By Alexa Robles-Gil Having an imaginary friend, playing house or daydreaming about the future were long considered uniquely human abilities. Now, scientists have conducted the first study indicating that apes have the ability to play pretend as well. The findings, published Thursday in the journal Science, suggest that imagination is within the cognitive potential of an ape and can possibly be traced back to our common evolutionary ancestors. “This is one of those things that we assume is distinct about our species,” said Christopher Krupenye, a cognitive scientist at Johns Hopkins University and an author of the study. “This kind of finding really shows us that there’s much more richness to these animals’ minds than people give them credit for,” he said. Researchers knew that apes were capable of certain kinds of imagination. If an ape watches someone hide food in a cup, it can imagine that the food is there despite not seeing it. Because that perception is the reality — the food is actually there — it requires the ape to sustain only one view of the world, the one that it knows to be true. “This kind of work goes beyond it,” Dr. Krupenye said. “Because it suggests that they can, at the same time, consider multiple views of the world and really distinguish what’s real from what’s imaginary.” Bonobos, an endangered species found only in the Democratic Republic of Congo, are difficult to study in the wild. For this research, Dr. Krupenye and Amalia Bastos, a cognitive scientist at the University of St. Andrews, relied on an organization known as the Ape Initiative to study Kanzi, a male bonobo famous for demonstrating some understanding of spoken English. (Kanzi was an enculturated ape born in captivity; he died last year at age 44.) © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Consciousness; Evolution
Link ID: 30112 - Posted: 02.07.2026

By Jake Buehler Though fearsome predators, snakes can go weeks or even months without eating. Now, scientists think they may know how they do it. Snakes have lost the genes to produce ghrelin, a key hormone that regulates appetite, digestion, and fat storage, researchers report today in Royal Society Open Biology. Chameleons and a group of desert lizards called toadhead agamas that also have huge spaces between meals have also lost the same genes, hinting that cutting off ghrelin is a key way to excel at fasting, possibly by suppressing appetite and holding onto fat stores. “I give [the researchers] a lot of credit for looking more deeply into the data that was staring us all in the face—myself included,” says Todd Castoe, a genomicist at the University of Texas at Arlington not involved with the study. The hormone is ubiquitous across vertebrates, from fish to mammals. So finding that reptiles have repeatedly ditched it is “pretty remarkable,” he says. When scientists first discovered ghrelin nearly 30 years ago, they thought this “hunger hormone” could be key to fighting obesity in humans. But it hasn’t been that simple. Since then, researchers have found that ghrelin has a complicated role within a network of hormones constantly tweaking hunger and energy stores. And even though ghrelin is commonly found in vertebrates, it’s been unclear how it has evolved across various groups of vertebrates. So in the new study, Rui Resende Pinto, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Porto, and his colleagues focused on reptiles, many of which can go long periods without food. The researchers scanned the genomes of 112 species. In snakes, chameleons, and toadhead agamas, ghrelin genes were either missing or so warped by mutations they could no longer encode the hormone, the team found. The degree of the genes’ erosion also varied considerably between snake families: Some snakes such as boas and pythons had malformed ghrelin genes, but others, such as vipers, cobras, and their relatives, barely had anything left.

Keyword: Obesity; Evolution
Link ID: 30104 - Posted: 02.04.2026

By Joshua P. Johansen Growing up in the 1980s in Santa Cruz, California, where redwood-covered mountains descend to the rocky edge of the Pacific, might sound idyllic. But in the dark wake of the drug-fueled ’70s, the beach town could also be frightening. There was a bully at my high school who once chased me down the street threatening to hurt me. Unsurprisingly, catching sight of him in the hallways or at the skate park filled me with dread. Just walking past his house would trigger a wave of anxiety. Yet if I saw him in class, with teachers present, I felt more at ease. How did my brain know to fear him only in specific circumstances? More broadly, how did I infer emotional significance from the world around me? The fact that I or anyone can make these judgments suggests that emotion arises from an internal model in the brain that supports inference, abstraction and flexible, context-dependent evaluations of threat or safety. These model-based emotion systems helped me infer danger from otherwise innocuous features of the environment, such as the bully’s house, or to downgrade my alarm, as I did when an adult was present. Understanding the neural basis of emotion is a central question in neuroscience, with profound implications for the treatment of anxiety, trauma and mood disorders. Yet the field remains divided over what emotions are and how they should be defined, limiting progress. On one side are neurobiologists focused on the neural underpinnings of simple learned and innate defensive behaviors. On the other are psychological theorists who view emotions as subjective experiences arising from complex conceptual brain models of the world that are unique to humans. This divide fuels persistent arguments over whether emotion should be defined primarily as a conscious state or not. Though subjective feelings are undeniably important, limiting our definitions to conscious phenomena prevents us from studying the underlying mechanisms in nonhuman species. To move forward, we need to identify the conserved neural processes that support higher-order, internal-model-based emotional experiences across species, regardless of whether they rise to consciousness. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions; Consciousness
Link ID: 30096 - Posted: 01.28.2026

By Erin Garcia de Jesús A deck brush can be a good tool for the right task. Just ask Veronika, the Brown Swiss cow. Veronika uses both ends of a deck brush to scratch various parts of her body, researchers report January 19 in Current Biology. It’s the first reported tool use in a cow, a species that is often “cognitively underestimated,” the researchers say. Cows usually rub against trees, rocks or wooden planks to scratch, but Veronika’s handy tool allows her to reach parts of her body that she couldn’t otherwise, says Antonio Osuna-Mascaró, a cognitive biologist at the Messerli Research Institute of the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. It’s unclear how the cow figured it out, but “somehow Veronika learned to use tools, and she’s doing something that other cows simply can’t.” Veronika, a pet cow that lives in a pasture on a small Austrian farm, picks up the brush by its handle with her tongue and twists her neck to place the brush where she needs it. Setting the brush in front of her in different orientations showed that she uses the hard, bristled end to target most areas, including the tough, thick skin on her back. She also uses the nonbristled end, slowly moving the handle over softer body parts such as her belly button and udder. Veronika uses different parts of a deck brush to reach various parts of her body. She uses the brush end to scratch large areas such as her thigh (top left) and back (top right). She uses the handle to scratch more delicate areas such as her navel flap (bottom left) and anus (bottom right). © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Evolution
Link ID: 30088 - Posted: 01.21.2026

By Darren Incorvaia Much like his ninja namesake, Naruto the white-lipped peccary was a bit of a loner. Named after the titular character from a popular manga and anime, Naruto was the youngest male and one of the least social in his group of 17 peccaries, all of whom were born and raised in captivity at the Laboratory of Applied Ethology at the State University of Santa Cruz in Ilhéus, Brazil. Destined for reintroduction into Brazil’s Estação Veracel Private Natural Heritage Reserve and the Pau-Brasil Ecological Station, the peccaries were each given a personality test of sorts by lab researchers. The piglike mammals were video recorded as they went about their daily lives, resulting in 17 hours’ worth of behavioral data. Their aggressive actions, friendly touches and moments of exploration were tallied so that the peccaries could be ranked in traits such as boldness and sociability. The goal was to determine whether an individual peccary’s behavioral traits influenced its survival when released into the wild. White-lipped peccaries (Tayassu pecari) are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or IUCN. In Brazil, the size of the species’ historical range had plunged by 60 percent by 2020, and past efforts to reintroduce them had met limited success. Around the globe, scientists are increasingly recognizing how a reintroduced animal’s personality can impact how both individuals and groups fare in the wild. Such work is part of a growing trend to infuse the study of personality, and how it affects behavior, into conservation. When working with wild animals and tight budgets, personality tests may not always be possible. But understanding animal personality could help conservationists choose which individuals stand the best chance of surviving — helping to restore populations threatened with extinction. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30083 - Posted: 01.17.2026

Nicola Davis Science correspondent Same-sex sexual behaviour among non-human primates may arise as a way to reinforce bonds and keep societies together in the face of environmental or social challenges, researchers have suggested. Prof Vincent Savolainen, a co-author of the paper from Imperial College London, added that while the work focused on our living evolutionary cousins, early human species probably experienced similar challenges, raising the likelihood they, too, showed such behaviour. “There were many different species that unfortunately [are] all gone, that must have done this same thing as we see in apes, for example,” he said. Writing in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution, Savolainen and colleagues reported how they analysed accounts of same-sex sexual behaviour in non-human primates, finding it to be widespread in most major groups, with reports in 59 species including chimpanzees, Barbary macaques and mountain gorillas. That, they added, either suggested an evolutionary origin far back in the primate family tree, or the independent evolution of the behaviour multiple times. While some studies have previously highlighted the possibility such behaviour could help reduce tensions in groups or aid bonding, the new study looked across different species to explore its possible drivers. The results reveal it to be more likely in species living in drier environments, where resources are scarce, and where there is greater risk from predators. “Previous research has shown there is a heritable element to [same-sex sexual behaviour], however, there is also environmental influence which is often overlooked,” said Chloe Coxshall, the first author of the study. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30080 - Posted: 01.14.2026

By Sujata Gupta Chimps ages 2 to 5 are more likely than older chimps to free-fall from tree limbs in the forest canopies or leap wildly from branch to branch, researchers report January 7 in iScience. Past age 5, those dangerous canopy behaviors decrease by roughly 3 percent each year. Among humans, teens are the real daredevils. They are, for instance, more likely than other children to break bones and die from injuries. But human toddlers might behave as recklessly as chimp toddlers were it not for parents and caregivers putting the kibosh on all the fun — and broken bones, says biologist Lauren Sarringhaus of James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va. “If humans scaled back their oversight, our kids would be way more daredevilish.” Humans and chimpanzees show markedly different caregiving patterns, say Sarringhaus and others. Chimp moms largely parent alone. Dads don’t help. Nor, typically, do grandmothers, older siblings or other group members. Chimpanzees cling to their moms for the first five years of life, but by age 2 or so, they begin to explore more independently. Moms can’t readily help kids swinging high up in the air. By comparison, the presence of alloparents, or caregivers beyond the parents, are a defining feature of human groups, Sarringhaus says. In modern times, alloparents have come to include teachers and coaches for a plethora of supervised after-school activities. Nowadays, many developmental experts in the Western world have been decrying the rise of intensive or helicopter parenting in which kids spend less time unsupervised and playing outside than those in generations past. “It’s a really exciting avenue of research of how caregiving influences risk-taking behavior. There’s not a lot of research out there addressing this point,” says Lou Haux, a psychologist and primatologist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, who was not involved with the study. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026

Keyword: Development of the Brain; Evolution
Link ID: 30078 - Posted: 01.14.2026

Nell Greenfieldboyce If you've ever had to spell out words like W-A-L-K or T-R-E-A-T around a dog, you know that some dogs listen in to humans' chitchat and can pick out certain key words. Well, it turns out that some genius dogs can learn a brand new word, like the name of an unfamiliar toy, by just overhearing brief interactions between two people. Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed Animals Your dog is a good boy, but that's not necessarily because of its breed What's more, these "gifted" dogs can learn the name of a new toy even if they first hear this word when the toy is out of sight — as long as their favorite human is looking at the spot where the toy is hidden. That's according to a new study in the journal Science. "What we found in this study is that the dogs are using social communication. They're using these social cues to understand what the owners are talking about," says cognitive scientist Shany Dror of Eötvös Loránd University and the University of Veterinary Medicine, Vienna. Sponsor Message "This tells us that the ability to use social information is actually something that humans probably had before they had language," she says, "and language was kind of hitchhiking on these social abilities." Fetch the ball — or the frisbee? © 2026 npr

Keyword: Language; Evolution
Link ID: 30075 - Posted: 01.10.2026

By Natalia Mesa Nestled in the ventromedial nucleus of the hypothalamus lies a cluster of neurons that can make otherwise mild-mannered mice fly into a rage. Stimulating these neurons, as if flipping a switch, prompts male mice to attack their cagemates. The optogenetic manipulation of these and other specialized hypothalamic neurons, starting in the early 2010s, supported the long-standing idea that distinct cell types act as an “on” switch for different innate behaviors. But it has proved challenging to disentangle the neural signals that underlie those innate behaviors from ones that drive an animal’s internal state—such as anger, hunger or sexual arousal. Mounting evidence suggests that the hypothalamus also gives rise to these internal states, which can shape innate perceptions and behaviors. Rather than triggering an innate behavior, a specific pattern of population activity encodes the intensity and duration of anger and sexual arousal, according to four studies published within the past three years. This work is “revolutionary for the hypothalamus community,” says Tatiana Engel, associate professor of computational neuroscience at the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, who was not involved in the studies. It upends the notion that the neurons in the hypothalamus merely act as a simple switchboard, Engel says. Instead, local computations in the hypothalamus keep track of the animal’s internal state and influence its behavior, the studies suggest. The hypothalamic signals that encode the intensity and duration of aggression and sexual arousal can be represented by a mathematical model called a line attractor, the four studies show. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30073 - Posted: 01.10.2026

By Carl Zimmer If you live in the United States, chances are you’re familiar with the game rock-paper-scissors. You put out your hand in one of three gestures: clenching it in a fist (rock), holding it out flat (paper) or holding up two fingers in a “V” (scissors). Rock beats scissors, scissors beat paper and paper beats rock. Americans by no means have a monopoly on the game. People play it around the world in many variations, and under many names. In Japan, where the game has existed for thousands of years, it’s known as janken. In Indonesia, it’s known as earwig-man-elephant: The elephant kills the man, the man kills the earwig and the earwig crawls up through the elephant’s trunk and eats its brain. The game is so common that it exists beyond our own species. Over millions of years, animals have evolved their own version of rock-paper-scissors. For them, winning the game means passing down their genes to future generations. A study published on Thursday in the journal Science reveals the hidden biology that makes the game possible — and shows how it may be an important source of nature’s diversity. The first clues that nature also played rock-paper-scissors emerged three decades ago in the dry hills outside Merced, Calif. Barry Sinervo, a biologist then at Indiana University, studied the common side-blotched lizard there. He would mark the lizards — named for the dark blue or black spot on their side, just behind the front leg — release them into the tall grass and catch the survivors to check up on them in later years. Dr. Sinervo, who later joined the faculty at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and who died in 2021, grew fascinated by the strange mating habits of the lizards. At the start of every breeding season, the males developed one of three colors on their throats: blue, orange or yellow. And depending on their color, the males behaved differently. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Aggression; Animal Communication
Link ID: 30071 - Posted: 01.07.2026

By Jack Tamisiea You don’t need a brain to benefit from a good night of sleep. Despite lacking a central nervous system, jellyfish and sea anemones have sleep patterns remarkably similar to those of humans, researchers report today in Nature Communications. The work supports the idea that sleep arose early in animal evolution to help the first neurons repair themselves, says Cheryl Van Buskirk, a geneticist at California State University, Northridge who was not involved with the research. “This study is another nail in the coffin of the idea that sleep evolved to manage complex, powerful brains.” In nature, sleep is risky: Snoozing organisms are vulnerable to predators. Yet species across the animal kingdom spend multiple hours a day dozing off—even ancient groups including cnidarians, which include jellyfish, anemones, and corals—all among the earliest animals to develop neurons. Researchers have recorded sleeplike behavior in upside-down jellyfish in the genus Cassiopea and small freshwater relatives of jellyfish known as hydra. To learn more about why these simple animals sleep, researchers in Israel studied the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) and an upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea andromeda). Both species reside along the bottoms of shallow lagoons with their tentacles hovering in the water to snag prey. In the lab, the team housed several jellyfish in an aquarium and exposed them to 12 hours of light and 12 hours of darkness over multiple days. They used infrared cameras to monitor how often the critters pulsed their umbrellalike bells, a sign of wakefulness. © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Sleep; Evolution
Link ID: 30070 - Posted: 01.07.2026

By Trip Gabriel Paul Ekman, a psychologist who linked thousands of facial expressions to the emotions they often subconsciously conveyed, and who used his research to advise F.B.I. interrogators and screeners for the Transportation Security Administration as well as Hollywood animators, died on Nov. 17 at his home in San Francisco. He was 91. His daughter, Eve Ekman, confirmed the death. Dr. Ekman sought to add scientific exactitude to the human impulse to interpret how others feel through their facial expressions. He recorded 18 types of smiles, for example, distinguishing between a forced smile and a spontaneous one; a genuine smile, he discovered, crinkles the orbicularis oculi muscle — that is, it creates crow’s feet around the eyes. Sometimes described as the world’s most famous face reader, Dr. Ekman was ranked No. 15 in 2015 by the American Psychological Association in its list of 200 eminent psychologists of the modern era. He was influential in reshaping the way facial expressions were understood — as the product of evolution rather than environment — and his findings crossed over to popular culture. The Fox TV drama “Lie to Me,” which ran for three seasons starting in 2009, featured a psychologist modeled on Dr. Ekman (played by Tim Roth) who assists criminal investigations by decoding the hidden meanings of facial expressions and body language. The show was developed by the producer Brian Grazer, who was inspired by a lengthy profile of Dr. Ekman by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker in 2002. “The idea that you could tell a liar by some scientific test and know what they’re feeling just by looking at them was staggering to me,” the show’s writer, Samuel Baum, told The New York Times in 2009. As a young research psychologist in the late 1960s, Dr. Ekman changed the scientific consensus on facial expressions. In the postwar era, the conventional wisdom of eminent anthropologists like Margaret Mead was that human facial expressions were learned and that they varied across cultures. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 30031 - Posted: 11.29.2025

By Ali Watkins The act has been called many things: Centrifugal motion. Perpetual bliss. The thrill of the moment. Unstoppable. In technical terms, it is “non-agonistic interaction involving directed, intraspecific, oral-oral contact with some movement of the lips/mouthparts and no food transfer.” Or, as her majesty Faith Hill might say, “This kiss.” And, it turns out, it’s also really old. British scientists say they’ve traced the age of the kiss, to anywhere from 16 million to 21 million years ago, and have found that it was far more common among other species than previously understood. Ants? They smooch. Fish? Kissers. Neanderthals? Yep, they puckered up, too — sometimes even with us. But kissing, the researchers said, has always been something of a so-called evolutionary mystery. It doesn’t present much benefit for survival, it has minimal reproductive benefits, and it’s mostly symbolic. “Kissing is a really interesting behavior,” said Matilda Brindle, an evolutionary biologist at Oxford University who led the study. Dozens of societies and cultures use it, it’s common, and it has weighted symbolism. But, she said, “we’ve not really tested it from an evolutionary perspective.” In prehistoric kissing, it seems, could be the primitive origins of our search for intimate connection. The act inherently requires vulnerability, and trust. It’s not always sexual and is often used among and between genders simply to show affection, and often between parents and offspring. Though researchers found evidence of kissing in several species, they narrowed the focus of the study mostly to the behavior of large apes, like gorillas, orangutans and baboons. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Sexual Behavior; Evolution
Link ID: 30022 - Posted: 11.22.2025

By Kate Graham-Shaw A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, R2-D2 beeped and booped—and now birds that copy the Star Wars character are giving scientists fresh insight into how different species imitate complex sounds. A study, published recently in Scientific Reports, analyzed the sounds of nine species of parrots, including Budgies, as well as European Starlings to see how accurately each bird mimicked R2-D2’s robotic whirring. Researchers did acoustic analyses on samples of birds imitating the plucky droid that were already available online to compare how statistically similar each bird’s noises were to a model of R2-D2’s sounds. The starlings, a type of songbird, emerged as star vocalists: their ability to produce “multiphonic” noises—in their case, two different notes or tones expressed simultaneously—allowed them to replicate R2-D2’s complex chirps more accurately. Parrots and budgies, which only produce “monophonic” (or single-tone) noises, imitated the droid’s sounds with less accuracy and musicality. The differing abilities stem from physical variations in the birds’ “syrinx”—a unique vocal organ that sits at the base of the avian windpipe. “Starlings can produce two sounds at once because they control both sides of the syrinx independently,” says study co-author Nick Dam, an evolutionary biologist at Leiden University in the Netherlands. “Parrots are physically incapable of producing two tones simultaneously.” It isn’t exactly known why different species developed differing control over their syrinx. “Likely, some ancestor of songbirds happened to evolve the ability to control the muscles on both sides of the syrinx, and this helped them in some way,” says University of Northern Colorado biologist Lauryn Benedict, who wasn’t involved in the study but sometimes works with its authors. One of the leading explanations involves mating; the better at singing a male songbird is, the more females he attracts. © 2025 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN,

Keyword: Animal Communication; Language
Link ID: 30017 - Posted: 11.19.2025

By Kathryn Hulick Dolphins whistle, humpback whales sing and sperm whales click. Now, a new analysis of sperm whale codas — a unique series of clicks — suggests a previously unrecognized acoustic pattern. The finding, reported November 12 in Open Mind, implies that the whales’ clicking communications might be more complex — and meaningful — than previously realized. But the study faces sharp criticism from marine biologists who argue that these patterns are more likely to be recording artifacts or by-products of alertness rather than language-like signals. For decades, biologists have known that both the number and timing of clicks in a coda matter and can even identify the clan of a sperm whale (Physeter macrocephalus). Sperm whales in the eastern Caribbean Sea off the coast of Dominica, for example, often use a series of two slow and three quick sounds: “click…click… click-click-click.” Relying on artificial intelligence and linguistics analysis, the new study finds that sometimes this series sounds more like “clack…clack… clack-clack-clack,” says Shane Gero, a marine biologist at Project CETI, a Dominica-based nonprofit studying sperm whale communication. Project CETI linguist Gašper Beguš wonders about the meanings a coda might convey. “It sounds really alien,” almost like Morse code, says Beguš, of the University of California, Berkeley. Based on his team’s result, he now speculates that sperm whales might use clicks or clacks “in a similar way as we use our vowels to transmit meaning.” Not everyone agrees with that assessment. The comparison to vowels is “completely nonsense,” says Luke Rendell, a marine biologist at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland who has studied sperm whales for more than 30 years. “There’s no evidence that the animals are responding in any way to this [new pattern].” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Keyword: Language; Animal Communication
Link ID: 30013 - Posted: 11.15.2025

By Katarina Zimmer The 10 snakes faced a tough predicament. Collected from the Colombian Amazon, they had been without food for several days in captivity and then were presented with extremely unappetizing prey: three-striped poison dart frogs, Ameerega trivittata. The skin of those frogs contains deadly toxins — such as histrionicotoxins, pumiliotoxins and decahydroquinolines — that interfere with essential cell proteins. Six of the royal ground snakes (Erythrolamprus reginae) preferred to go hungry. The other four intrepidly slithered in for the kill. But before swallowing their meals, they dragged the frogs across the ground — akin to the way some birds rub toxins off their prey, noted biologist Valeria Ramírez Castañeda of the University of California, Berkeley, and her colleagues, who conducted the experiment. In a recent study, some royal ground snakes dragged poison frogs along the ground before eating them, probably in an effort to rub off some of the frogs’ deadly toxins. Three of the four snakes survived the meal — suggesting that their bodies were capable of handling the toxins that remained. Living beings have been wielding deadly molecules to kill each other for hundreds of millions of years. First came microbes that used the chemicals to weed out competitors or attack host cells they were invading; then animals, to kill prey or ward off predators, and plants, to defend against herbivores. In response, many animals have evolved ways to survive these toxins. They sometimes even store them to use against opponents.

Keyword: Neurotoxins; Evolution
Link ID: 29989 - Posted: 10.29.2025

By Roberta McLain Two small genetic changes reshaped the human pelvis, setting our early ancestors on the path to upright walking, scientists say. One genetic change flipped the ilium — the bone your hands rest on when you put them on your hips — 90 degrees. The rotation reoriented the muscles that attach to the pelvis, turning a system for climbing and running on all four legs into one for standing and walking on two legs. The other change delayed how long it takes for the ilium to harden from soft cartilage into bone, evolutionary biologist Gayani Senevirathne of Harvard University and colleagues report in the Sept. 25 Nature. The result: a distinctive bowl-shaped pelvis that supports an upright body. While nonhuman primates can walk upright to some extent, they typically move on all fours. The newly identified changes to human pelvic development were “essential for creating and shifting muscles that are usually on the back of the animal, pushing the animal forward, to now being on the sides, helping us stay upright as we walk,” says coauthor Terence Capellini, a Harvard evolutionary biologist. The researchers examined tiny slices of developing pelvic tissue from humans, chimpanzees and mice under a microscope, and paired those findings with CT imaging. Human ilium cartilage grows sideways, not vertically as it does in other primates, the team found. What’s more, the cartilage transitions to bone more slowly than in nonhuman primates and in other human body parts. Together, these shifts allow the pelvis to expand sideways and maintain its wide, bowl-like shape as it grows. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 29986 - Posted: 10.29.2025

By Rachel Nuwer No one knows why magic mushrooms evolved to produce psilocybin, a powerful psychedelic molecule. But this trait was apparently so beneficial for fungi that it independently evolved in two distantly related types of mushrooms. An even greater surprise to biologists was that rather than arriving at the same solution for producing psilocybin, the two groups pursued completely different biochemical pathways, according to a study published last month in the journal Angewandte Chemie International Edition. “This finding reminds us that nature finds more than one way to make important molecules,” said Dirk Hoffmeister, a pharmaceutical microbiologist at Friedrich Schiller University Jena in Germany and an author of the study. He added that it was also evidence that mushrooms were “brilliant chemists.” Practically speaking, Dr. Hoffmeister said, the research also suggested a possible new path for synthesizing psilocybin for use in scientific research and therapies. “We can expand our toolbox,” he said. Psilocybe and Inocybe mushrooms occur in some of the same habitats, but they follow different lifestyles. Psilocybe, the group that includes what are traditionally called magic mushrooms, thrives on decaying material such as decomposing organic matter or cow dung. Inocybe, commonly known as fiber caps, are symbiotic organisms that form intimate, mutually beneficial relationships with trees. In 1958, Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who discovered LSD, became the first researcher to isolate psilocybin from Psilocybe mushrooms. Some scientists later suspected that a few Inocybe mushrooms also produced the compound. Since then, psilocybin has been identified in around half a dozen Inocybe species. (The other species tend to produce a potent neurotoxin.) © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Evolution
Link ID: 29985 - Posted: 10.25.2025

By Keith Schneider Jane Goodall, one of the world’s most revered conservationists, who earned scientific stature and global celebrity by chronicling the distinctive behavior of wild chimpanzees in East Africa — primates that made and used tools, ate meat, held rain dances and engaged in organized warfare — died on Wednesday in Los Angeles. She was 91. Her death, while on a speaking tour, was confirmed by the Jane Goodall Institute, whose U.S. headquarters are in Washington, D.C. When not traveling widely, she lived in Bournemouth, on the south coast of England, in her childhood home. Dr. Goodall was 29 in the summer of 1963 when National Geographic magazine published her 7,500-word, 37-page account of the lives of primates she had observed in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzee Reserve in what is now Tanzania. The National Geographic Society had been financially supporting her field studies there. The article, with photographs by Hugo van Lawick, a Dutch wildlife photographer whom she later married, also described Dr. Goodall’s struggles to overcome disease, predators and frustration as she tried to get close to the chimps, working from a primitive research station along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. On the scientific merits alone, her discoveries about how wild chimpanzees raised their young, established leadership, socialized and communicated broke new ground and attracted immense attention and respect among researchers. Stephen Jay Gould, the evolutionary biologist and science historian, said her work with chimpanzees “represents one of the Western world’s great scientific achievements.” On learning of Dr. Goodall’s documented evidence that humans were not the only creatures capable of making and using tools, Louis Leakey, the paleoanthropologist and Dr. Goodall’s mentor, famously remarked, “Now we must redefine ‘tool,’ redefine ‘man,’ or accept chimpanzees as humans.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Evolution; Animal Communication
Link ID: 29953 - Posted: 10.04.2025

By Lauren Schneider Bad news for mouse poker players: Their facial movements offer “tells” about decision-making variables that the animals track without always acting on them, according to a study published today in Nature Neuroscience. The findings indicate that “cognition is embodied in some surprising ways,” says study investigator Zachary Mainen, a researcher at the Champalimaud Center for the Unknown. And this motor activity holds promise as a noninvasive bellwether of cognitive patterns. The study builds on mounting evidence that mouse facial expressions are not solely the result of a task’s motor demands and provides a “very clear” illustration of how this movement reflects cognitive processes, says Marieke Schölvinck, a researcher at the Ernst Strüngmann Institute for Neuroscience, who was not involved with the work. For years, mouse facial movements have mostly served as a way for researchers to gauge an animal’s pain levels. Now, however, machine-learning technology has made it possible to analyze this fine motor behavior in greater detail, says Schölvinck, who has investigated how facial expressions reflect inner states in mice and macaques. Evidence that mouse facial expressions correspond to emotional states inspired the new analysis, according to Fanny Cazettes, who conducted the experiments as a postdoctoral researcher in Mainen’s lab. She says she wondered what other ways the “internal, private thoughts of animals” might manifest on their faces. Two variables shape most mouse decisions over different foraging sites, the team found: the number of failures at a site (unrewarded licks from a source of sugar water) and the site’s perceived value (the difference between reward and failure). © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Emotions; Evolution
Link ID: 29950 - Posted: 10.01.2025