Sunday, June 22, 2008
Some migratory songbirds figure out the best place to live by eavesdropping on the singing of others that successfully have had baby birds – a communication and behavioral trait so strong that researchers playing recorded songs induced them to nest in places they otherwise would have avoided. This suggests that songbirds have more complex communication abilities than had previously been understood, researchers say, and that these “social cues” can be as or more important than the physical environment of a site.
Full article: EurekAlert
Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can – by using self-control and imagining future events. Mathias and Helena Osvath’s research, from Lunds University Cognitive Science in Sweden, is the first to provide conclusive evidence of advanced planning capacities in non-human species. Their findings are published online this week in Springer’s journal, Animal Cognition.
Full article: EurekAlert
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny. Published June 12, The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old question of what is humour. Clarke explains how and why we find things funny and identifies the reason humour is common to all human societies, its fundamental role in the evolution of homo sapiens and its continuing importance in the cognitive development of infants.
Full article: Science Daily
What do parasites and mountains have in common? They both keep populations apart and drive evolution, say researchers. In the absence of geographical barriers such as mountains and oceans, parasite “wedges” keep populations of the same species apart, say Corey Fincher and Randy Thornhill of the University of New Mexico in the US. They claim this can provide the opportunity for populations and even new languages to evolve separately.
Full news article: New Scientist
Sunday, June 8, 2008
Asian and European honeybees can learn to understand one another’s dance languages despite having evolved different forms of communication, an international research team has shown for the first time. The findings are published this week in the journal PLoS ONE. …
Full story: EurekAlert!
A new computer program can accurately predict how our brains respond to any noun, whether “celery”, “airplane”, or “kumquat”. The program guesses a word’s meaning from its occurrence in a huge volume of internet text, and then builds a mental picture of the word based on the brain’s reaction to other words. …
Full story: New Scientist
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