Latest news with #FayClark
CBC
06-03-2025
- Science
- CBC
Mar 1: The recipe for finding life on other planets, and more...
On this week's episode of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald: We've learned a lot about the remarkable intelligence of birds like crows and parrots, but not much work has been done on large flightless birds. A new study that explored the problem-solving abilities of emus, ostriches and rheas suggests that some of these birdy behemoths have impressive cognition too. In a first-of-its-kind study, a team led by University of Bristol's Fay Clark trained the birds to use puzzles to get food, and they found that the rheas and emus were able to solve the puzzle easily, though the ostriches did not. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports. Researchers have done a lot of work to try and understand how astronauts can best prepare for and compensate for the muscle and bone atrophy that they will experience after long periods in microgravity. A new study, led by Marco Chiaberge at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that a workout that includes jumping might be beneficial. The researchers found that by training mice to repeatedly jump up from one level to another increased their knee cartilage thickness by 26 per cent. The research was published in the journal npj Microgravity. Sheep are among the animals that humans domesticated first, in the Middle East during the dawn of agriculture. A new genetic study of hundreds of ancient sheep remains, which date across 12 millennia, is shedding light on the intertwined history of sheep and humans. The work, led by geneticist Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin, tells the story of how the sheep's domestication not only gave us clothes but also milk and meat which fueled our spread around the world for thousands of years, and how humans molded sheep by selecting them for colour and wool. The research was published in the journal Science. The tiniest member of the great ape family — the group that today includes the chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas, and us — has been identified from fossils found in Germany. Nearly 12 million years ago, the 10-kilogram animal would have shared its environment with another, larger great ape species, something researchers didn't think was possible. David Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, said its two fossilized teeth and a single knee bone indicated that Buronius manfredschmidi had its own ecological niche high up in the trees. The study was published in the journal PLOS One. In the last two decades we've discovered literally thousands of planets orbiting nearby stars. Our technology has now advanced to the point where we can investigate whether there's life on those planets. We speak to astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger, the founder of Cornell University's Carl Sagan Institute, about her work trying to answer that question, and her book Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos.
Yahoo
20-02-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Emus might not be the ‘world's dumbest bird' after all
The insult 'bird brain' should probably be retired. Eurasian jays can pass the marshmallow test, some species have 'culture', and even extinct avians like the dodo were probably smarter than we previously thought. Large birds called palaeognaths–the closest living relatives of dinosaurs–are considered more simple. However, a small study found that some large birds are also capable of innovation. They can solve a physical task in order to access food, according to a study published February 20 in the journal Scientific Reports. Palaeognaths include emus and ostriches, and can reach 9 feet tall and weigh upwards of 300 pounds. They are more known for their brawn than their brains and often rely on their running speed and kicking to defend themselves. Emus have been called the 'world's dumbest bird' for decades. While we know that other birds are effective problem-solvers, not as much work has been done on other groups of avians. 'The more we study the same species repeatedly, the more we create an 'echo chamber' of knowledge and create a false impression that other species are less 'intelligent' but in reality they haven't been studied to the same level,' Fay Clark, a study co-author and a comparative experimental psychologist at the University of Bristol in the UK, said in a statement For this new study, the team worked with three palaeognath species at Noah's Ark Zoo Farm in Bristol–emus, rheas, and ostriches. They designed the test to measure their ability to innovate, or 'the use of pre-existing behaviors in novel circumstances or invention of novel behaviors.' Testing innovation and its relationship with animal cognition is a common way for scientists to measure general intelligence. Based on previous research, the team designed a rotating wheel that had to be moved in the right way to align with a hole to get a food reward. Each of the three species was given the test in 10 sessions. The emus were able to line up a hole with a food chamber and moved the hole in the most efficient direction towards food 90 percent of the time. A male rhea used this same technique, but also created a second one. He rotated the bold in the middle of the wheel until it fell apart. However, this particular group of ostriches did not innovate during these tests. 'We classify palaeognath innovation as low level or simplistic–and it is certainly not as complex as the innovation we see in crows and parrots,' said Clark. 'However, it is still a very important finding. There were no reports of technical innovation in palaeognaths before our study, and there was a prevailing view that they are 'dumb' birds. Our research suggests that is not true and that technical innovation may have evolved far earlier in birds than previously thought.' [ Related: Why are there so many birds? ] The team plans on conducting more cognitive research on palaeognath birds. In order to make a fair comparison, the rotary task must be used on other bird species to assess both how they respond to the same problems and how they try to solve them. 'The more we study palaeognath birds, the more we can understand the broader picture of bird cognition,' said Clark. 'And because palaeognaths birds are the closest living relatives to dinosaurs, research might shed light on how dinosaurs behaved.'
