Why elephants never forget but fleas have, well, the attention span of a flea
Researchers have developed a model to calculate how quickly or slowly an organism should ideally learn in its surroundings. An organism's ideal learning rate depends on the pace of environmental change and its life cycle, they say.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r....eleases/2024/10/2410
New methods for whale tracking and rendezvous using autonomous robots
Today, a research team has proposed a new reinforcement learning framework with autonomous drones to find sperm whales and predict where they will surface.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r....eleases/2024/10/2410
Sinuses prevented prehistoric croc relatives from deep diving
Paleobiologists have found that the sinuses of ocean dwelling relatives of modern-day crocodiles prevented them from evolving into deep divers like whales and dolphins.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r....eleases/2024/10/2410
Solar-powered animal cells
Energy-making chloroplasts from algae have been inserted into hamster cells, enabling the cells to photosynthesize light, according to new research in Japan. It was previously thought that combining chloroplasts (chlorophyll containing structures in the cells of plants and algae) with animal cells was not possible, and that the chloroplasts would not survive or function. However, results showed that photosynthetic action continued for at least two days. This technique could be useful for artificial tissue engineering. Tissues can struggle to grow due to a lack of oxygen, but adding chloroplast-infused cells could enable oxygen and energy to be supplied through light exposure and photosynthesis.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r....eleases/2024/10/2410
Alcohol consumption among non-human animals may not be as rare as previously thought, say ecologists
Anecdotes abound of wildlife behaving 'drunk' after eating fermented fruits, but despite this, nonhuman consumption of ethanol has been assumed to be rare and accidental. Ecologists now challenge this assumption. They argue that since ethanol is naturally present in nearly every ecosystem, it is likely consumed on a regular basis by most fruit- and nectar-eating animals.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/r....eleases/2024/10/2410
