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A group at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology developed a sophisticated facial recognition software specially designed to identify birds for photos. Called the Merlin Bird Photo ID, the software works its magic by employing a combination of image recognition algorithms, deep learning techniques (so it learns from its mistakes and gets better in time) and human collaborators who upload photos and help the software by first identifying the key features that makes a species distinct. The team is now working at turning the software into an app, so that anyone with a smartphone can take photos of a lingering avian wonder then instantly come to know which species it is.
Seven miniature species of frogs living on seven different mountain tops sounds like the premise for the next Kung Fu Panda sequel. But as researcher Marcio Pie of the Federal University of Parana and his colleagues show in a paper published in PeerJ., it is what they have found in the Atlantic Rainforest of Brazil.
They call it "Tree 76", because it stands 76 meters tall (249 feet) above the Muir Woods floor in California. Researchers wanted to see how old Tree 76 is, and they were surprised to see how young it is - at only 777 years old, it's much younger than the oldest known trees of its kind.
Chimps not only have the brain power to understand the concept of cooked food, but they are willing to delay eating raw food if they know they can cook it. This highlights impressive cognitive abilities, such as the foresight and patience to resist their urge of eating food.
In the beginning, the Earth's surface was a lifeless, hot, but chemically rich place. In these harsh conditions, the first amino acids synthesized from inorganic compounds, and from them, proteins formed. They built the first single cells, which went on to form plants and animals. Recent research helped us understand the process that created amino acids, and there is a widespread consensus in the scientific community as to the path cells took to evolve to complex life as we know it today.
A team of biologists from Queensland discovered two new species belonging to a marsupial genus known for mating until it literally dies. The antechinus marsupials look like pouched mice or shrews, but as cute as they may look, they're real beasts in the sack. Typically, once the breeding season starts, males embark in vicious sexual orgies 14 hours at a time, and it doesn't stop for two or so weeks. At the very end, the males suffers from diseases, internal bleeding, their fur falls off and some get ulcer. Ultimately, all that whole lotta love kills them, and rather painful too. Though they've just been discovered, the new antechinus species are considered endangered by the researchers.
A routine DNA test came up with some extremely surprising results - female sawfish in Florida reproduce without mating with males. This is among the very few times this process was observed in vertebrates.
The 2011 Japan tsunami was so massive that even today, debris from it keeps washing up in Washington - and that might be a problem. Scientists report that along with the debris, invasive species are also make their way to the USA.
New controversial research concluded that dinosaurs weren't the cold blooded lizards we tend to see them today - instead, they had much in common with mammals, and were warm blooded.
An Alberta citizen discovered a trove of rare fossilized fish while digging up his basement. But Edgar Nernberg isn't a man who "believes" in science - instead, he claims that the fish are 4,500 years old, from Noah's flood.
Six mice were spent 91 days on board the Internationals Space Station in 2009, or seven years in the life of a mouse. Comparing their tissue characteristics with mice living in the same conditions, only on Earth, researchers found micro-gravity induces some peculiar biological changes. For instance, the mice's skin was thinner and their hair grew more. Like humans, mice too suffer from muscle and bone atrophy in micro-gravity, which prompted scientists to consider them as reliable models for studying the effect of living in space for extended periods of time. Previously, human astronauts have complained about skin dryness and irritation and these latest findings seems to suggest that these may indeed be caused by micro-gravity.
A female Yangtze giant softshell turtle (quite possibly the last female of her species) has been given another chance to breed. She has been artificially inseminated at the Suzhou Zoo in China, in a last ditch effort to attempt to preserve her species.
It's more than just a nasty trick - scientists have actually 3D printed eggs to help them better understand bird behaviour. They were especially interested in bird perception and what particular characteristics make them identify real eggs from fake ones.
Scientists are studying a virus that survives in extremely hot environments in the hope that it will give us better ways of fighting infectious diseases.
Scientists have discovered what they thought to a different species of chameleon - but DNA analysis revealed that they were in fact dealing with 11 different species, hiding in plain sight.
In what's perhaps one of the most amazing marine science study, a team of researchers scoured the world's oceans fishing for microbes, viruses and other tiny life during a three and a half year trip aboard a schooner. The trip was long and arduous for sure, but ultimately it paid out - big time! The team collected 35,000 samples at 210 stations over the voyage, and found 35,000 species of bacteria, 5,000 new viruses and 150,000 single-celled plants and creatures. Most of these are new to science. Only a small fraction of the newly discovered and known species alike had been genetically sequenced, but results so far show just how interconnected and symbiotic marine life is. It also means it's also vulnerable in the face of environmental changes, particularly climate change.
Biologists have long suspected that cephalopods like the squid and cuttlefish have specialized proteins embedded in their skin, very similar to those found in the eye, which they can use to perceive light, and maybe even colour. Where previously attempts failed, a team at University of California at Santa Barbara now offers conclusive evidence that octopuses can 'see' with their skin. Namely, they can definitely perceive light characteristics like wavelengths, brightness and such, but not edges or contrast. So, you might as well add full body vision to the list of awesome octopus features: master of disguise, elegance in chaos, survival in sub-freezing Antarctic temperatures or special untangling switches. But hey, who's counting anymore. As much as octopuses are weird, they're just as fascinating!
A new analysis conducted by Yale researchers revealed that the first snakes may have actually evolved on land, not in water. These proto-snakes were likely night hunters that might have had hind legs and even toes. “We generated the first comprehensive reconstruction of what the ancestral snake was like,” said Allison Hsiang, lead author the […]
Giant pandas love to feast on bamboo - it's their favorite food, and they easily make quick work of it, using their powerful jaws to peel the plant's tough bark and get to its tender core. But even though the pandas love it, their stomachs don't - a new study has revealed that the panda's stomach is not adapted to a completely herbivorous diet, and still craves for an omnivorous meal, like other bears.
Our bones are much lighter and weaker than those of our Paleolithic ancestors (11,000 to 33,000 years ago), but it's not our spoiled modern day lifestyle that's to blame. Instead, a new study which closely compared homo sapiens bones, both ancient and modern, found that the most significant changes occurred once the paradigm shift from hunter-gatherer to agriculture took place, some 10,000 years ago. Humans started forming permanent settlements, worked the land and tended to flocks. Consequently, the lifestyle became more sedentary.
According to a new study, just like tree rings carry with them hints about previous dry or rainy years, bones in fish carry with them a specific signature which records the chemical composition of the waters they used to live in. Most vertebrates, especially fish, have what is called an ‘otolith’ – a specific bony structure […]
Fruit flies experience fear, one of the primary emotions, according to a new research that suggests there's much more to flies scattering about in the face of a swatter than a mere robotic reflex. But do the flies feel other emotions too? That's an extremely difficult question to answer, since the researchers themselves aren't even sure what they've been observing is genuine fear. It does, however, bear all the characteristics of fear. The findings are important since the show that other "lesser beings" that have a primitive nervous system like other insects or spiders might also experience fear, and possibly other emotions as well like happiness or sadness. Who knows, maybe love too?
Though it's a deep ocean fish, the slender opah is actually fully warm blooded - the first of its kind discovered so far. This remarkable insight was made by accident after researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration dissected the fish and noticed its blue and red blood vessels were located inside the gills, rather than in the fish's swimming muscles. Tuna or sharks, which both have the same vessels but not arranged in the same way, cool their blood once it reaches the gills for oxygen reloading. The opah's vessels are interwoven inside the gill like a net, which means the the veins that carry warm blood away from the hot muscles are interwoven with the arteries that carry cold blood in from the gills. This makes all the difference. Running so close to each other, the warm blood from the heart heats the cold blood from the gills. This way the Opah is 5 degrees Celsius warmer than its surroundings waters!
Cuba, famous for its rum and cigars, might be one of the unlikeliest places people think of when cutting-edge biotech research is concerned. Despite economic sanctions and embargoes set forth by the US and partners, the country's medical research institutes boasts some impressive results, particularly in immunization. One prime example is a lung cancer vaccine developed at Cuba’s Center for Molecular Immunology which increases life expectancy by up to six months. Now, the Roswell Park Cancer has signed an agreement with the Cuban medical center to finally bring the vaccine to the US for clinical trials.
Most evolutionary biologists seem to agree, based on fossil record, that the birds of today are direct descendants of dinosaurs, and that the first bird ancestors evolved some 150 million years ago. Though valuable, fossil records alone are not enough to recreate the DNA migration and tweaking that occurred to give rise to the avian family. What if you went from your original product (the bird) and genetically traced your steps backwards millions of years into the past? This is where a novel research might come in made by a collective from Harvard, Yale and several other universities. The scientists used the knowledge their garnered in eight years of research about how bird beaks form in the embryo stage to shut down key protein sequencing to basically breed birds with primitive, dinosaur-like snouts.
Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have discovered a new species of dinosaur, closely related to the famous velociraptor. This new species, Saurornitholestes sullivani was a bit bulkier, probably had a better sense of smell, an researchers believe it was an even better predator than its cousin.
This "drawing" might look like it was made by a kid in grade school, but make no mistake it symbolizes one of the biggest achievements in 21st century biology. This San Diego beach scene was actually drawn in an eight color palette of bacterial colonies expressing fluorescent proteins derived from GFP and the red-fluorescent coral protein dsRed. Effectively, this is a picture literally drawn with life.
The discovery of a new microorganism may help bridge the knowledge gap between simple and complex cellular organisms, also shedding light on how complex cellular life came to be.
When it comes to artificial muscles, researchers at from National Taiwan University really know their onions. The team applied an uncanny design in which they layered gold atop the treated skin of onions. Once an electrical current was discharged, the "onion muscle" contracted and bent, just like the real thing. There's a whole slew of possible applications for artificial muscles, from so-called "soft robotics" (flesh-like droids), to of course helping injured humans.
Some news outlets were quick to label beards as toilets. I disagree.
Apart from echolocation, bats have another ace up their sleeve that makes them formidable flying animals: tiny hairs that sense airflow and transmit this information to key areas of the brain. Here the info is decoded and used to steer the bats' flight for pinpoint accuracy. In combination with echolocation, this makes bats awesome hunters even in pitch black darkness.
Geologists have found a praying-mantis-like cockroach that lived at the side by side with the dinosaurs, 100 million years ago, during the mid Cretaceous. The insect was preserved in amber. Peter Vršanský from the Geological Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and Günter Bechly from the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart found the insect at a mine in […]
Many beetles have defense mechanisms which involves foul chemicals squirting from their abdomens, but bombardier beetles have taken it to the next level. Researchers from MIT, the University of Arizona, and Brookhaven National Laboratory wanted to see how it works, so they studied the bombardier beetle and figured it out. The research is published in Science.
The US National Institutes of Health (NIH) has reiterated its stance against modifying human embryos, after a paper published last week by Chinese researchers reported how they modified the DNA of human embryos to eradicate certain inheritable diseases from the lineage. Modifying human embryos was banned in 1996 for US government bodies, but in some states private entities are allowed to carry out such research.
While humans have invented a convention called time keeping to make society work, our bodies themselves also have a sort of clock called an internal biologic clock or circadian rhythm. When met by daylight, hormones are released that keep us awake and alert, while darkness releases different hormones that puts us to sleep. Canadian researchers have now found the molecular switch that resets and synchronizes the circadian clock. A drug that tweaks this switch could thus be made that regulates the internal clock, something travelers and night owls might find particularly useful.
Researchers from Cambridge have, for the first time, captured a 3D video of a living algal embryo turning itself inside out: from a sphere into a mushroom and into a sphere again. The results could help us better understand the process of gastrulation in animal embryos -- which biologist Lewis Wolpert called "the most important event in your life."
Endemic to Australia and New Zealand, the satin bowerbird is considered one of the most intelligent birds found in nature. Mature males are very easy to spot because of their bright blue eyes, while their bodies are uniformly covered in black, although sometimes light diffraction makes the bird's feathers turn almost into a metallic sheen. What sets these birds apart is their remarkable courtship ritual, and the male's seemingly obsessive fixation for blue.
A seven year old has discovered the fossil of a turkey-sized dinosaur that roamed South America over 140 million years ago. The tiny dinosaur was related to T-Rex, but had few similarities to it; aside for its size, the dinosaur was a vegetarian, munching on plants instead of terrorizing other creatures.
We all need to consider our future without pollinators, or if there even will be a future without them.
Despite lacking a rigid skeleton, octopuses have a remarkable coordinated locomotion. Using high-speed cameras, a group at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem found the octopus achieves this by precisely and independently moving one or more of its eight legs to crawl its body, even when its facing a different direction. Moreover, there is no discernible rhythm or pattern to this undulating leg movement, making the octopus unique in this respect. It's controlled chaos, and only the octopus itself completely knows how it pulls all this off.
European males are on average 11 centimeters taller now than they were in the 1870s, which is quite a lot by all means. Everybody makes fun of Napoleon for being short, but as a matter of fact he was actually standing above average height! Thank better nutrition and medicine for that. Even so, what in the world are the Dutch eating that makes them this tall? The average Dutchman now stands over six feet tall, and while the rest of the world seems to have stopped, they're still riding a growing trendline. The answer by actually be evolutionary - the tall Dutchmen have more babies.
Dealing with invasive species is one of the challenges that accompanies globalization and in many areas of the world, it's becoming harder and harder to tackle this issue. In the Colorado lake, 3,000 Koi fish (Japanese carp) are now swarming the water, wiping out native species and dramatically altering the environment.
When tyrannosaurs ruled the world, no one was safe from them - not even other tyrannosaurs. The skull of an unfortunate adolescent tyrannosaur shows signs of brutal fight; the individual was defeated and then eaten by members of its own species, new research shows.
Arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, is one of the most common phobias humans have. But out of all the spiders that live today, really very few are dangerous - so why is it that we fear them so much then? Researchers from Columbia University believe they might have found the answer to that - and it's strictly related to human evolution.
Dr. Milton Wainwright is trying to convince the world that the found alien life floating some 25 miles in our planet’s atmosphere – but while tabloids gobbled up his story like no tomorrow, the scientific community is much more reluctant to accept his results. Is there any truth to these claims? Let’s have a look. If […]
You've heard all about controlling robotic arms or prosthesis with thoughts, but what about genes? In a deceptively simple experiment, bioengineers in Switzerland combined a classical brain-computer interface with a biological implant, which effectively allowed a genetic switch to be operated by brain activity. Imagine wearing a "funny" cap fitted with electrodes and a tiny implant, then controlling your mood by thinking the perfect "pure" thoughts that would cause a cascade of feel good chemicals. The same could be made for painkillers, so you can deliver just the right amount. Really, there's a lot of potential floating around this thing.
There aren't blood vessels you're seeing, but itsy bitsy strands of artificial spider silk. For some years, researchers have been investigating synthesizing spider silk for a variety of very good reasons. Spider silk is the toughest known natural material, and has been explored in its synthetic variety for use as bulletproof vests, synthetic skin, biodegradable water bottles and even computer electronics. These strands presented above, however, serve a different purpose: as a bandaid meant to help regenerate skin and heal wounds.
Just like Pluto, the iconic dinosaur genus was demoted decades ago and classified under another sauropod genus. But a more sophisticated taxonomy recently published by researchers in the UK and Portugal warrants a revisit of the shelved, but never forgotten Brontosaurus.
A 1,000 year old Anglo-Saxon ‘eye salve’ made from onion, garlic, wine and part of a cow’s stomach wipes out 90 percent of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) - much better than modern antibiotics. It also does a great job at treating styes, small abscesses on the eyelid.
Blind rats learned to navigate mazes just as well as those that could see, after scientists strapped a simple geomagnetic compass - the kind that's found in your smartphone - fitted with electrodes directly onto their brains. Though they're not naturally equipped to sense magnetic fields, the rats' brains demonstrated tremendous plasticity and effectively incorporated a new sense! We can only presume this is possible in the case of humans as well, so the team from Japan which made the study believes blind people could incorporate a similar device - minus the brain hack. There are other alternatives after all, like say an iPhone app that acoustically alerts the blind person which way to turn or a sensor directly fitted into a walking cane.
