists at Tel Aviv University on a study of how a species of bats called Kuhl’s pipistrelle navigate in their natural environment.

There were several reasons that navigation via echolocation wasn’t obvious at all. For starters, echolocation is hopelessly limited when it comes to range. Bats can use it to sense objects that are at most a few dozen meters away. It’s a tool closer to an ultrasonic parking sensor in a car than to a long-distance sonar in a submarine. It is also not omnidirectional. The cone of coverage bats get from echolocation is usually a maximum of 120 degrees, although they can modulate it to an extent, depending on the shape of their mouths.

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Many animals, including humans, have developed a taste for alcohol in some form, but excessive consumption often leads to adverse health effects. One exception is the Oriental hornet. According to a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, these hornets can guzzle seemingly unlimited amounts of ethanol regularly and at very high concentrations with no ill effects—not even intoxication. They pretty much drank honeybees used in the same experiments under the table.

“To the best of our knowledge, Oriental hornets are the only animal in nature adapted to consuming alcohol as a metabolic fuel," said co-author Eran Levin of Tel Aviv University. "They show no signs of intoxication or illness, even after chronically consuming huge amounts of alcohol, and they eliminate it from their bodies very quickly."

Per Levin et al., there's a "drunken monkey" theory that predicts that certain animals well-adapted to low concentrations of ethanol in their diets nonetheless have adverse reactions at higher concentrations. Studies have shown that tree shrews, for example, can handle concentrations of up to 3.8 percent, but in laboratory conditions, when they consumed ethanol in concentrations of 10 percent or higher, they were prone to liver damage.

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It’s Halloween. You’ve just finished trick-or-treating and it’s time to assess the haul. You likely have a favorite, whether it’s chocolate bars, peanut butter cups, those gummy clusters with Nerds on them, or something else.

For some people, including me, one piece stands out—the Snickers bar, especially if it’s full-size. The combination of nougat, caramel, and peanuts coated in milk chocolate makes Snickers a popular candy treat.

As a food engineer studying candy and ice cream at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I now look at candy in a whole different way than I did as a kid. Back then, it was all about shoveling it in as fast as I could.

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Zettabytes—that’s 10²¹ bytes—of data are currently generated every year. All of those cat videos have to be stored somewhere, and DNA is a great storage medium; it has amazing data density and is stable over millennia.

To date, people have encoded information into DNA the same way nature has, by linking the four nucleotide bases comprising DNA—A, T,  C, and G—into a particular genetic sequence. Making these sequences is time-consuming and expensive, though, and the longer your sequence, the higher chance there is that errors will creep in.

But DNA has an added layer of information encoded on top of the nucleotide sequence, known as epigenetics. These are chemical modifications to the nucleotides, specifically altering a C when it comes before a G. In cells, these modifications function kind of like stage directions; they can tell the cell when to use a particular DNA sequence without altering the “text” of the sequence itself. A new paper in Nature describes using epigenetics to store information in DNA without needing to synthesize new DNA sequences every time.

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Colossal, the company founded to try to restore the mammoth to the Arctic tundra, has also decided to tackle a number of other species that have gone extinct relatively recently: the dodo and the thylacine. Because of significant differences in biology, not the least of which is the generation time of Proboscideans, these other efforts may reach many critical milestones well in advance of the work on mammoths.

Late last week, Colossal released a progress report on the work involved in resurrecting the thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, which went extinct when the last known survivor died in a zoo in 1936. Marsupial biology has some features that may make de-extinction somewhat easier, but we have far less sophisticated ways of manipulating it compared to the technology we've developed for working with the stem cells and reproduction of placental mammals. But, based on these new announcements, the technology available for working with marsupials is expanding rapidly.

Cane toad resistance

Colossal has branched out from its original de-extinction mission to include efforts to keep species from ever needing its services. In the case of marsupial predators, the de-extinction effort is incorporating work that will benefit existing marsupial predators: generating resistance to the toxins found on the cane toad, an invasive species that has spread widely across Australia.

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Evolution has turned out bizarre and baffling creatures, such as walking fish. It only gets weirder from there. Some of these fish not only walk on the seafloor, but use their leg-like appendages to taste for signs of prey that might be hiding.

Most species of sea robins are bottom-dwellers that both swim and crawl around on “legs” that extend from their pectoral fins. An international team of researchers has now discovered that the legs of the northern sea robin, Prionotus carolinus, double as sensory organs. They are covered in bumps called papillae (similar to those on a human tongue) with taste receptors that detect chemical stimuli coming from buried prey. If they taste something appetizing, they will dig for their next meal.

There is more to this fish than its extraordinary way of hunting. Analysis of P. carolinus genes found that a gene that may date back to the origin of animals controls the formation of both legs and sensory papillae, which hints at how they might have evolved.

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NASA's Europa Clipper spacecraft lifted off Monday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, kicking off a $5.2 billion robotic mission to explore one of the most promising locations in the Solar System for finding extraterrestrial life.

The Falcon Heavy rocket fired its 27 kerosene-fueled engines and vaulted away from Launch Complex 39A at 12:06 pm EDT (16:06 UTC) Monday. Delayed several days due to Hurricane Milton, which passed through Central Florida late last week, the launch of Europa Clipper signaled the start of a five-and-a-half- year journey to Jupiter, where the spacecraft will settle into an orbit taking it repeatedly by one of the giant planet's numerous moons.

The moon of Jupiter that has most captured scientists' interest, Europa, is sheathed in ice. There's strong evidence of a global ocean of liquid water below Europa's frozen crust, and Europa Clipper is going there to determine if it has the ingredients for life.

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Over the last few years, Virginia Tech scientists have been looking to the octopus for inspiration to design technologies that can better grip a wide variety of objects in underwater environments. Their latest breakthrough is a special switchable adhesive modeled after the shape of the animal's suckers, according to a new paper published in the journal Advanced Science.

“I am fascinated with how an octopus in one moment can hold something strongly, then release it instantly. It does this underwater, on objects that are rough, curved, and irregular—that is quite a feat,” said co-author and research group leader Michael Bartlett. "We’re now closer than ever to replicating the incredible ability of an octopus to grip and manipulate objects with precision, opening up new possibilities for exploration and manipulation of wet or underwater environments.”

As previously reported, there are several examples in nature of efficient ways to latch onto objects in underwater environments, per the authors. Mussels, for instance, secrete adhesive proteins to attach themselves to wet surfaces, while frogs have uniquely structured toe pads that create capillary and hydrodynamic forces for adhesion. But cephalopods like the octopus have an added advantage: The adhesion supplied by their grippers can be quickly and easily reversed, so the creatures can adapt to changing conditions, attaching to wet and dry surfaces.

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On Wednesday, the Nobel Committee announced that it had awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry to researchers who pioneered major breakthroughs in computational chemistry. These include two researchers at Google's DeepMind in acknowledgment of their role in developing AI software that could take a raw protein sequence and use it to predict the three-dimensional structure the protein would adopt in cells. Separately, the University of Washington's David Baker was honored for developing software that could design entirely new proteins with specific structures.

The award makes for a bit of a theme for this year, as yesterday's Physics prize honored AI developments. In that case, the connection to physics seemed a bit tenuous, but here, there should be little question that the developments solved major problems in biochemistry.

Understanding protein structure

DeepMind, represented by Demis Hassabis and John Jumper, had developed AIs that managed to master games as diverse as chess and StarCraft. But it was always working on more significant problems in parallel, and in 2020, it surprised many people by announcing that it had tackled one of the biggest computational challenges in existence: the prediction of protein structures.

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Comb jellies, technically known as ctenophores, are one of the weirdest creatures on Earth. They appeared in the seas over half a billion years ago and have maintained to the present day the comb-like rows of cilia they used to move around. Their transparent bodies and internal bioluminescence give them looks that rival gaming computers. But there’s something that makes them even weirder.

When a comb jelly is injured, it can regenerate at an amazing rate. But it can also attach a body part of another injured comb jelly and integrate it near-seamlessly into its own body. (Those who have played Elden Ring can enjoy comparisons to Godrick The Grafted.)

“I’ve been observing ctenophores for a long time, so it was easy to spot an unusually large specimen. Some of the anatomical features were doubled, so I realized what I’m looking at is actually two individuals that have fused together,” said Kei Jokura, a marine researcher at the University of Exeter and lead author of a recent Current Biology paper on the integration of fused ctenophores.

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On Monday, the Nobel Committee announced that two US researchers, Victor Ambros and Gary Ruvkun, will receive the prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discovery of a previously unknown mechanism for controlling the activity of genes. They discovered the first of what is now known to be a large collection of MicroRNAs, short (21-23 bases long) RNAs that bind to and alter the behavior of protein-coding RNAs. While first discovered in a roundworm, they've since been discovered to play key roles in the development of most complex life.

The story behind the discovery is typical of a lot of the progress in the biological sciences: genetics helps identify a gene important for the development of one species, and then evolutionary conservation reveals its widespread significance.

In the worm

Ambros and Ruvkun started on the path to discovery while post-doctoral fellows in the lab of earlier Nobel winner Robert Horvitz, who won for his role in developing the roundworm C. elegans as an experimental genetic organism. As part of the early genetic screens, people had identified a variety of mutations that caused developmental problems for specific lineages of cells. These lin mutations included lin-4, which Ambros was characterizing. It lacked a number of specialized cell types, as well as the physical structures that depended on them.

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In 2014, researchers monitoring acoustic recordings from the Mariana Archipelago picked up an unusual whale vocalization with both low- and high-frequency components. It seemed to be a whale call, but it sounded more mechanical than biological and has since been dubbed a "biotwang."

Now a separate team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model to scan a dataset of recordings of whale vocalizations from various species to help identify the source of such calls. Combining that analysis with visual observations allowed the team to identify the source of the biotwang: a species of baleen whales called Bryde's (pronounced "broodus") whales. This should help researchers track populations of these whales as they migrate to different parts of the world, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Marine biologists often rely on a powerful tool called passive acoustic monitoring for long-term data collection of the ocean's acoustic environment, including whale vocalizations. Bryde's whale calls tend to be regionally specific, per the authors. For instance, calls in the eastern North Pacific are pretty well documented, with frequencies typically falling below 100 Hz, augmented by harmonic frequencies as high as 400 Hz. Far less is known about the sounds made by Bryde's whales in the western and central North Pacific, since for many years there were only three known recordings of those vocalizations—including a call dubbed "Be8" (starting at 45 Hz with multiple harmonics) and mother-calf calls.

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We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which in turn form specialized growths that are harvested for food. But other ant species cooperate with fungi—in some cases strains of fungus that are also found growing in their environment.

Genetic studies have shown that these symbiotic relationships are highly specific—a given ant species will often cooperate with just a single strain of fungus. A number of genes that appear to have evolved rapidly in response to strains of fungi take part in this cooperative relationship. But it has been less clear how the cooperation originally came about, partly because we don't have a good picture of what the undomesticated relatives of these fungi look like.

Now, a large international team of researchers has done a study that traces the relationships among a large collection of both fungi and ants, providing a clearer picture of how this form of agriculture evolved. And the history this study reveals suggests that the cooperation between ants and their crops began after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, when little beyond fungi could thrive.

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Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.

They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

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In 2014, researchers monitoring acoustic recordings from the Mariana Archipelago picked up an unusual whale vocalization with both low- and high-frequency components. It seemed to be a whale call, but it sounded more mechanical than biological and has since been dubbed a "biotwang."

Now a separate team of scientists has developed a machine-learning model to scan a dataset of recordings of whale vocalizations from various species to help identify the source of such calls. Combining that analysis with visual observations allowed the team to identify the source of the biotwang: a species of baleen whales called Bryde's (pronounced "broodus") whales. This should help researchers track populations of these whales as they migrate to different parts of the world, according to a recent paper published in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science.

Marine biologists often rely on a powerful tool called passive acoustic monitoring for long-term data collection of the ocean's acoustic environment, including whale vocalizations. Bryde's whale calls tend to be regionally specific, per the authors. For instance, calls in the eastern North Pacific are pretty well documented, with frequencies typically falling below 100 Hz, augmented by harmonic frequencies as high as 400 Hz. Far less is known about the sounds made by Bryde's whales in the western and central North Pacific, since for many years there were only three known recordings of those vocalizations—including a call dubbed "Be8" (starting at 45 Hz with multiple harmonics) and mother-calf calls.

Read full article

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We tend to think of agriculture as a human innovation. But insects beat us to it by millions of years. Various ant species cooperate with fungi, creating a home for them, providing them with nutrients, and harvesting them as food. This reaches the peak of sophistication in the leafcutter ants, which cut foliage and return it to feed their fungi, which in turn form specialized growths that are harvested for food. But other ant species cooperate with fungi—in some cases strains of fungus that are also found growing in their environment.

Genetic studies have shown that these symbiotic relationships are highly specific—a given ant species will often cooperate with just a single strain of fungus. A number of genes that appear to have evolved rapidly in response to strains of fungi take part in this cooperative relationship. But it has been less clear how the cooperation originally came about, partly because we don't have a good picture of what the undomesticated relatives of these fungi look like.

Now, a large international team of researchers has done a study that traces the relationships among a large collection of both fungi and ants, providing a clearer picture of how this form of agriculture evolved. And the history this study reveals suggests that the cooperation between ants and their crops began after the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, when little beyond fungi could thrive.

Read full article

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Billions of cells die in your body every day. Some go out with a bang, others with a whimper.

They can die by accident if they’re injured or infected. Alternatively, should they outlive their natural lifespan or start to fail, they can carefully arrange for a desirable demise, with their remains neatly tidied away.

Originally, scientists thought those were the only two ways an animal cell could die, by accident or by that neat-and-tidy version. But over the past couple of decades, researchers have racked up many more novel cellular death scenarios, some specific to certain cell types or situations. Understanding this panoply of death modes could help scientists save good cells and kill bad ones, leading to treatments for infections, autoimmune diseases, and cancer.

Read full article

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