Biology & Evolution

Brainless Slime That Can Learn by Fusing. Ed Yong. www.theatlantic.com . old.reddit.com . Dec 21, 2016. Building Transit Networks Can a cell learn? When a part of the plasmodium touches something attractive, e.g. food, it pulses more quickly and widens. If a part meets something repulsive, like light, it pulses more slowly and shrinks. The article regards this as flowing in the best possible direction without conscious thought....

Crows Could be the Smartest Animal Other Than Primates. Chris Baraniuk. www.bbc.com . Dec 11, 2019. New Caledonian crows make hooked tools from soft twigs to scoop insects out of holes. Other animals that use tools: chimpanzees, parrots, alligators and crabs. The crows found the desired stems even when they had been disguised with leaves from a different plant species. There are anecdotes of crow intelligence too, e....

Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest uses a captivating narrative style to elaborate on a complex question. The exposition makes the scientific parts memorable. features a good anecdote of insight favoring the prepared. On a jog in London in January, probably primed by reading Nick Lane’s Oxygen, he noticed that there were some bar-headed geese. These geese migrate between India and Kazakhstan/Mongolia, necessitating a flight over the Himalayas, sometimes at 28,000 feet....