Scientific American

Genome Run: Andean Shrub Is First New Plant Species Described by Its DNA

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:45:00 EST

A flowering shrub from the Andean cloud forests made taxonomic history last month. The plant--now dubbed Brunfelsia plowmaniana --had puzzled botanists for decades as they endeavored to determine whether or not it was truly an evolutionary newcomer. When its DNA revealed this to be true, researchers made the unprecedented move to include B. plowmaniana 's genetic code in its description as a new species, in the journal PhytoKeys . That decision could open the door to future DNA definitions of new botanical species--and heal a rift in the field of botany.

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Memory Foraging: When the Brain Behaves Like a Bee

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 07:00:00 EST

In search of nectar, a honeybee flies into a well-manicured suburban garden and lands on one of several camellia bushes planted in a row. After rummaging through the ruffled pink petals of several flowers, the bee leaves the first bush for another. Finding hardly any nectar in the flowers of the second bush, the bee flies to a third. And so on. [More]

Carnivores Make Low Estimates of Animal Minds

Sun, 08 Apr 2012 09:00:00 EST

On the savanna a lioness will fell and shred her prey without empathy. Yet for we humans who can imagine that a cow might feel pain, pleasure and fear, enjoying animal flesh may have moral overtones. New research indicates that we have developed a mental tool to help us cope with the realities of our carnivorous nature: denial.

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In the Heat for a Moment: The Male Giant Panda's Sex Drive Fluctuates to Match the Female's Short-Lived Libido

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:00:00 EST

There is perhaps no mammal that is less often in the mood for sex than the female giant panda. Each spring, female pandas enter estrous (aka "heat") for only 24 to 72 hours. If male pandas do not make their move during that brief window of time, they miss their chance to mate. Although researchers initially struggled to breed pandas in captivity , they achieved recent success by closely studying the females' reproductive behaviors. But what about the males? It now seems that male pandas have a reproductive cycle of their own, knowledge of which could strengthen the growing captive panda population by improving both breeding strategies and artificial insemination techniques . From the summer through the fall, male pandas are not interested in sex at all. But each winter and early spring, sex hormones flood the males' bodies, plump up their testes and fire up their sperm factories in preparation for a very brief mating season. [More]

Bots of Burden: U.S. Army Recruiting an Array of Animal-Inspired Robots to Assist Battlefield Troops [Video]

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 07:00:00 EST

Three of the U.S. military's newest recruits reported for duty this week at the Army Test and Evaluation Command . These troops are different from normal soldiers in several ways--for starters, each has six feet. And they are robots designed to look and move like cockroaches. Aside from those details, the Army is hoping its new Boston Robotics RHex bots will soon join grunts in Afghanistan. [More]

Animals through the Ages: The Art of Charles R. Knight [Slide Show]

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 12:00:00 EST

Charles R. Knight (1874 – 1953) is best known for his arresting paintings of dinosaurs and other long-vanished beasts. In the April issue of Scientific American, anthropologist and science historian Richard Milner--author of Charles R. Knight: The Artist Who Saw Through Time --explores the experiences that shaped Knight as an artist and the influence his work had on science and popular culture. This slide show presents a selection of images from the book depicting both living animals and extinct ones.

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What Are the Structural Differences in the Brain between Animals That Are Self-Aware (Humans, Apes) and Other Vertebrates?

Sun, 25 Mar 2012 09:00:00 EST

What are the structural differences in the brain between animals that are self-aware (humans, apes) and other vertebrates? [More]

Frog Species Found in Big Apple

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 22:00:08 EST

Scientists discover new species all the time--on the order of 15,000 a year. One of the latest additions to the tree of life is a new type of leopard frog. Which might sound unremarkable, except for where it was found: New York City.

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Scary Stuff: Fright Chemical Identified in Injured Fish

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 12:00:00 EST

There's a scene in Pixar's Finding Nemo when Dory, a yellow-finned regal tang, injures herself in a tug-of-war over a snorkel mask. A tiny plume of blood curls away from Dory's face into the water around her, where it is sucked into the nostrils of Bruce, a "vegetarian" shark who immediately recants his no-sushi policy. (Fortunately, Dory escapes.) Scientists have known for some time that many ocean predators relish the scent of an injured fish, whereas fish that are more likely to end up as a meal flee from the same scent. Now, researchers think they have pinpointed the key chemical in fish skin that warns nearby fish of danger--a chemical related to a supplement some people take for joint pain. [More]

Raising the Dead: New Species of Life Resurrected from Ancient Andean Tomb

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 07:00:00 EST

QUITO, ECUADOR--Long before the Spanish conquered the Incas in 1533, and centuries before the Incas inhabited this area, the present-day site of Quito International Airport was a marshy lake surrounded by Indian settlements--the Quitus on one shore and the Ipias on the other. Between A.D. 200 and 800 these cultures prospered here, fishing the lake, growing corn, beans and potatoes in the fertile soil, and fermenting an alcoholic drink-- chicha --made of a watery corn broth.

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Upbleat Finding: Kids Start to Sound Alike over Time

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 19:08:08 EST

The sounds many animals make are determined by their genes--they don't have to learn them. Humans, on the other hand, have all sorts of languages and accents, stuff we pick up from those around us. We're not alone. Whales, elephants, songbirds and bats also listen and learn.

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Love for Life? 12 Animals That Are (Mostly) Monogamous [Slide Show]

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 13:45:00 EST

Let's face it, most animals get around. Only about 5 percent of mammals are considered to be monogamous . What a biologist means by monogamy is not necessarily what a marriage counselor might assume. In the animal kingdom, what we think of as commitment-type monogamy should really be separated out into at least three types of bonds, explained Diane Witt, who leads the Neural Systems Cluster at the National Science Foundation, in a live chat last week. There is sexual fidelity, social attachment and parental behavior. Research in a number of animal species suggests that differences in neurochemicals and receptors might influence various degrees of these sorts of pairing.

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Certain Neurons Respond Specifically to Animals

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 08:00:00 EST

Whether cute and cuddly or fierce and frightening, animals affect the brain in ways scientists are just starting to appreciate. In a study of people who had electrodes implanted in their brain for the treatment of epilepsy, an international team discovered neurons that respond specifically to animals. The 41 individuals in the study were shown picturesof recognizable landmarks, objects, animals and people for about one second each as tiny electrodes measured the activity of individual neurons in three regions of their brain. When the researchers analyzed the electrical data from the 400 to 550 neurons in each region, they found a marked jump in the activity of neurons in the right amygdala that was not seen in the other brain regions tested--and only after viewing the pictures of animals. The report by senior author Christof Koch, a neuroscientist at the Allen Institute for Brain Science, and his colleagues appeared this past August online in Nature Neuroscience . (Koch also writes the monthly column Consciousness Redux for Scientific American Mind .)

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Animals Get the Upper Paw, or Hoof, or Claw (preview)

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:00:00 EST

In journalism, there’s what you call your dog-bites-man situation. Which is anything too common and expected to be a good story (unless the dog is one of those Resident Evil hellhounds, or the man is Cesar Millan). An example of a dog-bites-man science story is yet another confirmation of Einstein and relativity.

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Designers of Exotic Materials Learn New Tricks from Animals (preview)

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:45:00 EST

Among the first things you notice when you step into the corner office of Harvard University professor Joanna Aizenberg are the playthings. Behind her desk sit a sand dollar, an azure butterfly mounted in a box, a plastic stand with long fibers that erupt in color when a switch is pulled, and haphazard rows of toys. Especially numerous are the Rubik’s cubes--the classic three-by-three, of course, but also ones with four, five, six and even seven mini cubes along each edge. An eight-year-old would be in heaven.

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Dirty Dancing: Dung Beetles Get Down to Walk the Line

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 17:00:00 EST

As a dung beetle rolls its planet of poop along the ground it periodically stops, climbs onto the ball and does a little dance. Why? It's probably getting its bearings. A series of experiments published in the January 18 issue of PLoS ONE shows that the beetles are much more likely to perform their dance when they wander off course or encounter an obstacle. Until now, no one had any idea what a jitterbugging dung beetle was up to. [More]

Female Trailblazer Inspires New Species Name

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 19:29:08 EST

Jeanne Baret was passionate about science. So passionate that, in the 1760s, the Frenchwoman disguised herself as a man. She hid her true identity to accompany her lover, botanist Philibert Commerson, on the first French ship to sail around the world. At the time, women weren’t allowed on French navy vessels, and general sexism prevented them from working in science.

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How Animals Stay Warm with Blubber

Thu, 29 Dec 2011 10:00:00 EST

Key concepts [More]

Magnetic Sense Shows Many Animals the Way to Go (preview)

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:00:00 EST

For what must have felt like an interminable six months back in 2007, Sabine Begall spent her evenings at her computer, staring at photographs of grazing cattle. She would download a satellite image of a cattle range from Google Earth, tag the cows one by one, then pull up the next image. With the help of her collaborators, Begall, a zoologist at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany, ultimately found that the unassuming ruminants were on to something. On average, they appeared to align their bodies with a slight preference toward the north-south axis. But they were not pointing to true north, which they could have located using the sun as reference. Instead they somehow knew how to orient themselves toward the magnetic north pole, which is hundreds of kilometers south of the geographic pole, in northern Canada.

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Pigeons Can Follow Abstract Number-Counting Rules

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 13:57:08 EST

Several vertebrate species can distinguish between, say, two and five bananas--but with the exception of primates, they can’t grasp the numerical rules that would let them arrange their piles of fruit from least to most. Now, new research suggests that pigeons, like primates, can follow these abstract numerical rules. The study is in the journal Science . [Damian Scarf, Harlene Hayne and Michael Colombo, " Pigeons on Par with Primates in Numerical Competence "]

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